ABSTRACT
Stirner’s redefinition of property Anyone trying to piece together a radical social philosophy in midnineteenth-century Europe had, before all else, to decide his attitudes to the rapidly emerging phenomenon, ‘economic man’. In particular he had to pit himself intellectually against the increasingly dominant liberal-rationalist ideology emanating from England. The rationalist drive to classify and to quantify and the utilitarian drive to maximize material happiness were combining with the effect of increasing the scale and the efficiency of industrial production at exponential rates. The ‘rationalization’ of work processes, the increasing division of labour, demanded that men be useful in increasingly specific ways, and irrespective of personal interests other than the need to earn a subsistence wage. The utilitarian concern with saving time ultimately served to streamline the whole gamut of social interaction. Human interests, dissociated from individual gratification, were progressively subordinated to the economic calculus.
