B. -- My Intercourse

     In society the human demand at most can be satisfied, while the egoistic must always come short.
     Because it can hardly escape anybody that the present shows no such living interest in any question as in the "social," one has to direct his gaze especially to society. Nay, if the interest felt in it were less passionate and dazzled, people would not so much, in looking at society, lose sight of the individuals in it, and would recognize that a society cannot become new so long as those who form and constitute it remain the old ones. If, e. g., there was to arise in the Jewish people a society which should spread a new faith over the earth, these apostles could in no case remain Pharisees.
     As you are, so you present yourself, so you behave toward men: a hypocrite as a hypocrite, a Christian as a Christian. Therefore the character of a society is determined by the character of its members: they are its creators. So much at least one must perceive even if one were not willing to put to the test the concept "society" itself.
     Ever far from letting themselves come to their full development and consequence, men have hitherto not been able to found their societies on themselves; or rather, they have been able only to found "societies" and to live in societies. The societies were always persons, powerful persons, so-called "moral persons," i.e. ghosts, before which the individual had the appropriate wheel in his head, the fear of ghosts. As such ghosts they may most suitably be designated by the respective names "people" and "peoplet": the people of the patriarchs, the people of the Hellenes, etc., at last the -- people of men, Mankind (Anacharsis Clootz was enthusiastic for the "nation" of mankind); then every subdivision of this "people," which could and must have its special societies, the Spanish, French people, etc.; within it again classes, cities, in short all kinds of corporations; lastly, tapering to the finest point, the little peoplet of the --family. Hence, instead of saying that the person that walked as ghost in all societies hitherto has been the people, there might also have been named the two extremes -- to wit, either "mankind" or the "family," both the most "natural-born units." We choose the word "people"¹ because its derivation has been brought into connection with the Greek polloi, the "many" or "the masses," but still more because "national efforts" are at present the order of the day, and because even the newest mutineers have not yet shaken off this deceptive person, although on the other hand the latter consideration must give the preference to the expression "mankind," since on all sides they are going in for enthusiasm over "mankind."
     The people, then -- mankind or the family -- have hitherto, as it seems, played history: no egoistic interest was to come up in these societies, but solely general ones, national or popular interests, class interests, family interests, and "general human interests." But who has brought to their fall the peoples whose decline history relates? Who but the egoist, who was seeking his satisfaction! If once an egoistic interest crept in, the society was "corrupted" and moved toward its dissolution, as Rome, e. g. proves with its highly developed system of private rights, or Christianity with the incessantly-breaking-in "rational self-determination," "self-consciousness," the "autonomy of the spirit," etc.
     The Christian people has produced two societies whose duration will keep equal measure with the permanence of that people: these are the societies State and Church. Can they be called a union of egoists? Do we in them pursue an egoistic, personal, own interest, or do we pursue a popular (i.e. an interest of the Christian people), to wit, a State, and Church interest? Can I and may I be myself in them? May I think and act as I will, may I reveal myself, live myself out, busy myself? Must I not leave untouched the majesty of the State, the sanctity of the Church?
     Well, I may not do so as I will. But shall I find in any society such an unmeasured freedom of maying? Certainly no! Accordingly we might be content? Not a bit! It is a different thing whether I rebound from an ego or from a people, a generalization. There I am my opponent's opponent, born his equal; here I am a despised opponent, bound and under a guardian: there I stand man to man; here I am a schoolboy who can accomplish nothing against his comrade because the latter has called father and mother to aid and has crept under the apron, while I am well scolded as an ill-bred brat, and I must not "argue": there I fight against a bodily enemy; here against mankind, against a generalization, against a "majesty," against a spook. But to me no majesty, nothing sacred, is a limit; nothing that I know how to overpower. Only that which I cannot overpower still limits my might; and I of limited might am temporarily a limited I, not limited by the might outside me, but limited by my own still deficient might, by my own impotence. However, "the Guard dies, but does not surrender!" Above all, only a bodily opponent!

     Many privileges have indeed been cancelled with time, but solely for the sake of the common weal, of the State and the State's weal, by no means for the strengthening of me. Vassalage, e. g., was abrogated only that a single liege lord, the lord of the people, the monarchical power, might be strengthened: vassalage under the one became yet more rigorous thereby. Only in favor of the monarch, be he called "prince" or "law," have privileges fallen. In France the citizens are not, indeed, vassals of the king, but are instead vassals of the "law" (the Charter). Subordination was retained, only the Christian State recognized that man cannot serve two masters (the lord of the manor and the prince); therefore one obtained all the prerogatives; now he can again place one above another, he can make "men in high place."
     But of what concern to me is the common weal? The common weal as such is not my weal, but only the furthest extremity of self-renunciation. The common weal may cheer aloud while I must "down";² the State may shine while I starve. In what lies the folly of the political liberals but in their opposing the people to the government and talking of people's rights? So there is the people going to be of age, etc. As if one who has no mouth could be mündig!³ Only the individual is able to be mündig. Thus the whole question of the liberty of the press is turned upside down when it is laid claim to as a "right of the people." It is only a right, or better the might, of the individual. If a people has liberty of the press, then I, although in the midst of this people, have it not; a liberty of the people is not my liberty, and the liberty of the press as a liberty of the people must have at its side a press law directed against me.
     This must be insisted on all around against the present-day efforts for liberty:
     Liberty of the people is not my liberty!
     Let us admit these categories, liberty of the people and right of the people: e. g., the right of the people that everybody may bear arms. Does one not forfeit such a right? One cannot forfeit his own right, but may well forfeit a right that belongs not to me but to the people. I may be locked up for the sake of the liberty of the people; I may, under sentence, incur the loss of the right to bear arms.
     Liberalism appears as the last attempt at a creation of the liberty of the people, a liberty of the commune, of "society," of the general, of mankind; the dream of a humanity, a people, a commune, a "society," that shall be of age.
     A people cannot be free otherwise than at the individual's expense; for it is not the individual that is the main point in this liberty, but the people. The freer the people, the more bound the individual; the Athenian people, precisely at its freest time, created ostracism, banished the atheists, poisoned the most honest thinker.
     How they do praise Socrates for his conscientiousness, which makes him resist the advice to get away from the dungeon! He is a fool that he concedes to the Athenians a right to condemn him. Therefore it certainly serves him right; why then does he remain standing on an equal footing with the Athenians? Why does he not break with them? Had he known, and been able to know, what he was, he would have conceded to such judges no claim, no right. That he did not escape was just his weakness, his delusion of still having something in common with the Athenians, or the opinion that he was a member, a mere member of this people. But he was rather this people itself in person, and could only be his own judge. There was no judge over him, as he himself had really pronounced a public sentence on himself and rated himself worthy of the Prytaneum. He should have stuck to that, and, as he had uttered no sentence of death against himself, should have despised that of the Athenians too and escaped. But he subordinated himself and recognized in the people his judge; he seemed little to himself before the majesty of the people. That he subjected himself to might (to which alone he could succumb) as to a "right" was treason against himself: it was virtue. To Christ, who, it is alleged, refrained from using the power over his heavenly legions, the same scrupulousness is thereby ascribed by the narrators. Luther did very well and wisely to have the safety of his journey to Worms warranted to him in black and white, and Socrates should have known that the Athenians were his enemies, he alone his judge. The self-deception of a "reign of law," etc., should have given way to the perception that the relation was a relation of might.
     It was with pettifoggery and intrigues that Greek liberty ended. Why? Because the ordinary Greeks could still less attain that logical conclusion which not even their hero of thought, Socrates, was able to draw. What then is pettifoggery but a way of utilizing something established without doing away with it? I might add "for one's own advantage," but, you see, that lies in "utilizing." Such pettifoggers are the theologians who "wrest" and "force" God's word; what would they have to wrest if it were not for the "established" Word of God? So those liberals who only shake and wrest the "established order." They are all perverters, like those perverters of the law. Socrates recognized law, right; the Greeks constantly retained the authority of right and law. If with this recognition they wanted nevertheless to assert their advantage, every one his own, then they had to seek it in perversion of the law, or intrigue. Alcibiades, an intriguer of genius, introduces the period of Athenian "decay"; the Spartan Lysander and others show that intrigue had become universally Greek. Greek law, on which the Greek States rested, had to be perverted and undermined by the egoists within these States, and the States went down that the individuals might become free, the Greek people fell because the individuals cared less for this people than for themselves. In general, all States, constitutions, churches, have sunk by the secession of individuals; for the individual is the irreconcilable enemy of every generality, every tie, i.e. every fetter. Yet people fancy to this day that man needs "sacred ties": he, the deadly enemy of every "tie." The history of the world shows that no tie has yet remained unrent, shows that man tirelessly defends himself against ties of every sort; and yet, blinded, people think up new ties again and again, and think, e. g., that they have arrived at the right one if one puts upon them the tie of a so-called free constitution, a beautiful, constitutional tie; decoration ribbons, the ties of confidence between
"-- -- --," do seem gradually to have become somewhat infirm, but people have made no further progress than from apron-strings to garters and collars.
     Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter.
     Everything sacred is and must be perverted by perverters of the law; therefore our present time has multitudes of such perverters in all spheres. They are preparing the way for the break-up of law, for lawlessness.
     Poor Athenians who are accused of pettifoggery and sophistry! poor Alcibiades, of intrigue! Why, that was just your best point, your first step in freedom. Your Æeschylus, Herodotus, etc., only wanted to have a free Greek people; you were the first to surmise something of your freedom.
     A people represses those who tower above its majesty, by ostracism against too-powerful citizens, by the Inquisition against the heretics of the Church, by the -- Inquisition against traitors in the State.
     For the people is concerned only with its self-assertion; it demands "patriotic self-sacrifice" from everybody. To it, accordingly, every one in himself is indifferent, a nothing, and it cannot do, not even suffer, what the individual and he alone must do -- to wit, turn him to account. Every people, every State, is unjust toward the egoist.
     As long as there still exists even one institution which the individual may not dissolve, the ownness and self-appurtenance of Me is still very remote. How can I, e. g. be free when I must bind myself by oath to a constitution, a charter, a law, "vow body and soul" to my people? How can I be my own when my faculties may develop only so far as they "do not disturb the harmony of society" (Weitling)?
     The fall of peoples and mankind will invite me to my rise.
