 Stirner’s account of the developing historical relationship between the individual and society is advanced in a series of parallels which are designed to portray egoism as the embodiment of a more advanced civilisation. At one point, he takes the early modern idea of a social contract, in which progress consists of a move from an individualistic state of nature to a communal civil society, and neatly inverts it. It is membership of society, and not isolation, Stirner suggests, which is humankind’s “state of nature” (271), an early stage of development whose inadequacies are, in due course, outgrown. Elsewhere, he describes the developing relationship between the individual and society as analogous to that between a mother and her child. As the individual (the child) develops a mature preference for a less suffocating environment, they must throw off the claims of society (the mother) which seeks to maintain them in a subordinate position. In both cases, Stirner draws the lesson that the individual must move from social to egoistic relationships in order to escape subjection.