A. My Power

The chapter on power has in its turn a trichotomous structure in that it treats of: 1) right, 2) law, and 3) crime. In order to conceal this trichotomy, Sancho resorts very frequently to the "episode". We give here the entire content in tabular form, with the necessary episodical insertions.

I. Right

A. Canonisation in General

Another example of the holy is right. Right is not ego

= not my right = alien right = existing right. All existing right = alien right = right of others J. The holy (not my right) = right given by others = (right, which one gives me, which is meted out to me) (pp. 244, 245). Note No. 1. The reader will wonder why the conclusion of equation No. 4 suddenly appears in equation No. 5 as the antecedent of the conclusion of equation No. 3, so that in the place of "right", "all existing right" suddenly appears as the antecedent. This is done to create the illusion that Saint Sancho is speaking of actual, existing right which, however, he by no means intends to do. He speaks of right only insofar as it is represented to be a holy "predicate".

Note No. 2. After right has been determined as "alien right", it can be given any names you like, such as "Sultan's right", "people's right", etc., depending on how Saint Sancho wishes to define the alien from whom he receives the right in question. This allows Sancho to go on to say that "alien right is given by nature, God, popular choice, etc." (p. 250), hence "not by me". What is naive is only the method by which our saint through the use of synonymy tries to give some semblance of development to the above simple equations.

"If some blockhead considers me right" (what if he himself is the blockhead who considers him right?\ "I begin to be mistrustful of my right" (it would be desirable in "Stirner's" interests that this were so). "But even if a wise man considers me right, this still does not mean that I am right. Whether I am right is quite independent of my being acknowledged right by fools or wise men. Nevertheless, up to now we have striven for this right. We seek right and to this end we appeal to the court.... But what do I seek from this court? I seek Sultan's right, not my right, I seek alien right ... before the high court of censorship I seek, therefore, the right of censorship" (pp. 244, 245).

One has to admire the cunning use of synonymy in this masterly proposition. Recognition of right in the ordinary conversational sense is identified with recognition of right in the juridical sense. Even more worthy of admiration is the faith capable of moving mountains in the idea that one "appeals to the court" for the sake of the pleasure of vindicating one's right — a faith which explains that courts are due to litigiousness.*

Notable, finally, is also the craftiness with which Sancho — as in the case of equation No. 5 above — smuggles in, in advance, the more

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] What idea Saint Jacques le bonhomme really has of a court can even be deduced from the fact that as an illustration he mentions the high court of censorship, which at best can only be regarded as a court according to Prussian notions; a court which can merely introduce administrative measures, but is unable either to inflict penalties or to settle civil suits. What does it matter to a saint who is always concerned with real individuals, that two completely different systems of production form the basis of the individuals where court and administration are separate, and where they are combined in a patriarchal way.

The above equations are now transformed into the moral injunctions "vocation", "designation", and "task", which Saint Max shouts in a thunderous voice to his faithful servant Szeliga, who has an uneasy conscience. Like a Prussian non-commissioned officer (his own "gendarme" speaks through his mouth) Saint Max addresses Szeliga in the third person: he should see to it that his right to eat remains uncurtailed, etc. The right of the proletarians to eat has never been "curtailed", nevertheless it happens "of itself" that they are very often unable to "exercise" it.

concrete name, in this case "Sultan's right", in order to be able more confidently later to bring in his universal category of "alien right".

Alien right = not my right. My being right according to alien

right = not to be right = to have no right = to be rightless (p. 247). My right = not your right = your wrong. Your right = my wrong.

Note. "You desire to be in the right against others" (it should read: to be in your right). "You cannot be this, in relation to them you will always remain in the 'wrong', for they would not be your opponents if they were not also in 'their' right. They will always 'consider' you 'wrong'.... If you remain on the basis of right, then you remain on the basis of litigiousness" (pp. 248, 253).

"Let us in the meantime consider the subject from yet another aspect." Having thus given adequate evidence of his knowledge of right, Saint Sancho can now restrict himself to defining right once again as the holy, in this connection repeating some of the epithets previously given to the holy with the addition of the word "right".

"Is not right a religious concept, i.e., something holy?" (p. 247). "Who can ask about 'right' if he does not have a religious standpoint?" (ibid.).

"Right 'in and for itself^[7]. Therefore without relation to me? 'Absolute right'l Therefore separated from me.—Something 'being in and for itself I—An Absolute] An eternal right, like an eternal truth"—the holy (p. 270).

"You recoil in horror before others because you imagine you see by their side the spectre of right !" (p. 253).

"You creep about in order to win the apparition over to your side" (ibid.). "Right is a whimsy, dispensed by an apparition" (the synthesis of the two propositions given above) (p. 276).

"Right is ... a fixed idea" (p. 270). "Right is spirit ..." (p. 244). "Because right can be dispensed only by a spirit" (p. 275).

Saint Sancho now expounds again what he already expounded in the Old Testament, viz., what a "fixed idea" is, with the only difference that here "right" crops up everywhere as "another example" of the "fixed idea".

"Right is originally my thought, or it"a (!) "has its origin in me. But if ita has escaped from me" (in common parlance, absconded), "if the 'word' has been uttered, then it has become flesh" (and Saint Sancho can eat his fill of it), "a fixed idea"—for

The German pronoun er, used in Stirner's book, refers to "my thought".—Ed.

which reason Stirner's whole book consists of "fixed ideas", which have "escaped" from him, but have been caught by us and confined in the much-praised "house for the correction of morals". "Now I can no longer get rid of the idea" (after the idea has got rid ofhiml); "however I twist and turn, it confronts me." (The pigtail, which hangs down behind him.3) "Thus, people have been unable to regain control of the idea of 'right' that they themselves have created. Their creature runs away with them. That is absolute right, which is absolved" (o synonymy!) "and detached from me. Since we worship it as Absolute, we cannot devour it again and it deprives us of our creative power; the creation is more than the creator, it exists in and for itself. Do not allow right to run about freely any longer...." (We shall already in this sentence follow this advice and chain it up for the time being) (p. 270).

Having thus dragged right through all possible ordeals of sanctifi-cation by fire and water and canonised it, Saint Sancho has thereby destroyed it.

"With absolute right, right itself disappears, at the same time the domination of the concept of right" (hierarchy) "is wiped out. For one should not forget that concepts, ideas, and principles have up to now ruled over us and that among these rulers the concept of right or the concept of justice has played one of the most important parts" (p. 276).

That relations of right here once again appear as the domination of the concept of right and that Stirner kills right simply by declaring it a concept, and therefore the holy, is something to which we are already accustomed; on this see "Hierarchy"'.0 Right [according to Stirner J does not arise from the material relations of people and the resulting antagonism of people against one another, but from their struggle against their own concept, which they shouid "get out of their heads^[5]. See 'Logic \c

This last form of the canonisation of right comprises also the following three notes:

Note i.

"So long as this alien right coincides with mine, I shall, of course, find the latter also in it" (p. 245).

Saint Sancho might ponder awhile over this proposition. Note 2.

"If once an egoistic interest crept in, then society was corrupted ... as is shown, for example, by the Roman society with its highly developed civil law" (p. 278).

According to this, Roman society from the very outset must have been corrupted Roman society, since egoistic interest is manifested in the Ten Tables^[92] even more sharply than in the "highly developed civil law" of the imperial epoch. In this unfortunate reminiscence

"" The words are from Chamisso's poem "Tragische Geschichte".— Ed.

from Hegel, therefore, civil law is considered a symptom of egoism, and not of the holy. Here, too, Saint Sancho might well reflect on the extent to which civil law [Privatrecht] is linked with private property [Privateigentum] and to what extent civil law implies a multitude of other legal relations (cf. "Private Property, State and Right"3) about which Saint Max has nothing to say except that they are the holy. Note 3.

"Although right is derived from the concept, nevertheless it only comes into existence because it serves men's needs."

So says Hegel (Rechtsphilosophie^ par 209, Addition) from whom our saint derived the hierarchy of concepts in the modern world. Hegel, therefore, explains the existence of right from the empirical needs of individuals, and rescues the concept only by means of a simple assertion. One can see how infinitely more materialistically Hegel proceeds than our "corporeal ego", Saint Sancho.

B. Appropriation by Simple Antithesis

a) The right of man — My right. b) Human right — Egoistic right. c) Alien right = to be I f My right = to be authorised authorised by others I I by myself. d) Right is that which man \ f Right is that which I con-considers right J \sider right.

"This is egoistic right, i.e., I consider it right, therefore, it is right" (passin; the last sentence is on p. 251).

Note 1.

"I am authorised by myself to commit murder if I do not forbid myself to do so, if I myself am not afraid of murder as a wrong" (p. 249).

This should read: I commit murder if I do not forbid myself to do so, if I am not afraid of murder. This whole proposition is a boastful expansion of the second equation in antithesis c, where the word "authorised" has lost its meaning.

Note 2.

"I decide whether it is right within me; outside me, no right exists" (p. 249).—"Are we what is in us? No, no more than we are what is outside us.... Precisely because we are not the spirit which dwells in us. for that very reason we had to transfer it outside us ... think of it as existing outside us ... in the beyond" (p. 43).

