💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › alexander-green-stirner-and-marx.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 07:05:02. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Stirner and Marx Author: Alexander Green Date: 2006 Language: en Topics: egoism, Karl Marx, Max Stirner, Non Serviam Source: Retrieved 06/15/2022 from https://web.archive.org/web/20080509100427/http://www.nonserviam.com/magazine/issues/23.html
The impact of Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own (1844)[1] on the modern
European thought has been strangely neglected. Few other figures in the
history of philosophy have been as systematically misread,
misunderstood, suppressed and pigeonholed as that of Max Stirner. He has
been labelled an anarchist, a nihilist, a crude “proto-Nietzsche” and
his influence constantly overlooked by both philosophical movements and
intellectual historians alike. Whilst there is no direct recipient of
Stirner’s version of egoism, it appears to exert a diffuse yet
substantial influence on modern philosophical thought. Identifying the
ultimate or unintended beneficiaries of Stirner’s ideas is challenging.
Recognition of his only major work emerged half a century after its
conception when The Egosurfaced in a range of intellectual projects,
recently including feminism and postmodernism. What is paradoxical about
Stirner’s impact is that his most critical influence – on the work of
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, has been obscured from the field of
intellectual history. Stirner’s official role in the philosophically
fraught period which saw the birth of historical materialism (1844–5)
was relegated to more “deviant tributaries” of European philosophy.[2]
Despite its apparent distinctiveness, The Ego was very much a product of
the milieu of the eighteen forties and of the Left Hegelian movement in
particular. Ironically, it is in this context that some of the most
genuine praise for Stirner’s surprising contribution to Left Hegelianism
was voiced, despite the critique of the group’s theoretical leaders that
had prompted The Ego. “The Free Ones” (hereafter Die Freien) were a
group of radical Berlin publicists, poets and philosophers who gathered
daily in Hippel’s Weinstube; many of its members were imbued with
revolutionary fervour, others were simply inebriated.[3] The group’s
leaders were the Bauer brothers, Bruno and Edgar. Marx, Engels and the
poets Herwegh and Hoffmann von Fallersleben were occasional
visitors.Hence Bauer’s later characterisation of the group as Berlin’s
“beer literati”.[4] Ludwig Feuerbach, Moses Hess, Ludwig Bühl, Adolf
Rutenberg, Eduard Meyen, and Julius Faucher also frequented Hippel’s.
Arnold Ruge, the self-appointed godfather of these Hegelians, carried on
nightly debates which were often very bitter.[5] Engels gives a
description of Stirner at such a gathering in his comic poem “The
Triumph of Faith”:
[Fig. I: Pencil sketch by Engels, Stirner stands on the middle right,
leaning against the table. He is a lonely figure: highbrowed,
bespectacled and smoking a cigarette. For Engels illustrated letters
see: Zwischen 18 und 25 Jugend Briefe von Friedrich Engels.]
Die Freien were the last remnants of Bruno Bauer’s “Doktorklub” – the
same club had once counted Marx as a member. Stirner cannot have joined
before the end of 1841. At that time the young Marx was leaving for
Paris and, as a result, the two were never to meet. Stirner spent most
of 1843 completing The Ego; it was published in November of 1844. For
English readers, the English-Latin word ego comes constrained by nuances
of a possible Freudian or Protestant analysis. However a careful reading
suggests that “The Unique One & His Property” (or Own-ness) would better
elucidate Stirner’s intentions. “The Unique One” might be best
understood as the individual self, not in opposition to later concepts
of the Freudian id or libido or even the “spirit” or “soul”, but as a
certain kind of absolute. The Ego immediately established Stirner as one
of the most formidable opponents of the very people with whom he had
seemed to have so much in common. Communists, critical philosophers,
humanitarians and reformers of every degree were attacked in Stirner’s
philosophy, a philosophy that Engels labelled “Egoism”.[6]) Among the
Young Hegelians, Bauer, Ruge, Moses Hess and even the famous Feuerbach
joined forces in order to combat what they saw as the menacing nihilism
of Stirner’s egoism.
Bruno Bauer and Szeliga both wrote articles, Feuerbach also replied.
Hess wrote an essay whilst Marx and Engels wrote the best part of a
book.[7] All seemed happy to admit Stirner was an adversary of note.
Bauer wrote that Stirner was “the most capable and courageous of all
combatants” of his own theory of “pure criticism”,[8] whereas Feuerbach
described Stirner as “the most gifted and the freest writer it has been
given me to meet”.[9] Arnold Ruge even heralded Stirner as the
“theoretical liberator” of German philosophy; The Ego had represented a
triumph on behalf of the concrete living individual over abstract
generalities. Engels himself, in a letter to Marx, wrote that “among the
Freien it is plain that Stirner has the most talent, personality and
energy”.[10] S.E. Parker[11] notes that Engels’s initial sympathetic
response to Stirner was probably subject to a severe reprimand from
Marx. Engels’ views radically changed as we shall see, and deference is
made to Marx in dealing with the chimera of Stirner’s egoism.
Nevertheless, Stirner enjoyed fleeting and alarming fame, his “conscious
egoism” was parodied in a popular novel and he himself had even
appeared, thinly disguised, as a philosophical character in another
novel.[12]
However, the speculative excitement over The Ego was as frantic as it
was transient, and the political events of 1848 obliterated the traces
of those philosophical struggles which had preceded them. In that year,
along with the revolutionary hopes of German radicals, the Left Hegelian
movement “collapsed into itself, becoming insignificant in both
intellectual and political life”,[13] emasculated “in the face of an
adamant union between a defensive Church and a reactionary
Monarchy”.[14] The Ego had sounded the theoretical death knell for the
group and Left Hegelianism reached “a final and angry impasse”.[15]
Stirner had made a “clean sweep of everything, leaving only naked
self-assertion”; with The Ego he had taken the Hegelian system to its
dialectical limit “… and transformed it into its opposite”.[16]
[Fig. II: Max Stirner Pencil sketch, inscription reads “Max Stirner.
Drawn from memory by Frederick Engels, London, 1892” reproduced in MECW
5:267, (Moscow 1976).]
Johann Caspar Schmidt (1806–56), who wrote and was known as Max Stirner,
had been a close friend of Engels during the year he spent in Berlin.
Engels was evidently impressed by Stirner, who was his senior by a
number of years. He was able to render a pencil sketch of Stirner fifty
years later, and recalled that they were “great friends”
[Duzbrüder].[17] However, it was Engels who helped in obscuring evidence
of Stirner’s influence on his colleague and lifelong friend, Karl Marx.
After reading The Ego, Engels wrote to Marx explicitly stating his
opinion, one which would powerfully colour Stirner’s legacy: “We must
not simply cast it [The Ego] aside, but rather use it as the perfect
expression of the present-day folly, and, while inverting it, continue
to build on it.”[18] Marx responded by burying himself in The Ego, and
constructing his reply in The German Ideology.[19] For Marx and Engels,
coming to terms with The Ego was a deeply fundamental moment in the
development of Communist theory. Marx claimed that the aim of The German
Ideology was simply “to settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical
conscience”.[20] First published in 1932, the bulk (three quarters) of
the work is a chapter entitled “Sankt Max”, Marx’s epic yet
uncomfortable diatribe on The Ego. The unpublished status of The German
Ideology did not allow for public discussion of Marx’s criticisms of
Stirner, in his own words it was “left to the gnawing criticism of
mice”.[21]
Stirner’s legacy suffered yet more interference from Engels’ essay
“Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy” (1886),
his account of the development of historical materialism. It attempted
to minimise the importance of The German Ideology, and therefore The Ego
in Marx’s formative philosophy. Engels claimed Darwin’s theory of
evolution had played a critical role in the route to dialectical
materialism, though Marx was always more of a Hegelian than Engels would
give him credit for. However, Engels at least recognised Feuerbach’s
influence whose concept of “species-being”/essence was easily transposed
onto Marx’s “social being”, conveniently replacing the old materialism
with a new “dialectical” form. There is no mention that Marx’s rejection
of Feuerbach’s humanism was only made possible by reading The Ego in
1844. Engels’ account mentions Stirner only in passing: “Stirner
remained an oddity, even after Bakunin blended him with Proudhon and
labelled the blend ‘anarchism’. Feuerbach alone was of significance as a
philosopher”.[22] Engels occluded Stirner’s self-evident “catalytic”[23]
contribution to the young Marx’s early philosophic formulations. By
labelling him the “prophet of contemporary anarchism”, Engels misaligned
Stirner with Proudhon and Bakunin, two thinkers he had openly condemned.
Marxists studying the theoretical development of the young Marx tend to
follow Engels and ignore the criticisms of Stirner featured in “Sankt
Max”. For the purposes of the “Marxist exegesis”, Marx’s most
characteristic aphorisms are to be found in the deceptively short yet
lucid chapter on Feuerbach, the most bona fide “Marxist” chapter of The
German Ideology. However, as we will learn, Marx’s criticisms of
Feuerbach were merely “perspectives” which “had been progressively
opened to Marx and Engels in the course of their study of Der Einzige
und sein Eigenthum”.[24]
At the close of the nineteenth century John Henry Mackay, a Scottish
poet turned Germanophile, rediscovered Stirner and initiated what has
since been called the “Stirner renaissance”.[25] Mackay happened to find
a brief citation regarding Stirner in Lange’s History of Materialism:
“The man who in German literature has preached Egoism most recklessly
and logically, Max Stirner, finds himself in distinct opposition to
Feuerbach”. After finding a copy of The Ego, Mackay immediately became a
disciple, and claimed the role of necromancer to the lifeless corpse of
Stirner’s thought. Stirner’s revival was also concurrent with the impact
of Friedrich Nietzsche’s work. As Karl Löwith points out “Stirner has
often been compared with Nietzsche, to the point of asserting that
Stirner was ‘intellectual arsenal’ from which Nietzsche derived his
weapons”.[26] Some went further in this comparison, Eduard von Hartmann
claimed “not only is this [The Ego] a brilliant work not inferior in
respect of style to Nietzsche’s work, but in respect of philosophical
value it surpasses the latter a thousand times”.[27] The spreading of
Nietzsche’s celebrity ignited a fresh and sympathetic interest in
Stirner’s ethic of self-will and indirectly helped to sustain
historians’ interest in The Ego into the twentieth-century.
Few historians have found consensus when discussing Stirner’s place in
the history of philosophy, not to suggest that they should. Scholars
remain divided in determining the place that The Ego might belong in
European thought, or even if it should belong at all. Mackay’s
resurrection of Stirner’s book caused a more extensive response; it
confirmed Stirner’s identification with his most commonly assigned
philosophical genre. For over a century The Ego has maintained a place
among the founders and luminaries of modern anarchism. Woodcock states
that “of all the libertarian classics [The Ego] remains the expression
of a point of view that belongs clearly to one end of the varied
spectrum of anarchist theory”.[28] The anarchic elements in Stirner’s
thought are even pronounced enough for Avron to declare Stirner
“anarchism’s most original and most consistent thinker”.[29] The
orthodox Marxist Hans G. Helms has argued that the influence of The Ego
has been as much political as philosophical. In his recent study, Die
Ideologie der anonymen Gesellschaft,[30] he argues that Stirner inspired
various German groups who were the immediate precursors of fascism.
