I. Together with law Stirner necessarily has to reject also, and just as unconditionally, the legal institution of property. This "lives by grace of the law. It has its guarantee only in the law; it is not a fact, but a fiction, a thought. This is law-property, legal property, warranted property. It is mine not by me, but by—law."[285]

Property in this sense, as well as the law and the State, is based not on the individual's recognizing it as favorable to his welfare, but on his counting it sacred. "Property in the civil sense means sacred property, in such a way that I must respect your property. 'Have respect for property!' Therefore the political liberals would like every one to have his bit of property, and have in part brought about an incredible parcellation by their efforts in this direction. Every one must have his bone, on which he may find something to bite."[286]

But property is not sacred. "I do not step timidly back from your property, be you one or many, but look upon it always as my property, in which I have no need to 'respect' anything. Now do the like with what you call my property!"[287]

Nor is property favorable to the individual's welfare. "Property, as the civic liberals understand it, is untenable, because the civic proprietor is really nothing but a propertyless man, a man everywhere excluded. Instead of the world's belonging to him, as it might, there belongs to him not even the paltry point on which he turns around."[288]

II. Every one's own welfare commands that a distribution of commodities based solely on its precepts should take the place of property. When Stirner designates as "property" the share of commodities assigned to the individual by these precepts, it is in the improper sense in which he constantly uses the word property: in the proper sense only a share of commodities assigned by law can be called property.[289]

Now, according to the decrees of his own welfare, every man should have all that he is powerful enough to obtain.

"What they are not competent to tear from me the power over, that remains my property: all right, then let power decide about property, and I will expect everything from my power! Alien power, power that I leave to another, makes me a slave; then let own power make me an owner."[290] "To what property am I entitled? To any to which I—empower myself. I give myself the right of property in taking property to myself, or giving myself the proprietor's power, plenary power, empowerment."[291] "What I am competent to have is my 'competence.'"[292] "The sick, children, the aged, are still competent for a great deal; e. g. to receive their living instead of taking it. If they are competent to control you to the extent of having you desire their continued existence, then they have a power over you."[293] "What competence the child possesses in its smile, its play, its crying,—in short, in its mere existence! Are you capable of resisting its demand? or do you not hold out to it, as a mother, your breast,—as a father, so much of your belongings as it needs? It puts you under constraint, and therefore possesses what you call yours."[294]

"Property, therefore, should not and cannot be done away with; rather, it must be torn from ghostly hands and become my property; then will the erroneous consciousness that I cannot entitle myself to as much as I want vanish.—'But what cannot a man want?' Well, he who wants much, and knows how to get it, has in all times taken it to him, as Napoleon did the continent, and the French Algeria. Therefore the only point is just that the respectful 'lower classes' should at length learn to take to themselves what they want. If they reach their hands too far for you, why, defend yourselves."[295] "What 'man' wants does not by any means furnish a scale for me and my needs; for I may have a use for more, or for less. Rather, I must have as much as I am competent to appropriate to myself."[296]

2. "In this matter, as well as in others, unions will multiply the individual's means and make secure his assailed property."[297] "When it is our will no longer to leave the land to the land-owners, but to appropriate it to ourselves, we unite ourselves for this purpose; we form a union, a sociÉtÉ, which makes itself owner; if we are successful, they cease to be land-owners. And, as we chase them out from land and soil, so we can also from many another property, to make it our own, the property of the—conquerors. The conquerors form a society, which one may conceive of as so great that by degrees it embraces all mankind; but so-called mankind is also, as such, only a thought (ghost); its reality is the individuals. And these individuals as a collective mass will deal not less arbitrarily with land and soil than does an isolated individual."[298]

"What all want to have a share in will be withdrawn from that individual who wants to have it for himself alone; it is made a common possession. As a common possession every one has a share in it, and this share is his property. Just so, even in our old relations, a house which belongs to five heirs is their common possession; but the fifth part of the proceeds is each one's property. The property which for the present is still withheld from us can be better made use of when it is in the hands of us all. Let us therefore associate ourselves for the purpose of this robbery."[299]