Thus, according to his own statement on page 43, Saint Sancho has again to transfer the right "in him" to "outside himself", and indeed "into the beyond". But if at some stage he wants to appropriate things for himself in this fashion, then he can transfer "into himself" morality, religion, everything "holy", and decide whether "in him" it is the moral, the religious, the holy—"outside him there exists no" morality, religion, holiness — in order thereupon to transfer them, according to page 43, again outside himself, into the beyond. Thereby the "restoration of all things"⁽¹⁾ according to the Christian model is brought about. Note 3.

"Outside me no right exists. If I consider it right then it is right. It is possible that it is still not on that account right for others" (p. 249).

This should read: If I consider it right then it is right for me, but it is still not right for others. We have by now had sufficient examples of the sort of synonymical "flea-jumps" Saint Sancho makes with the word "right". The right and right, legal "right", moral "right", what he considers "right", etc.—all are used higgledy-piggledy, as it suits him. Let Saint Max attempt to translate his propositions about right into another language; his nonsense would then become fully apparent. Since this synonymy was dealt with exhaustively in "The Logic [of the New Wisdom]", we need here only refer to that section.⁽²⁾

The proposition mentioned above is also presented in the following three "transformations":

A. "Whether I am right or not, of that there can be no other judge than I myself. Others can judge and decide only whether they agree with my right and whether it exists as right also for them" (p. 246).

B. "It is true that society wants each person to attain his right, but only right sanctioned by society, social right, and not actually his right" (it should read: "what is his"—"right" is a quite meaningless word here. And then he continues boastfully:) "I, however, give myself, or take for myself, right on my own authority.... Owner and creator of my right" ("creator" only insofar as he first declares right to be his thought and then asserts that he has taken this thought back into himself), "I recognise no other source of right but myself — neither God, nor the state, nor nature, nor man, neither divine nor human right" (p. 269).

C. "Since human right is always something given, in reality it always amounts to the right which people give to, i.e., concede, one another" (p. 251).

Egoistical right, on the other hand, is the right which / give myself or take.

However, "let us say in conclusion, it can be seen" that in Sancho's millennium egoistical right, about which people "came to terms'" with each other, is not so very different from that which people "give to" or "concede" one another. Note 4.

"In conclusion, I have now still to take back the half-and-half mode of expression which I desired to use only while I was delving into the bowels of right and allowed at least the word to remain. In point of fact, however, together with the concept the word loses its meaning. What I called my right, is no longer right at all" (p. 275).

Everyone will see at a glance why Saint Sancho allowed the "word" right to remain in the above antitheses. For as he dees not speak at all about the content of right, let alone criticise it, he can only by retaining the word right make it appear that he is speaking about right. If the word right is left out of the antithesis, all that it contains is "I", "my" and the other grammatical forms of the first person pronoun. The content was always introduced only by means of examples which, however, as we have seen, were nothing but tautologies, such as: if I commit murder, then T commit murder, etc., and in which the words "right", "authorised", etc., were introduced only to conceal the simple tautology and give it some sort of connection with the antitheses. The synonymy, too, was intended to create the appearance of dealing with some sort of content. Incidentally, one can see at once what a rich source of bragging this empty chatter about right provides.

Thus, all the "delving into the bowels of right" amounted to this, that Saint Sancho "made use of a half-and-half mode of expression" and "allowed at least the word to remain", because he was unable to say anything about the subject itself. If the antithesis is to have any meaning, that is to say, if "Stirner" simply wanted to demonstrate in it his repugnance to right, then one must say rather that it was not he who "delved into the bowels of right", but that right "delved" into his bowels and that he merely recorded the fact that right is not to his liking. "Keep this right uncurtailed", Jacques le bonhomme!

To introduce some sort of content into this void, Saint Sancho has to undertake yet another logical manoeuvre, which with great "virtuosity" he thoroughly shuffles together with canonisation and the simple antithesis, and so completely masks with numerous episodes that the German public and German philosophers, at any rate, were unable to see through it.

C. Appropriation by Compound Antithesis

"Stirner" now has to introduce an empirical definition of right, which he can ascribe to the individual, i.e., he has to recognise something else in right besides holiness. In this connection, he could have spared himself all his clumsy machinations, since, starting with Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Bodinus and others of modern times, not to mention earlier ones, might has been represented as the basis of right. Thereby the theoretical view of politics was freed from morality, and apart from the postulate of an independent treatment of politics nothing was accepted. Later, in the eighteenth century in France and in the nineteenth century in England, all right was reduced to civil law (which Saint Max does not discuss) and the latter to a quite definite power, the power of the owners of private property. Moreover, the matter was by no means left at a mere phrase.

Thus Saint Sancho draws the definition of might from right and explains it as follows:

"We are in the habit of classifying states according to the various ways in which the 'supreme power' is divided ... hence, the supreme power! Power over whom? Over the individual.... The state uses force ... the behaviour of the state is exercise of force, and it calls its force right.... The collective as a whole ... has a power which is called rightful, i.e., which is right" (pp. 259, 260).

Through "our" "habit", our saint arrives at his longed-for power and can now "look after"3 himself.

Right, the might of man — might, my right. Intermediate equations:

To be authorised = to be empowered. To authorise oneself = to empower oneself.

Antithesis:

To be authorised by man — to be empowered by me. First antithesis:

Right, might of man — Might, my right now becomes converted into:

r>- L. r ( Might of me, Right of man — < . , ^[6] . J. 0 J \ My might, because in the thesis right and might are identical, and in the antithesis the "half-and-half mode of expression" has to be "taken back", since right, as we have seen, has "lost all meaning".

Note 1. Examples of bombastic and boastful paraphrases of the above antitheses and equations:

"What you have the power to be, you have the right to be." "I derive all right and all authority from myself, I am authorised to do everything which I have the power to do."—"I do not demand any right, and therefore I need recognise none. What I can obtain for myself by force, I obtain for myself, and what I cannot obtain by force, to that I have no right either, etc.—It is a matter of indifference to me whether I am authorised or not; if only I have the potoer, then I am already empowered as a matter of course and do not need any other power or authority" (pp. 248, 275).

Note 2. Examples of the way in which Saint Sancho expounds might as the real basis of right:

"Thus, 'the communists' say" (how on earth does "Stirner" know what the communists say, since he has never set eyes on anything concerning them except the Bluntschli report,'1 Becker's Volksphilosophie and a few other things?): "Equal work gives people the right to equal enjoyment.... No, equal work does not give you this right, only equal enjoyment gives you the right to equal enjoyment. Enjoy, and you are entitled to enjoyment.... If you take enjoyment, then it is your right; if, on the other hand, you only yearn for it, without seizing it, it will remain as before the 'established right' of those who have the privilege of enjoyment. It is their right, just as it would become your right, by your seizing it" (p. 250).

Compare what is here put into the mouth of the communists with what was previously said about "communism". Saint Sancho again presents the proletarians here as a "closed society", which has only to take the decision of "seizing" in order the next day to put a summary end to the entire hitherto existing world order. But in reality the proletarians arrive at this unity only through a long process of development in which the appeal to their right also plays a part. Incidentally, this appeal to their right is only a means of making them take shape as "they", as a revolutionary, united mass.

As for the above proposition itself, from start to finish it is a brilliant example of tautology, as is at once clear if one omits both might and right, which can be done without any harm to the content. Secondly, Saint Sancho himself distinguishes between personal and material property," thereby making a distinction between enjoying and the power to enjoy. I may have great personal power (capacity) of enjoyment without necessarily having the corresponding material power (money, etc.). Thus my actual "enjoyment" still remains hypothetical.

"That the child of royalty sets himself above other children," continues our school-master, using examples suitable for a child's book, "is already his act. one which ensures his superiority, and that other children recognise and approve this act is their act, which makes them deserving of being subjects" (p. 250).

In this example, the social relation in which the royal child stands to other children is regarded as the power and indeed as the personal power of the royal child, and as the impotence of other children. If the fact that other children allow themselves to be commanded by the royal child is regarded as the "act" of the other children, this proves at most that they are egoists. "Peculiarity is at work in the little egoists" and induces them to exploit the royal child, to extract an advantage from him.

"It is said" (i.e., Hegel said) "that punishment is the right of the criminal.3 But impunity is equally his right. If he succeeds in his undertakings, he gets his right, and if he fails it equally serves him right. If someone with reckless courage puts himself in danger and is killed, we say: it serves him right, he asked for it. But if he overcomes the danger, i.e., if his power is victorious, it appears he is also right. If a child plays with a knife and cuts himself, it serves him right; if he does not cut himself, that is also all right. Therefore it serves the criminal right if he suffers the penalty he risked; why did he take the risk, knowing the possible consequences?" (p. 255).

In the concluding words of the last sentence, where the criminal is asked why he took the risk, the school-masterish nonsense of the whole passage is latent. Whether it serves a criminal right if on burgling a house he falls down and breaks his leg, or a child who cuts himself — all these important questions, with which only a man like Saint Sancho is capable of occupying himself, yield only the result that here chance is declared to be my power. Thus, in the first example it was my action that was "my power", in the second example it was social relations independent of me, in the third it was chance. But we have already encountered these contradictory definitions in connection with peculiarity.