Stirner has even been used by the New Right specifically to evoke the
darkness of the “interregnum” and emphasise the need for a total
cultural transformation.[31] In the 1963 Libertarian Book Club edition
of The Ego, James J. Martin wrote “it is at once a historical document,
a pamphlet of the intellectual disturbance of the mid-nineteenth
century, and a timeless classic”.
The publication history of The Ego also shows the strength of this
initial revival of Stirner. Forty-nine editions appeared between 1900
and 1929. However, after the 1930s, The Ego again slipped into relative
obscurity. Even amongst the thinkers who knew Stirner, opinion was
radically divided. There were a few during that period who had a better
insight into the meaning of Stirner’s thought. In 1939, Sidney Hook
indicated that the forgotten debate between Marx and Stirner involved
“the fundamental problems of any possible system of ethics or public
morality”,[32] and later in 1963 Isaiah Berlin noted that “the theory of
the alienation of the proletarians was enunciated by Max Stirner at
least one year before Marx.”[33] These voices were in the extreme
minority, yet significantly they identified the unresolved nature of the
Stirner-Marx relationship, and suggested that Stirner’s influence might
not be as negligible as was previously thought. These writers have paved
the way for a revaluation of Stirnerian thought.
In 1968 a new German edition of The Ego made its appearance. It had been
preceded, two years earlier, by a full study of Stirner’s thought and
influence, the first since Henri Avron’s in 1954, which had linked
Stirner with existentialism.[34] 1971 saw the publication of the first
extensive study of Stirner’s philosophy ever to appear in English: R. W.
K. Patterson’s The Nihilistic Egoist. Paterson’s study sought to be the
most comprehensively objective treatment of Stirner to date, yet Marx’s
accusations against Stirner are restated, minus the vitriol, and
Stirner’s vision is described as “frivolous”. The Nihilistic Egoist
remains a useful, if dated, springboard for a revisionist perspective
aiming to rediscover Stirner’s own intentionality.
In John Carroll’s Break-out from the Crystal Palace, The
Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky (1974),
a sociological approach was applied to Stirner’s thought. Carroll
recognised the psychological dimension of anarchism beyond its more
familiar appearance as political ideology. Whilst identifying Stirner’s
radical individualist psychology, he sees Stirner much like Georges
Sorel in considering society as senile, in need of fresh, invigorating
passions; a view that appealed to the young Mussolini and to the French
fascist aesthete Robert Brasillach (see William Tucker’s The Fascist
Ego). Carroll ultimately presents Stirner as a difficult, inspiring, yet
flawed champion of rebellion and the unceasing quest for
self-understanding, self-realization, and new values.
William Brazill’s recent work, The Young Hegelians (1970) as well as
David McLellan’s The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (1980) both direct
considerable attention to Stirner’s thought. In addition, John Edward
Toews has significantly revised Stirner’s place in the history of
philosophy in his recent study Hegelianism, The Path Toward Dialectical
Humanism, 1805–41 (1980), opening the way up for a more historically
sensitive, rather than philosophical/ideological interpretation of
Stirner’s contribution to the history of philosophy. Toews
contextualises Stirner’s position amongst the Left Hegelians, and
attacks those who see Stirner’s egoism as “purely subjective”.[35] He
identifies the core contradiction that Hegel’s radical heirs had to
wrangle with during the 1840s, that self-liberation and self-affirmation
required “revolutionary destruction” in order for their “concrete
historical actualisation”.[36] However, revolution necessitated
“commitment to suprapersonal values” and “a belief in an objective
meaning in history”.[37] Such values were a direct denial of the
“individual autonomy, self-expression and self-enjoyment” that
constituted Stirner’s aim of an inward rebellion which sought to end the
“historical pathology of self-alienation”.[38] Toews’ penetrating work
indicates that The Ego was deeply rooted in the struggles of Hegelian
thought during the 1840s and importantly Stirner is given an independent
and original role in disintegration of the Left Hegelian movement. As
Lawrence Stepelevich notes hopefully, we may be seeing the “beginning of
another cycle of interest in Stirner”.[39] The continued publication of
the journal Stirner-Studien since 1994 similarly reflects the renewed
academic interest in Stirner in his native Germany.[40]
The debate of 1845 still reverberates in late twentieth-century European
intellectual discourse. Indeed, there are many unusual and overlooked
parallels between Stirner’s critique of Enlightenment humanism,
universal rationality and essential identities, and similar critiques
developed by thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles
Deleuze and others. Such intellectual affinities have recently prompted
Saul Newman to attempt to reconcile classical anarchism with
poststructuralist thought (in order to define “postanarchism”) using
Stirner to “break out of the Enlightenment humanist paradigm of
essentialism … which continues to inform radical political theory”.[41]
Stirner’s ideas are also discernible in “primitivism” (John Zerzan),
“immediatism” (Hakim Bey) and “insurrectionary anarchism” (Alfredo
Bonnano).
This thesis aims to assess the difficult relationship between Marx and
Stirner and their respective ideas. It is timely to reconsider Stirner’s
place amongst the philosophic heavyweights of the nineteenth century,
after years where he has suffered under the suffocating modernity of
Marx and Nietzsche and been misconstrued by many as an intellectual
oddity. It is high time that the relevance of Stirner’s thought,
especially in relation to the development of Marx’s theories, was
restored to its correct place in history of philosophy. When we examine
Marx’s critique in The German Ideology, it will emerge that Stirner’s
legacy is more than that of an “anarcho-existentialist” whose egoism is
untenable. Both thinkers will be firmly set against the context of the
rise and fall of Left Hegelian humanism. Whilst by 1845 its key
luminaries accused each other of retreating to abstract and
undialectical positions of either metaphysical idealism or materialism,
all (including Marx and Stirner) had laid claim to dialectical
inheritance (Hegel). Therefore, it is instructive to see the thinkers on
a level playing field, Marx, Feuerbach, Bauer and Stirner all sharing
this “existential” ontology. We should similarly regard their opposing
solutions as embedded in their own context, remembering that the
“existential reductions” of 1844–5 were put forward as constructive
appropriations of the real content of Hegelian thought. Stirner was no
exception as his form of nihilism did not abandon the redemptive core of
the Hegelian project. Rather than a simple appendage of Marx’s early
formulations, The Ego must be given independent value and seen as
serious attempt to tackle the problems facing German philosophy in the
1840s. The main objective of this thesis will be to extricate Stirner
from Marx’s rambling, left-handed invective and reinstate him as a
thinker who deserves our attention and whose relevance and influence
have not been fully appreciated. We cannot simply overlook “Sankt Max”
as key evidence of Marx’s formative intellectual development. Marx
clearly exerted much cerebral effort to write a critique that ended up
being lengthier than The Ego itself. In short, the full effects of The
Egoupon the philosophy of the young Marx “have yet to be fully
assessed”.[42]
It is relatively easy to grasp the basic contemporary relevance,
significance and durability of The Ego in the history of philosophy. Yet
we still need to perceive more about Stirner’s complex, often
incongruous, relationship with Karl Marx – a figure who seems destined
to remain significant, despite the recent interest in Nietzschean
thought. What Derrida says of Marx is equally applicable to Stirner: “a
ghost never dies” nor can there be any “future” without “the memory and
inheritance … of at least one of his spirits”.[43]
[Figure III: Stirner’s birthplace, from John Henry Mackay’s book Max
Stirner: Sein Leben und Sein Werk.]
Born in 1806, Johann Caspar Schmidt was the son of Albert and Sophia
Schmidt who lived in a comfortable house overlooking the Marktplatz in
Bayreuth. The Schmidts were a lower-middle-class family of evangelical
Lutheran denomination. In 1826 Stirner matriculated in the Philosophy
Faculty of the University of Berlin and spent two years studying a range
of subjects including logic, Greek literature and geography. Whilst at
Berlin, unlike Marx, Strauss or Engels, Stirner attended Hegel’s
lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, the History of Philosophy, and
in the winter of 1827 his lectures on the Philosophy of the Subjective
Spirit. In 1832 Stirner returned to Berlin, where he would spend the
rest of his life. Continuing his philosophical studies, he attended a
two-semester course on Aristotle conducted by the Hegelian philosopher
Karl L. Michelet. Stirner’s formal acquaintance with Hegelian
philosophy, as well as Hegelian philosophers themselves, far surpassed
that obtained by other Left Hegelians. However, Stirner fell short of
academic success in his formal examinations in the upper forms of the
gymnasium and was awarded a conditional facultas docendi, never
realising his ambition to become a Gymnasiallehrer.
In 1839, Stirner obtained regular employment at a Berlin girls’ school.
He taught both history and literature with great success, and for next
five years enjoyed a relatively stable and ordered life, with a modest
income and ample freedom to pursue his philosophical reflections.
Ostensibly, this quiet middle-class school teacher hardly seems a likely
candidate to produce what has been called the “most revolutionary [book]
ever written”.[44] However, 1840’s Berlin was a melting pot of political
disaffection and intellectual unrest, whilst the revolution was not
being fought for in blood, the clubs and cafes of Berlin formed
political hubs in which groups of young radicals could meet and make
preparations. Stirner began attending meetings of Die Freien in 1841;
his formal education was undoubtedly supplemented by meetings with
Hegelians at various clubs and Weinstuben. During long boisterous
evenings at their favourite haunt (Hippel’s), Stirner would have had the
chance to review the metaphysical exuberance of Berlin’s disaffected and
rootless intelligentsia and literati. In the midst of such radical
clamour, Stirner met Bruno Bauer, the only member of Die Freien in the
Left Hegelian circle with whom he maintained a close relationship until
his death. It was through socialising with Die Freien that Stirner also
met his second wife (his first wife had died giving birth to a
still-born child), Marie Dahnhart. Marie was an uninhibited cigar
smoking, beer-drinking 25 year old who was about to enjoy an inheritance
of 30,000 thalers. In 1843, Stirner astutely married her.
The years between 1815 and 1848 have been seen as an “era of
polarisation”,[45] a conflict between modernity and tradition. However,
the post-1815 era of German restoration was not threatened by
philosophical trends; neither the moral creeds and entrenched dogmas of
rigid conservatives, nor the passionate individualism of the Romantics
sought to challenge the feudal complacency that still survived in some
German states. The loathed German Confederation soon showed its true
colours, with censorship and surveillance laws embodied in the Karslbad
Decrees of 1819 and the “Final Act” of 1820. Both ushered in an era of
oppression and illiberality for the German states, one that would be
strongly attacked by many contemporary thinkers.
During the 1830s the movement known as Junges Deutschland (Young
Germany), produced poets, thinkers and journalists, all of whom reacted
against the introspection and particularism of Romanticism. The Romantic
Movement was seen as apolitical lacking the activism that Germany’s
burgeoning intelligentsia required. Decades of compulsory school
attendance in German states had resulted in mass literacy and an excess
of educated males which the establishment could not subsume. Combined
with the advantage of the low cost printing press these factors caused a
rush into the so-called “free professions”.
