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Source: La Sensibilité individualiste. Paris, Alcan, 1909;
Translated: by Mitchell Abidor for marxists.org;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2006.
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The words anarchism and individualism are frequently used as synonyms. Many thinkers vastly different from each other are carelessly qualified sometimes as anarchists, sometimes as individualists. It is thus that we speak indifferently of Stirnerite anarchism or individualism, of Nietzschean anarchism or individualism, of Barrésian anarchism or individualism, etc. In other cases, though, this identification of the two terms is not looked upon as possible. We commonly say Proudhonian anarchism, Marxist anarchism, anarchist syndicalism. But we could not say Proudhonian, Marxist, or syndicalist individualism. We can speak of a Christian or Tolstoyan anarchism, but not of a Christian or Tolstoyan individualism.
At other times the two terms have been melted together in one name: anarchist individualism. Under this rubric M. Hasch designates a social philosophy that it differentiates from anarchism properly so-called, and whose great representative, according to him, are Goethe, Byron, Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Carlyle, Emerson, Kierkegaard, Renan, Ibsen, Stirner and Nietzsche. This philosophy can be summed up as the cult of great men and the apotheosis of genius. It would seem to us to be arguable whether the expression individualist anarchism can be used to designate such a doctrine. The qualification of anarchist, in the etymological sense, can be applied with difficulty to thinkers of the race of Goethe, Carlyle, and Nietzsche, whose philosophy seems on the contrary to be dominated by ideas of hierarchical organization and the harmonious placing of values in a series. What is more, the epithet of individualist can’t be applied with equal justice to all the thinkers we have just named. If it is appropriate for designating the egotist, nihilist and anti-idealist revolt of Stirner, it can with difficulty be applied to the Hegelian, optimist and idealist philosophy of a Carlyle, who clearly subordinates the individual to the idea.
There thus reigns a certain confusion concerning the use of the two terms anarchism and individualism, as well as the systems of ideas and sentiments that these terms designate. We would here like to attempt to clarify the notion of individualism and determine its psychological and sociological content by distinguishing it from anarchism...
Individualism is the sentiment of a profound, irreducible antinomy between the individual and society. The individualist is he who, by virtue of his temperament, is predisposed to feel in a particularly acute fashion the ineluctable disharmonies between his intimate being and his social milieu. At the same time, he is a man for whom life has reserved some decisive occasion to remark this disharmony. Whether through brutality, or the continuity of his experiences, for him it has become clear that for the individual society is a perpetual creator of constraints, humiliations and miseries, a kind of continuous generation of human pain. In the name of his own experience and his personal sensation of life the individualist feels he has the right to relegate to the rank of utopia any ideal of a future society where the hoped-for harmony between the individual and society will be established. Far from the development of society diminishing evil, it does nothing but intensify it by rendering the life of the individual more complicated, more laborious and more difficult in the middle of the thousand gears of an increasingly tyrannical social mechanism. Science itself, by intensifying within the individual the consciousness of the vital conditions made for him by society, arrives only at darkening his intellectual and moral horizons. Qui auget scientiam augel et dolorem.
We see that individualism is essentially a social pessimism. Under its most moderate form it admits that if life in society is not an absolute evil and completely destructive of individuality, for the individualist is at the very least a restrictive and oppressive condition, a necessary evil and a last resort.
The individualists who respond to this description form a small morose group whose rebellious, resigned or hopeless words contrast with the fanfares for the future of optimistic sociologists. It is Vigny saying: “The social order is always bad. From time to time it is bearable. Between bad and bearable the dispute isn’t worth a drop of blood.” It’s Schopenhauer seeing social life as the supreme flowering of human pain and evil. It’s Stirner with his intellectual and moral solipsism perpetually on his guard against the duperies of social idealism and the intellectual and moral crystallization with which every organized society threatens the individual. It is, at certain moments, an Amiel with his painful stoicism that perceives society as a limitation and a restriction of his free spiritual nature. It’s a David Thoreau, the extremist disciple of Emerson, that “student of nature,” deciding to stray from the ordinary paths of human activity and to become a “wanderer,” worshipping independence and dreams. A “wanderer whose every minute will be filled with more work than the entire lives of many men with occupations.” It’s a Challemel-Lacour with his pessimistic conception of society and progress. It is perhaps, at certain moments, a Tarde, with an individualism colored with misanthropy that he somewhere expresses: “It is possible that the flux of imitation has its banks and that, by the very effect of its excessive deployment, the need for sociability diminishes or rather alters and transforms itself into a kind of general misanthropy, very compatible, incidentally, with a moderate commercial circulation and a certain activity of industrial exchanges reduced to the strict necessary, but above all appropriate to reinforcing in each of us the distinctive traits of our inner individuality.”
Even among those who, like M. Maurice Barrès, by dilettantism and artistic posture, are averse to the accents of sharp revolt or discouraged pessimism, individualism remains a sentiment of “the impossibility that exists of harmonizing the private and the general I.” It’s a determination to set free the first I, to cultivate it in what it has of the most special, the most advanced, the most rummaged through, both in detail and in depth. “The individualist,” says M. Barrès, “is he who, through pride in his true I, which he isn’t able to set free, ceaselessly wounds, soils, and denies what he has in common with the mass of men...The dignity of the men of our race is exclusively attached to certain shivers that the world doesn’t know and cannot see and which we must multiply in ourselves.”
In all of them individualism is an attitude of sensibility that goes from hostility and distrust to indifference and disdain vis-à-vis the organized society in which we are forced to live, vis-à-vis its uniformising rules, its monotonous repetitions, and its enslaving constraints. It’s a desire to escape from it and to withdraw into oneself. Above all, it is the profound sentiment of the “uniqueness of the I,” of that which despite it all the I maintains of unrepressible and impenetrable to social influences. As M. Tarde says, it is the sentiment of the “profound and fleeting singularity of persons, of their manner of being, or thinking, of feeling, which is only once and of an instant.”
Is there any need to demonstrate how much this attitude differs from anarchism? There is no doubt that in one sense anarchism proceeds from individualism. It is, in fact, the anti-social revolt of a minority that feels itself oppressed or disadvantaged by the current order of things. But anarchism represents only the first moment of individualism, the moment of faith and hope, of actions courageous and confident of success. At its second moment individualism converts, as we have seen, into social pessimism.
The passage from confidence to despair, from optimism to pessimism is here, in great part, an affair of psychological temperament. There are delicate souls that are easily wounded on contact with social realities and consequently quick to be disillusioned, a Vigny or a Heine, for example. We can say that these souls belong to the psychological type that has been called “sensitive.” They feel that social determinism, insofar as it is repressive of the individual, is particularly tormenting and oppressive. But there are other souls who resist multiple failures, who disregard even experience’s toughest examples and remain unshakeable in their faith. These souls belong to the “active” type. Such are the souls of the anarchist apostles: Bakunin, Kropotkin, Reclus. Perhaps their imperturbable confidence in their ideal depends on a lesser intellectual and emotional acuity. Reasons for doubt and discouragement don’t strike them harshly enough to tarnish the abstract ideal they’ve forged and to lead them to the final and logical step of individualism: social pessimism.
Whatever the case, there can be no doubt concerning the optimism of anarchist philosophy. That optimism is spread, often simplistically and with naivety, in those volumes with blood red covers that form the reading matter of propagandists by the deed. The shadow of the optimistic Rousseau floats over all this literature.
Anarchist optimism consists in believing that social disharmonies, that the antinomies that the current state of affairs present between the individual and society, are not essential, but rather accidental and provisional; that they will one day be resolved and will give place to an era of harmony.
Anarchism rests on two principles that seem to complement each other, but actually contradict each other. One is the principle that is properly individualist or libertarian, formulated by Wilhelm von Humboldt and chosen by Stuart Mill as the epigraph of his “Essay on Liberty”: “The great principle is the essential and absolute importance of human development in its richest diversity.” The other is the humanist or altruist principle which is translated on the economic plane by communist anarchism. That the individualist and humanist principles negate each other is proven by logic and fact. Either the individualist principle means nothing, or it is a demand in favor of that which differs and is unequal in individuals, in favor of those traits that make them different, separates them and, if need be, opposes them. On the contrary, humanism aims at the assimilation of humanity. Following the expression of M. Gide, its ideal is to make a reality of the expression “our like.” In fact, at the current time we see the antagonism of the two principles assert itself among the most insightful theoreticians of anarchism, and that logical and necessary antagonism cannot fail to bring about the breakup of anarchism as a political and social doctrine.
Whatever the case and whatever difficulties might be met by he who wants to reconcile the individualist and humanist principles, these two rival and enemy principles meet at least at this one point: they are both clearly optimistic. Humboldt’s principle is optimistic insofar as it implicitly affirms the original goodness of human nature and the legitimacy of its free blossoming. It sets itself up in opposition to the Christian condemnation of our natural instincts, and we can understand the reservations of M. Dupont-White, the translator of the “Essay on Liberty,” had from the spiritualist and Christian point of view (condemnation of the flesh) as concerns this principle.
The humanist principle is no less optimistic. Humanism, in fact, is nothing but rendering divine of man in what he has of the general, of humanity, and consequently of human society. As we see, anarchism, optimistic as concerns the individual, is even more so as concerns society. Anarchism supposes that individual freedoms, left to themselves, will naturally harmonize and spontaneously realize the anarchist ideal of free society.
In regard to these two opposing points of view, the Christian and anarchist, what is the attitude of individualism? Individualism, a realist philosophy, all lived life and immediate sensation, equally repudiates these two metaphysics: one, Christian metaphysics, which a priori affirms original evil, the other the rationalist and Rosseauist metaphysic, that no less a priori affirms the original and essential goodness of our nature. Individualism places itself before the facts. And these latter make visible in the human being a bundle of instincts in struggle with each other and, in human society, a grouping of individuals also necessarily in struggle with each other. By the very fact of his conditions of existence the human being is subject to the law of struggle: internal struggle among his own instincts, external struggle with his like. If recognizing the permanent and universal character of egoism and struggle in human existence means being pessimistic, then we must say that individualism is pessimistic. But we must immediately add that the pessimism of individualism, a pessimism of fact, an experimental pessimism, if you will, pessimism a posteriori, is totally different from the theological pessimism that a priori pronounces, in the name of dogma, the condemnation of human nature. What is more, individualism separates itself every bit as much from anarchism. If, with anarchism, it admits Humboldt’s principle as the expression of a normal tendency necessary to our nature for its full blossoming, at the same time it recognizes that this tendency is condemned to never being satisfied because of the internal and external disharmonies of our nature. In other words, it considers the harmonious development of the individual and society as a utopia. Pessimistic as concerns the individual, individualism is even more so as concerns society: man is by his very nature disharmonious because of the internal struggle of his instincts. But this disharmony is exacerbated by the state of society which, through a painful paradox, represses our instincts at the same time as it exasperates them. In fact, from the rapprochement of individual wills-to-life is formed a collective will-to-life which becomes immediately oppressive for the individual will-to-life and opposes its flourishing with all its force. The state of society thus pushes to its ultimate degree the disharmonies of our nature. It exaggerates them and puts them in the poorest possible light. Following the idea of Schopenhauer, society thus truly represents the human will-to-life at its highest degree: struggle, lack of fulfillment, and suffering.
From this opposition between anarchism and individualism flow others. Anarchism believes in progress. Individualism is an attitude of thought that we can call non-historical. It denies becoming, progress. It sees the human will-to-life in an eternal present. Like Schopenhauer, with whom he has more than one similarity, Stirner is a non-historical spirit. He too believes that it is chimerical to expect something new and great from tomorrow. Every social form, by the very fact that it crystallizes, crushes the individual. For Stirner, there are no utopian tomorrows, no “paradise at the end of our days.” There is nothing but the egoist today. Stirner’s attitude before society is the same as that of Schopenhauer before nature and life. With Schopenhauer the negation of life remains metaphysical and, we might say, spiritual (we should remember that Schopenhauer condemns suicide which, would be the material and tangible negation). in the same way Stirner’s rebellion against society is an entirely spiritual internal rebellion, all intention and inner will. It is not, as is the case with Bakunin, an appeal to pan-destruction. Regarding society, it is a simple act of distrust and passive hostility, a mix of indifference and disdainful resignation. It is not a question of the individual fighting against society, for society will always be the stronger. It must thus be obeyed, obeyed like a dog. But Stirner, while obeying, as a form of consolation, maintains an immense intellectual contempt. This is more or less the attitude of Vigny vis-a-vis nature and society. “A tranquil despair, without convulsions of anger and without reproaches for heaven, this is wisdom itself.” And again: “Silence would be the best criticism of life.”
Anarchism is an exaggerated and mad idealism. Individualism is summed up in a trait common to Schopenhauer and Stirner: a pitiless realism. It arrives at what a German writer calls a complete “dis-idealization” (Entidealisierung) of life and society.
“An ideal is nothing but a pawn,” Stirner said. From this point of view Stirner is the most authentic representative of individualism. His icy word seizes souls with a shiver entirely different from that, fiery and radiant, of a Nietzsche. Nietzsche remains an impenitent, imperious, violent idealist. He idealizes superior humanity. Stirner represents the most complete dis-idealization of nature and life, the most radical philosophy of disenchantment that has appeared since Ecclesiastes. Pessimist without measure or reservations, individualism is absolutely anti-social, unlike anarchism, with which this is only relatively the case (in relation to current society). Anarchism admits an antinomy between the individual and the state, an antinomy it resolves by the suppression of the state, but it does not see any inherent, irreducible antinomy between the individual and society. This is because in its eyes society represents a spontaneous growth (Spencer), while the state is an artificial and authoritarian organization. In the eyes of an individualist society is as tyrannical, if not more so, than the state. Society, in fact, is nothing else but the mass of social ties of all kinds (opinions, mores, usages, conventions, mutual surveillance, more or less discreet espionage of the conduct of others, moral approval and disapproval, etc.) Society thus understood constitutes a closely- knit fabric of petty and great tyrannies, exigent, inevitable, incessant, harassing, and pitiless, which penetrates into the details of individual life more profoundly and continuously than statist constraints can. What is more, if we look closely at this, statist tyranny and the tyranny of mores proceed from the same root: the collective interest of a caste or class that wishes to establish or to maintain its domination and prestige. Opinion and mores are in part the residue of ancient caste disciplines that are in the process of disappearing, in part the seed of new social disciplines brought with them by the new leading caste in the process of formation. This is why between state constraint and that of opinion and mores there is only a difference in degree. Deep down they have the same goal: the maintenance of a certain moral conformism useful to the group, and the same procedures: the vexation and elimination of the independent and the recalcitrant. The only difference is that diffuse sanctions (opinions and mores) are more hypocritical than the others. Proudhon was right to say that the state is nothing but a mirror of society. It is only tyrannical because society is tyrannical. The government, following a remark of Tolstoy’s, is a gathering of men who exploit others and that favors the wicked and the cheaters If this is the practice of government, this is also that of society. There is a conformity between the two terms: state and society. The one is the same as the other. The gregarious spirit, or the spirit of society, is no less oppressive for the individual than the statist or priestly spirit, which only maintain themselves thanks to and through it.
