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12 - The Free AND Political Liberalism - part 1 - The Ego and His Own - Max Stirner · Logic Library

• Chapter two, subdivision c the Free, the Ancients and the Moderns. Having been presented above in two divisions, it may seem as if the free were here to be described in a third division as independent and distinct. This is not so. Free are only the more modern and most modern among the moderns, and are put in a separate division merely because they belong to the present and what is present. Above all claims our attention. Here. I give the free only as a translation of the liberals, but must with regard to the concept of freedom as in general, with regard to so many other things whose anticipatory introduction cannot be avoided. Refer to what comes later Section one Political liberalism. After the chalice of so called absolute monarchy had been drained down to the dregs in the eighteenth century, people became aware that their drink did not taste human too, clearly aware not to begin to crave a different cup. Since our fathers were human beings after all, they at last desired also to be regarded as such. Whoever sees in us something else than human beings in him, we likewise will not see a human being, but an inhuman being, and will meet him as an inhuman being. On the other hand, whoever recognizes us as human beings and protects us against the danger of being treated inhumanly him, we will honor as our true protector and guardian. Let us then hold together and protect the man and each other. Then we find the necessary protection in our holding together and in ourselves. Those who hold together a fellowship of those who know their human dignity and hold together as human beings. Our holding together is the state. We who hold together are the nation. In our being together, as nation or state, we are only human beings. How we deport ourselves in other respects as individuals, and what self seeking impulses we may there succumb to belong solely to our private life. Our public or state life is a purely human one. Everything unhuman or quote egoistic unquote the clings to us is degraded to a quote private man. And we distinguish the state definitely from quote civil society, which is the sphere of quote egoisms unquote activity. The true man is the nation, but the individual is always an egoist. Therefore, strip off your individuality or isolation. Wherein dwells discord egoistic inequality and consecrate yourself wholly to the true man, the nation, or the state. Then you will rank as men and have all that is man's. The state, the true man will entitle you to what belongs to it, and give you the rights of man. Man gives you his rights. So runs the speech of the Commonty editor's footnote regarding the word comalty, comalty, or citizen, the word dasbrugatum means either the condition of being a citizen or citizen like principles of the body of citizens, or of the middle or business class the bourgeoisie. And footnote the comalty is nothing else than the thought the state is all in all the true man, and that the individual's human value consists in being a citizen of the state. In being a good citizen, he seeks his highest honor. Beyond that he knows nothing higher than at most the antiquated being a good Christian. The comalty developed itself in the struggle against the privileged classes, by whom it was cavalierly treated as third estate and confounded with the kneel. In other words, up to this time the state had recognized caste. The son of a nobleman was selected for post to which the most distinguished commoners aspired in vain. The civic feeling revolted against this. No more distinction, no giving preference to persons, no difference of classes. Let all be alike. No separate interest is to be pursued longer. But the general interest of all. The state is to be a fellowship of free and equal men. And everyone is to devote himself to the welfare of the whole, to be dissolved in the state, to make the state his end and ideal state state. So ran the general cry, and thenceforth people sought for the right form of state, the best constitution, And so the state is best conception. The thought of the state passed into all hearts and awakened enthusiasm deserve it. This mundane god became the new divine service and worship. The properly political epoch had dawned. To serve the state or the nation became the highest ideal, the state's interest, the highest interest, state service for which one does not, by any means need to be an official, the highest honor. So then the separate interests and personalities had been scared away and sacrificed, for the state had become the shibbleth One must give up himself and live only for the state. One must act disinterestedly, not want to benefit himself, but the state. Hereby the latter has become the true person, before whom the individual personality vanishes. Not I lived, but it lives in me. Therefore, in comparison with the former self seeking this was unselfishness and impersonality itself. Before this God's state, all egoism vanished, and before it all were equal. There were, without any other distinction, men, nothing but men. The revolution took fire from the inflammable material of property. The government needed money. Now it must prove the proposition that it is absolute and so master of all property, sole proprietor. It must take to itself its money, which was only in the possession of the subjects, not their property. Instead of this, it calls states General to have this money granted to it. The shrinking from strictly logical action destroyed the illusion of an absolute government. He who must have something granted to him cannot be regarded as absolute. The subjects recognized that they were real proprietors, and that it was their money that was demanded. Those who had hitherto been subjects attained to consciousness that they were proprietors. By ye depicts this in a few words. If ye cannot dispose of my property without my consent, how much less can you of my person? Of all that concerns my mental and social position? All this is my property, like the peace of land that I till, and I have a right an interest to make the laws myself. By these words sound certainly as if every one was a proprietor. Now, however, instead of the government, instead of the prince, the nation now became proprietor and master. From this time on, the ideal is spoken of as quote popular liberty unquote, quote