The commonalty thought it had brought this about if it handed over everything human to competition, but gave the individual a right to every human thing. "Each may strive after everything!"
Social liberalism finds that the matter is not settled with the "may," because may means only "it is forbidden to none" but not "it is made possible to every one." Hence it affirms that the commonalty is liberal only with the mouth and in words, supremely illiberal in act. It on its part wants to give all of us the _means_ to be able to labor on ourselves.
By the principle of labor that of fortune or competition is certainly outdone. But at the same time the laborer, in his consciousness that the essential thing in him is "the laborer," holds himself aloof from egoism and subjects himself to the supremacy of a society of laborers, as the commoner clung with self-abandonment to the competition-State. The beautiful dream of a "social duty" still continues to be dreamed. People think again that society _gives_ what we need, and we are _under obligations_ to it on that account, owe it everything.[82] They are still at the point of wanting to _serve_ a "supreme giver of all good." That society is no ego at all, which could give, bestow, or grant, but an instrument or means, from which we may derive benefit; that we have no social duties, but solely interests for the pursuance of which society must serve us; that we owe society no sacrifice, but, if we sacrifice anything, sacrifice it to ourselves,--of this the Socialists do not think, because they--as liberals--are imprisoned in the religious principle, and zealously aspire after--a sacred society, such as the State was hitherto.
Society, from which we have everything, is a new master, a new spook, a new "supreme being," which "takes us into its service and allegiance"!
The more precise appreciation of political as well as social liberalism must wait to find its place further on. For the present we pass this over, in order first to summon them before the tribunal of humane or critical liberalism.
As liberalism is completed in self-criticising, "critical"[83] liberalism, in which the critic remains a liberal and does not go beyond the principle of liberalism, Man,--this may distinctively be named after Man and called the "humane."