     Listen, even as I am writing this, the bells begin to sound, that they may jingle in for tomorrow the festival of the thousand years' existence of our dear Germany. Sound, sound its knell! You do sound solemn enough, as if your tongue was moved by the presentiment that it is giving convoy to a corpse. The German people and German peoples have behind them a history of a thousand years: what a long life! O, go to rest, never to rise again -- that all may become free whom you so long have held in fetters. -- The people is dead. -- Up with me!
     O thou my much-tormented German people -- what was thy torment? It was the torment of a thought that cannot create itself a body, the torment of a walking spirit that dissolves into nothing at every cock-crow and yet pines for deliverance and fulfillment. In me too thou hast lived long, thou dear -- thought, thou dear -- spook. Already I almost fancied I had found the word of thy deliverance, discovered flesh and bones for the wandering spirit; then I hear them sound, the bells that usher thee into eternal rest; then the last hope fades out, then the notes of the last love die away, then I depart from the desolate house of those who now are dead and enter at the door of the -- living one:

                For only he who is alive is in the right.

     Farewell, thou dream of so many millions; farewell, thou who hast tyrannized over thy children for a thousand years!
     Tomorrow they carry thee to the grave; soon thy sisters, the peoples, will follow thee. But, when they have all followed, then -- mankind is buried, and I am my own, I am the laughing heir!

     The word Gesellschaft (society) has its origin in the word Sal (hall). If one hall encloses many persons, then the hall causes these persons to be in society. They are in society, and at most constitute a parlor-society by talking in the traditional forms of parlor speech. When it comes to real intercourse, this is to be regarded as independent of society: it may occur or be lacking, without altering the nature of what is named society. Those who are in the hall are a society even as mute persons, or when they put each other off solely with empty phrases of courtesy. Intercourse is mutuality, it is the action, the commercium, of individuals; society is only community of the hall, and even the statues of a museum-hall are in society, they are "grouped." People are accustomed to say "they haben inne⁴ this hall in common," but the case is rather that the hall has us inne or in it. So far the natural signification of the word society. In this it comes out that society is not generated by me and you, but by a third factor which makes associates out of us two, and that it is just this third factor that is the creative one, that which creates society.
     Just so a prison society or prison companionship (those who enjoy⁵ the same prison). Here we already hit upon a third factor fuller of significance than was that merely local one, the hall. Prison no longer means a space only, but a space with express reference to its inhabitants: for it is a prison only through being destined for prisoners, without whom it would be a mere building. What gives a common stamp to those who are gathered in it? Evidently the prison, since it is only by means of the prison that they are prisoners. What, then, determines the manner of life of the prison society? The prison! What determines their intercourse? The prison too, perhaps? Certainly they can enter upon intercourse only as prisoners, i.e. only so far as the prison laws allow it; but that they themselves hold intercourse, I with you, this the prison cannot bring to pass; on the contrary, it must have an eye to guarding against such egoistic, purely personal intercourse (and only as such is it really intercourse between me and you). That we jointly execute a job, run a machine, effectuate anything in general -- for this a prison will indeed provide; but that I forget that I am a prisoner, and engage in intercourse with you who likewise disregard it, brings danger to the prison, and not only cannot be caused by it, but must not even be permitted. For this reason the saintly and moral-minded French chamber decides to introduce solitary confinement, and other saints will do the like in order to cut off "demoralizing intercourse." Imprisonment is the established and -- sacred condition, to injure which no attempt must be made. The slightest push of that kind is punishable, as is every uprising against a sacred thing by which man is to be charmed and chained.
     Like the hall, the prison does form a society, a companionship, a communion (e. g. communion of labor), but no intercourse, no reciprocity, no union. On the contrary, every union in the prison bears within it the dangerous seed of a "plot," which under favorable circumstances might spring up and bear fruit.
     Yet one does not usually enter the prison voluntarily, and seldom remains in it voluntarily either, but cherishes the egoistic desire for liberty. Here, therefore, it sooner becomes manifest that personal intercourse is in hostile relations to the prison society and tends to the dissolution of this very society, this joint incarceration.
     Let us therefore look about for such communions as, it seems, we remain in gladly and voluntarily, without wanting to endanger them by our egoistic impulses.
     As a communion of the required sort the family offers itself in the first place. Parents, husbands and wife, children, brothers and sisters, represent a whole or form a family, for the further widening of which the collateral relatives also may be made to serve if taken into account. The family is a true communion only when the law of the family, piety⁶ or family love, is observed by its members. A son to whom parents, brothers, and sisters have become indifferent has been a son; for, as the sonship no longer shows itself efficacious, it has no greater significance than the long-past connection of mother and child by the navel-string. That one has once lived in this bodily juncture cannot as a fact be undone; and so far one remains irrevocably this mother's son and the brother of the rest of her children; but it would come to a lasting connection only by lasting piety, this spirit of the family. Individuals are members of a family in the full sense only when they make the persistence of the family their task; only as conservative do they keep aloof from doubting their basis, the family. To every member of the family one thing must be fixed and sacred -- viz., the family itself, or, more expressively, piety. That the family is to persist remains to its member, so long as he keeps himself free from that egoism which is hostile to the family, an unassailable truth. In a word: -- If the family is sacred, then nobody who belongs to it may secede from it; else he becomes a "criminal" against the family: he may never pursue an interest hostile to the family, e. g. form a misalliance. He who does this has "dishonored the family," "put it to shame," etc.
     Now, if in an individual the egoistic impulse has not force enough, he complies and makes a marriage which suits the claims of the family, takes a rank which harmonizes with its position, etc.; in short, he "does honor to the family."
     If, on the contrary, the egoistic blood flows fierily enough in his veins, he prefers to become a "criminal" against the family and to throw off its laws.
     Which of the two lies nearer my heart, the good of the family or my good? In innumerable cases both go peacefully together; the advantage of the family is at the same time mine, and vice versa. Then it is hard to decide whether I am thinking selfishly or for the common benefit, and perhaps I complacently flatter myself with my unselfishness. But there comes the day when a necessity of choice makes me tremble, when I have it in mind to dishonor my family tree, to affront parents, brothers, and kindred. What then? Now it will appear how I am disposed at the bottom of my heart; now it will be revealed whether piety ever stood above egoism for me, now the selfish one can no longer skulk behind the semblance of unselfishness. A wish rises in my soul, and, growing from hour to hour, becomes a passion. To whom does it occur at first blush that the slightest thought which may result adversely to the spirit of the family (piety) bears within it a transgression against this? Nay, who at once, in the first moment, becomes completely conscious of the matter? It happens so with Juliet in "Romeo and Juliet." The unruly passion can at last no longer be tamed, and undermines the building of piety. You will say, indeed, it is from self-will that the family casts out of its bosom those wilful ones that grant more of a hearing to their passion than to piety; the good Protestants used the same excuse with much success against the Catholics, and believed in it themselves. But it is just a subterfuge to roll the fault off oneself, nothing more. The Catholics had regard for the common bond of the church, and thrust those heretics from them only because these did not have so much regard for the bond of the church as to sacrifice their convictions to it; the former, therefore, held the bond fast, because the bond, the Catholic (i.e. common and united) church, was sacred to them; the latter, on the contrary, disregarded the bond. Just so those who lack piety. They are not thrust out, but thrust themselves out, prizing their passion, their wilfulness, higher than the bond of the family.
     But now sometimes a wish glimmers in a less passionate and wilful heart than Juliet's. The pliable girl brings herself as a sacrifice to the peace of the family. One might say that here too selfishness prevailed, for the decision came from the feeling that the pliable girl felt herself more satisfied by the unity of the family than by the fulfillment of her wish. That might be; but what if there remained a sure sign that egoism had been sacrificed to piety? What if, even after the wish that had been directed against the peace of the family was sacrificed, it remained at least as a recollection of a "sacrifice" brought to a sacred tie? What if the pliable girl were conscious of having left her self-will unsatisfied and humbly subjected herself to a higher power? Subjected and sacrificed, because the superstition of piety exercised its dominion over her!
     There egoism won, here piety wins and the egoistic heart bleeds; there egoism was strong, here it was -- weak. But the weak, as we have long known, are the -- unselfish. For them, for these its weak members, the family cares, because they belong to the family, do not belong to themselves and care for themselves. This weakness Hegel, e. g. praises when he wants to have match-making left to the choice of the parents.
     As a sacred communion to which, among the rest, the individual owes obedience, the family has the judicial function too vested in it; such a "family court" is described e. g. in the Cabanis of Wilibald Alexis. There the father, in the name of the "family council," puts the intractable son among the soldiers and thrusts him out of the family, in order to cleanse the smirched family again by means of this act of punishment. -- The most consistent development of family responsibility is contained in Chinese law, according to which the whole family has to expiate the individual's fault.
     Today, however, the arm of family power seldom reaches far enough to take seriously in hand the punishment of apostates (in most cases the State protects even against disinheritance). The criminal against the family (family-criminal) flees into the domain of the State and is free, as the State-criminal who gets away to America is no longer reached by the punishments of his State. He who has shamed his family, the graceless son, is protected against the family's punishment because the State, this protecting lord, takes away from family punishment its "sacredness" and profanes it, decreeing that it is only --"revenge": it restrains punishment, this sacred family right, because before its, the State's, "sacredness" the subordinate sacredness of the family always pales and loses its sanctity as soon as it comes in conflict with this higher sacredness. Without the conflict, the State lets pass the lesser sacredness of the family; but in the opposite case it even commands crime against the family, charging, e. g., the son to refuse obedience to his parents as soon as they want to beguile him to a crime against the State.
     Well, the egoist has broken the ties of the family and found in the State a lord to shelter him against the grievously affronted spirit of the family. But where has he run now? Straight into a new society, in which his egoism is awaited by the same snares and nets that it has just escaped. For the State is likewise a society, not a union; it is the broadened family ("Father of the Country -- Mother of the Country -- children of the country").

     What is called a State is a tissue and plexus of dependence and adherence; it is a belonging together, a holding together, in which those who are placed together fit themselves to each other, or, in short, mutually depend on each other: it is the order of this dependence. Suppose the king, whose authority lends authority to all down to the beadle, should vanish: still all in whom the will for order was awake would keep order erect against the disorders of bestiality. If disorder were victorious, the State would be at an end.