The German states, specifically the Prussian government, had a basic
distrust of speculative thought. On occasion the state would sometimes
sponsor philosophical teachings that offered an intellectual foundation
for the authoritarian organisation of society.[46] Hegelianism was
adopted as the academic standard for appointments in 1820s and 30s. To
begin with, Hegelianism was regarded as “the staunchest ideological
bulwark of Prussian aristocracy”, yet by the 1840s devotion to Hegelian
thought had led to a period of readjustment, and the late 1830s and
early 1840s resembled more a post-mortem of Hegelianism in which
thinkers extended or recast Hegelian phenomenology.[47] One outcome of
this method of criticism was the radical Left Hegelianism of the early
1840s, which Stirner found himself heir to. The “Young Hegelians”
(hereafter referred to as “Left”) sought to decisively challenge both
Church and State, finding resonance with the “Young Germany” of the
1830s; no longer allies of the establishment, they were rejected as
intellectual outcasts. The official Hegelianism that was extolled in
lecture theatres in Stirner’s undergraduate days had become the
“philosophy of disaffection”.[48]
Stirner occupied a unique position among the Left Hegelians, sharing an
essentially similar methodology to his closest contemporaries. By using
classical Hegelian concepts and modes of argument, the Left Hegelians
quickly reached conclusions that in effect nullified the whole upshot of
Hegel’s original system. Hegel’s universal synthesis of Being had begun
to produce discordant results. By reviving the republican idealism of
the eighteenth century, Left Hegelians believed education and political
liberties would solve all social problems without changing the system of
property on which material production and economic exchanges were based.
Stirner’s early work reflected these broad aims.
The False Principle of Our Education is considered the “most valuable
and significant of Stirner’s shorter works”.[49] Stirner, for the first
time, can be seen in pursuit of the goal of individual self-awareness
and an insistence on the primacy of the individual personality. He
rejected both humanism and realism as authorities external to the
individual that limited his freedom. In formal education, Stirner saw
that “the world of antiquity through classics and the Bible rule over us
as a mistress”.[50] He went on to stress the importance of personality
and the “free-moving ego” in education, insisting bluntly that education
is the most important “social question” in the world. Stirner’s
surprisingly modern insistence on the primacy of education and knowledge
was tied to man’s self-discovery: through “Truth” man discovers himself
and experiences “the liberation from all that is alien, the uttermost
abstraction or release from all authority, the re-won naturalness”.[51]
However, the Left Hegelians sought in vain to “educate” their fellow
countrymen and the 1840s brought disenchantment and schism; political
rulers and academics strove uselessly to restore a cultural unity and a
national idealism to Germany.
The disintegration of the Left Hegelian movement was born out of the
inability to make its philosophy the focus of any political movement,
especially one involving the country’s social forces. Mass poverty,
economic dislocation and social unrest had been rife in Germany, from
the student protests of the 1830s to the “hungry 1840s”. In some areas
socialists and communists had taken advantage of this. Yet unlike Marx’s
experiences in Britain, industrialization had only made very modest
advances in German states by 1848. German society was overwhelmingly
rural even during the 1840s; 70% of the population still worked on the
land. Within a short space of time the Left Hegelians became static and
ineffective, wrecked by their own internal theoretical disputes and
confined to Berlin’s bourgeois, pre-industrial world.
Before its disintegration, the Left Hegelian movement underwent a series
of “transformations”. The “emanation of divergent positions”, is crucial
in regard to Stirner, who inherited and then reacted against the
semiotic system or “distinctive” language that Hegelian thinkers created
and altered.[52] The period between 1835 and 1843 can be seen as a
period in which thinkers attempted to translate the original
metaphysical Hegelian language of Absolute Spirit into the language of
Hegelian humanism. During this period the concept Absolute Spirit was
replaced by “the idea of humanity”, “human species-being” or “human
self-consciousness”.[53] This secularisation or humanisation of Hegelian
thought was the basis for the radical Left Hegelian movement. Strauss
began this trend with his Life of Jesus (1835) where he asserted that
religious representation was the objectification of human essence, thus
religious consciousness contributed to alienation and kept human beings
from their own essential nature. By the time Strauss had cemented his
new humanist outlook in 1840–41, Bruno Bauer had developed his own
variant of the transformative humanist interpretation of the Hegelian
language of Absolute Spirit. For Bauer, Strauss had not gone far enough;
the “idea of humanity” itself remained enigmatic unless it actualised
itself in human history through its internalisation in the “free
activity of human self-consciousness”.[54] In book and articles
published in 1840–42, Bauer denounced terms such as “God”, “Absolute
Spirit” and “world-spirit” as deceptions implying a supranatural
transcendent power realising itself in human self-consciousness. Bauer’s
critical theory of human self-consciousness therefore sought to liberate
“the I” which “lives, creates, works and is everything” and “is the only
power in the world and history, and history has no other meaning than
the becoming and development of self-consciousness”.[55]
A third version of the humanist translation of Hegelianism was
constructed by Ludwig Feuerbach around 1840. Hegel’s “Absolute Spirit”
was a transcendent mystification, a self-alienation of a human process
and limitation on human thought. InThe Essence of Christianity (1840–41)
Feuerbach claimed religious consciousness and language meant “a
projection of humanity’s essential nature as an emotional and sensuous
being, governed and made happy only by images”.[56] Whilst the rightful
content of Hegelian metaphysics was thus affirmed by Bauer as human
self-consciousness, for Feuerbach such essential human content was more
a sensuous and emotional “essence”. By 1841, these thinkers were
publicly attributed with developing a distinctive theoretical
perspective, and Bauer and Feuerbach accepted their roles as the
intellectual mentors of radical “Left” Hegelians.
Historical reality ultimately undermined Hegelian humanism when its
theoretical practice failed to gain wide appeal. Left Hegelianism was in
terminal decline when The Ego was published in 1844. Academic positions
were denied to the Left Hegelians in the city that they deemed
philosophically and politically the capital of Germany. The constant
pressure of governmental censorship and academic rejection meant that
even Arnold Ruge’s attempts to rally a political party around the banner
of Left Hegelianism soon failed. In 1843, the Deutsche Jahrbücher was
prohibited from publication, even in “liberal” Saxony. It was equally a
defeat by politics as it was by abstract thought itself. Soon most
members of the movement became disillusioned with the idea of a
political public as the agent of liberation. The declarations of
Feuerbach, Bauer, Hess and Ruge in 1841 had set the Left Hegelians
against all prevailing orthodoxy be it religious, philosophical,
economic or political; yet all had failed at insurrection of existing
institutions or a political association based its ideas.
Such failure was reflected in the thought produced during the period
1843–46, which saw the publication of The Ego. It was a divisive process
of mutual criticism, where Stirner and others criticised the
“theological” illusions of a movement caught in a language of essence.
Stirner inherited the problem that “reality” must be comprehended and
described as contingent, concrete, finite “existence” with reason and
meaning emerging from actions of individual beings. The “analytic of
existence” was self-consciously presented not merely as a translation,
but as a step beyond Hegelian thought in some respects, seeking to
transcend it.[57] The humanism that had for a short time enjoyed the
attention of the movement’s most able thinkers was scoffed at by
Stirner: “In our days, … they have not realised that man has killed God
in order to become – “sole God on high” … God has had to give place, not
to us, but to – humanity”.[58] Stirner specifically condemned Feuerbach
and Bauer for creating this new god, “Humanity” to replace the Christian
god. For Stirner this was simply a “change of masters”.[59]
Hegelian humanism encountered strong criticism from former disciples and
comrades, most significantly in the publication of Stirner’s The Ego and
Marx’s The German Ideology. Both thinkers proposed a more radical break
with past Left Hegelian positions, and the language that had justified
it. Despite accusations of nihilism, Stirner’s “heaven-storming”
dismissal of the objectivity, universality, value, truth and meaning
still presented a description of individual-centred existence, with the
ego as sovereign as a positive appropriation of the true content of his
cultural and philosophical inheritance. It is a mistake therefore to see
Stirner as an anomaly in the history of philosophy or even as
“discordant” in some way.[60] The Ego did not exist in an intellectual
vacuum, and the context of Left-Hegelianism reveals how Stirner’s
thought was a legitimate product of this movement’s wider discourse, a
serious attempt to understand the transition from religion to
philosophy. Stirner (as all Left Hegelians did) saw himself as
dialectically concluding and fulfilling the Hegelian project. Similarly
Marx saw that within Hegelian thought were the means, and even the
imperative, to go beyond Hegel. He understood exactly what Stirner was
attempting, “a step which leads beyond Hegelian idealism and negates
it”;[61] he also knew how potentially damaging this could be to the
direction of his own work.
Rather than view The Ego as some wild or “severely mutilated”[62]
transformation of Hegel’s characteristic concepts, its construction
should be seen as a result of that philosophical paradigm which all Left
Hegelians practiced and embraced: dialectical development. There is even
room to regard Stirner as a concordant Hegelian par excellence. His
intimacy with Hegel has been explored by Stepelevich, who argues that
Stirner reinterprets Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit with new and
improved vision.[63] For Hegel, the “Absolute” is “the power of the
negative”;, i.e. that which views and criticises every determinate
thought – the Subject. For Stirner, in his critique, this “power of the
negative” is the single consciousness – himself, or the ego. Karl Löwith
similarly detected a logical connection stating that The Ego “is in
reality an ultimate logical consequence of Hegel’s historical
system”.[64] Whilst these interpretations elevate Stirner from the often
eccentric billing he is given in intellectual history, describing
Stirner as the “Last of the Hegelians” implies that The Ego is the “end
of a historical series of ever more decadent inheritors of Hegel’s
doctrines”.[65] We should recognise that whilst he attacked Hegelianism,
Stirner’s thought was still a product of it, bound within its
parameters, be they linguistic or logical. Therefore the choice lies
between seeing a “terminal orantithetical” relationship, one which could
make Stirner, in a sense, “the perfected Hegelian”.[66]
materialism.
The dissolution of Left Hegelianism coincided with the early thinking of
Marx who grew up among the ruins of their philosophy. Together with
Stirner, Marx accepted the philosophical categories and problems of
Hegelian thought. Placing Stirner among the many strands and mutations
of Hegelian thought highlights his intellectual proximity to the thought
of the young Marx. Whilst preparing to demolish German Idealism, Marx
entered the metaphysical fray at the same moment as Stirner, and
wrestled with the same ontological questions. The publication of The Ego
shook the pro-Feuerbachian position Marx found himself in 1844 and
perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, Marx was to experience the
depth and implications of Stirner’s criticism. Marx had originally
planned to write a review of The Ego; however he stalled whilst Bauer
and Feuerbach fielded their responses. Then, feeling clearly personally
provoked, Marx postponed previously commissioned works to pen “Sankt
Max”. After completing the work, Marx wavered and the criticism of
Stirner remained unprinted. Within this privately led dispute, The
German Ideology contained the seeds of a new philosophy, created to be
immune to a Stirnerian criticism: historical materialism. The birth of
this radical new theory was muted. These ideas were left in a drawer
along with “Sankt Max”, whilst Marx, wishing to escape the idealist
philosophy of the Left Hegelians, charged into political life, into
intellectual feuds with Proundhon and Bakunin.