a free people unquote, et cetera. As early as July eighth, seventeen eighty nine, the declaration of the Bishop about Tune and Beverer took away all semblance of the importance of each and every individual in legislation. It showed the complete powerlessness of the constituents. The majority of the representatives has become master. When on July ninth, the plan for division of the work on the Constitution is proposed, Mirabeau remarks that quote the government has only power, no rights. Only in the people is the source of all right to be found. On July sixteenth, the same Mirabeau exclaims, is not the people the source of all power, the source therefore of all right, and the source of all power. By the way, here the substance of right becomes visible. It is power. He who has power has right. The Commonalty is the heir of the privileged class. Fact the rights of the barons, which were taken from them as usurpations, only passed over to the Commonalty. For the Commonalty was now called the nation. Quote into the hands of the nation unquote, all prerogatives were given back. Thereby they ceased to be prerogatives. They became rights. From this time on the nation demands tithespulsory services. It has inherited the Lord's court the rights of bear and venison the serfs. The night of August fourth was the death knight of privileges or prerogatives. Cities, communes, boards of magistrates were also privileged, furnished with prerogatives and seniorial rights, and ended with the new mourning of right. The quote rights of the state, the quote rights of the nation unquote. The monarch, in the person of the Royal Master, had been a paltry monarch paired with this new monarch, the subvereign nation. This monarchy was a thousand times severer, stricter, and more consistent. Against the new monarch. There was no longer any right, any privilege at all, how limited the absolute king of the ancient regime looks in comparison. The revolution affected the transformation of limited monarchy into absolute monarchy. From this time on, every right that is not conferred by this monarchy is an assumption, but every prerogative that he bestows a right. The times demanded absolute royalty, absolute monarchy. Therefore downfell that so called absolute royalty, which had so little understood how to become absolute, that it remained limited by a thousand little lords. What was longed for and striven for through thousands of years, to wit, to find that absolute Lord, beside whom no other lords and lordlings any longer exist to clip his power, the bourgeoisie has brought to pass. It has revealed the lord who alone confers rightful titles, and without whose warrant nothing is justified. Quote. So now we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is no other God save the one first Corinthians, Chapter eight, Verse four. Against right, one can no longer, as against a right, come forward with the assertion that it is quote a wrong unquote one can say now only that it is a piece of nonsense, an illusion. If one called it wrong, one would have to set up another right in opposition to it, and measure it by this. If, on the contrary, one rejects right as such right in and of itself altogether, then one also rejects the concept of wrong and dissolves the whole concept of right to which the concept of wrong belongs. What is the meaning of the doctrine that we all enjoy equality of political rights? Only this that the state has no regard for my person, that to it, I, like every other, am only a man, without having another significance that commands its deference. I do not command its deference as an aristocrat, a nobleman's son, or even as heir of an official whose office belongs to me by inheritance, as in the Middle Aged countships, et cetera, and later under absolute royalty, where hereditary offices occur. Now, the state has an innumerable multitude of rights. To give away the right to lead a battalion, a company, etc. The right to lecture at a university, and so forth, it has them to give away because they are its own, namely state rights or quote political unquote rights withal It makes no difference to it to whom it gives them, if the receiver only fulfills the duties that spring from the delegated rights to it. We are all of us all right and equal, one worth no more and no less than another. It is indifferent to me who received the command of the army, says the subfaran state, provided the grantee understands the matter properly. Quote. Equality of political rights unquote has consequently the meaning that everyone may acquire every right that the state has to give away, if only he fulfills the conditions annexed thereto, conditions that are to be sought only in the nature of the particular right, not in a predilection for the person persona grata. The nature of the right to become an officer varies with it the necessity that one possessed sound limbs at a suitable measure of knowledge, but it does not have noble birth as a condition. If, on the other hand, even the most deserving commoner could not reach that station that an inequality of political rights would exist among the states of today, one has carried out that maximum of equality more another less the monarchy of the states, so I will call absolute royalty. The time of the kings before the Revolution kept the individual independence on a lot of little monarchies. These were fellowships, societies like the guilds, the nobility, the priesthood, the burgher class, cities, communes everywhere. The individual must regard himself first as a member of this little society, and yield unconditional obedience to its spirit, the esprit de corps, as his monarch. More than the individual nobleman himself, must his family, the honor of his race be to him only by means of his corporation his estate. Did the individual have relation to the greater corporation the state. As in Catholicism, the individual deals with God only through the priest. To this, the third estate now show encourage to negate itself as an estate made an end. It decided no longer to be and be called an estate beside other estates, but to glorify and generalize itself into the nation. Hereby it created a much more complete and absolute monarchy. And the entire previously ruled principle of estates, the principle of little monarchies inside the great went down. Therefore, it cannot be said that the revolution was a revolution against the first two privileged estates. It was against the