     But is this thought of love, to fit ourselves to each other, to adhere to each other and depend on each other, really capable of winning us? According to this the State should be love realized, the being for each other and living for each other of all. Is not self-will being lost while we attend to the will for order? Will people not be satisfied when order is cared for by authority, i.e. when authority sees to it that no one "gets in the way of" another; when, then, the herd is judiciously distributed or ordered? Why, then everything is in "the best order," and it is this best order that is called -- State!
     Our societies and States are without our making them, are united without our uniting, are predestined and established, or have an independent standing⁷ of their own, are the indissolubly established against us egoists. The fight of the world today is, as it is said, directed against the "established." Yet people are wont to misunderstand this as if it were only that what is now established was to be exchanged for another, a better, established system. But war might rather be declared against establishment itself, the State, not a particular State, not any such thing as the mere condition of the State at the time; it is not another State (e. g. a "people's State") that men aim at, but their union, uniting, this ever-fluid uniting of everything standing. -- A State exists even without my co-operation: I am born in it, brought up in it, under obligations to it, and must "do it homage."⁸ It takes me up into its "favor,"⁹ and I live by its "grace." Thus the independent establishment of the State founds my lack of independence; its condition as a "natural growth," its organism, demands that my nature do not grow freely, but be cut to fit it. That it may be able to unfold in natural growth, it applies to me the shears of "civilization"; it gives me an education and culture adapted to it, not to me, and teaches me e. g. to respect the laws, to refrain from injury to State property (i.e. private property), to reverence divine and earthly highness, etc.; in short, it teaches me to be -- unpunishable, "sacrificing" my ownness to "sacredness" (everything possible is sacred; e. g. property, others' life, etc.). In this consists the sort of civilization and culture that the State is able to give me: it brings me up to be a "serviceable instrument," a "serviceable member of society."
     This every State must do, the people's State as well as the absolute or constitutional one. It must do so as long as we rest in the error that it is an I, as which it then applies to itself the name of a "moral, mystical, or political person." I, who really am I, must pull off this lion-skin of the I from the stalking thistle-eater. What manifold robbery have I not put up with in the history of the world! There I let sun, moon, and stars, cats and crocodiles, receive the honor of ranking as I; there Jehovah, Allah, and Our Father came and were invested with the I; there families, tribes, peoples, and at last actually mankind, came and were honored as I's; there the Church, the State, came with the pretension to be I -- and I gazed calmly on all. What wonder if then there was always a real I too that joined the company and affirmed in my face that it was not my you but my real I. Why, the Son of Man par excellence had done the like; why should not a son of man do it too? So I saw my I always above me and outside me, and could never really come to myself.
     I never believed in myself; I never believed in my present, I saw myself only in the future. The boy believes he will be a proper I, a proper fellow, only when he has become a man; the man thinks, only in the other world will he be something proper. And, to enter more closely upon reality at once, even the best are today still persuading each other that one must have received into himself the State, his people, mankind, and what not, in order to be a real I, a "free burgher," a "citizen," a "free or true man"; they too see the truth and reality of me in the reception of an alien I and devotion to it. And what sort of an I? An I that is neither an I nor a you, a fancied I, a spook.
     While in the Middle Ages the church could well brook many States living united in it, the States learned after the Reformation, especially after the Thirty Years' War, to tolerate many churches (confessions) gathering under one crown. But all States are religious and, as the case may be, "Christian States," and make it their task to force the intractable, the "egoists," under the bond of the unnatural, e. g., Christianize them. All arrangements of the Christian State have the object of Christianizing the people. Thus the court has the object of forcing people to justice, the school that of forcing them to mental culture -- in short, the object of protecting those who act Christianly against those who act un-Christianly, of bringing Christian action to dominion, of making it powerful. Among these means of force the State counted the Church too, it demanded a -- particular religion from everybody. Dupin said lately against the clergy, "Instruction and education belong to the State."
     Certainly everything that regards the principle of morality is a State affair. Hence it is that the Chinese State meddles so much in family concerns, and one is nothing there if one is not first of all a good child to his parents. Family concerns are altogether State concerns with us too, only that our State -- puts confidence in the families without painful oversight; it holds the family bound by the marriage tie, and this tie cannot be broken without it.
     But that the State makes me responsible for my principles, and demands certain ones from me, might make me ask, what concern has it with the "wheel in my head" (principle)? Very much, for the State is the -- ruling principle. It is supposed that in divorce matters, in marriage law in general, the question is of the proportion of rights between Church and States. Rather, the question is of whether anything sacred is to rule over man, be it called faith or ethical law (morality). The State behaves as the same ruler that the Church was. The latter rests on godliness, the former on morality.
     People talk of the tolerance, the leaving opposite tendencies free, etc., by which civilized States are distinguished. Certainly some are strong enough to look with complacency on even the most unrestrained meetings, while others charge their catchpolls to go hunting for tobacco-pipes. Yet for one State as for another the play of individuals among themselves, their buzzing to and fro, their daily life, is an incident which it must be content to leave to themselves because it can do nothing with this. Many, indeed, still strain out gnats and swallow camels, while others are shrewder. Individuals are "freer" in the latter, because less pestered. But I am free in no State. The lauded tolerance of States is simply a tolerating of the "harmless," the "not dangerous"; it is only elevation above pettymindedness, only a more estimable, grander, prouder -- despotism. A certain State seemed for a while to mean to be pretty well elevated above literary combats, which might be carried on with all heat; England is elevated above popular turmoil and -- tobacco-smoking. But woe to the literature that deals blows at the State itself, woe to the mobs that "endanger" the State. In that certain State they dream of a "free science," in England of a "free popular life."
     The State does let individuals play as freely as possible, only they must not be in earnest, must not forget it. Man must not carry on intercourse with man unconcernedly, not without "superior oversight and mediation." I must not execute all that I am able to, but only so much as the State allows; I must not turn to account my thoughts, nor my work, nor, in general, anything of mine.
     The State always has the sole purpose to limit, tame, subordinate, the individual -- to make him subject to some generality or other; it lasts only so long as the individual is not all in all, and it is only the clearly-marked restriction of me, my limitation, my slavery. Never does a State aim to bring in the free activity of individuals, but always that which is bound to the purpose of the State. Through the State nothing in common comes to pass either, as little as one can call a piece of cloth the common work of all the individual parts of a machine; it is rather the work of the whole machine as a unit, machine work. In the same style everything is done by the State machine too; for it moves the clockwork of the individual minds, none of which follow their own impulse. The State seeks to hinder every free activity by its censorship, its supervision, its police, and holds this hindering to be its duty, because it is in truth a duty of self-preservation. The State wants to make something out of man, therefore there live in it only made men; every one who wants to be his own self is its opponent and is nothing. "He is nothing" means as much as, the State does not make use of him, grants him no position, no office, no trade, etc.
     Edgar Bauer,¹⁰ in the Liberale Bestrebungen (vol. II, p.50), is still dreaming of a "government which, proceeding out of the people, can never stand in opposition to it." He does indeed (p.69) himself take back the word "government": "In the republic no government at all obtains, but only an executive authority. An authority which proceeds purely and alone out of the people; which has not an independent power, independent principles, independent officers, over against the people; but which has its foundation, the fountain of its power and of its principles, in the sole, supreme authority of the State, in the people. The concept government, therefore, is not at all suitable in the people's State." But the thing remains the same. That which has "proceeded, been founded, sprung from the fountain" becomes something "independent" and, like a child delivered from the womb, enters upon opposition at once. The government, if it were nothing independent and opposing, would be nothing at all.
     "In the free State there is no government," etc. (p.94). This surely means that the people, when it is the sovereign, does not let itself be conducted by a superior authority. Is it perchance different in absolute monarchy? Is there there for the sovereign, perchance, a government standing over him? Over the sovereign, be he called prince or people, there never stands a government: that is understood of itself. But over me there will stand a government in every "State," in the absolute as well as in the republican or "free." I am as badly off in one as in the other.
     The republic is nothing whatever but -- absolute monarchy; for it makes no difference whether the monarch is called prince or people, both being a "majesty." Constitutionalism itself proves that nobody is able and willing to be only an instrument. The ministers domineer over their master the prince, the deputies over their master the people. Here, then, the parties at least are already free -- videlicet, the office-holders' party (so-called people's party). The prince must conform to the will of the ministers, the people dance to the pipe of the chambers. Constitutionalism is further than the republic, because it is the State in incipient dissolution.
     Edgar Bauer denies (p.56) that the people is a "personality" in the constitutional State; per contra, then, in the republic? Well, in the constitutional State the people is -- a party, and a party is surely a "personality" if one is once resolved to talk of a "political" (p.76) moral person anyhow. The fact is that a moral person, be it called people's party or people or even "the Lord," is in no wise a person, but a spook.
     Further, Edgar Bauer goes on (p.69): "guardianship is the characteristic of a government." Truly, still more that of a people and "people's State"; it is the characteristic of all dominion. A people's State, which "unites in itself all completeness of power," the "absolute master," cannot let me become powerful. And what a chimera, to be no longer willing to call the "people's officials" "servants, instruments," because they "execute the free, rational law-will of the people!" (p.73). He thinks (p.74): "Only by all official circles subordinating themselves to the government's views can unity be brought into the State"; but his "people's State" is to have "unity" too; how will a lack of subordination be allowed there? subordination to the -- people's will.
     "In the constitutional State it is the regent and his disposition that the whole structure of government rests on in the end." (p. 130.) How would that be otherwise in the "people's State"? Shall I not there be governed by the people's disposition too, and does it make a difference for me whether I see myself kept in dependence by the prince's disposition or by the people's disposition, so-called "public opinion"? If dependence means as much as "religious relation," as Edgar Bauer rightly alleges, then in the people's State the people remains for me the superior power, the "majesty" (for God and prince have their proper essence in "majesty") to which I stand in religious relations. -- Like the sovereign regent, the sovereign people too would be reached by no law. Edgar Bauer's whole attempt comes to a change of masters. Instead of wanting to make the people free, he should have had his mind on the sole realizable freedom, his own.
     In the constitutional State absolutism itself has at last come in conflict with itself, as it has been shattered into a duality; the government wants to be absolute, and the people wants to be absolute. These two absolutes will wear out against each other.