How strange! Stirner himself, on the question of the relations between society and the state, seems to share the error of Spencer and Bakunin. He protests against the intervention of the state in the acts of the individual, but not against that of society. “Before the individual the state girds itself with an aureole of sanctity. For example, it makes laws concerning duels. Two men who agree to risk their lives in order to settle an affair (whatever it might be) cannot execute their agreement because the state doesn’t want it. They would expose themselves to judicial pursuit and punishment. What becomes of the freedom of self-determination? Things are completely different in those places, like North America, where society decides to make the duelists suffer certain disagreeable consequences of their act and takes form them, for example, the credit they had previously enjoyed. The refusing of credit is everyone’s affair, and if it pleases a society to deprive someone of it for one reason or another, he who is struck by it cannot complain of an attack on his liberty: society has done nothing but exercise its own. The society of which we spoke leaves the individual perfectly free to expose himself to the harmful or disagreeable consequences that result from his way of acting, and leaves full and entire his freedom of will. The state does exactly the contrary: it denies all legitimacy to the will of the individual and only recognizes as legitimate its own will, the will of the state.” Strange reasoning. The law doesn’t attack me. In what way am I freer if society boycotts me? Such reasoning would legitimize all the attacks of a public opinion infected by moral bigotry against the individual. The legend of individual liberty in Anglo-Saxon countries is built on this reasoning. Stirner himself feels the vice of his reasoning, and a little further along he arrives at his celebrated distinction between society and association. In the one (society) the individual is taken as a means; in the other (association), he takes himself as an end and treats the association as a means of personal power and enjoyment: “You bring to the association all your might, all your riches and make your presence felt In society you and your activity are utilized. In the first you live as an egoist; in the second you live as a man, i.e., religiously; you work in the Lord’s vineyard. You owe society everything you have; you are its debtor and you are tormented with social obligations. You owe nothing to the association. She serves you and you leave it without scruples as soon as you no longer have any advantages to draw from it...” “If society is more than you then you will have it pass ahead of you and you will make yourself its servant. The association is your tool, your weapon; it sharpens and multiplies your natural strength. The association only exists for you and by you. Society, on the contrary, claims you as its good and can exist without you. In short, society is sacred and the association is your property; society uses you and you use the association.
A vain distinction if ever there was one! Where should we fix the boundary between society and association? As Stirner himself admitted, doesn’t an association tend to crystallize into a society?
However we approach it, anarchism cannot reconcile the two antinomic terms, society and individual liberty. The free society that it dreams of is a contradiction in terms. It’s a piece of steel made of wood, a stick without an end. Speaking of anarchists Nietzsche wrote: “We can already read on all the walls and all the tables their word for the future: Free society. Free society? To be sure. But I think you know, my dear sirs, what we will build it with: Wood made of iron...” Individualism is clearer and more honest than anarchism. It places the state, society, and association on the same plane. It rejects them both and as far as this is possible tosses them overboard. “All associations have the defects of convents,” Vigny said.
Antisocial, individualism is openly immoralist. This is not true in an absolute fashion. In a Vigny pessimistic individualism is reconciled with a morally haughty stoicism, severe and pure. Even so, even in Vigny an immoralist element remains: a tendency to dis-idealize society, to separate and oppose the two terms society and morality, and to regard society as a fatal generator of cowardice, unintelligence, and hypocrisy. “Cinq mars, Stello, and Servitude et Grandeur militaires are the songs of a kind of epic poem on disillusionment. But it is only social and false things that I will destroy and illusions I will trample on. I will raise on these ruins, on this dust, the sacred beauty of enthusiasm, of love, and of honor.” It goes without saying that in a Stirner or a Stendhal individualism is immoralist without scruples or reservations. Anarchism is imbued with a crude moralism. Anarchist morality, even without obligations or sanctions, is no less a morality. At heart it is Christian morality, except for the pessimist element contained in the latter. The anarchist supposes that those virtues necessary to harmony will flourish on their own. Enemy of coercion, the doctrine accords the faculty to take from the general stores even to the lazy. But the anarchist is persuaded that in the future city the lazy will be rare, or will not exist at all.
Optimistic and idealistic, imbued with humanism and moralism, anarchism is a social dogmatism. It is a “cause” in the sense that Stirner gave this word. A “cause” is one thing, “the simple attitude of an individual soul” is another. A cause implies a common adherence to an idea, a shared belief and a devotion to that belief. Such is not individualism. Individualism is anti-dogmatic and little inclined to proselytism. It would gladly take as its motto Stirner’s phrase: “I have set my affair on nothing.” The true individualist doesn’t seek to communicate to others his own sensation of life and society. What would be the good of this? Omne individuum inefabile. Convinced of the diversity of temperaments and the uselessness of a single rule, he would gladly say with David Thoreau: “I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for, beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead.” The individualist knows that there are temperaments that are refractory to individualism and that it would be ridiculous to want to convince them. In the eyes of a thinker in love with solitude and independence, a contemplative, a pure adept of the inner life, like Vigny, social life and its agitations seem to be something artificial, rigged, excluding any true and strongly felt sentiments. And conversely, those who by their temperament feel an imperious need for life and social action, those who throw themselves into the melee, those who have political and social enthusiasm, those who believe in the virtues of leagues and groups, those who have forever on their lips the words “The Idea,” “The Cause,” those who believe that tomorrow will bring something new and great, these people necessarily misunderstand and disdain the contemplative, who lowers before the crowd the harrow of which Vigny spoke. Inner life and social action are two things that are mutually exclusive. The two kinds of souls are not made to understand each other. As antitheses, we should read alongside each other Schopenhauer’s “Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life,” that bible of a reserved, mistrustful, and sad individualism, or the Journal Intime of Amiel. Or the Journal d’un Poète by Vigny. On the other side, we should read a Benoit Malon, an Elisée Reclus or a Kropotkin, and we will see the abyss that separates the two kinds of souls...
martes, 13 de octubre de 2009
"Review of “Schopenhauer und Nietzsche ein vortragszyklus” by Georg Simmel" byGeorges Palante
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Source: Revue Philosophique, year 32, Vol 64 July-December 1907;
Translated: by Mitch Abidor for marxists.org;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2006.
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M. G Simmel’s book develops within an intellectual framework wider than that in which historical-critical studies of this kind usually move. For the author it’s not a question of studying Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s work in detail, but of drawing up a balance sheet of modern culture by taking as typical examples of this culture the two great philosophical figures who sum up its essential oppositions. In other words, M. Simmel’s goal is to study Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in function of modern culture.
In the first chapter the author formulates the respective positions of the two thinkers confronting this culture. The two philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are the perfect expression of our state of civilization. The characteristic of all advanced societies – which as a result of this are both differentiated and complicated – is the need for unity, for a final end (Endzweck) capable of conferring a meaning on it. For a long time Christianity satisfied this need for unity. Today it has lost its hold over souls, but the need for unity survives.
Schopenhauer’s philosophy expresses that nostalgia for a final and total unity. The Schopenhauerian will-to-life, dominated by the law of the insatiability of desire, and incapable of resting on a final goal, is the symbol of this. The consideration of a universe propelled by the will for a goal and yet deprived of a goal is also Nietzsche’s point of departure. But between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche there is Darwin. While Schopenhauer stops at the negation of a final goal and concludes at the negation of the will-to-life, Nietzsche finds in mankind’s evolution the possibility of a goal that permits life to affirm itself. In Schopenhauer it is the horror of life that is affirmed, in Nietzsche it’s the sentiment of life’s magnificence. The Superman is the formula of life’s ascension, which always surpasses itself, in opposition to the eternal monotony of the Schopenhauerian universe. In a remarkable parallel between the two thinkers M. Simmel remarks that Nietzsche better answers than Schopenhauer the aspirations of the modern spirit. “This ascendance of life is the great and imperishable consolation which, thanks to Nietzsche, has become the light of our modern intellectual landscape. This fundamental concept makes us forget the anti-social form which it clothes itself in in Nietzsche, so that despite this anti-social tendency Nietzsche appears, compared to Schopenhauer, as a much more fitting expression of the modern life feeling. And it is the tragic side of Schopenhauer’s destiny that with superior forces he defended the lesser cause. Schopenhauer is an incomparably more profound thinker than Nietzsche, a brilliant metaphysician, hearing in the depths of his soul the mysterious sounds of universal existence. It is not the metaphysical instinct that inspires Nietzsche: it’s the genius of the psychologist and the moralist that dominate in him. But he lacks the grand style of Schopenhauer, which bursts from tension of the thinker towards the mystery of things, and not only of man and his value; this grand style that seems to be refused in the most singular fashion to men of the greatest psychological finesse.”
Of the seven chapters that follow, five are dedicated to Schopenhauer and two to Nietzsche. As concerns Schopenhauer, we should note the penetrating critique to which M. Simmel submits pessimism.. He notes that Schopenhauer’s pessimism is not based on the amount of suffering, but on this statement of principle: evil is an a priori of life. It is a function of desire, the essence of life. To a system based on the psychological observation that desire is accompanied by pain and its satisfaction by pleasure, must be opposed a psychological refutation. In the will Schopenhauer only considers the obstacle or the departure and arrival points. He forgets the trajectory between the two end points, a trajectory each step of which is accompanied by pleasure, be it only the pleasure of anticipation. This refutation is identical to that of Guyau, who is not quoted by M. Simmel. Schopenhauer’s successors wanted to add empirical proofs to the metaphysical proof of evil: the sum of the evil surpasses the sum of the good. Again like Guyau, M. Simmel remarks that the comparison isn’t possible. And Schopenhauer, faithful to his principle of the metaphysical unity of the will and consequently of universal suffering, doesn’t linger over the question of the distribution of good and evil among individuals. To the contrary, any system resting on the differentiation of individuals and their absolute reality is especially attached to the question of distribution. An example: socialism.
Of the two chapters on Nietzsche one is called “Human Values and Decadence,” and the other “The Morality of Distinction.” Schopenhauer recognizes only one value, non-life. Nietzsche glorifies life. Nietzsche attacks Christianity, which sacrifices the strong to the weak and, because of this, is a decadence. But there is a misunderstanding in the thought of Nietzsche: he looks only at the moral side of Christianity and not at its transcendental value. In reality Christianity and Nietzsche exalt the individual. But while for Nietzsche it reaches its apex in this life, for Christianity it only reaches it in the Kingdom of God. Nietzsche doesn’t see in Christianity the intensive cultivation of the soul, he only sees its practical altruism. He only sees the act of charity, he doesn’t see the intense state that precedes it. He only sees the centrifugal force and not the centripetal. Nietzsche denies God: the opposition between God and the I demands this. Only Schleiermacher was able to reconcile the two by absorbing the one in the other. To the Kingdom of God Nietzsche substitutes the idea of a humanity realized by individuals of the elite, which he opposes to that of society. Goethe too had isolated “das allgemein-menschliche.” Nietzsche says: humanity only lives in individuals and not in society. The progress of the individual is the progress of society. From the point of view of the social concept the individual is a point of intersection of social threads. From the Nietzschean point of view the individual is a reality: he sums up a line of man that exited up to his arrival. And if this line is an ascending line the individual incarnates humanity’s progress. M. Simmel opposes Nietzschean individualism to liberalism.
A propos of Nietzchean aristocratism M. Simmel cleverly compares Nietzsche and M. Maeterlinck. Nietzsche places the value of life in a few elite individuals and a few heroic hours, culminating points of individual existence, “rupture of the equilibrium of our pendulum between heaven and earth.” M. Maeterlinck places the values of life in daily existence and in each of its moments. There is no need of the heroic, the catastrophic, the exceptional. “Learn to venerate the small hours of life.” This is the same idea as that expressed in the worker aesthetic of the sculptor Meunier: the individual, aristocratic, and esthetic value and charm of the individual, but who only counts as an equal drawn from a crowd of his peers. Maeterlinck makes the democratic evaluation descend into the infinite of the individual soul.
The final chapter, “The Morality of Distinction,” contains many ideas no less subtle and ingenious. Thus the remark that it is not the act but being that gives a man his rank. Society only respects what a man does; humanity, on the other hand, only profits from what a man is. M. Simmel recalls here the phrase of Schiller: “Noble natures count for what they are; common natures for what they do.”
We have gone on at length on this book that deserves a special place in Nietzschean literature, a book fertile in ingenious connections, penetrating criticisms, and subtle psychological and sociological observations. In summary the two essential points to be noted are: the refutation of Schopenhauerian pessimism through Guyau’s concepts, and the refutation of Nietzschean aristocratism through the moral democratism of Maeterlinck. M. Simmel reproaches Schopenhauer for only taking into account extreme states, pain and pleasure, and neglecting transitional states. He reproaches Nietzsche for only paying attention to the summits of life and heroic hours, and neglecting daily life and anonymous hours, that continuity that forms the uninterrupted and solid course of our destiny.
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Source: Revue Philosophique, year 32, Vol 64 July-December 1907;
Translated: by Mitch Abidor for marxists.org;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2006.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
M. G Simmel’s book develops within an intellectual framework wider than that in which historical-critical studies of this kind usually move. For the author it’s not a question of studying Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s work in detail, but of drawing up a balance sheet of modern culture by taking as typical examples of this culture the two great philosophical figures who sum up its essential oppositions. In other words, M. Simmel’s goal is to study Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in function of modern culture.
In the first chapter the author formulates the respective positions of the two thinkers confronting this culture. The two philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are the perfect expression of our state of civilization. The characteristic of all advanced societies – which as a result of this are both differentiated and complicated – is the need for unity, for a final end (Endzweck) capable of conferring a meaning on it. For a long time Christianity satisfied this need for unity. Today it has lost its hold over souls, but the need for unity survives.
Schopenhauer’s philosophy expresses that nostalgia for a final and total unity. The Schopenhauerian will-to-life, dominated by the law of the insatiability of desire, and incapable of resting on a final goal, is the symbol of this. The consideration of a universe propelled by the will for a goal and yet deprived of a goal is also Nietzsche’s point of departure. But between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche there is Darwin. While Schopenhauer stops at the negation of a final goal and concludes at the negation of the will-to-life, Nietzsche finds in mankind’s evolution the possibility of a goal that permits life to affirm itself. In Schopenhauer it is the horror of life that is affirmed, in Nietzsche it’s the sentiment of life’s magnificence. The Superman is the formula of life’s ascension, which always surpasses itself, in opposition to the eternal monotony of the Schopenhauerian universe. In a remarkable parallel between the two thinkers M. Simmel remarks that Nietzsche better answers than Schopenhauer the aspirations of the modern spirit. “This ascendance of life is the great and imperishable consolation which, thanks to Nietzsche, has become the light of our modern intellectual landscape. This fundamental concept makes us forget the anti-social form which it clothes itself in in Nietzsche, so that despite this anti-social tendency Nietzsche appears, compared to Schopenhauer, as a much more fitting expression of the modern life feeling. And it is the tragic side of Schopenhauer’s destiny that with superior forces he defended the lesser cause. Schopenhauer is an incomparably more profound thinker than Nietzsche, a brilliant metaphysician, hearing in the depths of his soul the mysterious sounds of universal existence. It is not the metaphysical instinct that inspires Nietzsche: it’s the genius of the psychologist and the moralist that dominate in him. But he lacks the grand style of Schopenhauer, which bursts from tension of the thinker towards the mystery of things, and not only of man and his value; this grand style that seems to be refused in the most singular fashion to men of the greatest psychological finesse.”
