Stirner Opposes All Forms of Social Contract Theory

In the case of each of these political and social theorists, the social contract is founded on the belief, or the metaphor, that a violent and meaningless presocial state of nature prompts individuals to contract with each other or social institutions to provide for order, structure, and meaning in their everyday lives. In opposition to all forms of social contract theory, Stirner argues that the “state of nature” is not an egoistic bellum omnium contra omnia, but a structured, institutionalized, collectivized existence in which state, society, and culture predate the birth and interaction of the person. For Stirner, society is the state of nature. It is nonsense to speak of a contract that no one living ever agreed to. It is nonsense to speak of the twinborn nature of the relationship between the individual and society, or the notion that language, meanings, and culture are negotiated among persons on an everyday basis. Individuals are not “born free” and subsequently enslaved by society. They are born into a society with preexisting and powerful institutional controls over language, thought, and behavior. Human beings do not “enter” into society as an equal partner with interactions governed by contracts or norms of reciprocity. Regardless of the sociohistorical circumstances, the relationship between the individual and society is a struggle from the beginning over the ownership of the person’s life, self, liberty, and property.... the primary conflict is over the efforts by society to appropriate the individual’s “ownness” or property: Every society intends to appropriate the person’s body, mind, and self. Every society seeks the person’s subservience and the relinquishing of his or her ownness. Human existence is characterized by the struggle of the person, or the unique one, against the external appropriation of property.

--John F. Welsh, Max Stirner's Dialectical Egoism: A New Interpretation (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), 96.