THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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a wild old primary school teacher than a lion, began with the call for the ego as such, for the owner of one's self. This owner is one of the heroes in Marx's ‘Holy
Family’; that strange work ‘The Lone Individual and his Property’, 1844, wants to free the individual, and nobody else, from the last ‘quirks’ or ‘ghosts’ which have
been left over from the other world. Thus, from the standpoint of the completely private person, it is the social and moral quirks which have been left over. The lone
individual scorns to have himself trained any further for such ideal service, for a service to his neighbour, to the nation, to humanity. The lone individual is already a
human being, he does not need to become one first by fulfilling so­called general, and therefore spectral duties. Every super­ego disappears and every demand it
makes: ‘I do not live for a job any more than the flower grows and is fragrant for a job.’ The ego is its own super­ego and also its own utopian state, it maintains with
others of its kind at most a ‘contact or association’, just as long as the latter aids self­benefit. As soon as the association becomes fixed, as soon as it threatens to
become a society or even a state, it must be terminated by the lone individual. In short, the lone individual who only enters into the contrat social for himself is a free
outsider not merely in existing society but in every conceivable one. He also demonstrates of course how much society and the fact of being an outsider are correlatively
connected: the lone individual is himself only a social phenomenon. Stirner's individual and his association has much in common with that of the Cynics, apart from
absence of needs; the Cynic also became a complete cynic. Naturalist drama particularly liked to portray such lone individuals, only they did not turn into a future state
of their own. But into scornfully unhappy bohemians, or moving bankrupt ones, or simply cynics of the living lie (Braun in Hauptmann's ‘Lonely People’, Ulrik Brendel
in Ibsen's ‘Rosmersholm’, Relling in the ‘Wild Duck’). And the counterpart of the lone individual, in the same sphere, is the philistine: his total freedom, if it is no other
than that of the private sphere, contains just as much total limitation. The released individual even as a social dream gets no further than the society of private
entrepreneurs, or even small investors, which delivered him. The lone individual and his property, — this inscription logically adorns not only the coat of arms of
libertinism but also the house sign of philistinism; and the latter is wholly the case with the anarchist Proudhon. Originally of course, in its infancy as it were, Proudhon's
song still sounded rough, in fact his lyrics, which soon became so petit­bourgeois, appeared to be full of power, an attack on property such as had not yet been made
before. Proudhon's first work