I am going to quote a paragraph from the 2023 Wikipedia entry on Max Stirner, and in it the author (s) discusses his anarchist credentials. Here goes: “Stirner proposes that most commonly accepted social institutions—including the notion of state, property as a right, natural rights in general and the very notion of society—were mere illusions, ‘spooks’ or ghosts in the mind.”
My response: As a lover of the Age of Enlightenment, I suggest that human nature, human rights, natural rights, the notion of the state and private property are not just reified abstractions, but are based upon some rule in the mind of Logos or God, shared with or intuited by humans as a natural law or social condition of importance for helping people manage their affairs. The name applied is not the thing itself, but the thing itself does exist and carried significant weight, and can be known and described with some degree of accuracy, enough to serve as a touchstone for managing oor affairs.
Wiki continues: “He advocated egoism and a form of amoralism in which the individuals wound unite in Unions of egoists only when it is in their self-interest to do so. For him, property simply comes about through might, saying: ‘Whoever knows how to take and defend the thing, to him belongs (property). (. . . ) What I have in my power, that is my own. So long as I assert myself as holder, I am proprietor of the thing.’ He add that ‘I do not step shyly back from your property, but look upon it always as my property.”
My response: It is shaky to label Stirner as anything, since his extreme nominalism and subjective egoism, and radical, hostile rejection of the possibility of our knowing anything all, contribute to our seeing tendencies in him, and so labeling him and that must suffice. Essentialists believe that accurate, clear labels provide us with knowledge, and skeptics like Stirner deny that knowledge is possible to glean. Let us say that he has anarchist and egoistic proclivities and leave it at that.
He is amoral more than immoral because he wants people to control their appetites, and because he attacks groupism leading to mass movement and ideological worship of a fixed idea or worshiped ism. He also points out that institutions deaden and alienate and enslave people and that is true and a devasting moral criticism of social conditions. And is refusal to express his anti-capitalism as revolution violent and totalitarian, rather he wants the individual to do his insurrection so if enough people just withdraw their support for the system, their refusal to provide voluntary servitude any longer to this system of oppression will lead to its collapse.
Still his refusal to believe in God, the source of goodness and morality, his refusal to accept the Golden Rule and the ten commandments, his refusal to believe in human nature as essentially fallen—these defects in his ethical posture leads to the rise of chaos, bad anarchy, disorder lawlessness tyranny and evil in the world.
His disrespect for the property of others means that their individuality is not respected and this strong anti-egoist slant from an egoist is a powerful contradiction that cannot be reconciled. I suggest that people need intellectual and material property, lots of it, so they may maverize in luxury relatively—to steal another’s property is to deprive him of his individual power, choice and options, so cut it out.
Wiki continues: “Stirner considers the world and everything in it, including other persons, available to one’s taking or use without moral constraint and that rights do not exist in regard to objects and people at all. He sees no rationality n taking the interests of others into account unless doing so furthers one own self-interest, which he believes is the only legitimate reason for acting. He denies society as being an actual entity, calling society a ‘spook’ and that the ‘individuals are its reality.”
My response: We have not right to allow others to rip off, rob, enslave, exploit, or oppress us, and we have not right to do that to them. This is the eogistic golden rule in action. Society may just be an abstraction, but people believe it is real, so it is real in that way, and a society of evil people form a group-souls that is evil and invisible and this intangible reality doe
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