Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/429

Rh is not a unified organism and there is no unified social consciousness.

Marx formulated his extreme social objectivism in opposition to the extreme subjectivism and individualism of Stirner; but Marx, no less than Stirner, preached egoism and annulled ethics, though rather from an amoral than from an antimoral outlook.

Psychologically no less than epistemologically and metaphysically, ethically no less than socially, we reject individualist solipsism and socialist solomnism (I really must ask pardon of the philologists!).

For anarchism just as for socialism, the fundamental problem is the relationship of the individual to society. What is the individual? What is society? I and the world, I and society, subject and object—this is the problem which, since the days of Hume and Kant, philosophy has been endeavouring to solve.

I and thou, we and you? We and you—some, many, the majority, all?

Society is a peculiar organisation of organisations, comprising the separate organisations of state, church, and school, the organisation of the nation and of the economic unit, the lesser organisations of parties and classes, and so on. The social whole is made up out of the socialisation of organised individuals, and therefore the problem cannot be formulated "aut individual aut society," but must necessarily be formulated, "individual and society." There is no individual without society and no society without the individual. Extreme individualism, individualism in the solipsist sense, is absurd; but no less absurd is extreme socialism, the socialism which in its pronounced objectivism solomnistically negates the individual. The individual must not and cannot be sacrificed to society, and society must not and cannot be sacrificed to the individual. It is not individualism and socialism that are mutually exclusive, but solipsism and solomnism, or, in the concrete, Stirner and Marx, for both are wrong.

I need not now fear that I am using empty words when I declare that individualism, as an endeavour to secure the utmost possible development and perfectionment of one's own personality within society, is justifiable, and must be made possible and regarded as desirable in every political