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162
THE EGO AND HIS OWN
tition is certainly outdone. But at the same time the
laborer, in his consciousness that the essential thing in
him is " the laborer," holds himself aloof from egoism
and subjects himself to the supremacy of a society of
laborers, as the commoner clung with self-abandon-
ment to the competition-State. The beautiful dream
of a " social duty " still continues to be dreamed.
People think again that society gives what we need,
and we are under obligations to it on that account,
owe it everything.* They are still at the point of
wanting to serve a " supreme giver of all good." That
society is no ego at all, which could give, bestow, or
grant, but an instrument or means, from which we
may derive benefit; that we have no social duties, but
solely interests for the pursuance of which society must
serve us; that we owe society no sacrifice, but, if we
sacrifice anything, sacrifice it to ourselves,--of this the
Socialists do not think, because they--as liberals--are
imprisoned in the religious principle, and zealously as-
pire after--a sacred society, such as the State was
hitherto.
Society, from which we have everything, is a new
master, a new spook, a new " supreme being," which
"takes us into its service and allegiance"!
The more precise appreciation of political as well as
social liberalism must wait to find its place further on.
For the present we pass this over, in order first to
summon them before the tribunal of humane or crit-
ical liberalism.
* Proudhon (" Création de l'Ordre") cries out, e. g., p. 414, " In industry,
as in science, the publication of an invention is the first and most sacred of
duties!"
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 163
§ 3.--H
UMANE
L
IBERALISM
As liberalism is completed in self-criticising, "criti-
cal"* liberalism,--in which the critic remains a lib-
eral and does not go beyond the principle of liberal-
ism, Man,--this may distinctively be named after
Man and called the " humane."
The laborer is counted as the most material and
egoistical man. He does nothing at all for humanity,
does everything for himself, for his welfare.
The commonalty, because it proclaimed the freedom
of Man only as to his birth, had to leave him in the
claws of the un-human man (the egoist) for the rest of
life. Hence under the régime of political liberalism
egoism has an immense field for free utilization.
The laborer will utilize society for his egoistic
ends as the commoner does the State. You have only
an egoistic end after all, your welfare! is the humane
liberal's reproach to the Socialist; take up a 'purely
human interest, then I will be your companion.
" But to this there belongs a consciousness stronger,
more comprehensive, than a laborer-consciousness."
" The laborer makes nothing, therefore he has noth-
ing; but he makes nothing because his labor is always
a labor that remains individual, calculated strictly for
* [In his strictures on " criticism " Stirner refers to a special movement
known by that name in the early forties of the last century, of which Bruno
Bauer was the principal exponent. After his official separation from the
faculty of the university of Bonn on account of his views in regard to the
Bible, Bruno Bauer in 1841 settled near Berlin and founded the Allgemeine
Literatur-Zeitung, in which he and his friends, at war with their surround-
ings, championed the '' absolute emancipation " of the individual within
the limits of " pure humanity" and fought as their foe "the mass," com-
prehending in that term the radical aspirations of political liberalism and
the communistic demands of the rising Socialist movement of that time.
For a brief account of Bruno Bauer's movement of criticism, see John
Henry Mackay, " Max Stirner. Sein Leben und sein Werk,"]