In the spring of 1845, Max Stirner gambled away all of his wife's inheritance on a centralized milk distribution business. Supposedly he wanted to use the business to both prove his ideas would work in practice, and to set him up for life, so he wouldn't have to worry about money and could just write. Well, the business failed almost immediately, because he had trouble finding customers, possibly because of his inability to relate to his customers, his inexperience in business, and him alienating people with his strange egoistic anarchist politics (details are scarce, so it is mostly speculation). He was made fun of ruthlessly by his contemporary intellectuals, and his wife of two years left after he blew all of their money. For the rest of his life he lived off the very meager income he got from writing.
To add insult to injury, the idea of a centralized milk distributor was a quite good one, and a highly successful business in the same vein popped up soon after, according to his biography by John Henry Mackay:
How sound the idea of the enterprise was, in spite of the unsuccessful attempt, was later shown by Klingel-Bolle, which is well known today by every Berlin child. It mixed its milk, if not with water, then with a big portion of Christianity and thus contributed not inconsiderably to the success of its business.
It turned out that Christianity worked better than anarchism as a selling point for milk. Who could have predicted that? Not Max Stirner, apparently.
To add insult to injury, the idea of a centralized milk distributor was a quite good one, and a highly successful business in the same vein popped up soon after, according to his biography by John Henry Mackay:
How sound the idea of the enterprise was, in spite of the unsuccessful attempt, was later shown by Klingel-Bolle, which is well known today by every Berlin child. It mixed its milk, if not with water, then with a big portion of Christianity and thus contributed not inconsiderably to the success of its business.
It turned out that Christianity worked better than anarchism as a selling point for milk. Who could have predicted that? Not Max Stirner, apparently.
It turns out that when you agree to play a game with Camus, you implicitly agree to the "Camus Contract". That means Camus is gonna do whatever the fuck he wants.
Social Contract Theory is the area of philosophy that deals with how an individual deals with the society that they belong to. In modern philosophy, it is mostly closely associated with Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Hobbes, in particular, thought that humans were naturally in an "all against all" violent state before civilization, and in order to avoid this, individuals cede authority to a sovereign. Rousseau argued for a more democratic society, where instead of a single sovereign, we cede our rights to the will of the majority. He attempted to reconcile individual freedom with this sort of ceding of rights to the majority, or to a society as a whole. For Rousseau, in some sense, in order to fully become free we had to give up some of our freedom, because a society which individuals did not give up freedom would be less free. Although not an example Rousseau gives, we can see that a society where individuals give up the right to own slaves becomes more free, on the whole. If we do not form some kind of social contract, then it becomes very difficult to guarantee any kind of legitimate freedom for anyone, because anyone's freedom could be taken away by arbitrary force.
Camus, while he didn't explicitly talk about social contract theory, was something of an anarchist, and wrote in The Rebel that an individual must always have the right to rebel against an unjust society.
Camus, while he didn't explicitly talk about social contract theory, was something of an anarchist, and wrote in The Rebel that an individual must always have the right to rebel against an unjust society.
It turns out that when you agree to play a game with Camus, you implicitly agree to the "Camus Contract". That means Camus is gonna do whatever the fuck he wants.
Social Contract Theory is the area of philosophy that deals with how an individual deals with the society that they belong to. In modern philosophy, it is mostly closely associated with Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Hobbes, in particular, thought that humans were naturally in an "all against all" violent state before civilization, and in order to avoid this, individuals cede authority to a sovereign. Rousseau argued for a more democratic society (although Hobbes was neccesarily arguing against democracy, but merely for a unified society), where instead of a single sovereign, we cede our rights to the will of the majority. He attempted to reconcile individual freedom with this sort of ceding of rights to the majority, or to a society as a whole. For Rousseau, in some sense, in order to fully become free we had to give up some of our freedom, because a society which individuals did not give up freedom would be less free. Although not an example Rousseau gives, we can see that a society where individuals give up the right to own slaves becomes more free, on the whole. If we do not form some kind of social contract, then it becomes very difficult to guarantee any kind of legitimate freedom for anyone, because anyone's freedom could be taken away by arbitrary force.
Camus, while he didn't explicitly talk about social contract theory, was something of an anarchist, and wrote in The Rebel that an individual must always have the right to rebel against an unjust society.
Camus, while he didn't explicitly talk about social contract theory, was something of an anarchist, and wrote in The Rebel that an individual must always have the right to rebel against an unjust society.
It turns out that when you agree to play a game with Camus, you implicitly agree to the "Camus Contract". That means Camus is gonna do whatever the fuck he wants.
Social Contract Theory is the area of philosophy that deals with how an individual deals with the society that they belong to. In modern philosophy, it is mostly closely associated with Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Hobbes, in particular, thought that humans were naturally in an "all against all" violent state before civilization, and in order to avoid this, individuals cede authority to a sovereign. Rousseau argued for a more democratic society (although Hobbes was not necessarily arguing against democracy, but merely for a unified society), where instead of a single sovereign, we cede our rights to the will of the majority. He attempted to reconcile individual freedom with this sort of ceding of rights to the majority, or to a society as a whole. For Rousseau, in some sense, in order to fully become free we had to give up some of our freedom, because a society which individuals did not give up freedom would be less free. Although not an example Rousseau gives, we can see that a society where individuals give up the right to own slaves becomes more free, on the whole. If we do not form some kind of social contract, then it becomes very difficult to guarantee any kind of legitimate freedom for anyone, because anyone's freedom could be taken away by arbitrary force.
Camus, while he didn't explicitly talk about social contract theory, was something of an anarchist, and wrote in The Rebel that an individual must always have the right to rebel against an unjust society.
Camus, while he didn't explicitly talk about social contract theory, was something of an anarchist, and wrote in The Rebel that an individual must always have the right to rebel against an unjust society.
Hey, just because I've always been wrong about every other case, doesn't mean I'm wrong about this one!
One of David Hume's central skeptical ideas was that we could never observe causation directly. So, for example, when we see that a billiard ball hits another billiard ball causing it to move, we only see the two events occur next to each other (Hume called this "constant conjunction"), we don't actually observe any "causation". Hume was a strict empiricist, meaning that he thought all knowledge came from the senses, so this lead him to doubt that we could ever have any knowledge about causation, or know for certain if some event caused another event to occur.