Of the seven chapters that follow, five are dedicated to Schopenhauer and two to Nietzsche. As concerns Schopenhauer, we should note the penetrating critique to which M. Simmel submits pessimism.. He notes that Schopenhauer’s pessimism is not based on the amount of suffering, but on this statement of principle: evil is an a priori of life. It is a function of desire, the essence of life. To a system based on the psychological observation that desire is accompanied by pain and its satisfaction by pleasure, must be opposed a psychological refutation. In the will Schopenhauer only considers the obstacle or the departure and arrival points. He forgets the trajectory between the two end points, a trajectory each step of which is accompanied by pleasure, be it only the pleasure of anticipation. This refutation is identical to that of Guyau, who is not quoted by M. Simmel. Schopenhauer’s successors wanted to add empirical proofs to the metaphysical proof of evil: the sum of the evil surpasses the sum of the good. Again like Guyau, M. Simmel remarks that the comparison isn’t possible. And Schopenhauer, faithful to his principle of the metaphysical unity of the will and consequently of universal suffering, doesn’t linger over the question of the distribution of good and evil among individuals. To the contrary, any system resting on the differentiation of individuals and their absolute reality is especially attached to the question of distribution. An example: socialism.
Of the two chapters on Nietzsche one is called “Human Values and Decadence,” and the other “The Morality of Distinction.” Schopenhauer recognizes only one value, non-life. Nietzsche glorifies life. Nietzsche attacks Christianity, which sacrifices the strong to the weak and, because of this, is a decadence. But there is a misunderstanding in the thought of Nietzsche: he looks only at the moral side of Christianity and not at its transcendental value. In reality Christianity and Nietzsche exalt the individual. But while for Nietzsche it reaches its apex in this life, for Christianity it only reaches it in the Kingdom of God. Nietzsche doesn’t see in Christianity the intensive cultivation of the soul, he only sees its practical altruism. He only sees the act of charity, he doesn’t see the intense state that precedes it. He only sees the centrifugal force and not the centripetal. Nietzsche denies God: the opposition between God and the I demands this. Only Schleiermacher was able to reconcile the two by absorbing the one in the other. To the Kingdom of God Nietzsche substitutes the idea of a humanity realized by individuals of the elite, which he opposes to that of society. Goethe too had isolated “das allgemein-menschliche.” Nietzsche says: humanity only lives in individuals and not in society. The progress of the individual is the progress of society. From the point of view of the social concept the individual is a point of intersection of social threads. From the Nietzschean point of view the individual is a reality: he sums up a line of man that exited up to his arrival. And if this line is an ascending line the individual incarnates humanity’s progress. M. Simmel opposes Nietzschean individualism to liberalism.
A propos of Nietzchean aristocratism M. Simmel cleverly compares Nietzsche and M. Maeterlinck. Nietzsche places the value of life in a few elite individuals and a few heroic hours, culminating points of individual existence, “rupture of the equilibrium of our pendulum between heaven and earth.” M. Maeterlinck places the values of life in daily existence and in each of its moments. There is no need of the heroic, the catastrophic, the exceptional. “Learn to venerate the small hours of life.” This is the same idea as that expressed in the worker aesthetic of the sculptor Meunier: the individual, aristocratic, and esthetic value and charm of the individual, but who only counts as an equal drawn from a crowd of his peers. Maeterlinck makes the democratic evaluation descend into the infinite of the individual soul.
The final chapter, “The Morality of Distinction,” contains many ideas no less subtle and ingenious. Thus the remark that it is not the act but being that gives a man his rank. Society only respects what a man does; humanity, on the other hand, only profits from what a man is. M. Simmel recalls here the phrase of Schiller: “Noble natures count for what they are; common natures for what they do.”
We have gone on at length on this book that deserves a special place in Nietzschean literature, a book fertile in ingenious connections, penetrating criticisms, and subtle psychological and sociological observations. In summary the two essential points to be noted are: the refutation of Schopenhauerian pessimism through Guyau’s concepts, and the refutation of Nietzschean aristocratism through the moral democratism of Maeterlinck. M. Simmel reproaches Schopenhauer for only taking into account extreme states, pain and pleasure, and neglecting transitional states. He reproaches Nietzsche for only paying attention to the summits of life and heroic hours, and neglecting daily life and anonymous hours, that continuity that forms the uninterrupted and solid course of our destiny.
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Respect by Georges Palante
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Source: Chroniques Complètes, Tome II. Edited by Stéphane Beau. Paris, Coda, 2009;
Source: Revue Philosophique, year 32, Vol 64 July-December 1907;
Translated: by Mitchell Abidor for marxists.org;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2009.
Palante specialist Stéphane Beau notes that this piece, which appeared in the December 1903 issue of the anarchist revue “L’Ennemi du people” was signed only GP. There is thus no guarantee that it is actually from the pen of Georges Palante, but the ideas expressed in it, and the form of their expression, are so clearly Palantian, that there is no real question as to its attribution.
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The contemptible sentiment par excellence. Mosaic of crystallized fears; mixture of herd stupidity and secular religiosity.
I mean the respect of collective beings; of the maleficent and deceptive metaphors that populate our social mythologies.
Stirner gives collective entities the characteristic name of “respectful personalities.” Moral idols, political idols, society idols, they float, like the specter of religion in Lucretius’ heavens; ghostly, vain, formidable.
Stendhal had already pointed out the respectful mania, the mother of all hypocrisies, guardian of all big shots and oligarchs.
The beatific social optimism of the crowd is only a form of that respectful mania. For the crowd, whatever kind of collectivity we might be dealing with – public administration, government body, the family – are always right against the individual. It is right for the very reason that it is a collectivity. The label “collective” suffices. The dogma of infallibility is thus secularized and socialized.
Oligarchs know this. They bank on the crowd’s capacity for respect, which gives an idea of the infinite, as does its stupidity.
The citizen is a respectful and irremediably religious animal; it now inclines to civic genuflection. It adores social fetishes just as the little dog Riquet in “Monsieur Bergeret à Paris” venerated doors, the table, and the kitchen chair.
Reproductive animal, the citizen venerates the fetish “marriage.” An electoral animal, he venerates that other fetish, the modern holy ampoule, the Civic Ballot Box.
With respect to crowds we oppose irony, pensive irony, of a cold smile and a clear eye.
Source: Chroniques Complètes, Tome II. Edited by Stéphane Beau. Paris, Coda, 2009;
Source: Revue Philosophique, year 32, Vol 64 July-December 1907;
Translated: by Mitchell Abidor for marxists.org;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2009.
Palante specialist Stéphane Beau notes that this piece, which appeared in the December 1903 issue of the anarchist revue “L’Ennemi du people” was signed only GP. There is thus no guarantee that it is actually from the pen of Georges Palante, but the ideas expressed in it, and the form of their expression, are so clearly Palantian, that there is no real question as to its attribution.
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The contemptible sentiment par excellence. Mosaic of crystallized fears; mixture of herd stupidity and secular religiosity.
I mean the respect of collective beings; of the maleficent and deceptive metaphors that populate our social mythologies.
Stirner gives collective entities the characteristic name of “respectful personalities.” Moral idols, political idols, society idols, they float, like the specter of religion in Lucretius’ heavens; ghostly, vain, formidable.
Stendhal had already pointed out the respectful mania, the mother of all hypocrisies, guardian of all big shots and oligarchs.
The beatific social optimism of the crowd is only a form of that respectful mania. For the crowd, whatever kind of collectivity we might be dealing with – public administration, government body, the family – are always right against the individual. It is right for the very reason that it is a collectivity. The label “collective” suffices. The dogma of infallibility is thus secularized and socialized.
Oligarchs know this. They bank on the crowd’s capacity for respect, which gives an idea of the infinite, as does its stupidity.
The citizen is a respectful and irremediably religious animal; it now inclines to civic genuflection. It adores social fetishes just as the little dog Riquet in “Monsieur Bergeret à Paris” venerated doors, the table, and the kitchen chair.
Reproductive animal, the citizen venerates the fetish “marriage.” An electoral animal, he venerates that other fetish, the modern holy ampoule, the Civic Ballot Box.
With respect to crowds we oppose irony, pensive irony, of a cold smile and a clear eye.
Esprit de Corps by Georges Palante
Georges Palante 1899
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Source: Combat pour l’individu. Paris, Alcan, 1904; originally appeared as an article in La Revue Philosophique in 1899;
Translated: by Mitch Abidor for marxists.org;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2006.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Esprit de corps” is one of the most interesting of phenomena for any observer of contemporary life. In the midst of the disintegration of so many moral and social influences it has maintained a certain hold on people’s consciousness and manifests itself in important ways. We thought it useful to study esprit de corps in some of its principal manifestations. This small psychological inquiry will then lead us to a few considerations on the moral value of esprit de corps.
For greater precision it would be appropriate to distinguish two meanings of this expression, “esprit de corps”: a broad and a narrow sense. In a narrow sense esprit de corps is a spirit of solidarity animating all members of a same professional group. In a broader sense the expression esprit de corps designates the spirit of solidarity in general, not only in the professional group, but in all those social circles, whatever they might be (class, caste, sect, etc.), in which the individual feels himself to be more or less subordinated to the interests of the collectivity. It is in this sense that there exists a class spirit; for example, the bourgeois spirit which though difficult to precisely define nevertheless exists and shows itself to be no less combative whenever it’s a matter of defeating anti-bourgeois doctrines and tendencies. It is also in this sense that Schopenhauer was able to speak of women’s esprit de corps or the esprit de corps of married people, about which he made such interesting remarks in his “Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life.” In this broad sense we could also speak of the esprit de corps among the inhabitants of a city, who in certain cases find themselves more or less the associates in a same commercial enterprise. Ibsen showed this esprit de corps in a masterly way in the small city in which he placed the scene in his “An Enemy of the People” where we see all the inhabitants agreeing to remain silent about a secret (the contamination of the waters) which if divulged would ruin the city’s bathing establishments. The broad sense of the expression esprit de corps is manifestly nothing but the extension of the narrow or purely professional sense.
Professional solidarity is one of the most powerful social ties. But its action is most energetic in the so-called liberal professions (clergy, army, magistracy, the bar, various administrations). Workers belonging to the same trade, for example mechanics, carpenters, or foundry workers, do not manifest an esprit de corps as developed as that of the officer, the priest, or the functionaries in the various government offices. This is not to say that these workers are lacking in all corporate solidarity, since we know that in some countries the workers of a same craft are capable of uniting in trade unions and joining together to vigorously defend their interests against the bosses. But among workers this solidarity remains purely economic. It limits itself to defending the material interests of the trade union. Once this goal is achieved its action ceases: it isn’t transformed into a coherent and systematic moral or social discipline that dominates and invades individual consciousnesses. Or if it acts in this sense it is solely in order to develop in the worker his consciousness of his rights as a “proletarian” in opposition to the antagonistic class, the bourgeois or capitalist class. Properly speaking, this is not esprit de corps in the narrow sense of that expression; instead it is class spirit.
But in the liberal professions things are different. Here esprit de corps arrogates to itself a moral sway over individual consciousness. Here the corporation imposes on and inculcates in its members, in a more or less conscious fashion, an intellectual and moral conformism and marks them with an indelible stamp. This stamp is well defined and varies from one group to another. The ways of thinking, feeling, and acting proper to a priest, an officer, an administrator and a functionary are all different. Here each body has its self-conscious interests, its defined and precise slogans that are imposed on the members of these groups. This energy particular to esprit de corps in the liberal professions can perhaps be explained in part by the fact that the priest, the magistrate, the soldier, and the functionary are generally subject to a powerful hierarchical organization whose effect is to singularly strengthen esprit de corps. It is clear that the more organized and hierarchical a social group the more narrow and energetic is the moral and social discipline it imposes on its members.
What are the principal characteristics of esprit de corps?
A ‘corps’ is a defined social group with its own interests, its own will to life and which seeks to defend itself against all exterior or interior causes of its destruction or diminution.
If we were to ask ourselves what are the goods for which a corps fights we would see that they are moral advantages: the good name of the corps, influence, consideration, credit. These moral advantages are doubtless nothing but the means for ensuring the material prosperity of the corps and its members. But the corps treats them as ends in themselves and in order to conquer and defend them deploys an energy, a fierceness, a combativeness that individual passions can only give a faint idea of.
A corps pursues these advantages by striving to suggest to those who are not part of this corps a high idea of its social utility and superiority. If need be it doesn’t fear to exaggerate this value and importance, and since it isn’t unaware of the power of the imagination over man’s credulity it willingly envelops itself in the decorum most likely to increase its respectability in the spirit of the crowd. Max Nordau, in his book “The Conventional Lies of our Civilization,” studied the lies that the various organized social groups knowingly and deliberately maintain and that they consider among their conditions for existence (religious lies, aristocratic, political, economic lies, etc.). Mr. Nordau could have added to these corporate lies, which are often nothing but a combination and a synthesis of others. It is in this great general law of social insincerity that one must enter the special tactic by which a corps hides its defects, its weaknesses or its faults and strives to remain, in the eyes of the vulgar, in an attitude of uncontested superiority, of recognized infallibility and impeccability.
In order to maintain this attitude the corps demands that all its members “conduct themselves properly.” It wants its members to be irreproachable externally and to decently play their role in the social theatre.
Competition is the great law that dominates the evolution of societies; it also dominates the life of constituted corps. Each corps has its caste pride and its special point of honor vis-à-vis the others. It wants to maintain its respectability intact and not fall from its rank in the greater organism that the various corps form in uniting. We can observe a muted rivalry among the various constituted corps, which is translated into public life and even into private relations. M. Anatole France depicts this rivalry humorously in the short story entitled “Un Substitut,” which he attributes to M. Bergeret in “L’Orme du Mail.”
This rivalry forces the corps to jealously watch over its caste honor and to exercise strict control over the conduct of its members. Woe on he who, through word or act, appears to compromise the honor of the corps. He should expect neither pity not justice from his peers. He is condemned without appeal.
When it’s possible, the scapegoat is sacrificed in an official execution. In the contrary case he is silently eliminated by more or less hypocritical proceedings that denote a Machiavellianism in the corps that is more conscious than is commonly believed. In this the corps obeys the vital instinct of all societies. M. Maurice Barrès said: “In the same way that a barnyard falls upon a sick chicken to kill or expel it, each group tends to reject its weakest members.” The weak, those incapable of pushing themselves ahead in the world, the evil extras of the social comedy constitute for the corps a dead weight that slows it down and which it seeks to rid itself of: and so the corps vilifies and humiliates them. It strives to create around them what Guyau calls an atmosphere of intolerability.
The corps pursues this policy of elimination against its weak members with a disdain of the individual and a lack of scruples that often, it must be said, justifies Daudet’s line that “constituted corps are cowards.”