     Edgar Bauer inveighs against the determination of the regent by birth, by chance. But, when "the people" have become "the sole power in the State" (p. 132), have we not then in it a master from chance? Why, what is the people? The people has always been only the body of the government: it is many under one hat (a prince's hat) or many under one constitution. And the constitution is the -- prince. Princes and peoples will persist so long as both do not collapse, i. e., fall together. If under one constitution there are many "peoples" -- as in the ancient Persian monarchy and today --then these "peoples" rank only as "provinces." For me the people is in any case an --accidental power, a force of nature, an enemy that I must overcome.
     What is one to think of under the name of an "organized" people (p. 132)? A people "that no longer has a government," that governs itself. In which, therefore, no ego stands out prominently; a people organized by ostracism. The banishment of egos, ostracism, makes the people autocrat.
     If you speak of the people, you must speak of the prince; for the people, if it is to be a subject¹¹ and make history, must, like everything that acts, have a head, its "supreme head." Weitling sets this forth in [Die Europäische] Triarchie, and Proudhon declares, "une société, pour ainsi dire acéphale, ne peut vivre."¹²
     The vox populi is now always held up to us, and "public opinion" is to rule our princes. Certainly the vox populi is at the same time vox dei; but is either of any use, and is not the vox principis also vox dei?
     At this point the "Nationals" may be brought to mind. To demand of the thirty-eight States of Germany that they shall act as one nation can only be put alongside the senseless desire that thirty-eight swarms of bees, led by thirty-eight queen-bees, shall unite themselves into one swarm. Bees they all remain; but it is not the bees as bees that belong together and can join themselves together, it is only that the subject bees are connected with the ruling queens. Bees and peoples are destitute of will, and the instinct of their queens leads them.
     If one were to point the bees to their beehood, in which at any rate they are all equal to each other, one would be doing the same thing that they are now doing so stormily in pointing the Germans to their Germanhood. Why, Germanhood is just like beehood in this very thing, that it bears in itself the necessity of cleavages and separations, yet without pushing on to the last separation, where, with the complete carrying through of the process of separating, its end appears: I mean, to the separation of man from man. Germanhood does indeed divide itself into different peoples and tribes, i.e. beehives; but the individual who has the quality of being a German is still as powerless as the isolated bee. And yet only individuals can enter into union with each other, and all alliances and leagues of peoples are and remain mechanical compoundings, because those who come together, at least so far as the "peoples" are regarded as the ones that have come together, are destitute of will. Only with the last separation does separation itself end and change to unification.
     Now the Nationals are exerting themselves to set up the abstract, lifeless unity of beehood; but the self-owned are going to fight for the unity willed by their own will, for union. This is the token of all reactionary wishes, that they want to set up something general, abstract, an empty, lifeless concept, in distinction from which the self-owned aspire to relieve the robust, lively particular from the trashy burden of generalities. The reactionaries would be glad to smite a people, a nation, forth from the earth; the self-owned have before their eyes only themselves. In essentials the two efforts that are just now the order of the day - to wit, the restoration of provincial rights and of the old tribal divisions (Franks, Bavarians, Lusatia, etc.), and the restoration of the entire nationality -- coincide in one. But the Germans will come into unison, i.e. unite themselves, only when they knock over their beehood as well as all the beehives; in other words, when they are more than -- Germans: only then can they form a "German Union." They must not want to turn back into their nationality, into the womb, in order to be born again, but let every one turn in to himself. How ridiculously sentimental when one German grasps another's hand and presses it with sacred awe because "he too is a German!" With that he is something great! But this will certainly still be thought touching as long as people are enthusiastic for "brotherliness," i.e. as long as they have a "family disposition". From the superstition of "piety," from "brotherliness" or "childlikeness" or however else the soft-hearted piety-phrases run -- from the family spirit -- the Nationals, who want to have a great family of Germans, cannot liberate themselves.
     Aside from this, the so-called Nationals would only have to understand themselves rightly in order to lift themselves out of their juncture with the good-natured Teutomaniacs. For the uniting for material ends and interests, which they demand of the Germans, comes to nothing else than a voluntary union. Carrière, inspired, cries out,¹³ "Railroads are to the more penetrating eye the way to a life of the people e. g. has not yet anywhere appeared in such significance." Quite right, it will be a life of the people that has nowhere appeared, because it is not a -- life of the people. -- So Carrière then combats himself (p. 10): "Pure humanity or manhood cannot be better represented than by a people fulfilling its mission." Why, by this nationality only is represented. "Washed-out generality is lower than the form complete in itself, which is itself a whole, and lives as a living member of the truly general, the organized." Why, the people is this very "washed-out generality," and it is only a man that is the "form complete in itself."
     The impersonality of what they call "people, nation," is clear also from this: that a people which wants to bring its I into view to the best of its power puts at its head the ruler without will. It finds itself in the alternative either to be subjected to a prince who realizes only himself, his individual pleasure -- then it does not recognize in the "absolute master" its own will, the so-called will of the people -- or to seat on the throne a prince who gives effect to no will of his own -- then it has a prince without will, whose place some ingenious clockwork would perhaps fill just as well. -- Therefore insight need go only a step farther; then it becomes clear of itself that the I of the people is an impersonal, "spiritual" power, the -- law. The people's I, therefore, is a -- spook, not an I. I am I only by this, that I make myself; i.e. that it is not another who makes me, but I must be my own work. But how is it with this I of the people? Chance plays it into the people's hand, chance gives it this or that born lord, accidents procure it the chosen one; he is not its (the "sovereign" people's) product, as I am my product. Conceive of one wanting to talk you into believing that you were not your I, but Tom or Jack was your I! But so it is with the people, and rightly. For the people has an I as little as the eleven planets counted together have an I, though they revolve around a common center.
     Bailly's utterance is representative of the slave-disposition that folks manifest before the sovereign people, as before the prince. "I have," says he, "no longer any extra reason when the general reason has pronounced itself. My first law was the nation's will; as soon as it had assembled I knew nothing beyond its sovereign will." He would have no "extra reason," and yet this extra reason alone accomplishes everything. Just so Mirabeau inveighs in the words, "No power on earth has the right to say to the nation's representatives, It is my will!"
     As with the Greeks, there is now a wish to make man a zoon politicon, a citizen of the State or political man. So he ranked for a long time as a "citizen of heaven." But the Greek fell into ignominy along with his State, the citizen of heaven likewise falls with heaven; we, on the other hand, are not willing to go down along with the people, the nation and nationality, not willing to be merely political men or politicians. Since the Revolution they have striven to "make the people happy," and in making the people happy, great, etc., they make us unhappy: the people's good hap is -- my mishap.
     What empty talk the political liberals utter with emphatic decorum is well seen again in Nauwerck's "On Taking Part in the State". There complaint is made of those who are indifferent and do not take part, who are not in the full sense citizens, and the author speaks as if one could not be man at all if one did not take a lively part in State affairs, i.e. if one were not a politician. In this he is right; for, if the State ranks as the warder of everything "human," we can have nothing human without taking part in it. But what does this make out against the egoist? Nothing at all, because the egoist is to himself the warder of the human, and has nothing to say to the State except "Get out of my sunshine." Only when the State comes in contact with his ownness does the egoist take an active interest in it. If the condition of the State does not bear hard on the closet-philosopher, is he to occupy himself with it because it is his "most sacred duty?" So long as the State does according to his wish, what need has he to look up from his studies? Let those who from an interest of their own want to have conditions otherwise busy themselves with them. Not now, nor evermore, will "sacred duty" bring folks to reflect about the State -- as little as they become disciples of science, artists, etc., from "sacred duty." Egoism alone can impel them to it, and will as soon as things have become much worse. If you showed folks that their egoism demanded that they busy themselves with State affairs, you would not have to call on them long; if, on the other hand, you appeal to their love of fatherland etc., you will long preach to deaf hearts in behalf of this "service of love." Certainly, in your sense the egoists will not participate in State affairs at all.
     Nauwerck utters a genuine liberal phrase on p. 16: "Man completely fulfills his calling only in feeling and knowing himself as a member of humanity, and being active as such. The individual cannot realize the idea of manhood if he does not stay himself upon all humanity, if he does not draw his powers from it like Antaeus."
     In the same place it is said: "Man's relation to the res publica is degraded to a purely private matter by the theological view; is, accordingly, made away with by denial." As if the political view did otherwise with religion! There religion is a "private matter."
     If, instead of "sacred duty," "man's destiny," the "calling to full manhood," and similar commandments, it were held up to people that their self-interest was infringed on when they let everything in the State go as it goes, then, without declamations, they would be addressed as one will have to address them at the decisive moment if he wants to attain his end. Instead of this, the theology-hating author says, "If there has ever been a time when the State laid claim to all that are hers, such a time is ours. -- The thinking man sees in participation in the theory and practice of the State a duty, one of the most sacred duties that rest upon him" -- and then takes under closer consideration the "unconditional necessity that everybody participate in the State."
     He in whose head or heart or both the State is seated, he who is possessed by the State, or the believer in the State, is a politician, and remains such to all eternity.
     "The State is the most necessary means for the complete development of mankind." It assuredly has been so as long as we wanted to develop mankind; but, if we want to develop ourselves, it can be to us only a means of hindrance.
     Can State and people still be reformed and bettered now? As little as the nobility, the clergy, the church, etc.: they can be abrogated, annihilated, done away with, not reformed. Can I change a piece of nonsense into sense by reforming it, or must I drop it outright?
     Henceforth what is to be done is no longer about the State (the form of the State, etc.), but about me. With this all questions about the prince's power, the constitution, etc., sink into their true abyss and their true nothingness. I, this nothing, shall put forth my creations from myself.

     To the chapter of society belongs also "the party," whose praise has of late been sung.
