Miguel Giménez Igualada

Miguel Giménez Igualada (1888, Iniesta, Spain - 1973, Mexico), was a Spanish individualist anarchist writer also known as Miguel Ramos Giménez and Juan de Iniesta.

In his youth, Igualada engaged in illegalist activities. He unsuccessfully proposed the creation of a Spanish Union of Egoists, and from the 1920s was a member of the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo. Among the many means of earning a living he was a street vendor, taxi driver, gardener, manager of a sugar plantation and rationalist teacher at the Libertarian Atheneum at Las Ventas, Madrid.

Between October 1937 and February 1938 he edited the individualist anarchist magazine Nosotros, which included writings by Han Ryner and Émile Armand; he also collaborated in the publication of Al Margen: Publicación quincenal individualista, another anarchist magazine.

Igualada was strongly influenced by Max Stirner. Through his writings he promoted Stirner within Spain, and published the fourth Spanish edition of Stirner's book, The Ego and Its Own, writing its preface. In 1968 he published a treatise on Stirner, dedicated to the memory of fellow anarchist Emile Armand, and wrote and published the tract, Anarchism. He also contributed to the anarchist publications Boletín Interno del CIR, Cénit, Cultura y Pedagogía, Despertad!, Fuego, Inquietudes, Ruta and Tierra y Libertad (the newspaper of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica).

Igualada later lived in Argentina, Uruguay and Mexico, and was present at the First Congress of the Mexican Anarchist Federation in 1945.

In his major work Anarchism Igualada states that "humanism or anarchism,...for me are the same thing". He sees the anarchist as one who "does not accept the imposition of a thought on us and who does not allows one´s own thought to be imposed over another brain, oppressing it...since anarchy is not for me a mere negation, but a twofold activity of consciousness; in the first instance a consciousness of the individual on its meaning within the human world, defending his personality against every external imposition; on a second instance, and here is present the whole great beauty of its ethic, it defends, stimulates and enhances the other´s personality.... He sees that "he who subjects his life to an exterior model cannot have any other loves which are not given by the chosen model, to which he builds an altar in his heart similar to a deity. And so even though it might preach love, it will not be loving; even it might talk about liberty, it will only conceive of a liberty conditioned by this or that which dominates it, and that liberty has every character of slavery: religion which linked his life to an external belief, which subjugates it".

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