Between the above childish examples Sancho inserts the following amusing little intermezzo:

"For otherwise right would be a humbug. The tiger who attacks me is right and I, who kill it, am also right. I am protecting against it not my right, but myself" (p. 251).

In the first part of this passage Saint Sancho sets himself in a relation of right to the tiger, but in the second part it occurs to him that basically no relation of right is involved at all. For that reason "right" appears to "be a humbug". The right of "Man" merges into the right of the "Tiger".

This concludes the criticism of right. Long after having learned from hundreds of earlier writers that right originated from force, we now learn from Saint Sancho that "right" is "the power of man". Thus he has successfully eliminated all questions about the connection between right and real people and their relations, and has established his antithesis. He restricts himself to abolishing right in the form in which he posits it, namely, as the holy, i.e., he restricts himself to abolishing the holy and leaving right untouched.

This criticism of right is embellished with a host of episodes — all sorts of things which people are "in the habit" of discussing at Stehely's between two and four in the afternoon.

Episode 1. "The right of man" and "established right".

"When the revolution made 'equality' into a 'right', it [the revolution] fled into the religious sphere, into the domain of the holy, the ideal. Therefore a struggle has been waged ever since over the holy, inalienable rights of man. Quite naturally and with equal justification, the 'established right of the existing' is asserted against the eternal right of man; right against right, and of course each of these condemns the other as a wrong. Such has been the dispute over right since the revolution" (p. 248).

Here Saint Sancho first of all repeats that the rights of man are "the holy" and that t h ere fore a struggle over the rights of man has been waged ever since. Thereby he only proves that the material basis of this struggle is still, for him, holy, i.e., alien.

Since the "right of man" and "established right" are both "rights", they are "equally justified" and here in fact "justified" in the historical sense. Since both are "rights" in the legal sense, they are "equally justified" in the historical sense. In this way one can dispose of everything in the shortest space of time without knowing anything about the matter. Thus, for example, it can be said of the struggle over the Corn Laws in England: "quite naturally and with equal justification" rent, which is also profit (gain), is "asserted" against the profit (gain) [of the manufacturers], gain against gain, and "of course each of these decries the other. Such has been the struggle" over the Corn Laws in England since 1815.^[93]

Incidentally, Stirner might have said from the outset: existing right is the right of man, human right. In certain circles one is also "in the habit" of calling it "established right". Where then is the difference between the "right of man" and "established right"?

We already know that alien, holy right is what is given to me by others. But since the rights of man are also called natural, innate rights, and since for Saint Sancho the name is the thing itself, it follows that they are rights which are mine by nature, i.e., by birth.

But "established rights amount to the same thing, namely to nature, which gives me a right, that is to birth and, furthermore, to inheritance", and so on. "I am born as a man is equivalent to saying: I am born as a king's son."

This is on pages 249, 250, where Babeuf is reproached for not having had this dialectical talent for dissolving differences. Since "under all circumstances", the "ego" is "also" man, as Saint Sancho later concedes, and therefore has the benefit "also" of what it has as man, just as the ego, for instance, as a Berliner has the benefit of the Berlin Tiergarten,3 so "also" the ego has the benefit of the right of man "under all circumstances". But since he is by no means born a "king's son" "under all circumstances", he by no means has the benefit of "established right" "under all circumstances". In the sphere of right, therefore, there is an essential difference between the "right of man" and "established right". If it had not been necessary for Saint Sancho to conceal his logic it "should have been said here": After I have, in my opinion, dissolved the concept of right, in the way in which I am generally "in the habit" of dissolving concepts, the struggle over these two special rights becomes a struggle within a concept which, in my opinion, has been dissolved by me, and "therefore" does not need to be touched upon any further by me.

For greater thoroughness Saint Sancho could have added the following new turn of expression: The right of man too is acquired, hence well acquired, and well-acquired [i.e., established] right is the human right possessed by men, the right of man.

That such concepts, if they are divorced from the empirical reality underlying them, can be turned inside-out like a gloveb has already been thoroughly enough proved by Hegel, whose use of this method, as against the abstract ideologists, was justified. Saint Sancho, therefore, has no need to make it appear ridiculous by his own "clumsy" "machinations".

So far established right and the right of man "have amounted to the same thing", so that Saint Sancho could reduce to nothing a struggle that exists outside his mind, in history. Now our saint proves that he is as keen-witted in drawing distinctions as he is all-powerful in heaping everything together, in order to be able to bring about a new terrible struggle in the "creative nothing" of his head.

" I am also ready to admit" (magnanimous Sancho) "that everyone is born as a human being" (hence, according to the above-mentioned reproach against Babeuf, also as a "king's son"), "hence, the newly born are in this respect equal to one another ... only because as yet they reveal themselves and act as nothing but mere children of men, naked little human beings." On the other hand, adults are the "children of their own creation". They "possess more than merely innate rights, they have acquired rights".

(Does Stirner believe that the infant emerged from the mother's womb without any act of his own, an act by which he acquired the "right" to be outside the mother's womb; and does not every child from the very beginning reveal himself and act as a "unique" child?)

"What a contradiction, what a battlefield! The old battle of innate rights and established rights!" (p. 252).

What a battle of bearded men against babes! Incidentally, Sancho speaks against the rights of man only because "in recent times" it has again become "customary" to speak against them. In fact he has "acquired" these innate rights of man. In connection with peculiarity we already met the man who is "born free"a; there Sancho made peculiarity the innate right of man, because merely by being born he revealed himself as being free and acted as such. Furthermore: "Every ego is already from birth a criminal against the state", whereby a crime against the state becomes an innate right of man, and the child already commits a crime against something that does not yet exist for him, but for which he exists. Finally, "Stirner" speaks further on about "innately limited intellects", "born poets", "born musicians", etc. Since here the power (musical, poetic resp. limited ability) is innate, and right = power, one sees how "Stirner" claims for the "ego" the innate rights of man, although this time equality does not figure among these rights.

Episode 2. Privileges and equal rights. Our Sancho first of all transforms the struggle over privilege and equal right into a struggle over the mere "concepts'''' privileged and equal. In this way he saves himself the trouble of having to know anything about the medieval mode of production, the political expression of which was privilege, and the modern mode of production, of which right as such, equal right, is the expression, or about the relation of these two modes of production to the legal relations which correspond to them. He can even reduce the two above-mentioned "concepts" to the still simpler expression: equal and unequal, and prove that one and the same thing (e.g., other people, a dog, etc.) may, according to circumstances, be a matter of indifference — i.e., of equanimity, equality, or it may not be a matter of indifference — i.e., it may be different, unequal, preferred, etc., etc.

"Let the brother of low degree rejoice in that he is exalted." (Saint-Jacques le bonhomme 1:9.)

II. Law

Here we must disclose to the reader a great secret of our saint, viz., that he begins his whole treatise about right with a general explanation of right, which 'escapes" from him so long as he is speaking about right, and which he is only able to recapture when he begins to speak about something totally different, namely — law. Then the gospel called out to our saint: judge not, that ye be not judged⁽¹⁾—and he opened his mouth and taught, saying:

"Right is the spirit of society." (But society is the holy), "//society has a will, then this will is indeed right: society exists only thanks to right. But since it exists only thanks to the fact" (not thanks to right, but only thanks to the fact) "that it exercises its domination over individuals, so right is its dominant will" (p. 244).

That is to say: "right ... is ... has ... then ... indeed ... exists only ... since ... exists only thanks to the fact ... that ... so ... dominant will". This passage is Sancho in all his perfection.

This passage "escaped" at that time from our saint because it was not suitable for his theses, and has now been partially recaptured because it is now partially suitable again.

"States endure so long as there is a dominant will and this dominant will is regarded as equivalent to one's own will. The will of the ruler is law" (p. 256).

The dominant will of society = right,
Dominant will = law—
Right = law.

"Sometimes", i.e., as the trade mark of his "treatise" about law, there will still turn out to be a distinction between right and law, a distinction which— strange to say — has almost as little to do with his "treatise" about law as the definition of right which "escaped" from him has to do with the "treatise" about "right":

"But what is right, what is considered legitimate in a society is also given a verbal expression — in law" (p. 255)

This proposition is a "clumsy" copy of Hegel:

"That which is lawful is the source of the knowledge of what is right or, properly, what is legitimate."

What Saint Sancho calls "receiving verbal expression", Hegel also calls: "posited", "known", etc., Rechtsphilosophie, par. 211 et seq.

It is very easy to understand why Saint Sancho had to exclude right as the "will" or the "dominant will" of society from his "treatise" about right. Only to the extent that right was defined as man's power could he take it back into himself as his power. For the sake of his antithesis, therefore, he had to hold fast to the materialistic definition of "power" and let the idealistic definition of "will" "escape". Why, when speaking of "law", he now recaptures "will" we shall understand in connection with the antitheses about law.