In order to better ensure its policy of domination esprit de corps tends as much as possible to expand its sphere of influence. Essentially, it is an invader. It doesn’t limit itself to controlling the professional existence of its members, but it often interferes in the domain of their private life. A contemporary novelist, M. Verniolle, has wittily described this characteristic of the esprit de corps in a very suggestive story called “Par la Voie Hierarchique.” In this story the author shows us a high school teacher (the true type of a personality invaded by the corps) who appeals to the administrative hierarchy and corporate influences to resolve his domestic difficulties. And in fact we see the esprit de corps, in the form of the headmaster and his colleagues, intervene in a domestic situation with a clumsiness only equalled by its incompetence. M. Verniolle has also cleverly noted in another story titled “Pasteurs d’Ames” this other trait of the esprit de corps: the hostility against the members of the corps who in one way or another seem not to fit in with the corporation. We should recall the hostility of the young and dashing Professor Brissart – the true type of what Thackeray called the university snob – against an old and not very decorative colleague who, because of his careless way of dressing, stands out from a corps of which the young snob considers himself the most beautiful ornament.
In a general way, the corporation tends to take the life of the individual under its control. Let us recall the narrow moral discipline to which the corporations of the Middle Ages submitted the private lives of their members.
This disposition brings to the entire corps a narrow and petty curiosity applied to all that individuals do. A corporation resembles in this a gossipy small town. Look at our administration and its functionaries. In this regard they are like so many small towns spread across space and disseminated across the entire extent of the French territory. If one of its even slightly well-known members commits some clumsy act or if something of interest occurs then immediately, from Nancy to Bayonne and from Dunkirk to Nice, news is spread around the entire corps, in the exact same way that the gossip of the day goes from salon to salon among the good women of a small town.
These remarks on the actions of esprit de corps permit us to see in it a particularly energetic manifestation of what Schopenhauer calls the will to life. Like all organized societies a corps is the human will to life condensed and taken to a degree of intensity that individual egoism can never reach. Let us add that this collective will to life is very different from that which acts on a crowd, which is an essentially unstable and transitory group. The corps has all those things that are lacking in a crowd: its hierarchy, its point of honor, its defined prejudices, its accepted and imposed morality. Thus the corps, in its judgments of things and men, has a stubbornness which the crowd, unstable and varying, is not susceptible to to the same degree. Look at the crowd: led astray, momentarily criminal, it can change its mind a minute later and change its decision. A corps considers itself and wants to be seen as infallible. Another difference between a crowd and a corps: in general a crowd is more impartial than a corps in its appreciation of the merit of individuals. “In a corps of functionaries,’” says Simmel, “jealously often takes from talent the influence it should have, while a crowd, renouncing all personal judgment, easily follows a leader of genius.”
From the fact that a corps is essentially a collective will to life we can judge the qualities a corps demands of its members: it is those that are useful to the corps, and these alone. A corps doesn’t ask its members for eminent individual qualities. It could care less about those rare and precious qualities that are subtlety of intelligence, strength and suppleness of the imagination, delicacy and tenderness of the soul. As we have said, what it demands of its members is a certain conduct,’ a certain perseverance in their docility towards the moral code of the corps. It is this perseverance in docility which – through I don’t know what misunderstanding – is sometimes decorated with the title of character. By this latter word a corps does not at all mean initiative in decision making or daring in execution, nor any of the qualities of spontaneity and energy that make up a strong personality, but solely and exclusively a certain constancy in obedience to the rule. A corps has no particular esteem for what is called merit or talent; rather it is suspicious of them. Esprit de corps is a friend of that mediocrity favorable to perfect conformism. We can say about all constituted bodies what Renan says of the Seminary of Issy: “The first rule of the company is to abdicate all that can be called talent and originality in order to bend before the discipline of a mediocre community.” Nowhere better than in a corps does the celebrated antithesis between talent and character appear which Heinrich Heine mocked with such exquisite irony in the foreword to “Atta Troll.” We recall, and not without a smile, that good Swabian school of poetry – which possessed the esprit de corps to a high degree -which asked of its members not that they have talent, but that they be characters. It is the same in our constituted corps. A corps wants its members to be characters, that is, perfectly disciplined beings, wan and mediocre actors who play their social role in this social theatre which Schopenhauer speaks of, where the police severely prohibit the actors to improvise.
And so in the corps the great lever for “arriving” is not merit, but mediocrity backed by family ties and camaraderie. But those individuals in those bodies that dispense advancement and sought after places don’t always practice nepotism for interested reasons: they are acting in good faith. They are sincerely persuaded, imbued as they are with esprit de corps, that nepotism and camaraderie are ties both respectable and useful to the cohesion of the corps. In rewarding merit alone they believe they are sacrificing to a dangerous individualism.
This disdain on the part of esprit de corps for personal qualities (intellectual or moral of the individual) are admirably explained in the final pages of a novel by M. Ferdinand Fabre, “L’Abbe Tigrane,” in which Cardinal Maffei explains to Abbe Ternisien the tactics of the Roman congregation.
It seems to us that these considerations sufficiently confirm the definition we gave above of esprit de corps. According to us esprit de corps is a collective egoism, uniquely concerned with collective ends and disdainful of the individual and individual qualities. Thus defined, esprit de corps presents an excellent illustration of what tends to be, according to the doctrine of Schopenhauer, pure will to life, separated from the intellect.
The preceding remarks also permit us to present a few considerations on the ethical value of the esprit de corps.
Certain contemporary sociologists and moralists have favorably judged the moral influence of esprit de corps. Some have even thought of investing it with a political mission by substituting for universal suffrage as it is practiced in our country a system of vote by corporations, each individual being obliged to vote for a representative chosen from among his peers or hierarchical chiefs from his corporation. We cite among the moralists who have recently insisted upon the value of esprit de corps MM. Dorner and Durkheim, who took the moral point of view, and Messieurs Benoist and Walras, who have taken the political point of view.
M. Dorner sees in corporations a remedy for moral and social discontent. He finds in the subordination of the individual to the corporate group the pacifying of all internal and external troubles. “Each person must understand,” says M. Dormer, “that he can only occupy a determined place in the whole and he can’t surpass the limits imposed by his salary and his own faculties. The individual more easily acquires this conviction if he belongs to a corporation that determines in advance the general conditions of his economic and social life. The corporation holds before his eyes that alone which is possible, and keeps from his imagination the castles in the air (Luftschlossern) that make him discontented with the present. On the other hand, thanks to his application the individual learns the measure of his possible progress, and he participates in the collective intelligence of his associates (Berufsgenossen). Consequently, there results from all this a general tendency that aspires to establishing on the basis of what we already possess those improvements that are profitable to the individual as well as the whole, while allowing for progress within the limits of professional activity.”
It is of the highest moral interest that the individual be able to attach himself to a professional group, for this tie permits him to properly judge his personal faculties; and by its intermediary he can cultivate his intelligence, obtain a wider viewpoint on things, and can be encouraged by it to the great moral universal organism. Corporations are nothing but organs of this organism, and so they must for once and for all have their respective rights specified so that each can independently accomplish its tasks in its respective domains. Corporations must then be inspired by the interests of the organism of which they are the organ, they must forgo their rivalries in the pursuit of privileges and advantages in keeping with the consciousness their of their collaboration in a common task.”
For his part M. Durkehim sees in a corps a useful intermediary between the individual and the state. The state, he says, is a social entity, too abstract and too distant from the individual. The individual will attach himself more easily to an ideal nearer at hand and more practical. According to him this is the ideal that the professional group presents. M. Durkheim sees in corporations the great remedy to what he calls social anomy: “The principal role of corporations,” he says, “in the future as in the past, will be to regulate social functions and especially economic functions, and consequently to extract them from the state of disorganization in which they are currently found. Whenever envy will be excited to such an extent that it knows no limits it will be up to the corporation to fix the portion which should equitably devolve to each of the cooperators. Superior to its members, it will have all the authority needed to demand from them those sacrifices and concessions that are indispensable and to impose a rule on them. We don’t see in what other milieu this law of distributive justice, so urgent, can be elaborated, nor by what organ it could be applied.”
MM. Benoist and Walras, for their part, develop the advantages of a political organization by corporations. We can thus see that the system is complete: corporate politics is connected to a professional morality.
We will not discuss here the question of corporative politics. We will content ourselves with presenting a few observations on corporative morality as they result from our analysis of esprit de corps.
According to us the individual cannot ask from the corporate group his law and his moral criteria. In our eyes the value of the individual’s moral activity is in direct relationship with the freedom of which he disposes. The corporate group dominates the individual through interests too immediate and too material for this liberty not to be hindered. It can, in fact, suppress the means of existence for an individual refractory to its moral discipline. It holds him by what we can call, borrowing an expression from the socialist vocabulary: “the belly question.”
Another question that is posed is that of knowing whether or not affiliation with a corporate group would be a real remedy to “anomy” and if it would bring an end to social discontent. “Yes, perhaps,” we could say, if the kind of distributive justice which M. Durkheim speaks or were exactly applied. But this is a utopian desideratum, at least in those corporations where the labor furnished cannot be precisely measured, as is the case with manual labor. Stuart Mill said that from the top to the bottom of the social ladders remuneration is in inverse ratio to the labor furnished. There is doubtless some exaggeration in this way of seeing things, but it is confirmed in those professional groups where the nature of the services rendered prevents material measurement and permits esprit de corps to deploy its oppressive influence on individual merit.
This is not all. To seek the individual’s moral criterion in the corporation would mean going against the march of evolution, which increasingly multiplies social circles around the individual. This consequently permits him to simultaneously take part in a greater number of diverse and independent societies that offer to his sensibility, his intelligence, and his activity an ever richer and more various nourishment. “History multiplies the number of social religious, intellectual, and commercial circles to which individuals belong and raises their personality only through the increasing implication of these circles. Consequently, their (the individual’s) obligation is no longer relatively simple, clear, and unilateral, as was the case when the individual was one with society. The increasing differentiation of social elements, the corresponding differentiation of psychological elements in the consciousness, all the laws of the parallel development of societies and individuals, seem to augment rather than to diminish the number and importance of moral conflicts. At the same time that history increases the number of the objects of morality, it renders the subjects more appreciable.” It results from this law of progressive differentiation that the freedom of the individual – and consequently his value and moral capacity – are in direct ratio with the number and extent of the social circles in which he participates. The moral ideal is not to subordinate the individual to the moral conformism of a group, but to remove him from the herd spirit, to permit him to deploy himself in a multi-faceted activity. The individual, while he is in a certain sense a tissue of general properties, can be regarded as the point of interference of a more or less considerable number of social circles whose moral influences reverberate within him. The individual is a harmonious and living monad whose vital and harmonious law is to maintain himself in a state of equilibrium in the midst of a system of interfering social forces. It is in this free and progressive flourishing of individuality that the true moral ideal resides. There is no other. For, whatever we say or do, the individual remains the living source of energy and the measure of the ideal.
We have arrived at the conclusion that corporative morality, the very form of the herd spirit, is a regressive form of morality. Many complain, following in the footsteps of M.Barrès, that we are rootless. MM. Dorner and Durkheim invite us to take root in the soil of the professional corporation. We ask if this isn’t too narrow a terrain for plants that want free air, light, and the broad horizons of a human morality to take root.
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Source: Combat pour l’individu. Paris, Alcan, 1904; originally appeared as an article in La Revue Philosophique in 1899;
Translated: by Mitch Abidor for marxists.org;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2006.
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“Esprit de corps” is one of the most interesting of phenomena for any observer of contemporary life. In the midst of the disintegration of so many moral and social influences it has maintained a certain hold on people’s consciousness and manifests itself in important ways. We thought it useful to study esprit de corps in some of its principal manifestations. This small psychological inquiry will then lead us to a few considerations on the moral value of esprit de corps.
For greater precision it would be appropriate to distinguish two meanings of this expression, “esprit de corps”: a broad and a narrow sense. In a narrow sense esprit de corps is a spirit of solidarity animating all members of a same professional group. In a broader sense the expression esprit de corps designates the spirit of solidarity in general, not only in the professional group, but in all those social circles, whatever they might be (class, caste, sect, etc.), in which the individual feels himself to be more or less subordinated to the interests of the collectivity. It is in this sense that there exists a class spirit; for example, the bourgeois spirit which though difficult to precisely define nevertheless exists and shows itself to be no less combative whenever it’s a matter of defeating anti-bourgeois doctrines and tendencies. It is also in this sense that Schopenhauer was able to speak of women’s esprit de corps or the esprit de corps of married people, about which he made such interesting remarks in his “Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life.” In this broad sense we could also speak of the esprit de corps among the inhabitants of a city, who in certain cases find themselves more or less the associates in a same commercial enterprise. Ibsen showed this esprit de corps in a masterly way in the small city in which he placed the scene in his “An Enemy of the People” where we see all the inhabitants agreeing to remain silent about a secret (the contamination of the waters) which if divulged would ruin the city’s bathing establishments. The broad sense of the expression esprit de corps is manifestly nothing but the extension of the narrow or purely professional sense.
Professional solidarity is one of the most powerful social ties. But its action is most energetic in the so-called liberal professions (clergy, army, magistracy, the bar, various administrations). Workers belonging to the same trade, for example mechanics, carpenters, or foundry workers, do not manifest an esprit de corps as developed as that of the officer, the priest, or the functionaries in the various government offices. This is not to say that these workers are lacking in all corporate solidarity, since we know that in some countries the workers of a same craft are capable of uniting in trade unions and joining together to vigorously defend their interests against the bosses. But among workers this solidarity remains purely economic. It limits itself to defending the material interests of the trade union. Once this goal is achieved its action ceases: it isn’t transformed into a coherent and systematic moral or social discipline that dominates and invades individual consciousnesses. Or if it acts in this sense it is solely in order to develop in the worker his consciousness of his rights as a “proletarian” in opposition to the antagonistic class, the bourgeois or capitalist class. Properly speaking, this is not esprit de corps in the narrow sense of that expression; instead it is class spirit.
But in the liberal professions things are different. Here esprit de corps arrogates to itself a moral sway over individual consciousness. Here the corporation imposes on and inculcates in its members, in a more or less conscious fashion, an intellectual and moral conformism and marks them with an indelible stamp. This stamp is well defined and varies from one group to another. The ways of thinking, feeling, and acting proper to a priest, an officer, an administrator and a functionary are all different. Here each body has its self-conscious interests, its defined and precise slogans that are imposed on the members of these groups. This energy particular to esprit de corps in the liberal professions can perhaps be explained in part by the fact that the priest, the magistrate, the soldier, and the functionary are generally subject to a powerful hierarchical organization whose effect is to singularly strengthen esprit de corps. It is clear that the more organized and hierarchical a social group the more narrow and energetic is the moral and social discipline it imposes on its members.
What are the principal characteristics of esprit de corps?
A ‘corps’ is a defined social group with its own interests, its own will to life and which seeks to defend itself against all exterior or interior causes of its destruction or diminution.
If we were to ask ourselves what are the goods for which a corps fights we would see that they are moral advantages: the good name of the corps, influence, consideration, credit. These moral advantages are doubtless nothing but the means for ensuring the material prosperity of the corps and its members. But the corps treats them as ends in themselves and in order to conquer and defend them deploys an energy, a fierceness, a combativeness that individual passions can only give a faint idea of.