     In the State the party is current. "Party, party, who should not join one!" But the individual is unique,¹⁴ not a member of the party. He unites freely, and separates freely again. The party is nothing but a State in the State, and in this smaller bee- State "peace" is also to rule just as in the greater. The very people who cry loudest that there must be an opposition in the State inveigh against every discord in the party. A proof that they too want only a --State. All parties are shattered not against the State, but against the ego.¹⁵
     One hears nothing oftener now than the admonition to remain true to his party; party men despise nothing so much as a mugwump. One must run with his party through thick and thin, and unconditionally approve and represent its chief principles. It does not indeed go quite so badly here as with closed societies, because these bind their members to fixed laws or statutes (e. g. the orders, the Society of Jesus, etc.). But yet the party ceases to be a union at the same moment at which it makes certain principles binding and wants to have them assured against attacks; but this moment is the very birth-act of the party. As party it is already a born society, a dead union, an idea that has become fixed. As party of absolutism it cannot will that its members should doubt the irrefragable truth of this principle; they could cherish this doubt only if they were egoistic enough to want still to be something outside their party, i.e. non-partisans. Non-partisans they cannot be as party-men, but only as egoists. If you are a Protestant and belong to that party, you must only justify Protestantism, at most "purge" it, not reject it; if you are a Christian and belong among men to the Christian party, you cannot be beyond this as a member of this party, but only when your egoism, i.e. non-partisanship, impels you to it. What exertions the Christians, down to Hegel and the Communists, have put forth to make their party strong! They stuck to it that Christianity must contain the eternal truth, and that one needs only to get at it, make sure of it, and justify it.
     In short, the party cannot bear non-partisanship, and it is in this that egoism appears. What matters the party to me? I shall find enough anyhow who unite with me without swearing allegiance to my flag.
     He who passes over from one party to another is at once abused as a "turncoat." Certainly morality demands that one stand by his party, and to become apostate from it is to spot oneself with the stain of "faithlessness"; but ownness knows no commandment of "faithlessness"; adhesion, etc., ownness permits everything, even apostasy, defection. Unconsciously even the moral themselves let themselves be led by this principle when they have to judge one who passes over to their party -- nay, they are likely to be making proselytes; they should only at the same time acquire a consciousness of the fact that one must commit immoral actions in order to commit his own -- i.e. here, that one must break faith, yes, even his oath, in order to determine himself instead of being determined by moral considerations. In the eyes of people of strict moral judgment an apostate always shimmers in equivocal colors, and will not easily obtain their confidence; for there sticks to him the taint of "faithlessness," i.e. of an immorality. In the lower man this view is found almost generally; advanced thinkers fall here too, as always, into an uncertainty and bewilderment, and the contradiction necessarily founded in the principle of morality does not, on account of the confusion of their concepts, come clearly to their consciousness. They do not venture to call the apostate downright immoral, because they themselves entice to apostasy, to defection from one religion to another, etc.; still, they cannot give up the standpoint of morality either. And yet here the occasion was to be seized to step outside of morality.
     Are the Own or Unique¹⁶ perchance a party? How could they be own if they were e. g. belonged to a party?
     Or is one to hold with no party? In the very act of joining them and entering their circle one forms a union with them that lasts as long as party and I pursue one and the same goal. But today I still share the party's tendency, as by tomorrow I can do so no longer and I become "untrue" to it. The party has nothing binding (obligatory) for me, and I do not have respect for it; if it no longer pleases me, I become its foe.
     In every party that cares for itself and its persistence, the members are unfree (or better, unown) in that degree, they lack egoism in that degree, in which they serve this desire of the party. The independence of the party conditions the lack of independence in the party- members.
     A party, of whatever kind it may be, can never do without a confession of faith. For those who belong to the party must believe in its principle, it must not be brought in doubt or put in question by them, it must be the certain, indubitable thing for the party-member. That is: One must belong to a party body and soul, else one is not truly a party-man, but more or less -- an egoist. Harbor a doubt of Christianity, and you are already no longer a true Christian, you have lifted yourself to the "effrontery" of putting a question beyond it and haling Christianity before your egoistic judgment-seat. You have -- sinned against Christianity, this party cause (for it is surely not e. g. a cause for the Jews, another party.) But well for you if you do not let yourself be affrighted: your effrontery helps you to ownness.
     So then an egoist could never embrace a party or take up with a party? Oh, yes, only he cannot let himself be embraced and taken up by the party. For him the party remains all the time nothing but a gathering: he is one of the party, he takes part.

     The best State will clearly be that which has the most loyal citizens, and the more the devoted mind for legality is lost, so much the more will the State, this system of morality, this moral life itself, be diminished in force and quality. With the "good citizens" the good State too perishes and dissolves into anarchy and lawlessness. "Respect for the law!" By this cement the total of the State is held together. "The law is sacred, and he who affronts it a criminal". Without crime no State: the moral world -- and this the State is -- is crammed full of scamps, cheats, liars, thieves, etc. Since the State is the "lordship of law," its hierarchy, it follows that the egoist, in all cases where his advantage runs against the State's, can satisfy himself only by crime.
     The State cannot give up the claim that its laws and ordinances are sacred.¹⁷ At this the individual ranks as the unholy¹⁸ (barbarian, natural man, "egoist") over against the State, exactly as he was once regarded by the Church; before the individual the State takes on the nimbus of a saint.¹⁹ Thus it issues a law against dueling. Two men who are both at one in this, that they are willing to stake their life for a cause (no matter what), are not to be allowed this, because the State will not have it: it imposes a penalty on it. Where is the liberty of self-determination then? It is at once quite another situation if, as e. g. in North America, society determines to let the duelists bear certain evil consequences of their act, e. g. withdrawal of the credit hitherto enjoyed. To refuse credit is everybody's affair, and, if a society wants to withdraw it for this or that reason, the man who is hit cannot therefore complain of encroachment on his liberty: the society is simply availing itself of its own liberty. That is no penalty for sin, no penalty for a crime. The duel is no crime there, but only an act against which the society adopts counter-measures, resolves on a defense. The State, on the contrary, stamps the duel as a crime, i.e. as an injury to its sacred law: it makes it a criminal case. The society leaves it to the individual's decision whether he will draw upon himself evil consequences and inconveniences by his mode of action, and hereby recognizes his free decision; the State behaves in exactly the reverse way, denying all right to the individual's decision and, instead, ascribing the sole right to its own decision, the law of the State, so that he who transgresses the State's commandment is looked upon as if he were acting against God's commandment -- a view which likewise was once maintained by the Church. Here God is the Holy in and of himself, and the commandments of the Church, as of the State, are the commandments of this Holy One, which he transmits to the world through his anointed and Lords-by-the-Grace-of-God. If the Church had deadly sins, the State has capital crimes; if the one had heretics, the other has traitors; the one ecclesiastical penalties, the other criminal penalties; the one inquisitorial processes, the other fiscal; in short, there sins, here crimes, there inquisition and here -- inquisition. Will the sanctity of the State not fall like the Church's? The awe of its laws, the reverence for its highness, the humility of its "subjects," will this remain? Will the "saint's" face not be stripped of its adornment?
     What a folly, to ask of the State's authority that it should enter into an honourable fight with the individual, and, as they express themselves in the matter of freedom of the press, share sun and wind equally! If the State, this thought, is to be a de facto power, it simply must be a superior power against the individual. The State is "sacred" and must not expose itself to the "impudent attacks" of individuals. If the State is sacred, there must be censorship. The political liberals admit the former and dispute the inference. But in any case they concede repressive measures to it, for -- they stick to this, that State is more than the individual and exercises a justified revenge, called punishment.
     Punishment has a meaning only when it is to afford expiation for the injuring of a sacred thing. If something is sacred to any one, he certainly deserves punishment when he acts as its enemy. A man who lets a man's life continue in existence because to him it is sacred and he has a dread of touching it is simply a -- religious man.
     Weitling lays crime at the door of "social disorder," and lives in the expectation that under Communistic arrangements crimes will become impossible, because the temptations to them, e. g. money, fall away. As, however, his organized society is also exalted into a sacred and inviolable one, he miscalculates in that good-hearted opinion. e. g. with their mouth professed allegiance to the Communistic society, but worked underhand for its ruin, would not be lacking. Besides, Weitling has to keep on with "curative means against the natural remainder of human diseases and weaknesses," and "curative means" always announce to begin with that individuals will be looked upon as "called" to a particular "salvation" and hence treated according to the requirements of this "human calling." Curative means or healing is only the reverse side of punishment, the theory of cure runs parallel with the theory of punishment; if the latter sees in an action a sin against right, the former takes it for a sin of the man against himself, as a decadence from his health. But the correct thing is that I regard it either as an action that suits me or as one that does not suit me, as hostile or friendly to me, i.e. that I treat it as my property, which I cherish or demolish. "Crime" or "disease" are not either of them an egoistic view of the matter, i.e. a judgment starting from me, but starting from another -- to wit, whether it injures right, general right, or the health partly of the individual (the sick one), partly of the generality (society). "Crime" is treated inexorably, "disease" with "loving gentleness, compassion," etc.
     Punishment follows crime. If crime falls because the sacred vanishes, punishment must not less be drawn into its fall; for it too has significance only over against something sacred. Ecclesiastical punishments have been abolished. Why? Because how one behaves toward the "holy God" is his own affair. But, as this one punishment, ecclesiastical punishment, has fallen, so all punishments must fall. As sin against the so-called God is a man's own affair, so is that against every kind of the so-called sacred. According to our theories of penal law, with whose "improvement in conformity to the times" people are tormenting themselves in vain, they want to punish men for this or that "inhumanity"; and therein they make the silliness of these theories especially plain by their consistency, hanging the little thieves and letting the big ones run. For injury to property they have the house of correction, and for "violence to thought," suppression of "natural rights of man," only --representations and petitions.
     The criminal code has continued existence only through the sacred, and perishes of itself if punishment is given up. Now they want to create everywhere a new penal law, without indulging in a misgiving about punishment itself. But it is exactly punishment that must make room for satisfaction, which, again, cannot aim at satisfying right or justice, but at procuring us a satisfactory outcome. If one does to us what we will not put up with, we break his power and bring our own to bear: we satisfy ourselves on him, and do not fall into the folly of wanting to satisfy right (the spook). It is not the sacred that is to defend itself against man, but man against man; as God too, you know, no longer defends himself against man, God to whom formerly (and in part, indeed, even now) all the "servants of God" offered their hands to punish the blasphemer, as they still at this very day lend their hands to the sacred. This devotion to the sacred brings it to pass also that, without lively participation of one's own, one only delivers misdoers into the hands of the police and courts: a non-participating making over to the authorities, "who, of course, will best administer sacred matters." The people is quite crazy for hounding the police on against everything that seems to it to be immoral, often only unseemly, and this popular rage for the moral protects the police institution more than the government could in any way protect it.