In actual history, those theoreticians who regarded might as the basis of right were in direct contradiction to those who looked on will as the basis of right — a contradiction which Saint Sancho could have regarded also as that between realism (the child, the ancient, the Negro, etc.) and idealism (the youth, the modern, the Mongol, etc.). If power is taken as the basis of right, as Hobbes, etc., do, then right, law, etc., are merely the symptom, the expression of other relations upon which state power rests. The material life of individuals, which by no means depends merely on their "will", their mode of production and form of intercourse, which mutually determine each other — this is the real basis of the state and remains so at all the stages at which division of labour and private property are still necessary, quite independently of the will of individuals. These actual relations are in no way created by the state power; on the contrary they are the power creating it. The individuals who rule in these conditions — leaving aside the fact that their power must assume the form of the state—have to give their will, which is determined by these definite conditions, a universal expression as the will of the state, as law, an expression whose content is always determined by the relations of this class, as the civil and criminal law demonstrates in the clearest possible way. Just as the weight of their bodies does not depend on their idealistic will or on their arbitrary decision, so also the fact that they enforce their own will in the form of law, and at the same time make it independent of the personal arbitrariness of each individual among them, does not depend on their idealistic will. Their personal rule must at the same time assume the form of average rule. Their personal power is based on conditions of life which as they develop are common to many individuals, and the continuance of which they, as ruling individuals, have to maintain against others and, at the same time, to maintain that they hold good for everybody. The expression of this will, which is determined by their common interests, is the law. It is precisely because individuals who are independent of one another assert themselves and their own will, and because on this basis their attitude to one another is bound to be egoistical, that self-denial is made necessary in law and right, self-denial in the exceptional case, and self-assertion of their interests in" the average case (which, therefore, not they, but only the "egoist in agreement with himself" regards as self-denial). The same applies to the classes which are ruled, whose will plays just as small a part in determining the existence of law and the state. For example, so long as the productive forces are still insufficiently developed to make competition superfluous, and therefore would give rise to competition over and over again, for so long the classes which are ruled would be wanting the impossible if they had the "will" to abolish competition and with it the state and the law. Incidentally, too, it is only in the imagination of the ideologist that this "will" arises before relations have developed far enough to make the emergence of such a will possible. After relations have developed sufficiently to produce it, the ideologist is able to imagine this will as being purely arbitrary and therefore as conceivable at all times and under all circumstances.

Like right, so crime, i.e., the struggle of the isolated individual against the predominant relations, is not the result of pure arbitrariness. On the contrary, it depends on the same conditions as that domination. The same visionaries who see in right and law the domination of some independently existing general will can see in crime the mere violation of right and law. Hence the state does not exist owing to the dominant will, but the state, which arises from the material mode of life of individuals, has also the form of a dominant will. If the latter loses its domination, it means that not only the will has changed but also the material existence and life of the individuals, and only for that reason has their will changed. It is possible for rights and laws to be "inherited",3 but in that case they are no longer dominant, but nominal, of which striking examples are furnished by the historv of ancient Roman law and English law. We saw earlier how a theory and history of pure thought could arise among philosophers owing to the separation of ideas from the individuals and their empirical relations which serve as the basis of these ideas. In the same way, here too one can separate right from its real basis, whereby one obtains a "dominant will" which in different eras undergoes various modifications and has its own, independent history in its creations, the laws. On this account, political and civil history becomes ideologically merged in a history of the domination of successive laws. This is the specific illusion of lawyers and politicians, which Jacques le bonhomme adopts sans façon. He succumbs to the same illusion as, for example, Frederick William IV, who also regards laws as mere caprices of the dominant will and hence always finds that they come to grief against the "awkward something" of the world. Hardly [one] of his quite harmless whims reaches a further stage of realisation than cabinet decrees. Let him issue an order for a twenty-five million loan, i.e., for one hundred

Paraphrase of a passage from Goethe's Faust, I. Teil, 2. "Studierzimmerszene", where Mephistopheles says: "Laws and rights are inherited like an eternal malady."—Ed.

Paraphrase of a line from Goethe's Faust, I. Teil, 1. "Studierzimmerszene", where Mephistopheles says: "This something, this awkward world."—Ed.

and tenth part of the English national debt, and he will see whose will his dominant will is. Incidentally, we shall, find later on, too, that Jacques le bonhomme uses the phantoms or apparitions of his sovereign and fellow-Berliner as documents out of which to weave his own theoretical whimsies about right, law, crime, etc. This should occasion us the less surprise since even the spectre of the Vossische Zeitung repeatedly "offers" him something, e.g., the constitutional state. The most superficial examination of legislation, e. g., poor laws in all countries, shows how far the rulers got when they imagined that they could achieve something by means of their "dominant will" alone, i.e., simply by exercising their will. Incidentally, Saint Sancho has to accept the illusion of the lawyers and politicians about the dominant will in order to let his own will be splendidly displayed in the equations and antitheses with which we shall presently delight ourselves, and in order to arrive at the result that he can get out of his head any idea which he has put into it.

"My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations" (Saint-Jacques le bonhomme 1:2).

Law

Antitheses:

State will, alien will Dominant will of the state

Subjects of the state, who sustain the law of the state

equations: A) B) C) D)

State will

My will

Will My will

E)

F)

To desire the non-state

Self-will State will

G) My lack of will

= Dominant will of the state, = state will.

My will, own will. My own will My self-will. ( "Subjects of themselves (unique ones), who bear their own law in themselves" (p. 268).

Not-my will.
Not-state will.
Desire.
Non-desire of the state,
Will against the state,
111 will towards the state.

Self-will.
Not to desire the state.
Negation of my will,
My lack of will.
Existence of state will.

(We know already from the preceding that the existence of the state will is equal to the existence of the state, from which the following new equation results:)

H) My lack of will = Existence of the state. I) The negation of my lack

of will = Non-existence of the state. K) Self-will = Negation of the state. L) My will = Non-existence of the state.

Note 1. According to the already quoted passage from page 256:

"States endure so long as the dominant will is regarded as equivalent to one's own will."

Note 2.

"He who in order to exist" (the conscience of the state is appealed to) "is compelled to count on the lack of will of others is a creation of those others, just as the master is a creation of the servant" (p. 257). (Equations F, G, H, I.)

Note 3.

"My own will is the corrupter of the state. Therefore, it is branded by the latter as self-will. One's own will and the state are powers that are mortal enemies, between whom eternal peace is impossible" (p. 257).—"Therefore it in fact watches everybody, it sees an egoist in everyone" (self-will), "and it fears the egoist" (p. 263). "The state ... opposes the duel ... even a scuffle is punishable" (even if the police are not called in) (p. 245).

Note 4.

"For it, for the state,it is absolutely essential that no one should have his own will; if anyone had such a will, the state would have to expel him" (imprison, banish); "if everyone had it" ("who is this person whom you call 'everyone'"?) "then they would abolish the state" (p. 257).

This can also be expressed rhetorically:

"What is the use of your laws if no one obeys them, what is the use of your orders if everybody refuses to accept any orders?" (p. 256).*

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] Note 5. "People try to distinguish between law and the arbitrary command, or ordinance.... However, a law relating to human action ... is a declaration of will, hence a command (ordinance)" (p. 256).... "Someone can, of course, declare what he is prepared to put up with and consequently forbid the opposite by a law, announcing that he will treat the transgres-sor as an enemy.... I am forced to put up with the fact that he treats me as his enemy, but I shall never permit him to treat me as if I were his creature and to make his reason or perhaps unreasonableness my guiding principle" (p. 256).—Thus Sancho raises no objections here against the law when it treats the transgressor as an enemy. His hostility towards the law is directed only against the form, not against the content. Any repressive law which threatens him with the gallows and the wheel is acceptable to him if he can consider it as a declaration of war. Saint Sancho is satisfied if one does him the honour of regarding him as an enemy, and not as a creature. In reality he is at best the enemy of "Man", but the creature of the conditions in Berlin.

Note 5.

The simple antithesis: "state will — my will" is given an apparent motivation in the following paragraph: "Even if one were to imagine a case where each individual in the nation had expressed the same will and thus a perfect collective will" (!) "had come into existence, things would still remain the same. Would I not today and later be bound by my will of yesterday?... My creation, that is, a definite expression of will, would have become my master; but I ... the creator, would be hampered in my course and my dissolution.... Because yesterday I possessed will, I have today no will of my own; yesterday voluntary, today involuntary" (p. 258).

The old thesis, which has often been put forward both by revolutionaries and reactionaries, that in a democracy individuals only exercise their sovereignty for a moment and then at once relinquish their authority — this thesis Saint Sancho endeavours to appropriate here in a "clumsy" fashion by applying to it his phenomenological theory of creator and creation. But the theory of creator and creation deprives this thesis of all meaning. According to this theory of his, it is not that Saint Sancho has no will of his own today because he has changed his will of yesterday, i.e., has a differently defined will, so that the nonsense which yesterday he exalted into a law as the expression of his will, now weighs like a bond or fetter on his more enlightened will of today. On the contrary, according to his theory, his will of today must be the negation of his will of yesterday, because, as creator, he is in duty bound to dissolve his will of yesterday. Only as "one without will" is he creator, as one actually having will he is always the creation. (See "Phenomenology".3) In that case, however, it by no means follows that "because yesterday he possessed will", today he is "without will", but rather that he bears ill will to his will of yesterday, whether the latter has assumed the form of law or not. In both cases he can abolish it as he, in general, is accustomed to do, namely as his will. Thereby he has done full justice to egoism in agreement with itself. It is, therefore, a matter of complete indifference here whether his will of yesterday has assumed as law the form of something existing outside his head, particularly if we recall that earlier the "word which escaped from him" behaved likewise in a rebellious way towards him. In the above-mentioned thesis, moreover, Saint Sancho desires to preserve, not indeed his self-will, but his free will, freedom of will, freedom, which is a serious offence against the moral code of the egoist in agreement with himself. In committing this offence, Saint Sancho even goes so far as to proclaim that true peculiarity is the inner freedom that was so much condemned above, the freedom of bearing ill will.