A corps pursues these advantages by striving to suggest to those who are not part of this corps a high idea of its social utility and superiority. If need be it doesn’t fear to exaggerate this value and importance, and since it isn’t unaware of the power of the imagination over man’s credulity it willingly envelops itself in the decorum most likely to increase its respectability in the spirit of the crowd. Max Nordau, in his book “The Conventional Lies of our Civilization,” studied the lies that the various organized social groups knowingly and deliberately maintain and that they consider among their conditions for existence (religious lies, aristocratic, political, economic lies, etc.). Mr. Nordau could have added to these corporate lies, which are often nothing but a combination and a synthesis of others. It is in this great general law of social insincerity that one must enter the special tactic by which a corps hides its defects, its weaknesses or its faults and strives to remain, in the eyes of the vulgar, in an attitude of uncontested superiority, of recognized infallibility and impeccability.
In order to maintain this attitude the corps demands that all its members “conduct themselves properly.” It wants its members to be irreproachable externally and to decently play their role in the social theatre.
Competition is the great law that dominates the evolution of societies; it also dominates the life of constituted corps. Each corps has its caste pride and its special point of honor vis-à-vis the others. It wants to maintain its respectability intact and not fall from its rank in the greater organism that the various corps form in uniting. We can observe a muted rivalry among the various constituted corps, which is translated into public life and even into private relations. M. Anatole France depicts this rivalry humorously in the short story entitled “Un Substitut,” which he attributes to M. Bergeret in “L’Orme du Mail.”
This rivalry forces the corps to jealously watch over its caste honor and to exercise strict control over the conduct of its members. Woe on he who, through word or act, appears to compromise the honor of the corps. He should expect neither pity not justice from his peers. He is condemned without appeal.
When it’s possible, the scapegoat is sacrificed in an official execution. In the contrary case he is silently eliminated by more or less hypocritical proceedings that denote a Machiavellianism in the corps that is more conscious than is commonly believed. In this the corps obeys the vital instinct of all societies. M. Maurice Barrès said: “In the same way that a barnyard falls upon a sick chicken to kill or expel it, each group tends to reject its weakest members.” The weak, those incapable of pushing themselves ahead in the world, the evil extras of the social comedy constitute for the corps a dead weight that slows it down and which it seeks to rid itself of: and so the corps vilifies and humiliates them. It strives to create around them what Guyau calls an atmosphere of intolerability.
The corps pursues this policy of elimination against its weak members with a disdain of the individual and a lack of scruples that often, it must be said, justifies Daudet’s line that “constituted corps are cowards.”
In order to better ensure its policy of domination esprit de corps tends as much as possible to expand its sphere of influence. Essentially, it is an invader. It doesn’t limit itself to controlling the professional existence of its members, but it often interferes in the domain of their private life. A contemporary novelist, M. Verniolle, has wittily described this characteristic of the esprit de corps in a very suggestive story called “Par la Voie Hierarchique.” In this story the author shows us a high school teacher (the true type of a personality invaded by the corps) who appeals to the administrative hierarchy and corporate influences to resolve his domestic difficulties. And in fact we see the esprit de corps, in the form of the headmaster and his colleagues, intervene in a domestic situation with a clumsiness only equalled by its incompetence. M. Verniolle has also cleverly noted in another story titled “Pasteurs d’Ames” this other trait of the esprit de corps: the hostility against the members of the corps who in one way or another seem not to fit in with the corporation. We should recall the hostility of the young and dashing Professor Brissart – the true type of what Thackeray called the university snob – against an old and not very decorative colleague who, because of his careless way of dressing, stands out from a corps of which the young snob considers himself the most beautiful ornament.
In a general way, the corporation tends to take the life of the individual under its control. Let us recall the narrow moral discipline to which the corporations of the Middle Ages submitted the private lives of their members.
This disposition brings to the entire corps a narrow and petty curiosity applied to all that individuals do. A corporation resembles in this a gossipy small town. Look at our administration and its functionaries. In this regard they are like so many small towns spread across space and disseminated across the entire extent of the French territory. If one of its even slightly well-known members commits some clumsy act or if something of interest occurs then immediately, from Nancy to Bayonne and from Dunkirk to Nice, news is spread around the entire corps, in the exact same way that the gossip of the day goes from salon to salon among the good women of a small town.
These remarks on the actions of esprit de corps permit us to see in it a particularly energetic manifestation of what Schopenhauer calls the will to life. Like all organized societies a corps is the human will to life condensed and taken to a degree of intensity that individual egoism can never reach. Let us add that this collective will to life is very different from that which acts on a crowd, which is an essentially unstable and transitory group. The corps has all those things that are lacking in a crowd: its hierarchy, its point of honor, its defined prejudices, its accepted and imposed morality. Thus the corps, in its judgments of things and men, has a stubbornness which the crowd, unstable and varying, is not susceptible to to the same degree. Look at the crowd: led astray, momentarily criminal, it can change its mind a minute later and change its decision. A corps considers itself and wants to be seen as infallible. Another difference between a crowd and a corps: in general a crowd is more impartial than a corps in its appreciation of the merit of individuals. “In a corps of functionaries,’” says Simmel, “jealously often takes from talent the influence it should have, while a crowd, renouncing all personal judgment, easily follows a leader of genius.”
From the fact that a corps is essentially a collective will to life we can judge the qualities a corps demands of its members: it is those that are useful to the corps, and these alone. A corps doesn’t ask its members for eminent individual qualities. It could care less about those rare and precious qualities that are subtlety of intelligence, strength and suppleness of the imagination, delicacy and tenderness of the soul. As we have said, what it demands of its members is a certain conduct,’ a certain perseverance in their docility towards the moral code of the corps. It is this perseverance in docility which – through I don’t know what misunderstanding – is sometimes decorated with the title of character. By this latter word a corps does not at all mean initiative in decision making or daring in execution, nor any of the qualities of spontaneity and energy that make up a strong personality, but solely and exclusively a certain constancy in obedience to the rule. A corps has no particular esteem for what is called merit or talent; rather it is suspicious of them. Esprit de corps is a friend of that mediocrity favorable to perfect conformism. We can say about all constituted bodies what Renan says of the Seminary of Issy: “The first rule of the company is to abdicate all that can be called talent and originality in order to bend before the discipline of a mediocre community.” Nowhere better than in a corps does the celebrated antithesis between talent and character appear which Heinrich Heine mocked with such exquisite irony in the foreword to “Atta Troll.” We recall, and not without a smile, that good Swabian school of poetry – which possessed the esprit de corps to a high degree -which asked of its members not that they have talent, but that they be characters. It is the same in our constituted corps. A corps wants its members to be characters, that is, perfectly disciplined beings, wan and mediocre actors who play their social role in this social theatre which Schopenhauer speaks of, where the police severely prohibit the actors to improvise.
And so in the corps the great lever for “arriving” is not merit, but mediocrity backed by family ties and camaraderie. But those individuals in those bodies that dispense advancement and sought after places don’t always practice nepotism for interested reasons: they are acting in good faith. They are sincerely persuaded, imbued as they are with esprit de corps, that nepotism and camaraderie are ties both respectable and useful to the cohesion of the corps. In rewarding merit alone they believe they are sacrificing to a dangerous individualism.
This disdain on the part of esprit de corps for personal qualities (intellectual or moral of the individual) are admirably explained in the final pages of a novel by M. Ferdinand Fabre, “L’Abbe Tigrane,” in which Cardinal Maffei explains to Abbe Ternisien the tactics of the Roman congregation.
It seems to us that these considerations sufficiently confirm the definition we gave above of esprit de corps. According to us esprit de corps is a collective egoism, uniquely concerned with collective ends and disdainful of the individual and individual qualities. Thus defined, esprit de corps presents an excellent illustration of what tends to be, according to the doctrine of Schopenhauer, pure will to life, separated from the intellect.
The preceding remarks also permit us to present a few considerations on the ethical value of the esprit de corps.
Certain contemporary sociologists and moralists have favorably judged the moral influence of esprit de corps. Some have even thought of investing it with a political mission by substituting for universal suffrage as it is practiced in our country a system of vote by corporations, each individual being obliged to vote for a representative chosen from among his peers or hierarchical chiefs from his corporation. We cite among the moralists who have recently insisted upon the value of esprit de corps MM. Dorner and Durkheim, who took the moral point of view, and Messieurs Benoist and Walras, who have taken the political point of view.
M. Dorner sees in corporations a remedy for moral and social discontent. He finds in the subordination of the individual to the corporate group the pacifying of all internal and external troubles. “Each person must understand,” says M. Dormer, “that he can only occupy a determined place in the whole and he can’t surpass the limits imposed by his salary and his own faculties. The individual more easily acquires this conviction if he belongs to a corporation that determines in advance the general conditions of his economic and social life. The corporation holds before his eyes that alone which is possible, and keeps from his imagination the castles in the air (Luftschlossern) that make him discontented with the present. On the other hand, thanks to his application the individual learns the measure of his possible progress, and he participates in the collective intelligence of his associates (Berufsgenossen). Consequently, there results from all this a general tendency that aspires to establishing on the basis of what we already possess those improvements that are profitable to the individual as well as the whole, while allowing for progress within the limits of professional activity.”
It is of the highest moral interest that the individual be able to attach himself to a professional group, for this tie permits him to properly judge his personal faculties; and by its intermediary he can cultivate his intelligence, obtain a wider viewpoint on things, and can be encouraged by it to the great moral universal organism. Corporations are nothing but organs of this organism, and so they must for once and for all have their respective rights specified so that each can independently accomplish its tasks in its respective domains. Corporations must then be inspired by the interests of the organism of which they are the organ, they must forgo their rivalries in the pursuit of privileges and advantages in keeping with the consciousness their of their collaboration in a common task.”
For his part M. Durkehim sees in a corps a useful intermediary between the individual and the state. The state, he says, is a social entity, too abstract and too distant from the individual. The individual will attach himself more easily to an ideal nearer at hand and more practical. According to him this is the ideal that the professional group presents. M. Durkheim sees in corporations the great remedy to what he calls social anomy: “The principal role of corporations,” he says, “in the future as in the past, will be to regulate social functions and especially economic functions, and consequently to extract them from the state of disorganization in which they are currently found. Whenever envy will be excited to such an extent that it knows no limits it will be up to the corporation to fix the portion which should equitably devolve to each of the cooperators. Superior to its members, it will have all the authority needed to demand from them those sacrifices and concessions that are indispensable and to impose a rule on them. We don’t see in what other milieu this law of distributive justice, so urgent, can be elaborated, nor by what organ it could be applied.”
MM. Benoist and Walras, for their part, develop the advantages of a political organization by corporations. We can thus see that the system is complete: corporate politics is connected to a professional morality.
We will not discuss here the question of corporative politics. We will content ourselves with presenting a few observations on corporative morality as they result from our analysis of esprit de corps.
According to us the individual cannot ask from the corporate group his law and his moral criteria. In our eyes the value of the individual’s moral activity is in direct relationship with the freedom of which he disposes. The corporate group dominates the individual through interests too immediate and too material for this liberty not to be hindered. It can, in fact, suppress the means of existence for an individual refractory to its moral discipline. It holds him by what we can call, borrowing an expression from the socialist vocabulary: “the belly question.”
Another question that is posed is that of knowing whether or not affiliation with a corporate group would be a real remedy to “anomy” and if it would bring an end to social discontent. “Yes, perhaps,” we could say, if the kind of distributive justice which M. Durkheim speaks or were exactly applied. But this is a utopian desideratum, at least in those corporations where the labor furnished cannot be precisely measured, as is the case with manual labor. Stuart Mill said that from the top to the bottom of the social ladders remuneration is in inverse ratio to the labor furnished. There is doubtless some exaggeration in this way of seeing things, but it is confirmed in those professional groups where the nature of the services rendered prevents material measurement and permits esprit de corps to deploy its oppressive influence on individual merit.
This is not all. To seek the individual’s moral criterion in the corporation would mean going against the march of evolution, which increasingly multiplies social circles around the individual. This consequently permits him to simultaneously take part in a greater number of diverse and independent societies that offer to his sensibility, his intelligence, and his activity an ever richer and more various nourishment. “History multiplies the number of social religious, intellectual, and commercial circles to which individuals belong and raises their personality only through the increasing implication of these circles. Consequently, their (the individual’s) obligation is no longer relatively simple, clear, and unilateral, as was the case when the individual was one with society. The increasing differentiation of social elements, the corresponding differentiation of psychological elements in the consciousness, all the laws of the parallel development of societies and individuals, seem to augment rather than to diminish the number and importance of moral conflicts. At the same time that history increases the number of the objects of morality, it renders the subjects more appreciable.” It results from this law of progressive differentiation that the freedom of the individual – and consequently his value and moral capacity – are in direct ratio with the number and extent of the social circles in which he participates. The moral ideal is not to subordinate the individual to the moral conformism of a group, but to remove him from the herd spirit, to permit him to deploy himself in a multi-faceted activity. The individual, while he is in a certain sense a tissue of general properties, can be regarded as the point of interference of a more or less considerable number of social circles whose moral influences reverberate within him. The individual is a harmonious and living monad whose vital and harmonious law is to maintain himself in a state of equilibrium in the midst of a system of interfering social forces. It is in this free and progressive flourishing of individuality that the true moral ideal resides. There is no other. For, whatever we say or do, the individual remains the living source of energy and the measure of the ideal.
We have arrived at the conclusion that corporative morality, the very form of the herd spirit, is a regressive form of morality. Many complain, following in the footsteps of M.Barrès, that we are rootless. MM. Dorner and Durkheim invite us to take root in the soil of the professional corporation. We ask if this isn’t too narrow a terrain for plants that want free air, light, and the broad horizons of a human morality to take root.
The Future Society by Emile Armand
(1945)
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Note
Emile Armand reminds us that the individualist anarchist is focused on “his attempt to free himself from the yoke of existing domination” and is not interested in intellectualistic speculations about “the future society”. That is why those who accuse anarchists of preaching and wanting utopia (meaning with that term something unrealistic and unachievable) miss totally the point and show a crass ignorance of anarchists’ very practical and sensible aspirations.
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Individualists concern themselves little with a future society. That idea has been exploited and can nourish the believer just as exploitation of paradise nourishes the priest; but it resembles paradise, in that a description of its wonders has an enervating, soporific influence on those who hear it; it makes them forget present oppression, tyranny and bondage; it weakens energy, emasculates initiative. The individualist does not put his hope in the future society. He lives in the present moment, and he wants to draw from it the maximum results. Individualist activity is essentially present work and a present accomplishment. The individualist knows that the present is heir to the past and pregnant with the future. It is not in some tomorrow that he wants to see the end of encroachment by society on the individual, of invasion and oppression of one person by another. It is today, in his own life, that the individualist wants to win his independence.
To be sure, the individualist often fails in his attempts to free himself from the yoke of existing domination. Considering the forces of opposition and oppression, this is very natural. But the future will profit automatically from what he gains. The individualist knows very well that he will not explore the whole forest, but the path he opens will remain, and those who follow him, if they want to, will take good care of it and broaden it.
The individualist is incapable, it is true, of outlining in full detail the map of “future humanity” as it would be if his demands were won. Thus he cannot make a topographical work; but on the other hand he can foresee with certainty both the nature of the terrain and the quality of the liquid that will fill the rivers, and the possible kind of culture. "The new humanity” is not for him absolutely terra incognita.