Between 1844 and 1846 Marx and Engels were busy forging their new
revolutionary outlook. The German Ideology was composed in Brussels,
where Marx had moved in 1845 following his deportation from Paris by the
Guizot government who had been pressured by Prussia to expel the leading
collaborators of Vorwärts. During the last three months of 1845, Marx
and Engels wrote The German Ideology. In early 1846, both men visited
London in order to found a network of communist correspondence
committees to provide German, French and English socialists with access
to each other’s ideas and activities. The backdrop to Marx’s life was
one of financial struggle, censorship and political activity and exile.
However, the pair had integrated their theoretical and practical aims,
revolutionary communist teaching and rallying the progressive elements
of the proletariat and revolutionary intelligentsia.
In theoretical terms, this revolutionary outlook was partially created
through the intellectual struggle with what Marx saw as bourgeois and
petty bourgeois ideology of the Left Hegelians, of which Max Stirner was
seen as the perfect embodiment. The German Ideology directed criticism
against the many apparent failings of Left Hegelianism, many which echo
Stirner’s own critique of the movement. For Marx, however, the authority
of delusions or Stirner’s “spooks” over human minds was not a result of
mental distortion cured by working upon the consciousness, but rather
rooted in social conditions. For both Stirner and Marx, Left Hegelian
humanism was governed by false ideas where men are enslaved to the
creations of their minds. For Marx, the power of philosophy was to
expose and destroy these false ideas and revolutionise society. In the
Preface of The German Ideology Marx outlined his objections to the Left
Hegelians, and saw clearly his task in:
“uncloaking these sheep, who take themselves and are taken for wolves;
of showing that their bleating merely imitates in a philosophic form the
conceptions of the German middle class; that the boasting of these
philosophic commentators only mirrors the wretchedness of the real
conditions in Germany.”[67]
Throughout The German Ideology Marx clearly enjoys making fun of the
philosophical pretensions of the Left Hegelians, yet he also levels the
serious claim that the movement’s achievements only embodied a
corruption of Hegel, i.e. “the putrescence of the absolute spirit”.[68]
Why then compose such a lengthy rebuttal of German post-Hegelian
philosophy if all it amounted to was “shadows of reality”?[69] The
answer is simple: Stirner. Marxists tend to regard The German Ideology
as nothing more than a secondary attack against Left Hegelians, even an
enlarged version of The Holy Family. However, The Ego had unsettled
Marx; regardless of whether a public debate was to be had, he felt
inclined to convince himself at least that Stirner was wrong. Marx
realised that Stirner’s position was perfectly concordant with general
development of post-Hegelian dialectics in German philosophy and thus an
alternative to his profanization of the Hegel. In reading The Ego, Marx
came to reject Feuerbachian humanism, of which he had previously thought
highly, praising Feuerbach’s “brilliant arguments” in the Essence of
Christianity and defending his “real humanism” in The Holy Family. Now
revealed as a “pious atheist” by Stirner, Marx could not avoid
denunciating Feuerbach, but equally had to avoid an association with the
powerful Stirnerian position that had originally prompted the
rejection.[70] The German Ideology was less an attack, but more as an
angry defence against the theologically inspired and passivist humanism
of Feuerbach and the extreme voluntarism and subjectivist individualism
of Stirner.[71]
Marx’s familiarity with the aims of Left Hegelianism meant he agreed
that the more progressive an idea was, the more it desecrated the
quasi-religious status Hegel’s legacy. In The German Ideology Marx
attempted to be more radical than both Bauer and Feuerbach in profaning
the regions of Hegel’s thought which had been “transfigured”. However
whilst Marx believed that, like Stirner, he could fight against
illusions and opiates, against religion, political ideals and eventually
against Hegelian philosophy itself, he still retained the hidden
“eschatological attitude” and “implicit revolutionary drive” underlying
Hegelianism in mid-1840s.[72] Unlike Marx, Stirner didn’t retain Hegel’s
eschatology and regarded it as simply another “phantom” to be exorcised
from the mind, one perhaps essential if Hegelian thought was to be
overcome. Marx adhered to Hegel in so far as he chose not to abandon
some form of philosophical reconciliation, though not of the speculative
sort. For reconciliation to be attained in the materialtransformation of
the real world, Marx would have to elaborate and expound one of his most
controversial and debated theories: historical materialism.
Rather disingenuously the old Marx considered the birth of historical
materialism as simply theoretical analysis eschewing from purely
theoretical research.[73] Unfortunately there was no comprehensive or
detached study of “socioeconomic realities” that came to support Marx’s
theory in 1845; instead he was motivated by his desire to defend the
“passion and idealism” emanating from the dissolution of Hegel’s
philosophy against Stirner’s noxious philosophy of “total
disillusionment”.[74] Stirner, as a minority of commentators have
observed, played a decisive role in motivating Marx’s socialist thought
in this direction. The subjective origins of the “materialistic
conception of history” reflected Marx’s attempt to show that “the
putrescence of the absolute spirit” must not go as far as it does in The
Ego, yet it was perfectly acceptable to be a Hegelian of “revolutionary”
inspiration. It seems paradoxical to think that historical materialism,
Marx’s great epistemological “break”, could have emerged from the
context described above. Stirner’s impact has been displaced. Regardless
of the self-assured position Marx felt he had reached in The German
Ideology with regard to the specific criticisms of Left Hegelians, the
real gem of the work was clearly the materialist conception of history.
For Marx, it provided an ingenious escape route from the all-too
parochial problems of Left Hegelianism and German Idealist Philosophy,
whilst it also served as a methodological prerequisite for a new
political economy. In a letter to German publishers in Leske on August 1
1846, Marx pointed out that the publication of a polemical work against
the German philosophers was necessary in order to “prepare readers for
his point of view in this field of economic science”. The German
Ideology should therefore be seen chiefly as a polemical work; one that
Marx felt sure would lift him up and away from the ontological
squabbling of the Left Hegelians towards economics, historical analysis
and socialism.
For Marx, speculative philosophy had resulted in idealist self-deception
epitomised in the work of the Left Hegelians. Marx frequently attacked
the sterile and static nature of his milieu, stating “German critique
has, right up to its latest efforts, never left the realm of
philosophy”.[75] The movement’s ignorance of both of the need to specify
an agent for revolutionary change and of the nature of social and
historical explanation had meant their philosophy failed. Despite the
decline of Left Hegelian humanism, Marx’s complaint was essentially
methodological.[76] The Left Hegelians, like Descartes, thought that the
illusions of social life could be left behind if one takes the
standpoint of “self-consciousness”, “species” or the “ego”. For Marx,
this was a truly insulated standpoint. However, Stirner too had attacked
the Archimedean standpoint or standpoint “outside the world” in 1844:
“This foreign standpoint is the world of mind, of ideas, thoughts,
concepts, essences; it is heaven”.[77] In concordance with Marx, Stirner
attacked the Left Hegelians with similar gusto, identifying the same
weaknesses:
“Now nothing but mind rules in the world. An innumerable multitude of
concepts buzz about in people’s heads, and what are those doing who
endeavour to get further? They are negating these concepts to put new
ones in their place! … Thus the confusion of concepts moves
forward.”[78]
In recognising the force of Stirner’s criticism and the implications for
Left Hegelian modes of thought, Marx had to be just as “hard-line” on
idealism as Stirner had been. He had to adopt a position in which all
ideas were divested of their independence and autonomy. For a moment at
least, Marx was allied with Stirner’s heaven-storming nihilism, but only
in order to escape it:
“Morality, religion, metaphysics … have no history, no development; but
human beings, developing their material production and their material
intercourse, alter, along with this, their reality; also their thinking
and the products of their thinking.”[79]
Marx’s response, that the “material world” takes primacy over the ideal,
consciousness or thought itself, was not merely a major development in
terms of his thinking, but was the “thermo-nuclear” antidote to
Stirnerian egoism he desperately needed.[80]
Hegel had maintained that the ideal determined the material; Marx’s
supposed modernism was finding the Hegelian dialectic “standing on its
head” and turning it “right side up again”.[81] Quite what Marx means is
not readily apparent. He inverted the primacy of the ideal found in
German Idealist, Hegelian and post-Hegelian philosophy by replacing it
with an older form of materialism. The materialist conception of
consciousness can be summed up Marx’s famous axiom “Life is not
determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” (1846). Marx’s
paradigmatic shift invoked eighteenth-century materialism, which took
matter as primary and regarded consciousness, thought and sensation as
secondary. The French materialists of the eighteenth century provided
Marx with the simple mechanical categories that constituted the terms in
which the origin and history of man were to be explained. The “newness”
of Marxian materialism, the idea of conceiving of matter dialectically,
highlights Marx’s innate debt to Hegelian thought. Yet historical
materialism was also a backwards step. Marx wanted to reassert the
fundamental principle of eighteenth-century historical naturalism; that
historical events have natural causes. Hegel had broken away from
naturalism but had not demanded an autonomous history, “Marx went back
on this demand and swept Hegel away; he subjected history to dominion by
natural science which Hegel had freed it from”.[82] Thus Marx took a
“retrograde step”, which was simultaneously also prelude to an advance
in terms of political economy.[83] Despite cryptic statements such as
“standing Hegel on his feet instead of his head”, Marx’s “conjuring
trick” essentially took over the idea, inherited from both Kant and
Hegel, in which history culminated in the complete unity of man, the
identification of existence with essence and the abolition of
contingency in human life. For Marx, humanity was not doomed to
contingency, as Stirner maintained.[84]
As his response to Stirner suggests, Marx’s theory had no real
scientific basis, and its genesis appears in a somewhat dubious light.
Whilst it allowed Marx to condemn the present world order in terms of
the immanent laws of history itself, as a solution it was both
“ingenious and disingenuous”.[85] Stirner’s nihilism meant Marx had to
defend the basic claim to seek meaning in an ideal, rather than giving
up the whole conception of a salvation of man. Marx was of course keen
to emphasise that he was not really pursuing an ideal at all; his
presuppositions were “not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real
presuppositions from which abstraction can only be made in the
imagination”.[86] Marx saw them as empirical facts. Stirner, on the
other hand claimed “I presuppose only myself – and since it is I who
presuppose myself, I have no presuppositions”.[87] Marx painstakingly
insists Stirner himself does have ideals and even his own morality. Yet,
the materialistic reduction of ideals to historical necessities very
closely resembles a Stirnerian abandoning of ideals; nihilism was
inherent in both positions. How can Marx’s thought retain its
revolutionary aspect if economic patterns and laws thoroughly determine
man’s historical existence? Yet far from relinquishing his revolutionary
ideals, Marx believed he had succeeded in preserving by integrating them
into real history. This was the core of both Marx’s defence against
Stirner and the essence of the materialistic conception of history: the
ideals pursued by the Left Hegelians were declared to be the “immanent
telos of history itself”.[88] The Left Hegelian revolutionary force
became an immanent law of objective history. In other words, Marx turned
an ought into an is.