See this volume, pp. 257-58.—Ed.

"How is this to be changed?" cries Sancho. "Only in one way: by not recognising any duty, i.e., not binding myself and not allowing myself to be bound [....]

"However, they will bind me! No one can bind my will, and my ill will remains free!" (p. 258).

Drums and trumpets pay homage To his youthful splendour! a

Here Saint Sancho forgets "to make the simple reflection" that his "will" is indeed "bound" inasmuch as, against his will, it is "ill will".

The above proposition that the individual will is bound by the general will expressed through law completes, by the way, the idealistic conception of the state, according to which it is only a matter of the will, and which has led French and German writers to the most subtle philosophising.*

Incidentally, if it is merely a matter of "desiring" and not of "being able" and, at worst, merely of "ill will", then it is incomprehensible why Saint Sancho wants to abolish altogether an object so productive of "desiring" and "ill will" as state law.

"Law in general, etc.—that is the stage we have reached today" (p. 256).

The things Jacques le bonhomme believes!

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] Whether or not tomorrow the self-will of an individual will feel oppressed by the law which yesterday he helped to make, depends on whether new circumstances have arisen and whether his interests have changed to such an extent that yesterday's law no longer corresponds to his changed interests. If the new circumstances affect the interests of the ruling class as a whole, the class will alter the law; if they affect only a few individuals the majority will, of course, disregard their ill will.

Equipped with this freedom of the ill will, Sancho can now re-establish the restriction imposed on the will of one person bv the will of the others; it is precisely this restriction which forms the basis of the above-mentioned idealist conception of the state.

"Everything would be higgledy-piggledy if everyone could do what he liked.— But who says that everyone can do everything?" ("What he likes'' is here prudently omitted.)—

"Every one of you should become an omnipotent ego!" declared the egoist in agreement with himself.

"What do you exist for," he continues, "you who need not put up with everything? Defend yourself, then no one will harm you" (p. 259). And to remove the last semblance of a difference he lets "a few million" "stand as a protection" behind the one "you", so that the whole discussion can very well serve as a "clumsy" beginning of a political theory in the spirit of Rousseau.

From Heine's poem "Berg-Idylle".—Ed.

The equations so far examined were purely destructive as regards state and law. The true egoist had to adopt a purely destructive attitude to both. We missed appropriation; on the other hand, we had the satisfaction of seeing Saint Sancho performing a great trick in which he shows how the state is destroyed by a mere change of will, a change which in turn depends, of course, only on the will. However, appropriation is not lacking here either, although it is quite secondary, and can produce results only later on "from time to time". The two antitheses given above:

State will, alien will — My will, own will, Dominant will of the state — My own will can also be summarised as follows:

Domination of alien will — Domination of one's own will. In this new antithesis, which incidentally all the time formed the concealed basis of his destruction of the state through his self-will, Stirner appropriates the political illusion about the domination of arbitrariness, of ideological will. He could also have expressed this as follows:

Arbitrariness of law — Law of arbitrariness. Saint Sancho, however, did not reach such simplicity of expression. In antithesis III we already have a "law within him", but he appropriates the law still more directly in the following antithesis:

Law, the state's declaration ) I Law, declaration of my will, of will my declaration of will.

"Someone can, of course, cieclar what he is prepared to put up with, and consequently forbid the opposite by a law," etc. (p. 256).

This prohibition is necessarily accompanied by threats. The last antithesis is of importance for the section on crime.

Episodes. We are told on page 256 that there is no difference between "law" and "arbitrary command, ordinance" because both = "declaration of will", consequently "command".—On pages 254, 255, 260 and 263, while pretending to speak about "the State" Stirner substitutes the Prussian state and deals with questions that are of the greatest importance for the Vossische Zeitung, such as the constitutional state, removability of officials, bureaucratic arrogance and similar nonsense. The only important thing here is the discovery that the old French parliaments insisted on their right to register royal edicts because they wanted "to judge according to their own right". The registration of laws by the French parliaments came into being at the same time as the bourgeoisie and hence the acquisition of absolute power by the kings, for whom in face of both the feudal nobility and foreign states it became necessary to plead an alien will on which their own will depended, and at the same time to give the bourgeois some sort of guarantee. Saint Max can learn more about this from the history of his beloved Francis I; for the rest, before speaking about the French parliaments again, he might consult the fourteen volumes of Des Etats généraux et autres assemblées nationales, Paris, 1788,a concerning what the French parliaments wanted or did not want and their significance. In general it would be in place here to introduce a short episode about the erudition of our saint who is so desirous of conquests. Apart from theoretical works, such as the writings of Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, as well as the Hegelian tradition, which is his main source, apart from these meagre theoretical sources, our Sancho uses and quotes the following historical sources: on the French Revolution — Rutenberg's Politische Reden and the Bauers' Denkwürdigkeiten; on communism — Proudhon, August Becker's Volksphilosophie, the Einundzwanzig Bogen and the Bluntschli report; on liberalism — the Vossische Zeitung, the Sächsische Vaterlands-Blätter, Protocols of the Baden Chamber, the Einundzwanzig Bogen again and Edgar Bauer's epoch-making workb; in addition, here and there as historical evidence there are also quoted: the Bible, Schlosser's 18. Jahrhundert,0 Louis Blanc's Histoire de dix ans, Hinrichs' Politische Vorlesungen, Bettina's Dies Buch gehört dem König, Hess' Triarchie,d the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, the Zurich Anekdota, Moriz Carrière on Cologne Cathedral, the session of the Paris Chamber of Peers of April 25, 1844, Karl Nauwerck, Emilia Galotti,e the Bible — in short, the entire Berlin reading-room together with its owner, Willibald Alexis Cabanis. After this sample of Sancho's profound studies, one can easily understand why it is that he finds in this world so very much that is alien, i.e., holy.

III. Crime

"If you allow yourself to be judged right by someone else, then you must equally allow yourself to be judged wrong by him. If you receive justification and reward from him, then expect also accusation and punishment from him. Right is accompanied by wrong, legality by crime. Who — are — you?—You — are — a—criminalll" (p. 262).

By Charles Joseph Mayer.—Ed. Edgar Bauer, Die liberalen Bestrebungen in Deutschland.—Ed. Friedrich Christoph Schlosser, Geschichte des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts und des neunzehnten bis zum Sturz des französischen Kaiserreichs.—Ed.

Moses Hess, Die europäische Triarchie.—Ed. The reference is to Moriz Carrière, Der Kölner Dom als freie deutsche Kirche; François Guizot, Discours dans la chambre des pairs le 25 avril 1844; Karl Nauwerck, Ueber die Theilnahme am Staate; Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's drama Emilia Galotti.—Ed.

The code civil is accompanied by the code pénal, the code pénal by the code de commerce. Who are you? You are a commerçant!

Saint Sancho could have spared us this nerve-shattering surprise. In his case the words: "If you allow yourself to be judged right by someone else, then you must equally allow yourself to be judged wrong by him" have lost all meaning if they are intended to add a new definition; for one of his earlier equations already states: If you allow yourself to be judged right by someone else, then you allow yourself to be judged by alien right, hence your wrong.

A. Simple Canonisation of Crime and Punishment

a. Crime ;

As regards crime, we have already seen that this is the name for a universal category of the egoist in agreement with himself, the negation of the holy, sin. In the previously given antitheses and equations concerning examples of the holy (state, right, law), the negative relation of the ego to these holies, or the copula, could also be called crime, just as about Hegelian logic, which is likewise an example of the holy, Saint Sancho can also say: I am not Hegelian logic, I am a sinner against Hegelian logic. Since he was speaking of right, state, etc., he should now have continued: another example of sin or crime are what are called juridical or political crimes. Instead of this, he again informs us in detail that these crimes are

sin against the holy,

the fixed idea,
the spectre,
"Man".

"Criminals exist only against something holy" (p. 268).

"Only owing to the holy does the criminal code exist" (p. 318). "Crimes arise from the fixed idea" (p. 269). "One sees here that it is again 'man' who also creates the concept of crime, of sin, and thereby also of right." (Previously it was the reverse.) "A man in whom I do not recognise man is a sinner" (p. 268).

Note 1.

"Can I assume that someone commits a crime against me" (this is asserted in opposition to the French people in the revolution), "without also assuming that he ought to act as I consider right? And actions of this kind I ca//the right, the good, etc., those deviating from this — a crime. Accordingly I think that the others ought to aim with me at the same goal ... as beings who should obey some sort of 'rational' law" (Vocation! Designation! Task! The Holy!!!). "I lay down what man is and what it means to act truly as a man, and I demand from each that this law should become for him the norm and the ideal; in the reverse case he proves himself a sinner and criminal..." (pp. [267,] 268).

