Individualism and anarchism continue to denounce the state, when they
ought to reform it and improve its institutions. In the meantime the
world wags on. The state exists, society exists, and innumerable social
institutions exist. The individual grows under the influence of other
individuals, his ideas--mere spooks of his brain--yet the factors of
his life, right or wrong, guide him and determine his fate. There are
as rare exceptions a few lawless societies in the wild West where a few
outlaws meet by chance, revolver in hand, but even among them the state
of anarchy does not last long, for by habit and precedent certain rules
are established, and wherever man meets man, wherever they offer and
accept one another's help, they co-operate or compete, they join hands
or fight, they make contracts, form alliances, and establish rules, the
result of which is society, the state, with all the institutions of the
state, the administration, the legislature, the judiciary, with all the
intricate machinery that regulates the interrelations of man to man.
The truth is that man develops into a rational, human and humane being
through society by his intercourse with other men. Man is not really an
individual in the sense of Stirner and Nietzsche, a being by himself
and for himself, having no obligations to his fellows. Man is a part
of the society through which he originated and to which he belongs and
to overlook, to neglect and to ignore his relations to society, not to
recognize definite obligations or rules of conduct which we formulate
as duties is the grossest mistake philosophers can make, and this
becomes obvious if we consider the nature of man as a social being as
Aristotle has defined it.
[1] See the author's _The Nature of the State_, 1894, and
_Personality_, 1911.
ANOTHER NIETZSCHE