     In crime the egoist has hitherto asserted himself and mocked at the sacred; the break with the sacred, or rather of the sacred, may become general. A revolution never returns, but a mighty, reckless, shameless, conscienceless. proud --crime, does it not rumble in distant thunders, and do you not see how the sky grows presciently silent and gloomy?

     He who refuses to spend his powers for such limited societies as family, party, nation, is still always longing for a worthier society, and thinks he has found the true object of love, perhaps, in "human society" or "mankind," to sacrifice himself to which constitutes his honor; from now on he "lives for and serves mankind."
     People is the name of the body, State of the spirit, of that ruling person that has hitherto suppressed me. Some have wanted to transfigure peoples and States by broadening them out to "mankind" and "general reason"; but servitude would only become still more intense with this widening, and philanthropists and humanitarians are as absolute masters as politicians and diplomats.
     Modern critics inveigh against religion because it sets God, the divine, moral, etc., outside of man, or makes them something objective, in opposition to which the critics rather transfer these very subjects into man. But those critics none the less fall into the proper error of religion, to give man a "destiny," in that they too want to have him divine, human, and the like: morality, freedom and humanity, etc., are his essence. And, like religion politics too wanted to "educate" man, to bring him to the realization of his "essence," his "destiny," to make something out of him -- to wit, a "true man," the one in the form of the "true believer," the other in that of the "true citizen or subject." In fact, it comes to the same whether one calls the destiny the divine or human.
     Under religion and politics man finds himself at the standpoint of should: he should become this and that, should be so and so. With this postulate, this commandment, every one steps not only in front of another but also in front of himself. Those critics say: You should be a whole, free man. Thus they too stand in the temptation to proclaim a new religion, to set up a new absolute, an ideal -- to wit, freedom. Men should be free. Then there might even arise missionaries of freedom, as Christianity, in the conviction that all were properly destined to become Christians, sent out missionaries of the faith. Freedom would then (as have hitherto faith as Church, morality as State) constitute itself as a new community and carry on a like "propaganda" therefrom. Certainly no objection can be raised against a getting together; but so much the more must one oppose every renewal of the old care for us, of culture directed toward an end -- in short, the principle of making something out of us, no matter whether Christians, subjects, or freemen and men.
     One may well say with Feuerbach and others that religion has displaced the human from man, and has transferred it so into another world that, unattainable, it went on with its own existence there as something personal in itself, as a "God": but the error of religion is by no means exhausted with this. One might very well let fall the personality of the displaced human, might transform God into the divine, and still remain religious. For the religious consists in discontent with the present men, in the setting up of a "perfection" to be striven for, in "man wrestling for his completion."²⁰ ("Ye therefore should be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect." Matt. 5, 48): it consists in the fixation of an ideal, an absolute. Perfection is the "supreme good," the finis bonorum; every one's ideal is the perfect man, the true, the free man, etc.
     The efforts of modern times aim to set up the ideal of the "free man." If one could find it, there would be a new -- religion, because a new ideal; there would be a new longing, a new torment, a new devotion, a new deity, a new contrition.
     With the ideal of "absolute liberty," the same turmoil is made as with everything absolute, and according to Hess, e. g., it is said to "be realizable in absolute human society."²¹ Nay, this realization is immediately afterward styled a "vocation"; just so he then defines liberty as "morality": the kingdom of "justice" (equality) and "morality" (i.e. liberty) is to begin, etc.
     Ridiculous is he who, while fellows of his tribe, family, nation, rank high, is -- nothing but "puffed up" over the merit of his fellows; but blinded too is he who wants only to be "man." Neither of them puts his worth in exclusiveness, but in connectedness, or in the "tie" that conjoins him with others, in the ties of blood, of nationality, of humanity.
     Through the "Nationals" of today the conflict has again been stirred up between those who think themselves to have merely human blood and human ties of blood, and the others who brag of their special blood and the special ties of blood.
     If we disregard the fact that pride may mean conceit, and take it for consciousness alone, there is found to be a vast difference between pride in "belonging to" a nation and therefore being its property, and that in calling a nationality one's property. Nationality is my quality, but the nation my owner and mistress. If you have bodily strength, you can apply it at a suitable place and have a self-consciousness or pride of it; if, on the contrary, your strong body has you, then it pricks you everywhere, and at the most unsuitable place, to show its strength: you can give nobody your hand without squeezing his.
     The perception that one is more than a member of the family, more than a fellow of the tribe, more than an individual of the people, has finally led to saying, one is more than all this because one is man, or, the man is more than the Jew, German, etc. "Therefore be every one wholly and solely -- man." Could one not rather say: Because we are more than what has been stated, therefore we will be this, as well as that "more" also? Man and Germans, then, man and Guelph, etc.? The Nationals are in the right; one cannot deny his nationality: and the humanitarians are in the right; one must not remain in the narrowness of the national. In uniqueness²² the contradiction is solved; the national is my quality. But I am not swallowed up in my quality -- as the human too is my quality, but I give to man his existence first through my uniqueness.
     History seeks for Man: but he is I, you, we. Sought as a mysterious essence, as the divine, first as God, then as Man (humanity, humaneness, and mankind), he is found as the individual, the finite, the unique one.
     I am owner of humanity, am humanity, and do nothing for the good of another humanity. Fool, you who are a unique humanity, that you make a merit of wanting to live for another than you are.
     The hitherto-considered relation of me to the world of men offers such a wealth of phenomena that it will have to be taken up again and again on other occasions, but here, where it was only to have its chief outlines made clear to the eye, it must be broken off to make place for an apprehension of two other sides toward which it radiates. For, as I find myself in relation not merely to men so far as they present in themselves the concept "man" or are children of men (children of Man, as children of God are spoken of), but also to that which they have of man and call their own, and as therefore I relate myself not only to that which they are through man, but also to their human possessions: so, besides the world of men, the world of the senses and of ideas will have to be included in our survey, and somewhat said of what men call their own of sensuous goods, and of spiritual as well.
     According as one had developed and clearly grasped the concept of man, he gave it to us to respect as this or that person of respect, and from the broadest understanding of this concept there proceeded at last the command "to respect Man in every one." But if I respect Man, my respect must likewise extend to the human, or what is Man's.
     Men have somewhat of their own, and I am to recognize this own and hold it sacred. Their own consists partly in outward, partly in inward possessions. The former are things, the latter spiritualities, thoughts, convictions, noble feelings, etc. But I am always to respect only rightful or human possessions: the wrongful and unhuman I need not spare, for only Man's own is men's real own. An inward possession of this sort is, e. g., religion; because religion is free, i. e. is Man's, I must not strike at it. Just so honor is an inward possession; it is free and must not be struck at my me. (Action for insult, caricatures, etc.) Religion and honor are "spiritual property." In tangible property the person stands foremost: my person is my first property. Hence freedom of the person; but only the rightful or human person is free, the other is locked up. Your life is your property; but it is sacred for men only if it is not that of an inhuman monster.
     What a man as such cannot defend of bodily goods, we may take from him: this is the meaning of competition, of freedom of occupation. What he cannot defend of spiritual goods falls a prey to us likewise: so far goes the liberty of discussion, of science, of criticism.
     But consecrated goods are inviolable. Consecrated and guarantied by whom? Proximately by the State, society, but properly by man or the "concept," the "concept of the thing"; for the concept of consecrated goods is this, that they are truly human, or rather that the holder possesses them as man and not as un-man.²³
     On the spiritual side man's faith is such goods, his honor, his moral feeling -- yes, his feeling of decency, modesty, etc. Actions (speeches, writings) that touch honor are punishable; attacks on "the foundations of all religion"; attacks on political faith; in short, attacks on everything that a man "rightly" has.
     How far critical liberalism would extend the sanctity of goods -- on this point it has not yet made any pronouncement, and doubtless fancies itself to be ill-disposed toward all sanctity; but, as it combats egoism, it must set limits to it, and must not let the un-man pounce on the human. To its theoretical contempt for the "masses" there must correspond a practical snub if it should get into power.
     What extension the concept "man" receives, and what comes to the individual man through it -- what, therefore, man and the human are -- on this point the various grades of liberalism differ, and the political, the social, the humane man are each always claiming more than the other for "man." He who has best grasped this concept knows best what is "man's." The State still grasps this concept in political restriction, society in social; mankind, so it is said, is the first to comprehend it entirely, or "the history of mankind develops it." But, if "man is discovered," then we know also what pertains to man as his own, man's property, the human.
     But let the individual man lay claim to ever so many rights because Man or the concept man "entitles" him to them, because his being man does it: what do I care for his right and his claim? If he has his right only from Man and does not have it from me, then for me he has no right. His life, e. g., counts to me only for what it is worth to me. I respect neither a so-called right of property (or his claim to tangible goods) nor yet his right to the "sanctuary of his inner nature" (or his right to have the spiritual goods and divinities, his gods, remain un-aggrieved). His goods, the sensuous as well as the spiritual, are mine, and I dispose of them as proprietor, in the measure of my -- might.
     In the property question lies a broader meaning than the limited statement of the question allows to be brought out. Referred solely to what men call our possessions, it is capable of no solution; the decision is to be found in him "from whom we have everything." Property depends on the owner.
     The Revolution directed its weapons against everything which came "from the grace of God," e. g., against divine right, in whose place the human was confirmed. To that which is granted by the grace of God, there is opposed that which is derived "from the essence of man."
     Now, as men's relation to each other, in opposition to the religious dogma which commands a "Love one another for God's sake," had to receive its human position by a "Love each other for man's sake," so the revolutionary teaching could not do otherwise than, first, as to what concerns the relation of men to the things of this world, settle it that the world, which hitherto was arranged according to God's ordinance, henceforth belongs to "Man."
     The world belongs to "Man," and is to be respected by me as his property.
     Property is what is mine!
     Property in the civic sense means sacred property, such that I must respect your property. "Respect for property!" Hence the politicians would like to have every one possess his little bit of property, and they have in part brought about an incredible parcellation by this effort. Each must have his bone on which he may find something to bite.
     The position of affairs is different in the egoistic sense. I do not step shyly back from your property, but look upon it always as my property, in which I need to "respect" nothing. Pray do the like with what you call my property!
     With this view we shall most easily come to an understanding with each other.
