rney with Stirner.
No matter. Let us once more return to the reasoning of Feuerbach.

It is only itself that humanity seeks in religion. It is only himself,
it is liberty that the citizen seeks in Government.... Then the very
essence of the citizen is liberty? Let us assume this is true, but let
us also note that our French "Kant" has done nothing, absolutely
nothing, to prove the "legitimacy" of such an "Idea." Nor is this all.
What is this liberty which we are assuming to be the essence of the
citizen? Is it political liberty which ought in the nature of things to
be the main object of his attention? Not a bit of it! To assume this
would be to make of the "citizen" an "authoritarian" democrat.

It is the _absolute liberty of the individual_, which is at the same
time _commensurate and identical with_ Order, that our citizen seeks in
Government. In other words, it is the Anarchism of Proudhon which is the
essence of the "citizen." It is impossible to make a more pleasing
discovery, but the "biography" of this discovery gives us pause. We have
been trying to demolish every argument in favour of the Idea of
Authority, as Kant demolished every proof of the existence of God. To
attain this end we have--imitating Feuerbach to some extent, according
to whom man adored his own Being in God--assumed that it is liberty
which the citizen seeks in Government. And as to liberty we have in a
trice transformed this into "absolute" liberty, into Anarchist liberty.
Eins, zwei, drei; Geschwindigkeit ist keine Hexerei![17]

Since the "citizen" only seeks "absolute" liberty in Government the
State is nothing but a fiction ("this fiction of a superior person,
called the 'State'"), and all those formulas of government for which
people and citizens have been cutting one another's throats for the last
sixty centuries, are but the "phantasmagoria of our brain, which it
would be the first duty of free reason to relegate to the museums and
libraries." Which is another charming discovery made _en passant_. So
that the political history of humanity has, "for sixty centuries," had
no other motive power than a phantasmagoria of our brain!

To say that man adores in God his own essence is to indicate the
_origin_ of religion, but it is not to work out its "biography." To
write the biography of religion is to write its history, explaining the
evolution of this essence of man which found expression in it. Feuerbach
did not do this--could not do it.