The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.

The line reads like a compressed critique of bourgeois morality: what counts as “goodness” is recast as self-domination patterned on ownership. To “rule himself” the way one rules property suggests an internalization of the logic of possession, control, and instrumental management—turning the self into an object to be administered. “Autonomous being” then becomes suspect: rather than genuine freedom, autonomy is shaped by “material power,” i.e., the social relations of property and domination. The quote implies that modern ethical ideals can mirror and reproduce economic structures, making virtue complicit with the very forms of power it claims to transcend.