If Stirner combats Feuerbach, the "immortal" Proudhon imitates Kant.
"What Kant did some sixty years ago for religion, what he did earlier
for certainty of certainties; what others before him had attempted to do
for happiness or supreme good, the 'Voice of the People' proposes to do
for the Government," pompously declares "the father of Anarchism." Let
us examine his methods and their results.

According to Proudhon, before Kant, the believer and the philosopher
moved "by an irresistible impulse," asked themselves, "What is God?"
They then asked themselves "Which, of all religions, is the best?" "In
fact, if there does exist a Being superior to Humanity, there must also
exist a system of the relations between this Being and Humanity. What
then is this system? The search for the best religion is the second step
that the human mind takes in reason and in faith. Kant gave up these
insoluble questions. He no longer asked himself what is God, and which
is the best religion, he set about explaining the origin and development
of the Idea of God; he undertook to work out the biography of this
idea." And the results he attained were as great as they were
unexpected. "What we seek, what we see, in God, as Malebranche said ...
is our own Ideal, the pure essence of Humanity.... The human soul does
not become conscious of its Ego through premeditated contemplation, as
the psychologists put it; the soul perceives something outside itself,
as if it were a different Being face to face with itself, and it is this
inverted image which it calls God. Thus morality, justice, order, law,
are no longer things revealed from above, imposed upon our free will by
a so-called Creator, unknown and ununderstandable; they are things that
are proper and essential to us as our faculties and our organs, as our
flesh and our blood. In two words religion and society are synonymous
terms, man is as sacred to himself as if he were God."

Belief in authority is as primitive, as universal as belief in God.
Whenever men are grouped together in societies there is authority, the
beginning of a government. From time immemorial men have asked
themselves, What is authority? Which is the best form of government? And
replies to these questions have been sought for in vain. There are as
many governments as there are religions, as many political theories as
systems of philosophy. Is there any way of putting an end to this
interminable and barren controversy? Any