would
certainly not follow from formal legal compulsion in itself. Rather, I
base the lawfulness of law and the rightness of right, in its formal
state, upon the consideration that a legal organisation is the only
one open to all human beings without distinction of special fortuitous
qualifications. To organise means to unite under rules. Such a
regulation of human relationships is a means to an end, an instrument
serving the pursuit of the final end of the highest possible
perfection of man. Hence only that regulation of human society can be
universally justified which can embrace universally all human beings
without reference to their subjective or different peculiarities. Law
alone can do this. So even under a bad law legal compulsion in itself
retains its sound foundation. Its existence does not cease to be
justified, nor is it even touched, by any chance worthlessness of the
concrete law in question: it is firmly founded, because it alone
offers the possibility of a universally valid, because universally
human, organisation. Therefore social progress can only be made by
perfecting law as handed down by history, according to its content,
and not by abolishing legal compulsion as such."

[2] Stammler, _Die Theorie des Anarchismus_, Berlin, 1894, p.
42.

These conclusions block the way for the mischievous misapplications of
distorted expressions of an exact thinker such as Ihering. Ihering
certainly took away ruthlessly the ideological basis of law, but he
never denied or attacked necessity of legal compulsion as Stirner did.
We might just as well ascribe to Darwin the intention of disowning man
because he set forth man's natural descent.

It is of just as little use to claim that past master of sociology,
Herbert Spencer, in support of Stirner's views, because Spencer too
recognises the purely egoistical origin of law and of social
organisation. Egoism and Anarchism are not so mutually interchangeable
as Stirner thinks. The question is, first of all, whether egoism after
all really finds its account in the "union of egoists." It has been
already more than once remarked that here too, as in the case of
Proudhon, we only have to do, at bottom, with the logical extension of
the present order of society that rests on free competition. "Make
your value felt" is still to-day the highest economic principle; and
he whose value, whose individuality consists in knowledge alone
without an adequate admixture of world