At the same time, he sheds an anxious tear at the grave of those "proper people" who in the epoch of terror were slaughtered by the sovereign people in the name of the holy. Further, by means of an example, he shows how the names of real crimes can be construed from this holy-point of view.

"If, as in the revolution, this spectre, man, is understood to mean the 'good citizen', then the familiar 'political transgressions and crimes' are brought about from this concept of man." (He should have said: this concept, etc., brings up the familiar crimes) (p. 268).

A brilliant example of the extent to which credulity is Sancho's predominant quality in the section on crime is furnished by his transformation of the sansculottes of the revolution into "good citizens" of Berlin through a synonymical abuse of the word citoyen. According to Saint Max, "good citizens and loyal officials" are inseparable. Hence "Robespierre, for example, Saint-Just, and so on" would be "loyal officials", whereas Danton was responsible for a cash deficit and squandered state money. Saint Sancho has made a good start for a history of the revolution for the Prussian townsman and villager.

Note 2. Having thus described for us political and juridical crime as an example of crime in general — namely his category of crime, sin, negation, enmity, insult, contempt for the holy, disreputable behaviour towards the holy — Saint Sancho can now confidently declare:

"In crime, the egoist has hitherto asserted himself and mocked the holy" (p. 319).

In this passage all the crimes hitherto committed are assigned to the credit of the egoist in agreement with himself, although subsequently we shall have to transfer a few of them to the debit side. Sancho imagines that hitherto crimes have been committed only in order to mock at "the holy" and to assert oneself not against things, but against the holy aspect of things. Because the theft committed by a poor devil who appropriates someone else's taler can be put in the category of a crime against the law, for that reason the poor devil committed the theft just because of a desire to break the law. In exactly the same way as in an earlier passage Jacques le bonhomme imagined that laws are issued only for the sake of the holy, and that thieves are sent to prison only for the sake of the holy.

b. Punishment

Since we are at present concerned with juridical and political crimes we discover in this connection that such crimes "in the ordinary sense" usually involve a punishment, or, as it is written, "the wages of sin is death".3 After what we have already learned about crime, it follows, of course, that punishment is the self-defence and resistance of the holy to those who desecrate it.

Note 1.

"Punishment has sense only when it is intended as expiation for violating something holy" (p. 316). In punishing, "we commit the folly of desiring to satisfy right, a spectre" (the holy). "The holy must" here "defend itself against man". (Saint Sancho here "commits the folly" of mistaking "Man" for "the unique ones", the "proper egos", etc.) (p. 318).

Note 2.

"Only owing to the holy does the criminal code exist and it disintegrates of itself when punishment is abandoned" (p. 318).

What Saint Sancho really wants to say is: Punishment falls into decay of itself if the criminal code is abandoned, i.e., punishment only exists owing to the criminal code. "But is not" a criminal code that only exists owing to punishment "all nonsense, and is not" punishment that exists only, owing to the criminal code "also nonsense"? (Sancho contra Hess, Wigand,b p. 186.) Sancho here mistakes the criminal code for a textbook of theological moralitv.

Note 3. As an example of how crime arises from the fixed idea, there is the following:

"The sanctity of marriage is a fixed idea. From this sanctity it follows that infidelity is a crime, and therefore a certain law on marriage" (to the great annoyance of the "Glerman] Chambers" and of the "Emperor of all Rfussians]", not to speak of the "Emperor of Japan" and the "Emperor of China", and particularly the "Sultan") "imposes a shorter or longer term of punishment for that" (p. 269).

Frederick William IV, who thinks he is able to promulgate laws in accordance with the holy, and therefore is always at loggerheads with the whole world, can comfort himself with the thought that in our Sancho he has found at least one man imbued with faith in the state. Let Saint Sancho just compare the Prussian marriage law, which exists only in the head of its author, with the provisions of the Code civil, which are operative in practice, and he will be able to discover the difference between holy and worldly marriage laws. In the Prussian phantasmagoria, for reasons of state, the sanctity of marriage is supposed to be enforced both upon husband and wife; in French practice, where the wife is regarded as the private property of her husband, only the wife can be punished for adultery, and then only on the demand of the husband, who exercises his property right.

B. Appropriation o f Crime and Punishment Through Antithesis

Crime in the sense of man

Crime in my sense \ -

Violation of man's law (of the state's declaration of will, of state power), p. 259 et seq. Violation of my law (of my declaration of will, of my power), p. 256 and passim.

These two equations are countcrposed as antitheses and derive simply from the opposition of " man " and the "ego". They merely sum u p what has been said already.

— "I punish the 'ego'." I ( Hostility = crime against my [ \ law.

!

/ Enemy or opponent = criminal — | against the "ego", the cor-( poreal. i | My self-defence = My punish-| | ment of the "ego". \ ( Satisfaction (vengeance) = My >— ] punishment of the "ego".

The holy punishes the "ego" Crime = hostility to Man's law

(the Holy). The criminal = the enemy or

opponent of the holy (the

Holy as a moral person). Punishment = self-defence of the holy against the "ego". Punishment = satisfaction (vengeance) of man in relation to the "ego". ) V

In the last antithesis, satisfaction can also be called s£//-satisfaction, since it is the satisfaction of me, in opposition to the satisfaction of man.

If in the above antithetical equations only the first member is taken into account, then one obtains the following series of simple antitheses where the thesis always contains the holy, universal, alien name, while the rrn^'-thesis always contains the worldly, personal, appropriated name.

Crime — Criminal — Punishment —

Hostility. Enemy or opponent. My defence. fSatisfaction, vengeance, I self-satisfaction. In an instant we shall say a few words about these equations and antitheses which are so simple that even a "born simpleton" (p. 434)

Punishment — can master this "unique" method of thought in five minutes. But first a few more quotations in addition to those given earlier. Note 1.

"In relation to me you can never be a criminal but only an opponent" (p. 268),— and "enemy" in the same sense on p. 256.— Crime as the hostility of man is illustrated on page 268 by the example of the "enemies of the Fatherland".—"Punishment ought" (a moral postulate) "to be replaced by satisfaction, which again cannot aim at satisfying right or justice, but at giving us satisfaction" (p. 318).

Note 2. While Saint Sancho attacks the halo (the windmill) of existing power, he does not even understand this power, let alone come to grips with it; he only advances the moral demand that the relation of the ego to it should be formally changed. (See "Logic".⁽¹⁾)

"I am forced to put up with the fact" (bombastic assurance) "that he" (viz., my enemy, who has a few million people behind him) "treats me as his enemy; but I shall never permit him to treat me as his creature or to make his reason or unreasonableness my guiding principle" (p. 256, where he allows the aforesaid Sancho a very restricted freedom, namely the choice between allowing himself to be (reared as his creature or of suffering the 3,300 lashes imposed by Merlin on his postiUems. This freedom is allowed him by any criminal code which, it is true, does not first ask the aforesaid Sancho in what form it should declare its hostility to him).— "But even if you impress your opponent as a force" (being for him an "impressive force ) vou do not on that account become a sanctified authority; unless he is a wretch. He is not obliged to respect you and pay regard to you even if he has to be on his guard against you and your power" (p. 258).

H( u- Saint Sancho himself appears as a "wretch" when with the greatest seriousness he haggles⁽²⁾ about the difference between "to impress" and "to be respected", "to be on one's guard" and to "have regard for"—a difference of a sixteenth part at most. When Saint Sancho is "on his guard" against someone,

'lie gives himself over to reflection, and he has an object which he has in view, which he respects and which inspires him with reverence and fear" (p. 115).

In the above equations, punishment, vengeance, satisfaction, etc., are depicted as coming only from me; inasmuch as Saint Sancho is the object of satisfaction, the antitheses can be turned round: then self-satisfaction is transformed into another-getting-satisfaction-with-regard-to-me or the prejudicing-of-my-satisfaction.

Note 3. The very same ideologists who could imagine that right, law, state, etc., arose from a general concept, in the final analysis perhaps the concept of man, and that they were put into effect for the sake of this concept — these same ideologists can, of course, also imagine that crimes are committed purely because of a wanton attitude towards some concept, that crimes, in general, are nothing but making mockery of concepts and are only punished in order to do justice to the insulted concepts. Concerning this we have already said what was necessary in connection with right, and still earlier in connection with hierarchy, to which we refer the reader.