The individualist can, therefore, even now indicate what a "future humanity" will be. He knows it will resemble the present world in nothing - less by changes in detail than by a complete transformation of the general mentality, a different understanding of relations among men, a universal and individual change of state of mind, that will make certain methods and certain institutions impossible.
Thus the individualist can affirm with certainty that authoritarianism will in no case continue in the future society. To imagine a “world to come” where there would still be a trace of domination, coercion and duty is nonsense.
The individualist is sure that there will no longer be room for intervention of the State - of a governmental, social-legislative, penal, disciplinary institution or administration - in the thought, conduct and activity of human beings.
The individualist knows that relations and agreements among men will be arrived at voluntarily; understandings and contracts will be for a specified purpose and time, and not obligatory; they will always be subject to termination; there will not be a clause or an article of an agreement or contract that will not be weighed and discussed before being agreed to; a unilateral contract, obliging someone to fill an engagement he has not personally and knowingly accepted, will be impossible. The individualist knows that no economic, political or religious majority - no social group whatever -will be able to compel a minority, or one single man, to conform against his will to its decisions or decrees.
We have here a whole series of certainties on which there is no quibbling.
“Future humanity”, as the individualist conceives it, “unrolls itself” without terminal station, without point of arrival. It is eternally becoming; indefinitely evolving. A humanity of the dynamic type, if one can so express oneself, ignores stops en route; or if there are stops at stations, it understands that this is the time strictly necessary to let off those who want to try an experience that will involve only them.
The future humanity, "the new humanity", as the individualists understand it, constitutes a gigantic arena where, as much in thought and custom as in technique, all imaginable projects, plans, associations and practices will struggle and compete with each other.
It is because of these well established characteristics that "the new humanity" in no way resembles, can have no meeting point with ours, “the old humanity”. It will be poly-dynamic, polymorphous, multilateral.
When someone asks exactly how, in "the future humanity" that individualists want, one will solve some litigious point, it is clear that the questioner does not understand. But one can reply with certainty that there will never be a recourse to violence, compulsion or force to adjust a difference.
A good number of individualists think that the coming of "the future humanity" that individualists want, depends on an attack, on serious, rational and continued propaganda, against authoritarianism in all spheres of human activity, whether in political or social economy, in morals, in art, in science, in literature. Arguing from the fact that the individual is born into - is thrust into - an already organized society without being allowed to consent to it or reject it, or able to defend himself from it or oppose it, they deduce that this primordial fact confers on the victim the right to life, without restrictions or reservations.
That is, the right to consumption, independent of economic politics; the right to individual choice of the method of production and the means of production; the right to choose the consumers he wants to benefit by his exchange; the right to choose whether to associate with others, and, if he refuses to associate, the right to the means of production sufficient to maintain himself; the right to choose his associates and the purpose for which he associates.
In other words, the right to behave as he finds most advantageous, at his own risk, with no limit other than encroachment on the behaviour of others (to put it another way, the use of violence, compulsion or coercion towards one who behaves differently than you).
The right to the guarantee that he will not be forced to do what he considers personally disagreeable or disadvantageous, or hindered from doing what he wants to (he will not, therefore, resort to physical force, deceit or fraud in order to gain what appears useful, advantageous or agreeable to him). The right to circulate freely, to move wherever he pleases, to propagate those doctrines, opinions, propositions and theses that he feels impelled to, with the reservation of not using violence in any form to put them into practice; the right to experiment in all fields and all forms, to publicize his experiences, to recruit the associates needed for their realization, on condition that, only those who really want to, will participate, and that, those who no longer want to, can withdraw; the right to consumption and to means of production, even if he refuses to participate in any system, method or institution that seems to him disadvantageous.
The right to life, that is, the right to make one’s own happiness as one feels impelled to, alone or together with those one feels particularly attracted to, without fear of intervention or intrusion by personalities or organizations incompatible with one's ego or with the association of which one is momentarily part.
The individualists think that the guarantee of the right to life, thus conceived, is the least a human individual can demand when he realizes what an authoritarian and arbitrary act was committed in bringing him into the world. They think also that all propaganda for these demands, favours the advent of a transformed mentality, characteristic of all new humanity.
The struggle for the abolition of the monopoly of the State, or of any other executive form replacing it - against its intervention as centralizer, administrator, regulator, moderator, organizer or otherwise in any relation among individuals - equally favours, these individualists think, the emergence of this mentality.
I am aware that a good number of anarchist individualists have no interest in the "future humanity". For them "Without risk of erring too far, we can assume: 1. That there will never be a general, collective life from which authority is absolutely excluded; 2. That in all societies there will be individuals or groups who are protestants, malcontents, critics and negators. Without doubt we will witness transformations, improvements, modifications, even upheavals. The capitalist system of production may vanish in the end, gradually or forcibly. Little by little, one will work less, earn more; reforms will come, menacingly, inevitably. There may be an economic regime unlike ours. But whatever the social system, good sense indicates that its permanence depends on a system of regulation adapted to the average mentality of the people in it. Whether they want to, or not, those to the right or left of the average regulation must conform their behaviour to it; and it matters little whether its basis is exclusively economic, or biological, or moral.
Experience indicates that towards refractories they will use the only arguments men can dispose of: politics or violence, persuasion or compulsion, bargaining or command.
"The crowd always goes towards him who speaks well and carries himself well. Its angers last no longer than its admirations. It is always easy to fool and seduce. One can no more base oneself on it now than a century or a thousand years ago. The mass belongs to the strongest, the most superficial, the most slippery. In such a situation what do anarchist individualists do, what will they do?
“1. Some reply that they will remain within the milieu and struggle to affirm themselves - without concerning themselves too much with choice of means, for their great concern - the concern of their lives - is to react, at all costs, against external determination of their lives. It is to affirm oneself if not to diminish the pressure of the milieu on oneself. They are reactors, refractories, propagandists, revolutionaries, utilizing all possible means of battle: education, violence, ruse, illegalism. They seize occasions when the Power is abusive, to stir up rebelliousness among its victims. But it is for pleasure that they act, and not for the profit of the sufferers, or by abusing them by vain words. They go, they come, mingling in a movement or withdrawing, as their independence is or is not in danger of restriction, parting company with those they have called to revolt as soon as they pretend to follow them or constitute themselves a party. Perhaps they do, more than they are.
"2. Others situate themselves on the margin of the milieu. Having somehow obtained means of production, they preoccupy themselves with making their separation from the milieu a reality, trying to produce enough for themselves, while eliminating the factitious and the surplus.
"Because men, in general, seem to them hardly worth bothering about, they maintain only the minimum relations with people and human institutions, and their social life is limited to the company of selected 'comrades of ideas'. They group together at times, but only temporarily, and the limited association of which they are part is never delegated power to dispose of their product. The rest of the world exists for them only little or much - to the extent that they need it. Perhaps they are, more than they do.
“Between these two conceptions of individualist life, the divers anarchist individualist temperaments range themselves."
For the comrades whose opinions I have just transcribed, any sketch of "future humanity", any hypothesis of an individualist milieu, is a work of imagination, pure literary fantasy. They maintain that, for the mentality, the general will, really to transform itself, it would be necessary that "the species on the road to degeneration, the ‘directed categories’, deliver the earth of their presence: and that is not likely.”
It was only justice to make known this point of view that no individualist forgets, even when he speaks of becoming social.
For having depicted in broad strokes a tableau of "the new humanity" to which we would like to evolve, we cannot be taxed with being “future-society-ists”. The anarchist individualist is not a future-society-ist; a presentist, he could not, without bad reasoning and illogic, think of sacrificing his being, or his having, to the coming of a state of things he will not immediately enjoy. Individualist thought admits no equivocation on this point. It is amid the old humanity, the humanity of dominators and dictators of all kinds, that the “new humanity” appears, takes shape, becomes. Individualists are permanent and personal revolutionaries, they try to practise, in themselves, in their circle, in their relations with their comrades of ideas, their particular concepts of individual and group life. Every time one of the characteristics of the "new humanity" implants itself in the mores, every time one or more human beings, at their risk and peril, anticipate them by word or action, “the new humanity is realized”.
In the domain of art, letters, science, ethics, personal conduct, even in the economic sphere, one finds individuals who think and act contrary to the customs, usages, routines, prejudices and conventions of the “old society”, and attempt to break them down. In their kind of activity, they too represent the new humanity. Already the individualists take part in it, by their way of behaving towards the old world, because they reveal in each of their actions their intention, their will, their hope of seeing the individual free himself from the constraint of the herd, the mentality of the mass.
Can one hope that after many a flux and reflux, many a sad attempt, humanity will some day come to conscientious practice of reciprocity, to the anti-authoritarian, individualist-anarchist individualist-solution, the solution of equal liberty?
Can one anticipate that, more enlightened, more educated, better informed, the inhabitants of our planet will at last come to understand that neither coercion, nor domination of the majority, the elite, the dictatorship of an autocrat, class or caste, are capable of assuring happiness - that is, of reducing avoidable suffering? It is the secret of the future.
But, optimistic or pessimistic in this respect, the anarchist individualist will not the less continue to denounce the prejudice which gives statist authority its force: the superstition of necessary government and to live as though the prejudice and this superstition did not exist.
(Translated by D.T.W)
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Note
Emile Armand reminds us that the individualist anarchist is focused on “his attempt to free himself from the yoke of existing domination” and is not interested in intellectualistic speculations about “the future society”. That is why those who accuse anarchists of preaching and wanting utopia (meaning with that term something unrealistic and unachievable) miss totally the point and show a crass ignorance of anarchists’ very practical and sensible aspirations.
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Individualists concern themselves little with a future society. That idea has been exploited and can nourish the believer just as exploitation of paradise nourishes the priest; but it resembles paradise, in that a description of its wonders has an enervating, soporific influence on those who hear it; it makes them forget present oppression, tyranny and bondage; it weakens energy, emasculates initiative. The individualist does not put his hope in the future society. He lives in the present moment, and he wants to draw from it the maximum results. Individualist activity is essentially present work and a present accomplishment. The individualist knows that the present is heir to the past and pregnant with the future. It is not in some tomorrow that he wants to see the end of encroachment by society on the individual, of invasion and oppression of one person by another. It is today, in his own life, that the individualist wants to win his independence.
To be sure, the individualist often fails in his attempts to free himself from the yoke of existing domination. Considering the forces of opposition and oppression, this is very natural. But the future will profit automatically from what he gains. The individualist knows very well that he will not explore the whole forest, but the path he opens will remain, and those who follow him, if they want to, will take good care of it and broaden it.
The individualist is incapable, it is true, of outlining in full detail the map of “future humanity” as it would be if his demands were won. Thus he cannot make a topographical work; but on the other hand he can foresee with certainty both the nature of the terrain and the quality of the liquid that will fill the rivers, and the possible kind of culture. "The new humanity” is not for him absolutely terra incognita.
The individualist can, therefore, even now indicate what a "future humanity" will be. He knows it will resemble the present world in nothing - less by changes in detail than by a complete transformation of the general mentality, a different understanding of relations among men, a universal and individual change of state of mind, that will make certain methods and certain institutions impossible.
Thus the individualist can affirm with certainty that authoritarianism will in no case continue in the future society. To imagine a “world to come” where there would still be a trace of domination, coercion and duty is nonsense.
The individualist is sure that there will no longer be room for intervention of the State - of a governmental, social-legislative, penal, disciplinary institution or administration - in the thought, conduct and activity of human beings.
The individualist knows that relations and agreements among men will be arrived at voluntarily; understandings and contracts will be for a specified purpose and time, and not obligatory; they will always be subject to termination; there will not be a clause or an article of an agreement or contract that will not be weighed and discussed before being agreed to; a unilateral contract, obliging someone to fill an engagement he has not personally and knowingly accepted, will be impossible. The individualist knows that no economic, political or religious majority - no social group whatever -will be able to compel a minority, or one single man, to conform against his will to its decisions or decrees.
We have here a whole series of certainties on which there is no quibbling.
“Future humanity”, as the individualist conceives it, “unrolls itself” without terminal station, without point of arrival. It is eternally becoming; indefinitely evolving. A humanity of the dynamic type, if one can so express oneself, ignores stops en route; or if there are stops at stations, it understands that this is the time strictly necessary to let off those who want to try an experience that will involve only them.
The future humanity, "the new humanity", as the individualists understand it, constitutes a gigantic arena where, as much in thought and custom as in technique, all imaginable projects, plans, associations and practices will struggle and compete with each other.
It is because of these well established characteristics that "the new humanity" in no way resembles, can have no meeting point with ours, “the old humanity”. It will be poly-dynamic, polymorphous, multilateral.
When someone asks exactly how, in "the future humanity" that individualists want, one will solve some litigious point, it is clear that the questioner does not understand. But one can reply with certainty that there will never be a recourse to violence, compulsion or force to adjust a difference.
A good number of individualists think that the coming of "the future humanity" that individualists want, depends on an attack, on serious, rational and continued propaganda, against authoritarianism in all spheres of human activity, whether in political or social economy, in morals, in art, in science, in literature. Arguing from the fact that the individual is born into - is thrust into - an already organized society without being allowed to consent to it or reject it, or able to defend himself from it or oppose it, they deduce that this primordial fact confers on the victim the right to life, without restrictions or reservations.
That is, the right to consumption, independent of economic politics; the right to individual choice of the method of production and the means of production; the right to choose the consumers he wants to benefit by his exchange; the right to choose whether to associate with others, and, if he refuses to associate, the right to the means of production sufficient to maintain himself; the right to choose his associates and the purpose for which he associates.
In other words, the right to behave as he finds most advantageous, at his own risk, with no limit other than encroachment on the behaviour of others (to put it another way, the use of violence, compulsion or coercion towards one who behaves differently than you).
The right to the guarantee that he will not be forced to do what he considers personally disagreeable or disadvantageous, or hindered from doing what he wants to (he will not, therefore, resort to physical force, deceit or fraud in order to gain what appears useful, advantageous or agreeable to him). The right to circulate freely, to move wherever he pleases, to propagate those doctrines, opinions, propositions and theses that he feels impelled to, with the reservation of not using violence in any form to put them into practice; the right to experiment in all fields and all forms, to publicize his experiences, to recruit the associates needed for their realization, on condition that, only those who really want to, will participate, and that, those who no longer want to, can withdraw; the right to consumption and to means of production, even if he refuses to participate in any system, method or institution that seems to him disadvantageous.
The right to life, that is, the right to make one’s own happiness as one feels impelled to, alone or together with those one feels particularly attracted to, without fear of intervention or intrusion by personalities or organizations incompatible with one's ego or with the association of which one is momentarily part.
The individualists think that the guarantee of the right to life, thus conceived, is the least a human individual can demand when he realizes what an authoritarian and arbitrary act was committed in bringing him into the world. They think also that all propaganda for these demands, favours the advent of a transformed mentality, characteristic of all new humanity.
The struggle for the abolition of the monopoly of the State, or of any other executive form replacing it - against its intervention as centralizer, administrator, regulator, moderator, organizer or otherwise in any relation among individuals - equally favours, these individualists think, the emergence of this mentality.