little monarchies of estates in general. But if the estates and their despotism were broken, the king, too, we know, was only a king of estates, not a citizen king. The individuals, freed from the inequality of a state were left, Were they now really to be without estate and quote out of gear unquote, no longer bound by any estate, without a general bond of union? No where the third estate had declared itself the nation, only in order not to remain in a state beside other estates, but to become the sole estate. This sole estate is the nation, the quote state unquote. What had the individual now become a political Protestant? For he had come into immediate connection with his god, the state. He was no longer as an aristocrat in the monarchy of the nobility, as a mechanic in the monarchy of the guild. But he, like awe, recognized and acknowledged only one lord, the state, as whose servants they all received the equal title of honor citizen. The bourgeoisie is the aristocracy of dessert, its motto that desert were its crowns. It fought against the lazy aristocracy, for, according to it, the industrious aristocracy acquired by industry and desert. It is not the quote born unquote who are free, nor yet I who am free, either, but the quote deserving unquote man, the honest servant of his king, of the state of the people. In constitutional states, through service, one acquires freedom, that is, acquires deserts. Even if one served mammon, one must deserve well of the state, of the principle of the state, of its moral spirit. He who serves the spirit of the state is a good citizen. Let him live to whatever honest branch of industry he will. In its eyes, innovators practice a breathless art. Only the quote unquote shopkeeper is quote unquote practical, And the spirit that chases after public office is as much the shopkeeping spirit as is that which tries in trade to feather its nest, or otherwise to become useful to itself and anybody else. But if the deserving count as the free, for what does the comfortable commoner, the faithful officeholder lack of that freedom that his heart desires. Then the servants are the free. The obedient servant is the free man. What glaring nonsense? Yet this is the sense of the bourgeoisie and its poet Gerte, as well as its philosopher. Hegel exceeded in glorifying the dependence of the subject on the object obedience to the objective world. He who only serves the cause devotes himself entirely to it as the true freedom. And among thinkers the cause was reason, that which, like the state and church, gives general laws and puts the individual man in irons. By the thought of humanity, it determines what is quote true unquote, according to which one must then act no more quote unquote rational people than the honest servants, who primarily are called good citizens as servants of the state, be rich as croesus or poor as job the state of the commonality leaves that to your option, But only have a good disposition. This, it demands view, and counts it its most urgent task to establish this in all, therefore it will keep you from evil promptings, holding the ill disposed in check and silencing their inflammatory discourses under censors, canceling marks or press penalties, and behind dungeon walls, and will, on the other hand, appoint people of quote good disposition unquote as censors, and in every way have a moral influence exerted on you by quote well disposed and well meaning unquote people. If it has made you deaf to evil promptings, then it opens your ears again, all the more diligently to good promptings. With the time of the bourgeoisie begins that of liberalism. People want to see what is rational suited to the times, et cetera established everywhere. The following definition of liberalism, which is supposed to be pronounced in its honor, characterizes it completely. Quote liberalism is nothing else than the knowledge of reason applied to our existing relations unquote. Its aim is a quote rational order a quote moral behavior quote a quote limited freedom unquote, not anarchy, lawlessness, selfhood. But if reason rules, then the person succumbs. Art has for a long time not only acknowledged the ugly, but considered the ugly as necessary to its existence, and takes it up into itself. It needs the villain in the religious domain, too. The extremist liberals go so far that they want to see the most religious man regarded as a citizen, that is, the religious villain. They want to see no more of trials for heresy, but against the rational law. No one is to be rebel, otherwise he is threatened with the severest penalty. What is wanted is not free movement and realization with a person or of me, but of reason, the dominion of reason a dominion. The liberals are zealous, not exactly for the faith for God, but certainly for reason their master. They brook no lack of breeding and therefore no self development and self determination. They play the guardian as effectively as the most absolute rulers. Quote political liberty unquote. What are we to understand by that? Perhaps the individual's independence of the state and its laws. No, on the contrary, the individual's subjection in the state and the state's laws. But why quote unquote liberty because one is no longer separated from the state by intermediaries, but stands in direct and immediate relation to it. Because one is a citizen, not the subject of another, not even of the king as a person, but only in his quality as quote supreme head of the state unquote political liberty. This fundamental doctrine of liberalism is nothing but a second phase of Protestantism, and runs quite parallel with quote religious liberty unquote, or would a perchance be right to understand by the latter, and independence of religion anything but that independence of intermediaries is all that it is intended to express, independence of mediating priests, the abolition of the quote unquote laity, and so direct and immediate relation to religion or to God. Only on the supposition that one has religion can he enjoy freedom of religion. Freedom of religion does not mean being without religion, but an inwardness of faith, unmediated intercourse with God. To him who is religiously free, religion is an affair of the heart. It is to him his own affair. It is to him a sacredly serious matter. To the quote politically free unquote man, the state is a sacredly serious matter. It is his heart's affair, his chief affair, his own affair. In twelve