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Chapter 5 government. All laws infringe individual liberty, whether the government that enacts them is constitutional or arbitrary, democratic or dictatorial. In other words, all states are an offence against individual liberty. However, anarcho-individualism has taken a number of forms. The most important of these are: z z egoism z z libertarianism z z anarcho-capitalism. Egoism The boldest statement of anarchist convictions built on the idea of the sovereign individual is found in Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own ([1845] 1971). Like Marx, Stirner was deeply influenced by the ideas of the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), but the two arrived at fundamentally different conclusions. Stirner’s theories represent an extreme form of individualism. The term ‘egoism’ can have two meanings. It can suggest that individuals are essentially concerned about their ego or ‘self ’, that they are self-interested or self-seeking, an assumption that would be accepted by thinkers such as Hobbes or Locke. Self-interestedness, however, can generate conflict among individuals and justify the existence of a state, which would be needed to restrain each individual from harming or abusing others.
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MAX STIRNER (1806–56) A German philosopher, Stirner developed an extreme form of individualism, based on egoism, which condemned all checks on personal autonomy. In contrast to other anarchists’ stress on moral principles such as justice, reason and community, Stirner emphasized solely the ‘ownness’ of the human individual, thereby placing the individual self at the centre of the moral universe. Such thinking influenced Nietzsche (see p. 154) and later provided a basis for existentialism. Stirner’s most important political work is The Ego and His Own (1845).
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In Stirner’s view, egoism is a philosophy that places the individual self at the centre of the moral universe. The individual, from this perspective, should simply act as he or she chooses, without any consideration for laws, social conventions, religious or moral principles. This is a position that clearly points in the direction of both atheism and an extreme form of individualist anarchism. However, as Stirner’s anarchism also dramatically turned its back on the principles of the Enlightenment and contained few proposals about how order could be maintained in a stateless society, it had relatively little impact on the emerging anarchist movement. His ideas nevertheless influenced Friedrich Nietzsche (see p. 154) and twentieth-century existentialism. Libertarianism The individualist argument was more fully developed in the USA by libertarian thinkers such as Henry David Thoreau (see p. 119), Lysander Spooner (1808–87), Benjamin Tucker (1854–1939) and Josiah Warren (1798–1874). Thoreau’s quest for spiritual truth
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