     The political liberals are anxious that, if possible, all servitudes be dissolved, and every one be free lord on his ground, even if this ground has only so much area as can have its requirements adequately filled by the manure of one person. (The farmer in the story married even in his old age "that he might profit by his wife's dung.") Be it ever so little, if one only has somewhat of his own -- to wit, a respected property! The more such owners, such cotters,²⁴ the more "free people and good patriots" has the State.
     Political liberalism, like everything religious, counts on respect, humaneness, the virtues of love. Therefore does it live in incessant vexation. For in practice people respect nothing, and every day the small possessions are bought up again by greater proprietors, and the "free people" change into day- laborers.
     If, on the contrary, the "small proprietors" had reflected that the great property was also theirs, they would not have respectfully shut themselves out from it, and would not have been shut out.
     Property as the civic liberals understand it deserves the attacks of the Communists and Proudhon: it is untenable, because the civic proprietor is in truth nothing but a property-less man, one who is everywhere shut out. Instead of owning the world, as he might, he does not own even the paltry point on which he turns around.
     Proudhon wants not the propriétaire but the possesseur or usufruitier.²⁵ What does that mean? He wants no one to own the land; but the benefit of it -- even though one were allowed only the hundredth part of this benefit, this fruit -- is at any rate one's property, which he can dispose of at will. He who has only the benefit of a field is assuredly not the proprietor of it; still less he who, as Proudhon would have it, must give up so much of this benefit as is not required for his wants; but he is the proprietor of the share that is left him. Proudhon, therefore, denies only such and such property, not property itself. If we want no longer to leave the land to the landed proprietors, but to appropriate it to ourselves, we unite ourselves to this end, form a union, a société, that makes itself proprietor; if we have good luck in this, then those persons cease to be landed proprietors. And, as from the land, so we can drive them out of many another property yet, in order to make it our property, the property of the -- conquerors. The conquerors form a society which one may imagine so great that it by degrees embraces all humanity; but so-called humanity too is as such only a thought (spook); the individuals are its reality. And these individuals as a collective (mass will treat land and earth not less arbitrarily than an isolated individual or so-called propriétaire. Even so, therefore, property remains standing, and that as exclusive" too, in that humanity, this great society, excludes the individual from its property (perhaps only leases to him, gives his as a fief, a piece of it) as it besides excludes everything that is not humanity, e. g. does not allow animals to have property. -- So too it will remain, and will grow to be. That in which all want to have a share will be withdrawn from that individual who wants to have it for himself alone: it is made a common estate. As a common estate every one has his share in it, and this share is his property. Why, so in our old relations a house which belongs to five heirs is their common estate; but the fifth part of the revenue is, each one's property. Proudhon might spare his prolix pathos if he said: "There are some things that belong only to a few, and to which we others will from now on lay claim or -- siege. Let us take them, because one comes to property by taking, and the property of which for the present we are still deprived came to the proprietors likewise only by taking. It can be utilized better if it is in the hands of us all than if the few control it. Let us therefore associate ourselves for the purpose of this robbery (vol)." -- Instead of this, he tries to get us to believe that society is the original possessor and the sole proprietor, of imprescriptible right; against it the so-called proprietors have become thieves (La propriété c'est le vol); if it now deprives of his property the present proprietor, it robs him of nothing, as it is only availing itself of its imprescriptible right. -- So far one comes with the spook of society as a moral person. On the contrary, what man can obtain belongs to him: the world belongs to me. Do you say anything else by your opposite proposition? "The world belongs to all"? All are I and again I, etc. But you make out of the "all" a spook, and make it sacred, so that then the "all" become the individual's fearful master. Then the ghost of "right" places itself on their side.
     Proudhon, like the Communists, fights against egoism. Therefore they are continuations and consistent carryings-out of the Christian principle, the principle of love, of sacrifice for something general, something alien. They complete in property, e. g., only what has long been extant as a matter of fact -- to wit, the propertylessness of the individual. When the laws says, Ad reges potestas omnium pertinet, ad singulos proprietas; omnia rex imperio possidet, singuli dominio, this means: The king is proprietor, for he alone can control and dispose of "everything," he has potestas and imperium over it. The Communists make this clearer, transferring that imperium to the "society of all." Therefore: Because enemies of egoism, they are on that account -- Christians, or, more generally speaking, religious men, believers in ghosts, dependents, servants of some generality (God, society, etc.). In this too Proudhon is like the Christians, that he ascribes to God that which he denies to men. He names him (e. g. page 90) the Propriétaire of the earth. Herewith he proves that he cannot think away the proprietor as such; he comes to a proprietor at last, but removes him to the other world.
     Neither God nor Man ("human society") is proprietor, but the individual.

     Proudhon (Weitling too) thinks he is telling the worst about property when he calls it theft (vol). Passing quite over the embarrassing question, what well-founded objection could be made against theft, we only ask: Is the concept "theft" at all possible unless one allows validity to the concept "property"? How can one steal if property is not already extant? What belongs to no one cannot be stolen; the water that one draws out of the sea he does not steal. Accordingly property is not theft, but a theft becomes possible only through property. Weitling has to come to this too, as he does regard everything as the property of all: if something is "the property of all," then indeed the individual who appropriates it to himself steals.
     Private property lives by grace of the law. Only in the law has it its warrant -- for possession is not yet property, it becomes "mine" only by assent of the law; it is not a fact, not un fait as Proudhon thinks, but a fiction, a thought. This is legal property, legitimate property, guarantied property. It is mine not through me but through the -- law.
     Nevertheless, property is the expression for unlimited dominion over somewhat (thing, beast, man) which "I can judge and dispose of as seems good to me." According to Roman law, indeed, jus utendi et abutendi re sua, quatenus juris ratio patitur, an exclusive and unlimited right; but property is conditioned by might. What I have in my power, that is my own. So long as I assert myself as holder, I am the proprietor of the thing; if it gets away from me again, no matter by what power, e. g. through my recognition of a title of others to the thing -- then the property is extinct. Thus property and possession coincide. It is not a right lying outside my might that legitimizes me, but solely my might: if I no longer have this, the thing vanishes away from me. When the Romans no longer had any might against the Germans, the world-empire of Rome belonged to the latter, and it would sound ridiculous to insist that the Romans had nevertheless remained properly the proprietors. Whoever knows how to take and to defend the thing, to him it belongs till it is again taken from him, as liberty belongs to him who takes it.--
     Only might decides about property, and, as the State (no matter whether State or well-to-do citizens or of ragamuffins or of men in the absolute) is the sole mighty one, it alone is proprietor; I, the unique,²⁶ have nothing, and am only enfeoffed, am vassal and as such, servitor. Under the dominion of the State there is no property of mine.
     I want to raise the value of myself, the value of ownness, and should I cheapen property? No, as I was not respected hitherto because people, mankind, and a thousand other generalities were put higher, so property too has to this day not yet been recognized in its full value. Property too was only the property of a ghost, e. g. the people's property; my whole existence "belonged to the fatherland"; I belonged to the fatherland, the people, the State, and therefore also everything that I called my own. It is demanded of States that they make away with pauperism. It seems to me this is asking that the State should cut off its own head and lay it at its feet; for so long as the State is the ego the individual ego must remain a poor devil, a non-ego. The State has an interest only in being itself rich; whether Michael is rich and Peter poor is alike to it; Peter might also be rich and Michael poor. It looks on indifferently as one grows poor and the other rich, unruffled by this alternation. As individuals they are really equal before its face; in this it is just: before it both of them are -- nothing, as we "are altogether sinners before God"; on the other hand, it has a very great interest in this, that those individuals who make it their ego should have a part in its wealth; it makes them partakers in its property. Through property, with which it rewards the individuals, it tames them; but this remains its property, and every one has the usufruct of it only so long as he bears in himself the ego of the State, or is a "loyal member of society"; in the opposite case the property is confiscated, or made to melt away by vexatious lawsuits. The property, then, is and remains State property, not property of the ego. That the State does not arbitrarily deprive the individual of what he has from the State means simply that the State does not rob itself. He who is State-ego, i.e. a good citizen or subject, holds his fief undisturbed as such an ego, not as being an ego of his own. According to the code, property is what I call mine "by virtue of God and law." But it is mine by virtue of God and law only so long as -- the State has nothing against it.
     In expropriations, disarmaments, etc. (as, when the exchequer confiscates inheritances if the heirs do not put in an appearance early enough) how plainly the else-veiled principle that only the people, "the State," is proprietor, while the individual is feoffee, strikes the eye!
     The State, I mean to say, cannot intend that anybody should for his own sake have property or actually be rich, nay, even well-to-do; it can acknowledge nothing, yield nothing, grant nothing to me as me. The State cannot check pauperism, because the poverty of possession is a poverty of me. He who is nothing but what chance or another -- to wit, the State -- makes out of him also has quite rightly nothing but what another gives him. And this other will give him only what he deserves, i.e. what he is worth by service. It is not he that realizes a value from himself; the State realizes a value from him.
     National economy busies itself much with this subject. It lies far out beyond the "national," however, and goes beyond the concepts and horizon of the State, which knows only State property and can distribute nothing else. For this reason it binds the possessions of property to conditions -- as it binds everything to them, e. g. marriage, allowing validity only to the marriage sanctioned by it, and wresting this out of my power. But property is my property only when I hold it unconditionally : only I, an unconditional ego, have property, enter a relation of love, carry on free trade.
     The State has no anxiety about me and mine, but about itself and its: I count for something to it only as its child, as "a son of the country"; as ego I am nothing at all for it. For the State's understanding, what befalls me as ego is something accidental, my wealth as well as my impoverishment. But, if I with all that is mine am an accident in the State's eyes, this proves that it cannot comprehend me: I go beyond its concepts, or, its understanding is too limited to comprehend me. Therefore it cannot do anything for me either.
     Pauperism is the valuelessness of me, the phenomenon that I cannot realize value from myself. For this reason State and pauperism are one and the same. The State does not let me come to my value, and continues in existence only through my valuelessness: it is forever intent on getting benefit from me, i.e. exploiting me, turning me to account, using me up, even if the use it gets from me consists only in my supplying a proles (proletariat); it wants me to be "its creature."
     Pauperism can be removed only when I as ego realize value from myself, when I give my own self value, and make my price myself. I must rise in revolt to rise in the world.