It has not been properly acknowledged just how much The Ego is
responsible for pushing Marx into this epistemological corner. By
attempting to incorporate ideals into actual history, Marx went as far
as it is possible to rationalise the Left Hegelian revolutionary drive
without abandoning the “basic Left Hegelian insight”.[89] Marx had
reached an impossible dilemma, one which has haunted his more
intelligent disciples until today. As such, Marx could no longer
encourage action as he now predicted change; history did not depend upon
man’s conscious intentions; it depended on what humans do. This seems
incompatible with Marx’s dismissal of ideals and represents the basic
ambiguity of his thought, a blind spot which he left for Marxists to
excuse or explain. The contradictory nature of Marx’s position reflected
how “almost against his will” Marx was forced into dismissal by
Stirner.[90] On the one hand we have Marx the determinist, who will
later refer to laws and tendencies that work “with iron necessity
towards inevitable results”,[91] on the other we have Marx the
voluntarist, keen to incite the proletariat to rebellion. However, the
materialist conception of history was, in itself, a change of
consciousness, merely a new theory of reality and thus “recognition of
the existing order by means of another interpretation”.[92] The real
difference between Marx and the Left Hegelians was that instead of
pretending to save the world by changing their ideas, Marx arrived at an
idea that couldn’t be changed, a theory in which humanity saves itself,
regardless of philosophical speculations.
Historical materialism was the result of an attempt to preserve the Left
Hegelian humanist heritage in spite of Stirner’s challenge. Stirner’s
exposure of quasi-religious basis of Man undermined the idiom developed
by Marx in his pre-1845 writings. To escape the neo-Christian ethics of
humanism it was not enough to simply discard the legitimacy of the
humanist or socialist goal. In a totalitarian fashion, Marx divested all
ideas of any “autonomous” role whatsoever. Many commentators have argued
that the doctrine of historical materialism provided Marx with his most
powerful weapon against idealist philosophy. It did not – despite how
much Marx may have convinced himself – deal sufficiently with Stirnerian
thought. Like Marx, Stirner’s project was destructive. The Ego sought to
simply abolish philosophy in general by affirming that it was all
nonsense, summed in Stirner’s famous aphorisms “I have set my cause upon
nothing” and “Nothing is more to me than myself”.[93] Stirner’s
modernity resides in this progressive leap beyond Marx, beyond a
revolutionary mentality which required “moral postulates” or an ought.
For Stirner, uniqueness and creativity begin only when a person goes
beyond social identity and roles. He had shocked Marx into revising the
ethical and humanistic assumptions of a socialist agenda. At the same
time Stirner indirectly contributed to the creation and evolution of the
distinctive and classical “Marxist” doctrines.
In short, The Ego moved Marx from a passionately moral, even
sentimental, commitment to communism as a humanitarian creed, to a
sociological affirmation of communism as the historical outcome of
objective economic forces. During the mid-1840s Marx and Engels saw
themselves at a decisive stage in working out the philosophical
principles of scientific communism or “the scientific world outlook of
the revolutionary proletariat”.[94] Marx must have been painfully aware,
therefore, of the need to qualify his own action in theory. This crisis
for Marx reached its height in 1845, when The German Ideologyindicated
Marx’s final abandonment of the speculative abstractions of Feuerbach
and others; the very abstractions which had served as the metaphysical
foundations of his socialism. The unresolved nature of Marx’s
uncomfortable encounter with Stirner is also evident in the development
of the materialist conception of history. Historical materialism’s more
inconvenient implications and thus the spectre of The Ego haunted Marx;
burdening him with the “self-defeating task of reconciling a
“voluntarist movement” in an “economically determined historical
process”.[95]
By revealing “the hollowness of slogans which appealed to humanity,
country, or abstract freedom…” Stirner had “prepared the way for a
realistic analysis of the issues these phrases were used to
conceal”.[96] Despite Stirner’s nascent influence on the thought of the
young Marx, Marx came to dominate the historical era, his solution to
the crises of Hegelian ontology emerged as legitimate, whilst the
history and intentionality of Stirner’s thought were “excluded” in a
Foucauldian sense. However, as I have demonstrated by studying of the
genesis of historical materialism, the impact of The Ego on the
evolution of socialist thought was far from negligible.
In many respects, Stirner’s work stands as an anticipatory attack on
Marx’s thought. Modern critics of Marxism have frequently pointed out
inadequacies in the Marxist conception of history, especially concerning
what the theory had rendered obsolete in traditional philosophy. The Ego
essentially anticipated these inadequacies. 1845 is judged to be the
moment in Marx’s philosophical career where he “left behind” a
fundamental discourse on ethics; one that Hook argues “still occupies us
today”.[97] Marx’s new theory of historical materialism cut short a
discussion about any systems of ethics or public morality. Many have
recognised this negation in Marx’s work. For Marx, the crucial issue was
the validity of his theory of history; he felt notions of morality and
of religion had finally been eliminated from his work. However, the old
assumption that “scientific socialism” was a scientific system has
yielded to the notion that such a system of thought is in essence
moralistic or even religious; what Martin Buber calls a “socialist
secularisation of eschatology”.[98] If we accept this radical new
perspective, as many do, then Stirner’s stance in The Ego emerges as
more modern and radical than was previously considered. Stirner would no
doubt have agreed that the materialist conception of history was
eschatological; a religious mode of thought. Therefore, Stirner’s early,
if somewhat undeveloped attack on morality, often disguised as ideology,
assumes a vital position as the original critique of the young Marx.
In spite of the anti-moral nature of historical materialism and Marx’s
explicit repudiations of morality, his early thought was packed with
moral judgements, (e.g. condemnations, directions etc). Whether or not
we see Marx as moralist is beside the point. Marx did not practice moral
philosophy in the traditional sense of developing any form of system of
ethics, or enquiry. Whilst criticising The Ego, Marx was inspired to
claim:
“The communists … preach no morality, which Stirner does too much … on
the contrary, they know well that egoism as well as self-sacrifice is,
in certain circumstances, a necessary form of the self-assertion of
individuals.”[99]
The question of Marx’s status as a clandestine moralist who openly
opposed moral philosophy remains a key contradiction, especially in his
early thought. It represents a temporal rip in the fabric of Marxian
thought that still plagues its acolytes today. Its origins, found in
young Marx’s reading of The Ego, may further unsettle his adherents. If
Marx needed inspiration, or even encouragement to abandon his more
explicit moral leanings, then he needed to look no further than
Stirner’s polemic. Stirner had refuted Left Hegelian humanism,
especially targeting its innate moral content. He also attacked most
forms of moral convention, challenging the absolute basis of moral
edicts against polygamy, blasphemous desecration and even incest. Such
acts were still able to cause a “moral shudder”[100] in the common man,
an indication for Stirner that the actual emancipation of the ego, what
others might call spiritual emancipation, had yet to be realised.
For Stirner, self-possession was to be sought by the judicious
organisation of desire, rather than its arbitrary suppression. Taking
his cue from Charles Fourier, Stirner lauded animal appetites as more
healthy and poetic than a life of abstinence. Just as Feuerbachian
humanism was seen as the negation of traditional theology, Stirnerian
egoism was hailed the “negation of traditional ethics”.[101] Instead of
Man creating God in his own image, Stirner taught that the individual
ego had created Man in his own image. In The Essence of
Christianity(1841) Feuerbach believed he was being truly radical by
having dissolved the subject (God) into all of its predicates (Man);
Stirner had simply demonstrated how far such dialectical sabotage could
logically go, he chose to dissolve the predicate Society, into the
individual pronouns – I, me, myself. The individual ego was Stirner’s
“laughing heir” to the whole Hegelian project.[102] Stirnerian egoism
was not conceived of as a new form of morality, rather it was opposed to
morality. This is not to say egoism was inherently immoral; Stirner
rejected the idea of absolute opposition between moral categories,
“good” and “evil”, regarding them as “antediluvian”.[103]
Stirner’s claims of ethical antinomianism were deeply felt and taken
seriously by Marx. The Ego encouraged him to dispel any ethical ideas
from the new direction of his thought. Marx already regarded the
Hegelian accounts of political, judicial and moral conceptions as
critically wrong, but The Ego tipped the balance. If Marx’s moral or
metaphysical scepticism stems from Stirner, then the potency of his
criticism of the nihilism inherent in The Ego needs to be re-assessed.
Marx used Stirner’s desecration of morality to justify his own thought,
then proceeded to decry Stirnerian egoism as religious thought, as even
“preaching” a morality. Classifying all idealistic philosophies as
theodicies, a “surreptitious sort of clericalism”[104] that must be
repudiated, was a result of the dogmatic materialist positions that Marx
and Engels came to adopt. All idealists were by default religious
thinkers, yet the materialistic basis of their thought did little to
elucidate their position on moral teaching. The mystification
surrounding Marx’s conception of morality finds its basis in his
distortion of Stirner’s moral nihilism. Rather than offering an
alternative moral theory for communism Marx had disregarded all morality
in the pursuit of revolution and class struggle.
In truth, evacuating the moral content of his thought was something Marx
only aspired to. Ultimately, Stirner had pushed Marx to a philosophical
position where the moral content of his work now had to be implicit.
Sidney Hook states “Marx leaned so far backward that, soon after his
death, the myth became current that he had no place for any ethics in
his philosophy of social activity”.[105] Marx’s reaction was a tactical
manoeuvre, allowing him to preserve the silent moral content of his
work. Karl Popper saw Marx as a man for whom “principles of humanity and
decency … needed no discussion” they were “to be taken for
granted”.[106] However, if Marx decided to adopt a personal notion of
moral principles, why respond to Stirnerian egoism which was so
obviously an aberration? It is difficult to believe that Marx simply
avoided explicit moral theory because he disliked “preaching”, as Popper
assumes. Marx’s real antipathy for moral philosophy was rooted in his
actual thought. The very thought consolidated in The German Ideology as
a result of reading The Ego.
Regardless of the problems Marx left unresolved, the crisis of 1845 had
helped him finally realise the aim of his thought: to prove future world
revolution. However, yet again another Marxian impossibility emerged;
the problem of reconciling historical inevitability with an ethical
model. Historical inevitability could hardly function as an inherent
moral value for Marx.[107] The determinism of the materialist conception
of history had necessitated an angry confrontation with Stirner. It also
illuminated a displeasing characteristic of the young Marx, his
inability to recognize any opposition to his revolution. Further, it
showed that Marx underestimated the role of discontent in historical
events, which Stirner and Hegel did not; they had allowed contingency an
important role in the historical process. Crucially, unlike Marx,
Stirner argued that the historical process had to be the work of human
hands; history was never an abstraction that caused events. It was
concrete, specific and human in all its forms. He also recognised that
certain thinkers had hijacked history, and divested it of its autonomy:
“History seeks for man: but he is I, you, we. Sought as a mysterious
essence, as the divine, first as God, then as man (humanity, humaneness,
and mankind), he is found as the individual, the finite, the unique
one.”[108]
Stirner saw that all kinds of politics wanted to educate man, to bring
him to the realisation of his “essence”, to give man a “destiny” to make
something out of him – namely, a “true man”.[109] This itself was a
ruse, making thinkers fall for “the proper error of religion”.[110]
Whether one saw destiny as divine or human was of no concern. Stirner
found that both positions held that man should become this and that:
this postulate, this commandment, to be something.