I am aware that a good number of anarchist individualists have no interest in the "future humanity". For them "Without risk of erring too far, we can assume: 1. That there will never be a general, collective life from which authority is absolutely excluded; 2. That in all societies there will be individuals or groups who are protestants, malcontents, critics and negators. Without doubt we will witness transformations, improvements, modifications, even upheavals. The capitalist system of production may vanish in the end, gradually or forcibly. Little by little, one will work less, earn more; reforms will come, menacingly, inevitably. There may be an economic regime unlike ours. But whatever the social system, good sense indicates that its permanence depends on a system of regulation adapted to the average mentality of the people in it. Whether they want to, or not, those to the right or left of the average regulation must conform their behaviour to it; and it matters little whether its basis is exclusively economic, or biological, or moral.
Experience indicates that towards refractories they will use the only arguments men can dispose of: politics or violence, persuasion or compulsion, bargaining or command.
"The crowd always goes towards him who speaks well and carries himself well. Its angers last no longer than its admirations. It is always easy to fool and seduce. One can no more base oneself on it now than a century or a thousand years ago. The mass belongs to the strongest, the most superficial, the most slippery. In such a situation what do anarchist individualists do, what will they do?
“1. Some reply that they will remain within the milieu and struggle to affirm themselves - without concerning themselves too much with choice of means, for their great concern - the concern of their lives - is to react, at all costs, against external determination of their lives. It is to affirm oneself if not to diminish the pressure of the milieu on oneself. They are reactors, refractories, propagandists, revolutionaries, utilizing all possible means of battle: education, violence, ruse, illegalism. They seize occasions when the Power is abusive, to stir up rebelliousness among its victims. But it is for pleasure that they act, and not for the profit of the sufferers, or by abusing them by vain words. They go, they come, mingling in a movement or withdrawing, as their independence is or is not in danger of restriction, parting company with those they have called to revolt as soon as they pretend to follow them or constitute themselves a party. Perhaps they do, more than they are.
"2. Others situate themselves on the margin of the milieu. Having somehow obtained means of production, they preoccupy themselves with making their separation from the milieu a reality, trying to produce enough for themselves, while eliminating the factitious and the surplus.
"Because men, in general, seem to them hardly worth bothering about, they maintain only the minimum relations with people and human institutions, and their social life is limited to the company of selected 'comrades of ideas'. They group together at times, but only temporarily, and the limited association of which they are part is never delegated power to dispose of their product. The rest of the world exists for them only little or much - to the extent that they need it. Perhaps they are, more than they do.
“Between these two conceptions of individualist life, the divers anarchist individualist temperaments range themselves."
For the comrades whose opinions I have just transcribed, any sketch of "future humanity", any hypothesis of an individualist milieu, is a work of imagination, pure literary fantasy. They maintain that, for the mentality, the general will, really to transform itself, it would be necessary that "the species on the road to degeneration, the ‘directed categories’, deliver the earth of their presence: and that is not likely.”
It was only justice to make known this point of view that no individualist forgets, even when he speaks of becoming social.
For having depicted in broad strokes a tableau of "the new humanity" to which we would like to evolve, we cannot be taxed with being “future-society-ists”. The anarchist individualist is not a future-society-ist; a presentist, he could not, without bad reasoning and illogic, think of sacrificing his being, or his having, to the coming of a state of things he will not immediately enjoy. Individualist thought admits no equivocation on this point. It is amid the old humanity, the humanity of dominators and dictators of all kinds, that the “new humanity” appears, takes shape, becomes. Individualists are permanent and personal revolutionaries, they try to practise, in themselves, in their circle, in their relations with their comrades of ideas, their particular concepts of individual and group life. Every time one of the characteristics of the "new humanity" implants itself in the mores, every time one or more human beings, at their risk and peril, anticipate them by word or action, “the new humanity is realized”.
In the domain of art, letters, science, ethics, personal conduct, even in the economic sphere, one finds individuals who think and act contrary to the customs, usages, routines, prejudices and conventions of the “old society”, and attempt to break them down. In their kind of activity, they too represent the new humanity. Already the individualists take part in it, by their way of behaving towards the old world, because they reveal in each of their actions their intention, their will, their hope of seeing the individual free himself from the constraint of the herd, the mentality of the mass.
Can one hope that after many a flux and reflux, many a sad attempt, humanity will some day come to conscientious practice of reciprocity, to the anti-authoritarian, individualist-anarchist individualist-solution, the solution of equal liberty?
Can one anticipate that, more enlightened, more educated, better informed, the inhabitants of our planet will at last come to understand that neither coercion, nor domination of the majority, the elite, the dictatorship of an autocrat, class or caste, are capable of assuring happiness - that is, of reducing avoidable suffering? It is the secret of the future.
But, optimistic or pessimistic in this respect, the anarchist individualist will not the less continue to denounce the prejudice which gives statist authority its force: the superstition of necessary government and to live as though the prejudice and this superstition did not exist.
(Translated by D.T.W)
Our kind of individualist by Emile Armand
(1945)
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Note
In the words of Emile Armand, an individualist anarchist is somebody who does not want to be exploited or duped and does treat everybody in the civilized manner he wants to be treated, on the basis of the principles of reciprocity and mutualism; in other words, nothing exceptional nor extraordinary. And so, it is right to say that the way the individualist anarchists have been treated by the State (any State) is scandalous and amounts to a vicious persecution of a minority by a criminal power.
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Essentially, our paper is intended for a certain category of people only, a select body, distinct from the general run of society, who, in default of a better term, must be referred to as "our kind of individualist" and who are, it must be understood, the only variety of individualist we are interested in. This sort of person is invariably a "non-conformist" with regard to the ethics and aesthetics of the bourgeoisie, the present system of education, and, indeed, with most majority opinions in society. Ho has taken due thought, and has jettisoned all those phantoms, those abstract principles which had haunted him when he floated back and forth on the tides of convention, carried along like a cork on such currents as "everybody does it”, as the conformer must be. He has created for himself a personality which resists the influences surrounding it, which pays no attention to the vociferous, the braggart, or the fickle mob. He wants to know where he is going, though not without having carefully considered the route to be followed, and then without ever losing sight of the fact that his "freedom'" must always be dependent upon his "responsibility"'.
What else is "our" individualist? He is a person who is united with those of "his world" by comradeship, which we define as "a voluntary agreement between individualists aimed at eliminating all avoidable friction and unpleasantness from their relationships". Now this definition is more than twenty years old, dating from 1924, and in 1939 I again wrote: "Our conception of comradeship is positive, not negative; constructive, not destructive.” It is because such an idea is creative of good will, contentment and harmony that it will tend to reduce to a minimum the pain of living, and this in a society which is in itself indifferent. "And all this can be achieved without the protection of the State, the intervention of governments, or the mediation of the law."
But our kind of individualist is not only mind, spirit, thought. He is neither dry, nor niggardly of heart. If exclusively a rationalist, he would feel himself incomplete, so it is a necessity for him to be both sensible and "sentimental". This explains his plan for freeing “his world” of useless and avoidable suffering. He knows that this is possible when one speaks and understands "the language of the hearth", when one prefers agreement to struggle, abstention to the unlatching of actions dictated by bitterness, animosity or spite.
Individualism as we conceive and propagate it is understood seriously, without equivocation, passionately. It postulates rectitude, constancy, reciprocity, support, comprehensiveness, indeed compassion. It implies fidelity to the pledged word, whatever the matter in hand may be; care not to interfere under any pretext in the affairs of another comrade (unless asked), or to encroach on his rights, nor to withdraw any rights once given except in cases of betrayed trust. This individualism does not wish to provoke disquiet, disillusionment, torment or tears. Its freedom of affirmation must cease when it threatens another with hardship or pain.
Our kind of individualist must not be misunderstood. He is no moralist. He loathes "conventional lies", the false pretences of petite-bourgeoisie. He has discarded all preconceived ideas; he recognizes as a motive nothing outside himself. But he knows quite well that an individualist must give as well as take. He does not ignore the fact that the “gentleman’s agreement” must be honoured equally with the formal bond.
He repudiates violence, imposition, constraint, which is not to say that he accepts being exploited, duped, made a game of or inferior, whatever his personal appearance or level of culture might be. He does not wish to receive more than he gives, nor give more than he receives. He is proud. He sets a value upon his person. It means nothing to him that anyone else knows him only as a “poor relation”. Towards those who would humiliate him he reacts and considers himself in a state of legitimate defence. . . but he is always ready to make peace on a man to man basis.
Yes, our kind of individualism loves life. It makes no secret of it - it revels in the joy of living, but in a discreet manner, without din or noisy demonstrations. It recognizes happiness as its goal. It welcomes anything that will increase its receptiveness and appreciation for either the products of the human imagination or those of nature. No asceticism, it is repelled by mortification. It is conscious of personal dignity. It can both sow and reap. It pays no attention to what “they say.” It is neither young nor old; it is the age it feels itself to be. And while there is a drop of blood left in its veins, it will fight for a place in the sun.
But this joy, the enjoyment of living, the conquest of a life without prejudice, the individualist does not intend to gain at the expense of others, whether his friends or comrades, or only the most humble and least important person in his society. He refuses to play the role of trouble-maker; he would not be the cause of any grief for anyone. He abhors the idea that one of the members of his circle should be in any way frustrated on account of his ambitions - on has account. He could never pardon himself for such conduct.
Nor does he wish to have anything in common with those armchair Nietzcheans or weekend Stirnerites who imagine, poor wretches, that they are "affirming their individuality" by petty dishonesty in money matters, or by forcing themselves upon the companion of a friend in prison.
In short, the individualist, as we know him, abominates brutes, cretins, rogues, schemers, twisters, skunks and so forth, no matter with what ideology they wish to conceal themselves.
But he also recognizes that practice does not always conform to theory, and that often, though the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak. He holds nothing against his associates on account of their inabilities or their weaknesses; he freely forgives them. Concessions are not rarities with him. And any damage he does, or suffering he causes, he will pay for or rectify to the best of his ability. But further than that he will not go - anything beyond compensation is extortion.
In the midst of a social order in which, despite frequent pompous discourses and bombastic declarations from allegedly responsible persons, the pledged word is more often broken than not and the philosophy of "get out of your problems as best you can" is the reigning attitude of man to his fellow-man, our conception of comradeship, as described above, raises itself like a lighthouse to remind the world that there are still persons capable of resisting the seductions and gross appetites of our philistine society.
We believe that our kind of individualism has a bigger following than might at first sight appear, and that, though scattered, there is a not inconsiderable number of persons who are trying to re-integrate themselves on these lines; people who have revolted against social determinism and who have decided to submit all ideas to their own personal tests. These people we look upon as a psychological group apart from those who remain in the mass. To them our call goes out.
We look at “association” as a concrete manifestation of comradeship taking some co-operative or mutualist form, always providing that it is based on a sound understanding of the participants' characters. We know perfectly well that if in this association our personality affirms itself, that if the goal sought for is attained, it is at the cost of our "'liberty". When he associates, our kind of individualist accepts the disadvantages along with the advantages and he does not complain.
(Adapted from a translation of A Qui Est Destiné “L'Unique” by A.S.)
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Note
In the words of Emile Armand, an individualist anarchist is somebody who does not want to be exploited or duped and does treat everybody in the civilized manner he wants to be treated, on the basis of the principles of reciprocity and mutualism; in other words, nothing exceptional nor extraordinary. And so, it is right to say that the way the individualist anarchists have been treated by the State (any State) is scandalous and amounts to a vicious persecution of a minority by a criminal power.
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Essentially, our paper is intended for a certain category of people only, a select body, distinct from the general run of society, who, in default of a better term, must be referred to as "our kind of individualist" and who are, it must be understood, the only variety of individualist we are interested in. This sort of person is invariably a "non-conformist" with regard to the ethics and aesthetics of the bourgeoisie, the present system of education, and, indeed, with most majority opinions in society. Ho has taken due thought, and has jettisoned all those phantoms, those abstract principles which had haunted him when he floated back and forth on the tides of convention, carried along like a cork on such currents as "everybody does it”, as the conformer must be. He has created for himself a personality which resists the influences surrounding it, which pays no attention to the vociferous, the braggart, or the fickle mob. He wants to know where he is going, though not without having carefully considered the route to be followed, and then without ever losing sight of the fact that his "freedom'" must always be dependent upon his "responsibility"'.
What else is "our" individualist? He is a person who is united with those of "his world" by comradeship, which we define as "a voluntary agreement between individualists aimed at eliminating all avoidable friction and unpleasantness from their relationships". Now this definition is more than twenty years old, dating from 1924, and in 1939 I again wrote: "Our conception of comradeship is positive, not negative; constructive, not destructive.” It is because such an idea is creative of good will, contentment and harmony that it will tend to reduce to a minimum the pain of living, and this in a society which is in itself indifferent. "And all this can be achieved without the protection of the State, the intervention of governments, or the mediation of the law."
But our kind of individualist is not only mind, spirit, thought. He is neither dry, nor niggardly of heart. If exclusively a rationalist, he would feel himself incomplete, so it is a necessity for him to be both sensible and "sentimental". This explains his plan for freeing “his world” of useless and avoidable suffering. He knows that this is possible when one speaks and understands "the language of the hearth", when one prefers agreement to struggle, abstention to the unlatching of actions dictated by bitterness, animosity or spite.
Individualism as we conceive and propagate it is understood seriously, without equivocation, passionately. It postulates rectitude, constancy, reciprocity, support, comprehensiveness, indeed compassion. It implies fidelity to the pledged word, whatever the matter in hand may be; care not to interfere under any pretext in the affairs of another comrade (unless asked), or to encroach on his rights, nor to withdraw any rights once given except in cases of betrayed trust. This individualism does not wish to provoke disquiet, disillusionment, torment or tears. Its freedom of affirmation must cease when it threatens another with hardship or pain.
Our kind of individualist must not be misunderstood. He is no moralist. He loathes "conventional lies", the false pretences of petite-bourgeoisie. He has discarded all preconceived ideas; he recognizes as a motive nothing outside himself. But he knows quite well that an individualist must give as well as take. He does not ignore the fact that the “gentleman’s agreement” must be honoured equally with the formal bond.
He repudiates violence, imposition, constraint, which is not to say that he accepts being exploited, duped, made a game of or inferior, whatever his personal appearance or level of culture might be. He does not wish to receive more than he gives, nor give more than he receives. He is proud. He sets a value upon his person. It means nothing to him that anyone else knows him only as a “poor relation”. Towards those who would humiliate him he reacts and considers himself in a state of legitimate defence. . . but he is always ready to make peace on a man to man basis.
Yes, our kind of individualism loves life. It makes no secret of it - it revels in the joy of living, but in a discreet manner, without din or noisy demonstrations. It recognizes happiness as its goal. It welcomes anything that will increase its receptiveness and appreciation for either the products of the human imagination or those of nature. No asceticism, it is repelled by mortification. It is conscious of personal dignity. It can both sow and reap. It pays no attention to what “they say.” It is neither young nor old; it is the age it feels itself to be. And while there is a drop of blood left in its veins, it will fight for a place in the sun.