     What I produce, flour, linen, or iron and coal, which I toilsomely win from the earth, is my work that I want to realize value from. But then I may long complain that I am not paid for my work according to its value: the payer will not listen to me, and the State likewise will maintain an apathetic attitude so long as it does not think it must "appease" me that I may not break out with my dreaded might. But this "appeasing" will be all, and, if it comes into my head to ask for more, the State turns against me with all the force of its lion-paws and eagle-claws: for it is the king of beasts, it is lion and eagle. If I refuse to be content with the price that it fixes for my ware and labor, if I rather aspire to determine the price of my ware myself, e. g., "to pay myself," in the first place I come into a conflict with the buyers of the ware. If this were stilled by a mutual understanding, the State would not readily make objections; for how individuals get along with each other troubles it little, so long as therein they do not get in its way. Its damage and its danger begin only when they do not agree, but, in the absence of a settlement, take each other by the hair. The State cannot endure that man stand in a direct relation to man; it must step between as --mediator, must -- intervene. What Christ was, what the saints, the Church were, the State has become -- to wit, "mediator." It tears man from man to put itself between them as "spirit." The laborers who ask for higher pay are treated as criminals as soon as they want to compel it. What are they to do? Without compulsion they don't get it, and in compulsion the State sees a self-help, a determination of price by the ego, a genuine, free realization of value from his property, which it cannot admit of. What then are the laborers to do? Look to themselves and ask nothing about the State? -- --
     But, as is the situation with regard to my material work, so it is with my intellectual too. The State allows me to realize value from all my thoughts and to find customers for them (I do realize value from them, e. g. in the very fact that they bring me honor from the listeners, etc.); but only so long as my thoughts are --its thoughts. If, on the other hand, I harbor thoughts that it cannot approve (i.e. make its own), then it does not allow me at all to realize value from them, to bring them into exchange into commerce. My thoughts are free only if they are granted to me by the State's grace, i.e. if they are the State's thoughts. It lets me philosophize freely only so far as I approve myself a "philosopher of State"; against the State I must not philosophize, gladly as it tolerates my helping it out of its "deficiencies," "furthering" it. -- Therefore, as I may behave only as an ego most graciously permitted by the State, provided with its testimonial of legitimacy and police pass, so too it is not granted me to realize value from what is mine, unless this proves to be its, which I hold as fief from it. My ways must be its ways, else it distrains me; my thoughts its thoughts, else it stops my mouth.
     The State has nothing to be more afraid of than the value of me, and nothing must it more carefully guard against than every occasion that offers itself to me for realizing value from myself. I am the deadly enemy of the State, which always hovers between the alternatives, it or I. Therefore it strictly insists not only on not letting me have a standing, but also on keeping down what is mine. In the State there is no property, i.e. no property of the individual, but only State property. Only through the State have I what I have, as I am only through it what I am. My private property is only that which the State leaves to me of its, cutting off others from it (depriving them, making it private); it is State property.
     But, in opposition to the State, I feel more and more clearly that there is still left me a great might, the might over myself, i.e. over everything that pertains only to me and that exists only in being my own.
     What do I do if my ways are no longer its ways, my thoughts no longer its thoughts? I look to myself, and ask nothing about it! In my thoughts, which I get sanctioned by no assent, grant, or grace, I have my real property, a property with which I can trade. For as mine they are my creatures, and I am in a position to give them away in return for other thoughts: I give them up and take in exchange for them others, which then are my new purchased property.
     What then is my property? Nothing but what is in my power! To what property am I entitled? To every property to which I -- empower myself.²⁷ I give myself the right of property in taking property to myself, or giving myself the proprietor's power, full power, empowerment.
     Everything over which I have might that cannot be torn from me remains my property; well, then let might decide about property, and I will expect everything from my might! Alien might, might that I leave to another, makes me an owned slave: then let my own might make me an owner. Let me then withdraw the might that I have conceded to others out of ignorance regarding the strength of my own might! Let me say to myself, what my might reaches to is my property; and let me claim as property everything that I feel myself strong enough to attain, and let me extend my actual property as far as I entitle, i. e. -- empower, myself to take.
     Here egoism, selfishness, must decide; not the principle of love, not love-motives like mercy, gentleness, good-nature, or even justice and equity (for justitia too is a phenomenon of -- love, a product of love): love knows only sacrifices and demands "self-sacrifice."
     Egoism does not think of sacrificing anything, giving away anything that it wants; it simply decides, what I want I must have and will procure.
     All attempts to enact rational laws about property have put out from the bay of love into a desolate sea of regulations. Even Socialism and Communism cannot be excepted from this. Every one is to be provided with adequate means, for which it is little to the point whether one socialistically finds them still in a personal property, or communistically draws them from the community of goods. The individual's mind in this remains the same; it remains a mind of dependence. The distributing board of equity lets me have only what the sense of equity, its loving care for all, prescribes. For me, the individual, there lies no less of a check in collective wealth than in that of individual others; neither that is mine, nor this: whether the wealth belongs to the collectivity, which confers part of it on me, or to individual possessors, is for me the same constraint, as I cannot decide about either of the two. On the contrary, Communism, by the abolition of all personal property, only presses me back still more into dependence on another, viz., on the generality or collectivity; and, loudly as it always attacks the "State," what it intends is itself again a State, a status, a condition hindering my free movement, a sovereign power over me. Communism rightly revolts against the pressure that I experience from individual proprietors; but still more horrible is the might that it puts in the hands of the collectivity.
     Egoism takes another way to root out the non-possessing rabble. It does not say: Wait for what the board of equity will -- bestow on you in the name of the collectivity (for such bestowal took place in "States" from the most ancient times, each receiving "according to his desert," and therefore according to the measure in which each was able to deserve it, to acquire it by service), but: Take hold, and take what you require! With this the war of all against all is declared. I alone decide what I will have.
     "Now, that is truly no new wisdom, for self-seekers have acted so at all times!" Not at all necessary either that the thing be new, if only consciousness of it is present. But this latter will not be able to claim great age, unless perhaps one counts in the Egyptian and Spartan law; for how little current it is appears even from the stricture above, which speaks with contempt of "self-seekers." One is to know just this, that the procedure of taking hold is not contemptible, but manifests the pure deed of the egoist at one with himself.
     Only when I expect neither from individuals nor from a collectivity what I can give to myself, only then do I slip out of the snares of --love; the rabble ceases to be rabble only when it takes hold. Only the dread of taking hold, and the corresponding punishment thereof, makes it a rabble. Only that taking hold is sin, crime -- only this dogma creates a rabble. For the fact that the rabble remains what it is, it (because it allows validity to that dogma) is to blame as well as, more especially, those who "self-seekingly" (to give them back their favorite word) demand that the dogma be respected. In short, the lack of consciousness of that "new wisdom," the old consciousness of sin, alone bears the blame.
     If men reach the point of losing respect for property, every one will have property, as all slaves become free men as soon as they no longer respect the master as master. Unions will then, in this matter too, multiply the individual's means and secure his assailed property.
     According to the Communists' opinion the commune should be proprietor. On the contrary, I am proprietor, and I only come to an understanding with others about my property. If the commune does not do what suits me, I rise against it and defend my property. I am proprietor, but property is not sacred. I should be merely possessor? No, hitherto one was only possessor, secured in the possession of a parcel by leaving others also in possession of a parcel; but now everything belongs to me, I am proprietor of everything that I require and can get possession of. If it is said socialistically, society gives me what I require -- then the egoist says, I take what I require. If the Communists conduct themselves as ragamuffins, the egoist behaves as proprietor.
     All swan-fraternities, and attempts at making the rabble happy, that spring from the principle of love, must miscarry. Only from egoism can the rabble get help, and this help it must give to itself and -- will give to itself. If it does not let itself be coerced into fear, it is a power. "People would lose all respect if one did not coerce them into fear," says bugbear Law in Der gestiefelte Kater.
     Property, therefore, should not and cannot be abolished; it must rather be torn from ghostly hands and become my property; then the erroneous consciousness, that I cannot entitle myself to as much as I require, will vanish. --
     "But what cannot man require!" Well, whoever requires much, and understands how to get it, has at all times helped himself to it, as Napoleon did with the Continent and France with Algiers. Hence the exact point is that the respectful "rabble" should learn at last to help itself to what it requires. If it reaches out too far for you, why, then defend yourselves. You have no need at all to good-heartedly -- bestow anything on it; and, when it learns to know itself, it -- or rather: whoever of the rabble learns to know himself, he -- casts off the rabble-quality in refusing your alms with thanks. But it remains ridiculous that you declare the rabble "sinful and criminal" if it is not pleased to live from your favors because it can do something in its own favor. Your bestowals cheat it and put it off. Defend your property, then you will be strong; if, on the other hand, you want to retain your ability to bestow, and perhaps actually have the more political rights the more alms (poor-rates) you can give, this will work just as long as the recipients let you work it.²⁹
     In short, the property question cannot be solved so amicably as the Socialists, yes, even the Communists, dream. It is solved only by the war of all against all. The poor become free and proprietors only when they -- rise. Bestow ever so much on them, they will still always want more; for they want nothing less than that at last -- nothing more be bestowed.
     It will be asked, but how then will it be when the have- nots take heart? Of what sort is the settlement to be? One might as well ask that I cast a child's nativity. What a slave will do as soon as he has broken his fetters, one must --await.
     In Kaiser's pamphlet, worthless for lack of form as well as substance ("Die Persönlichkeit des Eigentümers in Bezug auf den Socialismus und Communismus," etc.), he hopes from the State that it will bring about a leveling of property. Always the State! Herr Papa! As the Church was proclaimed and looked upon as the "mother" of believers, so the State has altogether the face of the provident father.

     Competition shows itself most strictly connected with the principle of civism. Is it anything else than equality (égalité)? And is not equality a product of that same Revolution which was brought on by the commonalty, the middle classes? As no one is barred from competing with all in the State (except the prince, because he represents the State itself) and working himself up to their height, yes, overthrowing or exploiting them for his own advantage, soaring above them and by stronger exertion depriving them of their favorable circumstances -- this serves as a clear proof that before the State's judgment-seat every one has only the value of a "simple individual" and may not count on any favoritism. Outrun and outbid each other as much as you like and can