Incongruously, in his reading of The Ego Marx felt he could finally
reject a system of morality and yet maintain moral positions. He was
extremely anxious about the fact that his description of socialism could
become tainted by abstract moral ideals, ideals which Stirner had shown
to be transcendent. However, it was Stirner who had equipped Marx with
the very tools to wage a methodological campaign against Feuerbach’s
quasi-religious conception of “Man”, enabling him to reject an “ethics
of love” or a “politics of socialism” through his analysis of the social
nature of man. Such a solution would have been implausible to Stirner.
To many, the religious essence of historical materialism was
“superficially obscured by Marx’s rejection of the traditional
religions”.[111] However, Stirner had already identified such religious
essence in Marx’s pre-1845 intellectual allies. His criticisms of
Feuerbach were equally applicable to the young Marx who had stated: “The
criticism of religion ends with the precept that the supreme being for
man is man”.[112] In the same way Stirner observed the religious essence
of Left Hegelian humanism and early socialism, Marx too stands accused,
his atheism was still a categorically religious proposition.[113] Thus,
Stirner’s original accusation of the “pious” atheism of the Left
Hegelians is particularly compelling when applied to the thought of
young Marx.[114]
It is probable that Stirner would have seen the young Marx as a kind of
post-theological moralist attempting to solve problem of original sin
and ethical commitment through the redemptive power of human “History”.
The picture that Marx paints of capitalists and the bourgeois as
manifestations of evil, and his dismissal of the individual’s
responsibility for their own misery would surely be seen as the
personification of “clericalism”. Stirnerian critique would no doubt
pronounce Marx a vulgar moralist, subordinating the individual to the
new God, “History”. Now that history itself was moralised, the profound
Hegelian awareness of history as amoral was lost.
Like morality, Stirner regarded society as an equally fictive notion,
and saw that moral obligation was presumably derived from the social
nature of man. Stirner observed that man’s social dimension was merely
an alternative type of religious and moral ideology. His hostility to
“sacred society” abounds in The Ego; it was the arena in which “the most
oppressive evils make themselves felt”,[115] its domination was more
brutal and insensitive than any previous despotism. Not only was
Stirner’s notion of state antithetical to Marxism, but by utterly
rejecting the constructions of idealist philosophers he could only
discover consciousness inside the mind; not in some trans-empirical ego
or the Marxian “social being”. For Stirner, emphasis upon the social
nature of the mind, the evaluation of all ideas in relation to the
social whole (or state), represented a menace to individual freedom and
to the autonomy of the individual. He considered social duties as purely
self-legislated. Our relationship to society was seen as one mediated by
the ego. Whilst society may pattern self-realisation and define the
egoist’s rebellion, its formative influence fades in favour of the
individual until “society” itself is entirely displaced. For Marx,
however, the “atomism” of civil society was offensive – and had to be
transcended: Stirner had failed to root his ideas in the social process,
hence the arbitrary nature of his ideology. However, Stirner implied
that certain ideas are not merely reflections of their social
environment and can remain outside the appraisal that they are socially
conditioned by. For Stirner these were the figurative orderings of
experiences, the result of the irreducible egocentric nature of the
individual; self-reflection mediated by personal drives and private
needs.
Marx’s communist vision would still require the individual to conform to
a pattern of behaviour, though not through traditional morals, but
through collective obligation. Stirner’s critique of Feuerbach and
Proudhon had already shown that socialist morality was full of
superstitions, just as much as the Apostles’ creed. Julius’ article in
the second volume of Wigands Vierteljahrschrift (1845) attacked the
essentially Feuerbachian character of Marx’s “practical humanism”, which
Julius considered “religious alienation” – clearly inspired by Stirner’s
perception of socialism.[116] Stirner’s criticisms anticipate much later
accusations, especially from contemporary existentialists, against
Marxism: “Society … is a new master, a new spook, a new “supreme being”
which takes us into its service and allegiance”.[117] If society held
the individual back from achieving autonomy then communism was its most
severe form of suppression. In criticising Weitling’s communism, Stirner
stated that the Communists sought the welfare of all, “true welfare”,
which would eventually degenerate into fixity.[118] Stirner regarded
communism as the “strictest” or most dogmatic paradigm based on the idea
of “Man”. It was a sovereign power exalting itself over men, becoming
their supreme essence, a new god. “Do we not with this come right to the
point where religion begins its dominion of violence?” Stirner
argued.[119] The philosophy of community was enshrined in the old
Feuerbachian problem: separation from human essence. Essence was set
above individuals as something to be striven for, and Stirner argued
that both “Communism, and, consciously egoism-reviling humanism, still
count on love”.[120] The socialist stipulation that individuals must
work to become truly human simply reproduced the religious division of
individuals into “an essential and unessential self”.[121] Here, Stirner
refers to an obscure article by a contemporary – the young Karl Marx.
The dualism that supported social liberalism in all of its various
guises could not be tolerated and was brashly dismissed by Stirner: “we
will hear nothing of this cutting in two”.[122]
Marx misread The Ego, regarding Stirner as an ideologue embroiled in the
malicious circle of critical diatribe which had crippled Left Hegelian
philosophy. Stirner, however, consciously refused to uphold egoism as a
set of ideas or principles.
“Owness includes in itself everything own, and brings to honour again
what Christian language dishonoured. But owness has not any alien
standard either, as it is not in any sense an idea like freedom,
morality, humanity and the like: it is only a description of the –
owner.”[123]
Stirner desired above all to break free of the conceptual quagmire of
the 1840s where to postulate revolution was the trend. Stirner’s
critique of morality and society had shook the young Marx, forcing him
to abandon notions of “species”, “man” and “estrangement” that had
previously been assigned crucial roles in his earlier thought, but
Stirner’s attack on the whole host ofisms went deeper still. If Marx’s
repudiation of The Ego necessitated expunging the questions of ethical
meaning from his thought, then the issues of individual fulfilment and
emancipation – the very nucleus of Stirner’s thought – would also have
to be negated.
Freedom for Stirner was always freedom from some thing or other. Human
freedom was better interpreted as “freedom to action”; Stirner logically
concluded “my freedom becomes complete only when my – might”.[124]
Neither is freedom something to be given, it must be taken and defended:
“If you took might, freedom would come of itself”.[125] Ideologues of
political liberty were more dangerous, in Stirner’s mind, than even
religious or philosophical thinkers. The idea of a society based upon a
single principle (e.g. Communism) was simply an obligation putting man
at the service of the state: “Liberty of the people is not
myliberty!”.[126] Stirner saw that modern socialism, especially the kind
espoused by Proudhon, interposed a new “principle” between the
individual and the property of all, the socialist notion of “social
justice”, a concept just as potentially oppressive as the religious
notion of “divine grace”. Both socialism and communism left the
individual’s mind unchanged; it was still “a mind of dependence”.[127]
Communism was a backward step, a “dependence on another … on the
generality or collectivity”, a “status, a condition hindering my free
movement, a sovereign power over me”.[128]
Marx’s new form of “social justice” was founded on the notion of labour,
compulsory work done in the service of society. For Stirner, the
division of labour, with all its subdivisions, was simply a conceptual
apparatus directed against the individual. This of course led to
alienated labour, which Marx too would later claim to resolve. Stirner
argued that for the individual to negotiate so many forms of alienation
in the world he simply had to “expropriate” his property, his creative
strength and activity, to enable him to rely peacefully on himself
again. Like Hegel, true concrete individuality (Einzelheit) was a return
from alienation. Stirner’s notion of the Einzige, the “Ego”, more
helpfully translated as “The Unique One” clarifies his whole project.
“The Unique One” is man in his irreducible uniqueness, thus egoism is
the final definition of the human “essence”, not the subject of an
ethical category, but an uncomplicated existential fact. If one could
perceive this, all conceivable forms of alienation, conscious or
unconscious, would be impossible. Eigentum (Own-ness or Property) did
not mean a seizure of some moral content, but a man’s identity with his
manifestations, above all, with his individual existence. The notion has
Hegelian heritage: In Philosophy of Right the immediate manifestation of
right (liberty) was the possession by man of his body and his bodily
functions (work). Stirner took his position from the minor degree of
liberty advocated by Hegel. But the idea of liberty, like so many
concepts for Stirner, had been set up as a new absolute, that man should
be free. Stirner declared such a concept was nothing more than “… a new
longing, a new torment, a new deviation, a new deity, a new contrition …
”.[129]
Stirner’s opposition to the dogmatic ideologues clearly engaged the
thought of the young Marx. However, their two antithetical worlds – the
concrete direct experience of The Ego and the world of universal labour
outlined in The German Ideology – would never be reconciled. Marx, as
ever the disciple rather than the usurper of Hegelian thought, had still
sought some kind of accord. In attempting reconciliation, Marx decided
to put forward the doctrine of individual consciousness mediated by
social consciousness. The real question was to what extent social ties
necessarily determined individual consciousness. Marx could not give a
definitive answer. Such ambiguity lends support for Stirner; for if
consciousness was completely determined by society then nothing was to
be done, and an upheaval in the minds of men was therefore not possible.
Stirner allowed individual consciousness to retain some autonomy,
epitomised in the individual ego.
Marx could not perceive of any form such “oppositionist
consciousness”[130] that characterised Stirner’s position and surely
must arise if credence is given to ideas that intend to transform
political reality. Both Stirner and Bauer held that recognition of
dissent or “oppositionist consciousness” was essential to their project:
the merciless use of the principles of criticism, the principle of the
dialectic that would destroy the empty forms founded on dualism.[131]
For Marx, criticism or thought alone was not enough. Thought was the
acknowledged servant of human needs, and desired that philosophy
(generalised thought) become an instrument in changing the world. There
was no “oppositionist consciousness”; only moments of opposition that
were inevitably transformed into successive phases of development in the
historical process. Marx’s notion of social consciousness allowed him to
transcend Stirner’s individualism and as well as the abstract morality
of French materialism, and modify their historical conceptions with the
notion of a dynamic, propelling movement in nature and human thinking –
the dialectic.
Stirner saw man as progressing through stages of conflict and
alienation. He understood as Hegel had, that freedom in contemporary
society was explainable in terms of an individual’s orientation to a set
of moral postulates and social practices. Whilst opposing Hegel, Stirner
ironically posed a truly Hegelian problem: Could the “negativity”
inherent in Hegel’s process of change, the dialectic, ever be halted for
any possible ideological reasons? Both Stirner and Marx laid claim to
the Hegelian dialectic, and both claimed they were demystifying its
nature. Yet Marx’s “fundamental difficulty vis-à-vis Stirner” was the
question of “how will man be once he is free of alienation?”.[132]
Stirner refused to observe that the ideological process required an
intermediate stage; a “total alienation” of consciousness. For Marx,
this stage was to be found in the proletarian classes and necessitated
revolution. Stirner’s reality was the world of his immediate experience;
he wanted power straight away, not after some remote and hypothetical
“proletarian revolution”.
