The German Ideology

Stirner cannot eat without at the same time eating for the sake of his stomach. If the worldly conditions prevent him from satisfying his stomach, then his stomach becomes a master over him, the desire to eat becomes a fixed desire, and the thought of eating becomes a fixed idea—which at the same time gives him an example of the influence of world conditions in fixing his desires and ideas. Sancho’s “revolt” against the fixation of desires and thoughts is thus reduced to an impotent moral injunction about self-control and provides new evidence that he merely gives an ideologically high-sounding expression to the most trivial sentiments of the petty bourgeois.

The entire chapter about peculiarity boils down to the most trivial self-embellishment by means of which the German petty bourgeois consoles himself for his own impotence. Exactly like Sancho, he thinks that in the struggle of bourgeois interests against the remnants of feudalism and absolute monarchy in other countries everything turns merely on a question of principles, on the question of from what “Man” should free himself… The petty bourgeois also consoles himself that as a German, even if he is not free, he finds compensation for all sufferings in his own indisputable peculiarity. Again like Sancho, he does not see in freedom a power that he is able to obtain and therefore declares his own impotence to be power.

One cannot demand of us that we should deal further with the rest of Saint Sancho’s fantasies about the state and property, e.g., that the state “tames” and “rewards” individuals by means of property, that out of special malice it has invented high stamp duties in order to ruin the citizens if they are not loyal, etc., etc., and in general with the petty-bourgeois German idea of the omnipotence of the state, an idea which was already current among the old German lawyers and is here presented in the form of grandiloquent assertions.

Sancho has again chosen his example with his usual lack of skill. If all his nonsense about born poets, musicians, and philosophers is accepted, then this example only proves, on the one hand, that a born poet, etc., remains what he is from birth—namely a poet, etc.; and, on the other hand, that the born poet, etc., in so far as he becomes, develops, may, “owing to unfavorable circumstances”, not become what he could become. His example, therefore, on the one hand, proves nothing at all and, on the other hand, proves the opposite of what it was intended to prove; and taking both aspects together it proves that either from birth or owing to circumstances, Sancho belongs to “the most numerous class of mankind”. However, he shares the consolation of being a unique “blockhead” with this class and with his own blockheadedness.

Sancho’s old opinion that one has only to get a few ideas out of one’s head in order to abolish from the world the conditions which have given rise to these ideas, is reproduced here in the form that one has only to get out of one’s head the idea of man in order to put an end to the actually existing conditions which are today called inhuman—whether this predicate “inhuman” expresses the opinion of the individual in contradiction with his conditions or the opinion of the normal, ruling society about the abnormal, subjected class. In just the same way, a way taken from the ocean and put in the Kupfergraben, if it possessed consciousness, would declare this situation created by “unfavourable circumstances” to be unwhale-like, although Sancho could prove that it is whale-like, if only because it is its, the whale’s, own situation—that is precisely how people argue in certain circumstances.

What, at best, does Sancho’s sharpening of contradiction and abolition of the special amount to? To this, that the mutual relations of individuals should be their behaviour to one another, while their mutual differences should be their self-distinctions (as one empirical self distinguishes itself from another). Both of these are either, as with Sancho, an ideological paraphrase of what exists, for the relations of individuals under all circumstances can only be their mutual behaviour, while their differences can only be their self-distinctions. Or they are the pious wish that they should behave in such a way and differ from one another in such a way, that their behaviour does not acquire independent existence as a social relationship independent of them, and that their differences from one another should not assume the material character (independent of the person) which they have assumed and daily continue to assume.