But this joy, the enjoyment of living, the conquest of a life without prejudice, the individualist does not intend to gain at the expense of others, whether his friends or comrades, or only the most humble and least important person in his society. He refuses to play the role of trouble-maker; he would not be the cause of any grief for anyone. He abhors the idea that one of the members of his circle should be in any way frustrated on account of his ambitions - on has account. He could never pardon himself for such conduct.
Nor does he wish to have anything in common with those armchair Nietzcheans or weekend Stirnerites who imagine, poor wretches, that they are "affirming their individuality" by petty dishonesty in money matters, or by forcing themselves upon the companion of a friend in prison.
In short, the individualist, as we know him, abominates brutes, cretins, rogues, schemers, twisters, skunks and so forth, no matter with what ideology they wish to conceal themselves.
But he also recognizes that practice does not always conform to theory, and that often, though the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak. He holds nothing against his associates on account of their inabilities or their weaknesses; he freely forgives them. Concessions are not rarities with him. And any damage he does, or suffering he causes, he will pay for or rectify to the best of his ability. But further than that he will not go - anything beyond compensation is extortion.
In the midst of a social order in which, despite frequent pompous discourses and bombastic declarations from allegedly responsible persons, the pledged word is more often broken than not and the philosophy of "get out of your problems as best you can" is the reigning attitude of man to his fellow-man, our conception of comradeship, as described above, raises itself like a lighthouse to remind the world that there are still persons capable of resisting the seductions and gross appetites of our philistine society.
We believe that our kind of individualism has a bigger following than might at first sight appear, and that, though scattered, there is a not inconsiderable number of persons who are trying to re-integrate themselves on these lines; people who have revolted against social determinism and who have decided to submit all ideas to their own personal tests. These people we look upon as a psychological group apart from those who remain in the mass. To them our call goes out.
We look at “association” as a concrete manifestation of comradeship taking some co-operative or mutualist form, always providing that it is based on a sound understanding of the participants' characters. We know perfectly well that if in this association our personality affirms itself, that if the goal sought for is attained, it is at the cost of our "'liberty". When he associates, our kind of individualist accepts the disadvantages along with the advantages and he does not complain.
(Adapted from a translation of A Qui Est Destiné “L'Unique” by A.S.)
Our demands as individualist anarchists by Emile Armand
Note by John Zube
The following is merely the translation of a translation. It was written in French by E. Armand, published 1945 in "l'Unique", and reprinted in "LA FEUILLE", published by the Association Max Stirner du Quebec, C.P. 95, Stn. Place D'Armes, Montreal, P.Q H2Y 3E9. The translation into German for publication in "Lernziel Anarchie", No. 4, was done by C.R. This German translation is here roughly translated into English by John Zube, 30.12.1985.
In the comment it is mentioned that Armand's book "[L'Initiation Individualiste Anarchiste", 1923, 344 pp, ed. de "L'en Dehors"], is out of print. An improved and enlarged edition came out in Italian.
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The individualist anarchists in the meaning of the UNIQUE (of Stirner's The Ego and His Own) do advocate a "society without coercion". This implies the following demands, which are unqualified and without reservations. It is self-evident that these demands are to be realized, completely or partly, as far as is possible.
Individualists of our kind recognize every society as a "Society without Coercion" in which the State and any other aggressive power is eliminated, in which there is no longer any domination of man over man or over a sphere of society (and vice versa) and in which an exploitation of man by man or of man through social institutions (and vice versa ) is impossible.
Thereupon the following demands arise:
1) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT to decide for oneself in all respects.
This means that every unit in society moves according to its own discretion, develops itself, gathers experiences in accordance with its own preferences, corresponding to its talents, reasoning and personal resolutions.
In short, the individual is responsible only to himself (or to those to whom he has obliged himself) for all his actions.
This freedom finds its limits where the equal freedom of others begins and the danger arises that others are harmed.
2) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT to chose and practise one's profession and to utter one's opinion orally and in writing, publicly and privately.
3) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT to join any association that has definite and predetermined purposes or any other association of any kind.
4) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT to decide for oneself either for or against any expression of solidarity, for and against any contractual obligation of whatever kind and in whatever sphere of human activity and without regard to its aims and its duration. Likewise, the right to freely decide upon withdrawal from a contractual situation, within the framework of clearly predetermined contractual conditions. One precondition is that, in case a contract offer is declined or a contract is dissolved, the dissenters are not penalized or maligned. But when a contract is dissolved then neither disadvantages nor any harm must arise for the partner that would be contrary to the form and contents of the contract.
5) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT for producers and consumers and other partners to negotiate, whether alone or in groups. Full and unrestricted right, regardless of the sphere of activities and their purpose, to select the persons and societies of one's confidence and to authorize them, especially teachers, instructors, physicians, lawyers and arbitrators.
6) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT to determine and change the value or price of any goods, the own products or consumer goods, of whatever kind, according to one's own discretion. Likewise untouchable is the right to negotiate in this respect, to use an arbitrator or to do without any determination of values.
7) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT for every individual and every association or group to use any money that applies as a means of exchange to themselves, for their goods and service exchanges, to issue it themselves or to accept that issued by others, provided that this is always done by agreement and not under any monopolistic coercion. The same applies to the so-called labour bons and goods warrants and similar certificates, to bills, letters of credit etc., whether they are negotiable or not. Consequently, there is a definite right to utilize any voluntarily recognized means of payment for all economic transactions, as long as it is not subjected to any legal tender. With this is meant the unrestricted right to utilize any other kind of means of exchange, provided that an acceptor is found who decides for it without any coercion.
8) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT for individuals and groups, competing for any job or contract, provided that the applicants are not prevented from fully informing and improving themselves.
Likewise untouchable are the rights to act creatively in accordance with one's desires, to move and settle freely and to advertise one's own cause or services.
9) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT to exhibit and realize in any sphere of culture and economics one's opinions or services. There is no other limitation upon this than the condition that nothing may be forced upon others. They may freely decline whatever does not appeal to them. Under this condition the unrestricted right to freedom of expression applies and the right to propagate and teach a theory and to undertake experiments and gather experiences, even when this applies to economic, philosophic, scientific, religious, educational, artistic or any other spheres of activity.
10) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT to live from the returns of one's own services or production, even alone, outside of any group or community or society itself, at one's own risk.
Likewise unrestricted is the right to seek to live together with a partner, in a family, in a patriarchal or matriarchal society, in free associations and communes, in close ideological association of whatever kind.
11) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT to decide for oneself to join any association or league whose libertarian aims embrace any kind of human activity or search for knowledge. This applies to associations for any economic, intellectual, ethical, emotional recreational or other purpose and, especially for all spheres of production, consumption, trade, communication, insurance against all possible risks, educational methods and systems, to the utilization of scientific discoveries and of naturally or artificially produced energies.
12) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT to secede from any kind of association, but in accordance with the principles and clauses agreed upon when it was established.
13) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT for any association, league, cooperative etc. to organize itself in a way that suits its members best. This includes the right to order internal affairs at one's own discretion, in accordance with an internal constitution that applies only to the voluntary members.
14) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT to settle upon and utilize for oneself any non-inhabited and not claimed locality or real estate, provided that thereby the equal right of others is not infringed and no one else is exploited thereby.
Under this condition the individual has an incontestable right to possess his means of production (tradesman's tools, instruments, machines, land, minerals etc.).
This requires also the freedom to dispose oneself over the returns from or product of one's own labour - to the extent that no domination over or exploitation of others is involved.
Moreover, the individual shall be guaranteed the unrestricted right to exchange or dispose of his products upon the market or in any other way, regardless whether he does so for payment or under any other condition.
Any association or community has the equal right to apply within the own organization the principles here explained or similar ones.
15) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT for each individual and, likewise, for any member of an organized society, to dispose freely over his personal property, i.e. over the utilization rights and the returns that he receives in exchange for his personal labour services and which assure him his support, his accommodation (and, especially for the individual, the means of production).
16) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT to express affection for others and preference for anything, according to one's own discretion, provided that neither any deception or any fraud is associated with this and, most importantly, no one is harmed, restricted or in any way reduced thereby.
17) DEMANDS THAT APPLY ESPECIALLY TO WOMEN AND MOTHERS:
FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT for every woman, whether alone or in partnership, to determine for herself her readiness to become a mother.
A child shall remain only as long under supervision or custody until it has reached an age in which it can self-responsibly engage in contracts and associations. This applies also to the guardianship for a child. The mother possesses priority in this - which she may completely or partly transfer to another person or institution.
18) DEMANDS APPLYING ESPECIALLY TO CHILDREN:
FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT for the child, boy or girl, to demand an alteration or complete change in its wardship condition. The child may ask for an early declaration that it is of full legal age or for the clarification of any other problem. In this case the child has the right to arbitration and the right to chose the arbitrator or at least one of the arbitrators.
The following is merely the translation of a translation. It was written in French by E. Armand, published 1945 in "l'Unique", and reprinted in "LA FEUILLE", published by the Association Max Stirner du Quebec, C.P. 95, Stn. Place D'Armes, Montreal, P.Q H2Y 3E9. The translation into German for publication in "Lernziel Anarchie", No. 4, was done by C.R. This German translation is here roughly translated into English by John Zube, 30.12.1985.
In the comment it is mentioned that Armand's book "[L'Initiation Individualiste Anarchiste", 1923, 344 pp, ed. de "L'en Dehors"], is out of print. An improved and enlarged edition came out in Italian.
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The individualist anarchists in the meaning of the UNIQUE (of Stirner's The Ego and His Own) do advocate a "society without coercion". This implies the following demands, which are unqualified and without reservations. It is self-evident that these demands are to be realized, completely or partly, as far as is possible.
Individualists of our kind recognize every society as a "Society without Coercion" in which the State and any other aggressive power is eliminated, in which there is no longer any domination of man over man or over a sphere of society (and vice versa) and in which an exploitation of man by man or of man through social institutions (and vice versa ) is impossible.
Thereupon the following demands arise:
1) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT to decide for oneself in all respects.
This means that every unit in society moves according to its own discretion, develops itself, gathers experiences in accordance with its own preferences, corresponding to its talents, reasoning and personal resolutions.
In short, the individual is responsible only to himself (or to those to whom he has obliged himself) for all his actions.
This freedom finds its limits where the equal freedom of others begins and the danger arises that others are harmed.
2) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT to chose and practise one's profession and to utter one's opinion orally and in writing, publicly and privately.
3) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT to join any association that has definite and predetermined purposes or any other association of any kind.
4) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT to decide for oneself either for or against any expression of solidarity, for and against any contractual obligation of whatever kind and in whatever sphere of human activity and without regard to its aims and its duration. Likewise, the right to freely decide upon withdrawal from a contractual situation, within the framework of clearly predetermined contractual conditions. One precondition is that, in case a contract offer is declined or a contract is dissolved, the dissenters are not penalized or maligned. But when a contract is dissolved then neither disadvantages nor any harm must arise for the partner that would be contrary to the form and contents of the contract.
5) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT for producers and consumers and other partners to negotiate, whether alone or in groups. Full and unrestricted right, regardless of the sphere of activities and their purpose, to select the persons and societies of one's confidence and to authorize them, especially teachers, instructors, physicians, lawyers and arbitrators.
6) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT to determine and change the value or price of any goods, the own products or consumer goods, of whatever kind, according to one's own discretion. Likewise untouchable is the right to negotiate in this respect, to use an arbitrator or to do without any determination of values.
7) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT for every individual and every association or group to use any money that applies as a means of exchange to themselves, for their goods and service exchanges, to issue it themselves or to accept that issued by others, provided that this is always done by agreement and not under any monopolistic coercion. The same applies to the so-called labour bons and goods warrants and similar certificates, to bills, letters of credit etc., whether they are negotiable or not. Consequently, there is a definite right to utilize any voluntarily recognized means of payment for all economic transactions, as long as it is not subjected to any legal tender. With this is meant the unrestricted right to utilize any other kind of means of exchange, provided that an acceptor is found who decides for it without any coercion.
8) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT for individuals and groups, competing for any job or contract, provided that the applicants are not prevented from fully informing and improving themselves.
Likewise untouchable are the rights to act creatively in accordance with one's desires, to move and settle freely and to advertise one's own cause or services.
9) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT to exhibit and realize in any sphere of culture and economics one's opinions or services. There is no other limitation upon this than the condition that nothing may be forced upon others. They may freely decline whatever does not appeal to them. Under this condition the unrestricted right to freedom of expression applies and the right to propagate and teach a theory and to undertake experiments and gather experiences, even when this applies to economic, philosophic, scientific, religious, educational, artistic or any other spheres of activity.
10) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT to live from the returns of one's own services or production, even alone, outside of any group or community or society itself, at one's own risk.
Likewise unrestricted is the right to seek to live together with a partner, in a family, in a patriarchal or matriarchal society, in free associations and communes, in close ideological association of whatever kind.
11) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT to decide for oneself to join any association or league whose libertarian aims embrace any kind of human activity or search for knowledge. This applies to associations for any economic, intellectual, ethical, emotional recreational or other purpose and, especially for all spheres of production, consumption, trade, communication, insurance against all possible risks, educational methods and systems, to the utilization of scientific discoveries and of naturally or artificially produced energies.
12) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT to secede from any kind of association, but in accordance with the principles and clauses agreed upon when it was established.
13) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT for any association, league, cooperative etc. to organize itself in a way that suits its members best. This includes the right to order internal affairs at one's own discretion, in accordance with an internal constitution that applies only to the voluntary members.
14) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT to settle upon and utilize for oneself any non-inhabited and not claimed locality or real estate, provided that thereby the equal right of others is not infringed and no one else is exploited thereby.
Under this condition the individual has an incontestable right to possess his means of production (tradesman's tools, instruments, machines, land, minerals etc.).
This requires also the freedom to dispose oneself over the returns from or product of one's own labour - to the extent that no domination over or exploitation of others is involved.
Moreover, the individual shall be guaranteed the unrestricted right to exchange or dispose of his products upon the market or in any other way, regardless whether he does so for payment or under any other condition.
Any association or community has the equal right to apply within the own organization the principles here explained or similar ones.
15) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT for each individual and, likewise, for any member of an organized society, to dispose freely over his personal property, i.e. over the utilization rights and the returns that he receives in exchange for his personal labour services and which assure him his support, his accommodation (and, especially for the individual, the means of production).
16) FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT to express affection for others and preference for anything, according to one's own discretion, provided that neither any deception or any fraud is associated with this and, most importantly, no one is harmed, restricted or in any way reduced thereby.
17) DEMANDS THAT APPLY ESPECIALLY TO WOMEN AND MOTHERS:
FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT for every woman, whether alone or in partnership, to determine for herself her readiness to become a mother.
A child shall remain only as long under supervision or custody until it has reached an age in which it can self-responsibly engage in contracts and associations. This applies also to the guardianship for a child. The mother possesses priority in this - which she may completely or partly transfer to another person or institution.
18) DEMANDS APPLYING ESPECIALLY TO CHILDREN:
FULL AND UNRESTRICTED RIGHT for the child, boy or girl, to demand an alteration or complete change in its wardship condition. The child may ask for an early declaration that it is of full legal age or for the clarification of any other problem. In this case the child has the right to arbitration and the right to chose the arbitrator or at least one of the arbitrators.
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