Despite Marx’s own revolutionary tactics and tendencies of the future he
saw displayed in his own age, historical materialism meant he lacked a
doctrine for the immediate present – least of all for those whose
existence was resigned to the limits of the capitalism’s grasp and
economic process. On the other hand, for dissenting members of society
who had yet to become socialist and look forward to the dawn of a “new
order”, Stirnerian egoism provided an alternative protest: disobedience,
radical questioning, active resistance and bodily enjoyment. Most
importantly, it aimed at the deconstruction of linguistic “spooks”,
fixed ideas which ruled the real world. For Marx, Stirner’s radical
resistance did not engage the working class and was dismissed as a
“petty bourgeois essence”. It is ironic that Marx considered Stirner as
a quintessential wallflower of history, epitomising a shopkeeper’s
egoism. Stirner considered himself as going beyond dissent, conjuring a
picture of insurrection, rather than the polarised image of society that
engendered a new, Communistic change of masters: a new religion of
society. Stirner saw it as deceptive that the Enlightenment had simply
amounted to transferring the balance of religion to humanism in its
various bogus guises. Out of this last divisive stage of Hegelianism,
Stirner saw no reason for the dialectic to be subsumed in history.
Unlike Marx, he laid claim to its destructive force in the battle
against alienating concepts:
“… why should I only dissent (think otherwise) about a thing? Why not
push the thinking otherwise to its last extremity, that of no longer
having any regard at all for the thing, and therefore thinking its
nothingness, crushing it? Then the conception itself has en end, because
there is no longer anything to conceive of it.”[133]
Now it is possible to understand how Stirner would seen have the
“historical dialectic” as the “Will of God” reiterated in pseudo-secular
terms, and that Marx, in true theological fashion, attempted to mask the
causal efficacy given to ideological abstractions as “empirical” forces.
Stirner’s position was clearly nihilistic, but by attacking the very
idea of European Enlightenment in the nineteenth-century he had called
into question much more than its socialist doctrines, and insisted that
we lose all of our ideological props.
history and Stirnerian egoism.
Marx’s critique of Stirner in The German Ideology was a means of
distinguishing himself from what was, in his eyes, the impotent Left
Hegelian movement. For Marx, alienation was no longer a spiritual
phenomenon, but the objective forms of man’s economic products, the
separation of man from his production. Nevertheless, Marx’s position can
be interpreted as a relapse into Left Hegelianism: He urged a change of
consciousness in order to observe the correctness of a new standpoint;
the communistBetrachtungsweise (mode of view). Instead of the standpoint
from which consciousness is taken as the living individual, Marx wanted
to highlight the rational superiority of his new position adopted in
1844 i.e. that consciousness was a “social product”. More generally,
Marx wanted to establish that labour was our fundamental human relation
to the world and must be regarded as the “celebrated unity of the human
being and nature”.[134] In line with his attempt to leave behind
“philosophy” as he saw it, Marx refused to treat this as a metaphysical
question to be answered by the creation of a metaphysical premise.
Stirner, as opposed to Marx and many others, saw no prescriptive or
essential elements in human nature. He had acquiesced “I am a man just
as the earth is a star”.[135] Neither would Stirner fall into the trap
of picturing a future for man, since it would entail constructing
another external ideal:
“People have always supposed that they must give me a destiny lying
outside myself, so that at last they demanded that I should lay claim to
the human because I am – man. This is the Christian magic circle.”[136]
Stirner’s greatest fear was the “transcendent alternatives” that those
philosophically closest to him were creating: the state, humanity,
politics and the newest “spook” offered by the socialists: society. Like
all Left Hegelians, Stirner knew that he was experiencing the initial
stages of the apocalypse that would replace the old Christian world with
philosophical humanism. This fear is reflected in the “dynamic titanism”
of his own ego which became its own sort of absolute.[137] Dispossessed
by academic and political circumstances of any real power in shaping
humanity and its institutions, the Left Hegelians, particularly Stirner,
had to satisfy themselves with the role of subjective critics.[138]
Social or political action, vindicated by the younger generation of
Hegelians (especially Marx and Engels), was held in contempt. Stirner’s
inherent social atomism was evidently incompatible with the idea Marx
shared with the Utopian French socialists: the desire for a truly
“human” society.
If we regard Hegel as the last of the contemplative philosophers who
possessed the “secret of contemplation”, post-Hegelian philosophy
becomes what one commentator has called a “lost paradise”.[139] Stirner
reverted to the acquiescent attitude of a self-effacing mortal who must
find his entire fulfilment in his own life. Marx, to counter what he
perceived as Stirner’s and Hegel’s quietism, developed a universal
theory of action where contemplation was replaced by intolerance of
those who seek out a better state of things. Marx’s answer was a form of
materialistic fatalism that operated through economic laws. Stirner had
forced not so much an Althusserian “epistemological break” in the young
Marx’s thought, but had required him to retreat from a normative
conception of human nature. Marx’s historical ontology meant either
equating good with what happens or denying that there is any good: The
outcome was either way a form of nihilism. Whilst apparently repudiating
Stirner’s nihilistic egoism, Marx incorporated this nihilism into his
theory of history. For if man creates himself in history, then there is
no human essence from which he can be alienated. Therefore Marx cannot
justifiably assert the pre-eminence of communist society. The
incoherence of Marx’s philosophical anthropology was as much a result of
his intense encounter with Stirner as well as with non-German
philosophical concepts that had entered his work. In the mid-eighteen
forties Marx and Engels absorbed French ideas into the Hegelian
metaphysic. The French experience as well as that of the wider
industrial world – such as the advanced industrialisation of Victorian
England – dictated that the social question of industrial change and
labour emerged as the most significant of their age.[140]
Occupying another world, isolated and thoroughly bourgeois, the “Berlin
Buddhists” remained indifferent to these apparently epochal changes.
Only in Germany, where intellectuals inhabited an eccentric world of
blithe fantasy, would Marx’s reading of the “social question” not be
explicable. For Marx, German theoretical engagement with political forms
had consequently assumed a more abstract form than prevalent
elsewhere.[141] Nonetheless this context affords Stirner the unique
position of a disenfranchised academic dissenter, a point of
disinterestedness between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Stirner
occupied a disoriented historical moment, one before the experience of
capitalism and industry had been filtered through the paradigmatic
Marxian idioms. Moreover, Stirner did attempt to tackle the social
phenomenon of “pauperism” (the progressive impoverishment of the lower
social strata) which has been identified as the “dominant” social issue
of “pre-March” period.[142] Unlike the social problems that Marx
identified, pauperism was not a direct result of capitalism or even of
rapid industrialization, but a problem of demographic growth and was a
singularly (ignoring Berlin) rural phenomenon. Pauperism differed much
from traditional poverty. It was collective and structural rather than
determined by individual contingencies. Stirner recognized this social
phenomenon and discussed it at length in The Ego.[143] He was not
failing to grasp the true “social question” as Marx makes out; instead
he was analyzing his own reality: the parochial, yet unique,
pre-Industrial phase of German history – what Eric Hobsbawn called “the
last, and perhaps worst, economic breakdown of the ancien régime”.[144]
Stirner, along with the other Left Hegelians, saw himself as exclusively
concerned with the historical transition from religion to philosophy,
the fall-out of Hegelian thought. Marx, on the other hand, had already
proposed to disentangle himself from what he called “philosophy” through
his theory of history. It is therefore little wonder that these two
thinkers clashed theoretically, and that the specific ontological
debates would be forgotten. In a crossed sentence from The German
Ideology Marx confessed “We know only a single science, the science of
history”.[145] Marx’s conception of history meant every profound
philosophical problem would resolve itself as an empirical fact, and
thus Marx felt free to abandon the metaphysical conception of essence
that had been central to his thought up to 1845. With the division of
labour, one’s orientation to the world was a less important concern. By
rejecting this significant component of his conception of human nature,
Marx struggled to avoid his philosophical obligations. The German
Ideology was an attempt to avoid having to defend one’s standpoint
philosophically, to escape the Hegelian prerequisite to occupy a
supposedly epistemologically privileged position.
For all the progression that Marxists like to attribute to it, The
German Ideologywas also a reductive exercise. Marx and Engels swept
aside certain issues (ethics, individuality, consciousness) which they
longer wanted on their “erstwhile philosophical conscience”. The Ego had
conditioned Marx’s ontological response to Left Hegelian humanism. As we
have already seen, The Ego was not only a catalyst in Marx’s adoption of
the philosophical method of historical materialism, but also stood as an
anticipatory critique of its emergent form. Stirner had forced Marx to
break with Left Hegelian modes of thought, fracturing the epistemology
and materialism Marx had developed in Theses on Feuerbach and the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. In doing this, he forced
Marx to fundamentally reappraise his position on the role of human
nature in relation to his social criticism.
As a theoretical conclusion to the criticism of religion, the
“materialist conception of history” was an ambiguous explanation. Rather
than settlingMarx’s conscience, The German Ideology emphatically
displayed it as a badconscience. For many, Marx’s anger seems
disproportionate to the threat posed by Stirner, yet a closer analysis
has revealed just how much was at stake in their encounter. Marx chose
to make Stirner into a scapegoat, an opportune external object onto
which to project the unresolved inner conflict of his early thought. The
garrulous “Sankt Max” was the work of an intellect under threat. Derrida
recognised this:
“My feeling … is that Marx scares himself, he himself pursues
relentlessly someone who almost resembles him to the point that we could
mistake one for the other: a brother, a double, thus a diabolical image.
A kind of ghost of himself.”[146]
Parallels between the two thinkers are often neglected. However, as we
have seen, Marx and Stirner shared much in terms of philosophical
language and theoretical goals. Regardless of the claims about Marxian
humanism, Stirnerian egoism was just as much the “true” heir to German
Idealist Philosophy. Stirner had realised the fundamental nihilistic
element present in secularised Hegelianism and – through dialectics –
fearlessly drawn the consequence that “everything is permitted”.[147] Or
as Giles Deleuze more boldly claimed, “Stirner is the dialectician who
reveals nihilism as the truth of the dialectic”.[148] Stirnerian
nihilistic egoism, not Marxian humanism, certainly seems more consistent
with an overthrow of suprahistorical values. The sovereignty of the ego
and the exercise of self-assertion are the more spontaneous consequences
of the “death of God” and transcendent norms, as opposed to a philosophy
of community.
Marxists who see Marx and Engels’ socialism eschewing naturally from
Left Hegelian humanism remain blinded by the alternative, highly
inaccurate, account of their early thought which both men later
developed. The Ego remains a unique and powerful attack on Marxism as
well as all forms of socialism; Stirner highlighted the contradictions
and problems inherent any form of socialist or communist society. Yet
ironically for Max Stirner, the force of The Ego pushed Marx to embrace
the totalising perspective of an essential communism, nascent in The
German Ideology, rather than devalue the future of socialist thought
which it had, in part, helped create. With the advent of Marxism,
Stirner’s work was displaced in intellectual history. If Stirner is to
undergo rehabilitation as a thinker, it is important that this must not
revolve solely around Marx’s “leading role”, or in assigning debt to
Stirner where it is due. Future scholarship must attempt to escape his
status as the “too much intimate enemy” of Marx.[149]
In conclusion, Stirner’s answer to problems of the Hegelian dialectic
was to rewrite in existential terms as the historico-cultural narrative
of the self-actualisation of the spirit. His book described the
liberated, self-expressive, contingent, existing individual as the
“laughing heir”[150] of a dialectical development from immediacy through
self-division, to self-conscious freedom and transparency. In The Ego,
the Hegelian description of redemption found an existential form in
“living oneself out”.[151] Stirner set his existential perspectives
against the essentialism of Marx and others. Marx’s The German Ideology
was an attempt to wrench socialism from its utopian yearnings and
transform it philosophically into an empirical science. In doing so,
Marx escaped the Hegelian conception of “consciousness” by turning
consciousness into a by-product, socially determined. These two terminal
and antithetical standpoints occupied by Stirner and Marx in 1845 have
allowed fragments of the Hegelian project to continue to shape and frame
the Marxist/Existentialist debate of the last and present century.