In the above-mentioned antitheses, the canonised definitions — crime, punishment, etc.—are confronted with the name of another definition, which Saint Sancho in his favourite fashion extracts from these first definitions and appropriates for himself. This new definition, which, as we have said, appears here as a mere name, being worldly is supposed to contain the direct individual relation and express the factual relations. (See "Logic".) The history of right shows that in the earliest, most primitive epochs these individual, factual relations in their crudest form directly constituted right. With the development of civil society, hence with the development of private interests into class interests, the relations of right underwent changes and acquired a civilised form. They were no longer regarded as individual, but as universal relations. At the same time, division of labour placed the protection of the conflicting interests of separate individuals into the hands of a few persons, whereby the barbaric enforcement of right also disappeared. Saint Sancho's entire criticism of right in the above-mentioned antitheses is limited to declaring the civilised form of* legal relations and the civilised division of labour to be the fruit of the "fixed idea", of the holy, and, on the other hand, to claiming for himself the barbaric expression of relations of right and the barbaric method of settling conflicts. For him it is all only a matter of names; he does not touch on the content itself, since he does not know the real relations on which these different forms of right are based, and in the juridical expression of class relations perceives only the idealised names of those barbaric relations. Thus, in Stirner's declaration of will, we rediscover the feud; in hostility, self-defence, etc.—a copy of club-law and practice of the old feudal mode of life; in satisfaction, vengeance, etc.—the jus talionis, the old German Gewere, compensatio, satisfactio—in short, the chief elements of the leges barbarorum and consuetudines feudorum,^[95] which Sancho has appropriated for himself and taken to his heart not from libraries, but from the tales of his former master about Amadis of Gaul. In the final analysis, therefore, Saint Sancho again arrives merely at an impotent moral injunction that everybody should himself obtain satisfaction and carry out punishment. He believes Don Quixote's assurance that by a mere moral injunction he can without more ado convert the material forces arising from the division of labour into personal forces. How closely juridical relations are linked with the development of these material forces due to the division of labour is already clear from the historical development of the power of the law courts and the complaints of the feudal lords about the legal development. (See, e.g., Monteil, loc. cit.,a XIVe, XVe siècle.) It was just in the epoch between the rule of the aristocracy and the rule of the bourgeoisie, when the interests of two classes came into conflict, when trade between the European nations began to be important, and hence international relations themselves assumed a bourgeois character, it was just at that time that the power of the courts of law began to be important, and under the rule of the bourgeoisie, when this broadly developed division of labour becomes absolutely essential, the power of these courts reaches its highest point. What the servants of the division of labour, the judges and still more the professores juris, imagine in this connection is a matter of the greatest indifference.

C. Crime in the Ordinary and Extraordinary Sense

We saw above that crime in the ordinary sense, by being falsified, was put to the credit of the egoist in the extraordinary sense. Now this falsification becomes obvious. The extraordinary egoist now finds that he commits only extraordinary crimes, which have to be set against the ordinary crimes. Therefore we debit the aforesaid egoist with the ordinary crimes, which have been previously entered into the credit column.

The struggle of the ordinary criminals against other people's property can also be expressed as follows (although this holds good of any competitor):

that they—"seek other people's goods" (p. 265), seek holy goods, seek the holy, and in this way the ordinary criminal is transformed into a "believer" (p. 265).

But this reproach which the egoist in the extraordinary sense levels against the criminal in the ordinary sense is only an apparent one — for it is indeed he himself who strives for the halo of the whole world. The real reproach that he levels against the criminal is not that he seeks "the holy", but that he seeks "goods".

After Saint Sancho has built himself a "world of his own, a heaven", namelv this time an imaginary world of feuds and knights-errant, transferred to the modern world, after he has at the same time given documentary evidence of his difference, as a knightly criminal, from ordinary criminals, after this he once more undertakes a crusade against "dragons and ostriches, hobgoblins",⁽¹⁾

"ghosts, apparitions and fixed ideas". His faithful servant, Szeliga, gallops reverently after him. As they wend their way, however, there occurs the astounding adventure of the unfortunate ones who were being dragged off to some place they had no wish to go to, as described in Chapter XXII of Cervantes. For while our knight-errant and his servant Don Quixote were jogging along their path, Sancho raised his eyes and saw coming towards him some dozen men on foot manacled and bound together by a long chain, accompanied by a commissar and four gendarmes, belonging to the holy Hermandad,^[96] to the Hermandad which is holy, to the holy. When they came close, Saint Sancho very politely asked the guards to be so kind as to tell him why these people were being led in chains.— They are convicts of His Majesty sent to work at Spandau,^[97] you do not have to know any more.—How, cried Saint Sancho, men being forced? Is it possible that the king can use force against someone's "proper ego"? In that case I take upon myself the vocation of putting a stop to this force. "The behaviour of the state is violent action, and it calls this justice. Violent action of an individual, however, it calls crime." Thereupon Saint Sancho first of all began to admonish the prisoners, saying that they ought not to gri-eve, that although they were "not free", they were still their "own", and that although maybe their "bones" might "crack" under the lash of the whip and that perhaps they might even have a "leg torn off", yet, he said, you will triumph over all that, for "no one can bind your will"! "And I know for certain that there is no witchcraft in the world that could direct and compel the will, as some simpletons imagine; for the will is our free arbitrary power and there is no magic herb or spell that can subdue it." Yes, "your will no one can bind and your ill will remains free!"

But since this sermon did not pacify the convicts, who began one after the other to relate how they had been unjustly condemned, Sancho said: "Dear brethren, from what you have related it has become clear to me that, although you have been punished for your crimes, yet the punishment which you are suffering gives you little pleasure and that hence you are reluctant to receive it and do not look forward to it. And it is highly possible that the cause of your ruin is pusillanimity on the rack in one case, poverty in another, lack of favour in a third and, finally, the judge's unfair judgment, and that you have not been given the justice that was your due, 'your right'. All this compels me to show you why heaven sent me into the world. But since the wisdom of the egoist in agreement with himself prescribes not doing by force what can be done by agreement, I hereby request the commissar and gendarmes to release you and let you go your ways. Moreover, my dear gendarmes, these unfortunates have done you no harm. It does not behove egoists in agreement with themselves to become the executioners of other unique ones who have done them no harm. Evidendy, with you 'the category of the one who has been robbed stands in the forefront'. Why do you show such 'zeal' in your actions 'against crime'? 'Verily, verily I say unto you, you are enthusiastic for morality, you are filled with the idea of morality', 'You persecute all those who are hostile to it'—'Owing to your oath as officials', you are bringing these poor convicts 'to prison', you are the holy! Therefore release these people voluntarily. If you do not, you will have to reckon with me, who 'overthrows nations with one puff of the living ego', who 'commits the most unmeasured desecration' and 'is not afraid even of the Moon'."

"This is a fine piece of impudence indeed!" cried the commissar. "You'd do better to put that basin straight on your head and be on your way!"

Saint Sancho, however, infuriated by this Prussian rudeness, couched his lance and rushed at the commissar with as much speed as the "apposition" is capable of, so that he immediately threw him to the ground. There ensued a general mêlée, during which the convicts freed themselves from their chains, a gendarme threw Szeliga-Don Quixote into the Landwehrgraben^[98] or sheep's ditch [Schafgraberi], and Saint Sancho performed the most heroic feats in his struggle against the holy. A few minutes later, the gendarmes were scattered, Szeliga crept out of the ditch and the holy was abolished for the time being.

Then Saint Sancho gathered round him the liberated convicts and addressed them as follows (pp. 265, 266 of "the book"):

"What is the ordinary criminal" (the criminal in the ordinary sense) "but a man who has committed the fatal mistake" (a fatal story-teller for the citizen and the countryman!) "of striving after what belongs to the people instead of seeking what is his own? He has desired the contemptible" (a general muttering among the convicts at this moral judgment) "goods of another, he has done what believers do who aspire to what belongs to God" (the criminal as a noble soul). "What does the priest do who admonishes the criminal? He tells him of the great violation of right he has committed by his action in desecrating what the state has sanctified, the property of the state, which also includes the life of the state's subjects. Instead of this the priest might have done better to reproach the criminal with having besmirched himself" (titters among the convicts at this egoistical appropriation of banal clerical phraseology) "by not despising the alien but regarding it as worthy of being robbed" (murmuring among the convicts). "He could have done so, were he not a priest" (one of the convicts: "In the ordinary sense!"). I, however, "speak with the criminal as with an egoist, and he will be ashamed" (shameless, loud cheers from the criminals, who do not wish to be called upon to feel shame), "not because he has committed a crime against your laws and your goods, but because he considered it worth while to circumvent your laws" (this refers only to "circumvention in the ordinary sense"; elsewhere, however, "I go round a rock so long as I am unable to blow it up" and I "circumvent", for example, even the "censorship"), "and to desire your goods" (renewed cheers); "he will be ashamed...."

Gines de Passamonte, the arch-thief, who in general was not very patient, shouted: "Are we then to do nothing but feel ashamed, be submissive, when a priest in the extraordinary sense 'admonishes' us?"

"He will be ashamed," continues Sancho, "that he did not despise you, together with what is yours, that he was too little of an egoist." (Sancho here applies an alien measure to the egoism of the criminal. In consequence, a general bellowing breaks out among the convicts; in some confusion, Sancho gives way, turning with a rhetorical gesture to the absent "good burghers".) "But you cannot speak to him egoistically, for you have not the stature of a criminal, you ... perpetrate nothing."

Gines again interrupts: "What credulity, my good man! Our prison warders perpetrate all kinds of crimes, they embezzle, they defraud, they commit rape [...a]

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Endnotes

[7] The German Ideology — Die deutsche Ideologie. Kritik der neuesten deutschen Philosophie in ihren Repräsentanten Feuerbach, B. Bauer und Stirner, und des deutschen Sozialismus in seinen verschiedenen Propheten—is the joint work of Marx and Engels which they wrote in Brussels in 1845 and 1846. Marx and Engels decided to write a philosophical work in which they intended to counterpose their materialist conception of history to the idealist views of the Young Hegelians and to Feuerbach's inconsistent materialism in the spring of 1845, when Engels came to Brussels (early in April) and Marx outlined to him his materialist conception, which had nearly taken shape by then. Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach" were written in connection with this project. In the autumn of 1845 the project took the form of a definite plan to write a two-volume work directed against the Young Hegelians and the "true socialists". In November 1845 Marx and Engels began writing the book. In the course of their work the plan and composition of the book were changed several times. Moses Hess was enlisted to write two chapters. But the chapter against the Young Hegelian Arnold Ruge, which Hess wrote for Volume I, was excluded from the final version of The German Ideology, and the other chapter, dealing with the "true socialist" Kuhlmann, which Hess wrote for Volume II, was edited by Marx and Engels. Work on The German Ideology was in the main terminated in April 1846; it seems, however, that the authors continued working on Chapter I of the first volume until the middle of July, but it was never completed. The draft of the preface for Volume I was written by Marx not later than the middle of August. Work on Volume II was completed by early June 1846. Engels' work The True Socialists, which was intended as the concluding chapter of Volume II, was written between January and April 1847. In 1846 and 1847 Marx and Engels made repeated attempts to find a publisher in Germany for their work, but they were unsuccessful. This was due partly to difficulties made by the police and partly to the reluctance of the publishers to print the work, since their sympathies were on the side of the trends which Marx and Engels criticised. The only Chapter of The German Ideology known to be published during their lifetime was Chapter IV of Volume II, which appeared in the journal Das Westphälische Dampßoot in August and September 1847. The text of a few pages in Chapter II of Volume I (pp. 112-14 of this volume) is similar to that of an anonymous item dated "Brussels, November 20" (see this volume, pp. 15-18), which appeared in the Gesellschaftsspiegel, Heft VII, Januar 1846 (in the section "Nachrichten und Notizen"). Neither the title of the whole work nor the headings of the first and the second volumes have survived in the manuscript. They are, however, mentioned by Marx m his article "Declaration against Karl Grün" (see present edition, Vol. 6) and have been taken from there. The manuscript of chapters II and III of Volume II is missing, and it is possible that the "Circular against Kriege" by Marx and Engels and Engels' article "German Socialism in Verse and Prose" (see present edition, Vol. 6) formed part of this volume. The manuscript is in a rather poor condition, the paper has turned yellow and is damaged in places. "The gnawing criticism of the mice", as Marx wrote later in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, has left its mark on a number of pages, other pages are missing. The Preface to The German Ideology and some of the alterations and additions are in Marx's hand; the bulk of the manuscript, however, is in Engels' hand, except for Chapter V of Volume II and some passages in Chapter III of Volume I. which are in Joseph Weydemeyer's hand. As a rule, the pages are divided into two parts: the main text is on the left side while additions and changes are on the right. A number of passages were crossed out by the authors, and a few more passages were crossed out by Eduard Bernstein (this has been pointed out by S. Bahne in his article "Die Deutsche Ideologie von Marx und Engels. Einige Textergänzungen", published in the International Review of Social History, Vol. VII, 1962, Part I). Words and passages which have become unreadable have been reconstructed on the basis of the unimpaired parts whenever possible; they are enclosed in square brackets. Wherever it was necessary to insert a few words to clarify the meaning, they are likewise printed in square brackets. Gaps in the manuscript are indicated in footnotes. Marginal notes as well as the most important of the crossed-out passages are given in footnotes which are indicated by asterisks, whereas the editors' footnotes are indicated by index letters. Passages crossed out by Bernstein, wherever it was possible to decipher them, have been restored. After Engels' death the manuscript of The German Ideology came into the hands of the leaders of the German Social-Democratic Party, who in the course of 37 years published less than half of it. Part of Chapter III, "Saint Max", was published by Bernstein in 1903-04 (see Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, "III. Sankt Max", in Dokumente des Sozialismus, Stuttgart, Bd. III, Hefte 1-4 and 7-8, Januar-April and Juli-August 1903; Bd. IV, Hefte 5-9, Mai-September 1904). Another part of this chapter—"My Self-Enjoyment" — was brought out in 1913 (see Karl Marx, "Mein Selbstgenuss", in Arbeiter-Feuilleton, München. Nr. 8 and 9, März 1913). Gustav Meyer published the introductory pages of "The Leipzig Council" and Chapter II, "Saint Bruno", in 1921 (see Friedrich Engels und Karl Marx, "Das Leipziger Konzil", in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 47. Band, 3. Heft, Tübingen, 1921). Chapter I, "Feuerbach", the most important chapter of The German Ideology, was first published by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. in Russian in 1924 (Marx-Engels Archives, Book I) and in German in 1926 (Marx-Engels Archiv, I. Band). The whole work as it has come down to us (except for the six pages which were found later and printed in the International Review of Social History, Vol. VII, 1962, Part 1) was first published in Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe, Erste Abteilung, 5. Band, in 1932 by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. The first English version of Chapter I, translated from the Russian, was published in the American journal The Marxist No. 3, July 1926. A small part of this chapter, translated from the German, was published in the British journal The Labour Monthly, Vol. 15, No. 3, March 1933. An English translation of Chapter I, "Feuerbach", and Volume II, "Der wahre Sozialismus", was published by I^awrence and Wishart Ltd., London, 1938, under the title The German Ideology, Parts J & III. The first English translation of the whole work, except for one passage from Chapter I of the first volume (p. 29 of the manuscript), was issued by Progress Publishers, Moscow, in 1964.

b Cf. John 1:14.—Ed.

[5] This item, which was published anonymously, is the reply of the authors of The Holy Family to the anti-critique contained in Bruno Bauer's article "Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs" published in Wigand's Vierteljahrsschrift, 1845, Bd. 3. It is roughly identical with a passage in Chapter II, Volume I of The German Ideology (see this volume, pp. 112-14). In English the item was first published in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964.

[92] The "Ten Tables" — the original version of the "Twelve Tables" (lex duodecim tabularum), the oldest legislative document of the Roman slave-owners' state. These laws were enacted as a result of the struggle which the plebeians waged against the patricians during the republican period in the middle of the 5th century B.C.; they became the point of departure for the further development of Roman civil law.

This volume, pp. 180, 183.— Ed. c This volume, pp. 282-84, 286-88.— Ed.

This volume, p. 354.— Ed. G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts.—Ed.

(1) Mark 9: 12.—Ed.

(2) This volume, pp. 275-77.—Ed.

[6] The review was published anonymously under the heading "Die heilige Familie oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik. Gegen Br. Bauer und Consorten. Von F. Engels und K. Marx, Frankfurt, 1845".

a In the German original a pun on the word pflegen, which can mean to be in the habit, to be accustomed to and to look after, to take care of.— Ed.

Johann Caspar Bluntschli, "Die Kommunisten in der Schweiz nach den bei Weitling vorgefundenen Papieren".— Ed. In the original Vermögen, which can mean both ability, faculty, power and means, fortune, property.— Ed.

G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, I. Theil, 3. Abschnitt.— Ed.

[9 3] For the Corn Laws see Note 29.

a A park in Berlin.— Ed. Cf. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act III, Scene 1.—Ed.

See this volume, p. 311.—Ed. James 1 : 9.—Ed.

(1) Matthew 7 : 1.— Ed.

a James 1 : 2.— Ed.

a Romans 6 : 23.—Ed. Max Stirner, "Recensenten Stirners".—Ed.

(1) This volume, p. 286.—Ed.

(2) In the original a pun on the word Schacher which Stirner uses in the passage quoted—Schacher means "wretch" or "robber", while schachern means "to barter" "to haggle".—Ed.

[95] Leges barbarorum (laws of the barbarians)—codes of law which originated between the 5th and the 9th centuries and were, in the main, a written record of the customary or prescriptive law of the various Germanic tribes. Consuetudines feudorum (feudal customs) — a compilation of medieval feudal laws which was made in Bologna in the last third of the 12th century. Jus talionis (right of retaliation)—the right of retaliation by inflicting a punishment of the same kind ("an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth"). The old German Gewere—the legitimate rule of a free man over a piece of land where he exercised sovereign authority and was responsible for the protection of every person and thing. Compensatio—the balancing of claim and counter-claim against each other. Satisfactio—reparation, or atonement, for an offence; it can also mean satisfying a creditor not by repaying the debt incurred but by some other service.

a This volume, p. 220.—Ed. 13 — 2086

[96] The Holy Hermandad (Holy Brotherhood) — league of Spanish towns set up at the end of the 15th century with the approbation of the king, who sought to make use of the bourgeoisie in the struggle between absolutism and the powerful feudal lords. From the middle of the 16th century the armed detachments of the Hermandad performed police duties. The term "Holy Hermandad" was later used ironically for the police.

[97] Spandau—at that time a Prussian fortress west of Berlin with a jail for political prisoners.

(1) Cf. Isaiah 34 : 13-14.— Ed.

[98] Landwehrgraben— a canal in Berlin which extended up to Charlottenburg, then a Berlin suburb. It is possible that Marx and Engels are alluding to Egbert Bauer's publishing house in Charlottenburg, where Szeliga's works were published.

13*