Engels, F., “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German
Philosophy” in MarxEngels Collected Works, vol. 26. (London 1976).
Feuerbach, L., The Essence of Christianity trans. George Eliot (New
York, 1957).
Marx, K. & Engels F., The German Ideology in Marx Engels Collected
Works,vol. 5 (London 1976), 19–539.
Marx, K. & Engels F., Selected Writings, ed. D. McLellan (Oxford, 2000).
Marx, K. Capital (New York 1972–73), vol. I.
Stirner, M., The Ego and His Own trans. Steven T. Byington, ed. David
Leopold (Cambridge, 1995).
Stirner, M., The False Principle of our Education, or, Humanism and
Realism, ed. James J. Martin (Colorado Springs, Ralph Melees 1967).
Berlin, Isaiah, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment 4^(th) ed. (Oxford
2000)
Brazill, William J., The Young Hegelians (Yale 1970.).
Browning, G., Hegel & the History of Political Philosophy (Macmillan
1999).
Brudney, D., Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy (Harvard 1998).
Buber, Paths in Utopia (London 1949).
Carroll, J., Break-out from the Crystal Palace: The
Anarcho-Psychological Critique; Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky (London
1974).
Churbanov, L., Preface to The German Ideology , Institute of
Marxism-Leninism, in Marx, K, “The German Ideology” in MarxEngels
Collected Worksvol 5.
Clark, C., “Germany 1815–1848: Restoration or pre-March?” in German
History since 1800 ed. Mary Fulbrook (Arnold 1997), 38–60.
Clark, John P., Max Stirner’s Egoism (London 1976.)
Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History (Oxford 1956).
Deleuze, G., Nietzsche & Philosophy (Columbia 1985).
Dematteis, P. B., Individuality and the Social Organism: The Controversy
between Max Stirner and Karl Marx (New York 1976).
Derrida, J., Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning, and the New International trans. Peggy Kamuf, (London 1994).
Dupré, L., The Philosophical Foundations of Marxism (New York 1966).
Fleischmann, E. “The role of the individual in pre-revolutionary
society: Stirner, Marx, and Hegel” in Hegel’s Political Philosophy,
Problems and Perspectives: A Collection of Essays edit. Z.A. Pelczynski
(Cambridge 1971).
Griffin, R. “Between metapolitics and apoliteia: the New Right’s
strategy for conserving the fascist vision in the “interregnum”,Modern
and Contemporary France, 8 : 2 (2000).
Grimes, C.E. & Simmons, E.P. “A Reassessment of Alienation in Karl
Marx’s in The Western Political Quarterly Vol. 23, No.2 (Jun 1970), pp.
266–275.
Helms, Die Ideologie der anonymen Gesellschaft (Cologne 1968).
Arvon, H., Aux sources de 1’existentialisme Max Stirner (Paris 1954).
Hook, S. “Philosophy of Dialectical Materialism”, pt. 1 Journal of
Philosophy, 25 :5,
(1March 1928) and pt 2. Journal of Philosophy, 25 : 6 (15 March 1928).
Hook, S. From Hegel to Marx: Studies in the Intellectual Development of
Karl Marx (Michigan 1962).
Huneker, J., Egoists: A Book of Supermen (New York 1909).
Kolakowski, L., Main Currents of Marxism vol. 1–3, (Oxford 1978).
Laska, Bernd A., “A Durable Dissident”, in Stirner-Studien No. 2
(Nuremberg 1996) trans. Shveta Thakrar (June 2001),
http://www.lsr-projekt.de/poly/eninnuce.html.
Leopold, D., “Introduction” in TheEgo and Its Own , (Cambridge 1995)
xi-xxxii.
Lobkowicz, N., “Karl Marx and Max Stirner” in Demythologising Marxism,
ed. Frederick J. Adelmann (The Hague 1969) 64–95.
Lobkowicz, N., Theory and Practice: History of a Concept from Aristotle
to Marx (Notre Dame 1967).
Lowith, K. From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Ninteeth-Century
Thought, trans. David E. Green (NY, 1967). (Original German edition,
1941)
Mackay, J. H., Max Stirner. Sein Leben und sein Werk, 2^(nd) edition
(Berlin 1914).
Mackay, J. H., Max Stirner’s Kleinere Schriften (Berlin 1914).
Nielsen K. and Patten S. (eds) Marx and Morality (Ontario 1981).
McLellan, D., The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx, (Macmillan 1969).
Myers, D. B. “Marx and the Problem of Nihilism” in Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, 37 : 2 (Dec 1976), 193–204.
Newman, S., From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the
Dislocation of Power (Lexington 2001).
Parker, S.E, “Introduction” in The Ego and Its Own (London 1982).
Paterson, R. W. K. The Nihilistic Egoist Max Stirner (Hull 1971).
Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies vol. II (London 2002).
Stedman-Jones, G., “Introduction” in The Communist Manifesto (Penguin
Classics 2002).
Stepelevich, L. “Introduction” in The Young Hegelians: An Anthology edit
L. S. Stepelevich (Cambridge 1983).
Stepelevich, Lawrence S., “Hegel and Stirner: Thesis and Antithesis”,
Idealistic Studies, 6 : 3 (September 1976).
Stepelevich, Lawrence S., “Max Stirner and Ludwig Feuerbach”, Journal of
the History of Ideas (1978) 39 : 451–463.
Stepelevich, Lawrence S., “Max Stirner as Hegelian”, Journal of the
History of Ideas (1985) 46 : 597–614.
Stepelevich, Lawrence S., “The Revival of Max Stirner” Journal of the
History of Ideas 35 : 2 (April – June 1974), 323–328.
Stepelevich, Lawrence S., (ed.) The Young Hegelians: An Anthology
(Cambridge 1983).
Stern , R. Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit (Routledge 2002).
Thomas, P. “Karl Marx and Max Stirner” in Political Theory, 3 : 2 (May
1975), 159–179.
Toews, John Edward., Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism,
1805–1841. (Cambridge 1985).
Toews, John Edward., “Transformations of Hegelianism, 1805–1846”, in The
Cambridge Companion to Hegel ed. Frederick C. Beiser (Cambridge 1993),
378–413.
Tucker, R., Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge 1972).
[1] The Ego and Its Own (Leipzig, 1845). This work appeared in December
of 1844, and press copies were available even earlier, as Moses Hess had
read and forwarded his copy to Fredrich Engels no later than early
November of 1844. I will use David Leopold revised version of “The Ego
and His Own” (Cambridge 1995) based on Steven Byington’s original
translation. This edition will hereafter be referred to as The Ego.
[2] Patterson (1971): 102.
[3] Hence Bauer’s later characterisation of the group as Berlin’s “beer
literati”.
[4] Patterson (1971): 8.
[5] On Die Freien see: Patterson (1971) : 67–93; and Gustav Mayer, “Die
Anfange des politischen Radikalismus im vormarzlichen Preussen,” in
Zeitschrift für Politik. (1913) 6: 45–72.
[6] First usage: Engels to Marx, 19^(th) November 1844 in MECW, 38: 11.
[7] See Hess’ “The Recent Philosophers” in Stepelevich (1983).
[8] Cited by McLellan (1969): 130.
[9] McLellan (1969): 130.
[10] Engels to Marx, 19^(th) November 1844, MECW, 38: 13.
[11] Parker, S.E, “Introduction” The Ego and Its Own (1982).
[12] Patterson (1971) : 98.
[13] Stepelevich (1983): 14.
[14] Stepelevich (1983): 14.
[15] Stepelevich (1983): 14.
[16] Stepelevich (1983): 14.
[17] Cited by Stepelevich (1974) : 323.
[18] Engels to Marx, 19^(th) November 1844 in MECW, 38 : 11.
[19] The German Ideology in MECW (1976) 5 : 19–539.
[20] Marx Selected Writings ed. D. McLellan (2000) : 177.
[21] McLellan (2000) : 177.
[22] Engels, F. “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German
Philosophy” in MECW, vol. 26.
[23] Patterson (1971) : 105.
[24] Avron (1954) : 149.
[25] Mackay (1898).
[26] Löwith (1967) : 187.
[27] Quoted in Basch, L’individualisme anarchiste: Max Stirner : ii-iii.
[28] Woodcock, Anarchism, ch. 4. cited by Patterson (1971) : 126–127.
[29] Avron (1954) cited by Patterson (1971) : 127.
[30] Helms (1968).
[31] Griffin, R. “Between metapolitics and apoliteia: the New Right’s
strategy for conserving the fascist vision in the “interregnum”, Modern
and Contemporary France 8 : 2 (2000).
[32] Hook (1962): 165.
[33] Berlin (2000) : 143.
[34] Avron (1954).
[35] Toews (1985) : 368.
[36] Toews (1985) : 369.
[37] Toews (1985) : 369.
[38] Toews (1985) : 369.
[39] Stepelevich (1974) : 325.
[40] Laska, Bernd A. LSR Publishing House, Nuremberg.
[41] Newman (2001) : 9.
[42] Stepelevich (1974) : 328.
[43] Derrida (1994 ) : 99.
[44] Huneker (1909) : 350.
[45] Clark (1997) : 38.
[46] Patterson (1971): 22.
[47] Patterson (1971): 33.
[48] Patterson (1971): 33.
[49] Mackay (1914) : 235.
[50] Stirner, The False Principle of Our Education Or Humanism And
Realismfirst published in the supplements to four numbers of the
Rheinische Zeitungbetween the 10^(th) and l9th of April, 1842 edited by
James J. Martin (Colorado Springs 1967).
[51] Stirner, The False Principle of Our Education from
http://www.nonserviam.com/egoistarchive/stirner/articles/false.html
[52] Toews (1993) : 378.
[53] Toews (1993) : 391.
[54] Toews (1993) : 393.
[55] Bauer, B. Die Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts über Hegel den
Atheisten und Antichristen: Ein Ultimatum (Leipzig, 1841) : 77, 70.
[56] Feuerbach, (1957) : 75.
[57] Toews (1993) : 400.
[58] Stirner (1995) : 140.
[59] Stirner (1995) : 204.
[60] Patterson (1971) : 20.
[61] Lobkowicz (1969) : 85.
[62] Patterson (1971) : 20.
[63] Stepelevich (1985) : 601.
[64] Löwith (1967) : 102.
[65] McLellan (1969) : 119 cited by Stepelevich (1985).
[66] Toews (1985) : 604.
[67] Marx (1976) : 23.
[68] Marx (1976) : 27.
[69] Marx (1976) : 24.
[70] Stirner (1995) : 166
[71] Lobkowicz (1967) : 394.
[72] Lobkowicz (1967) : 395.
[73] Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”, MECW,
8 : 362.
[74] Lobkowicz (1967) : 397.
[75] Marx (1976) : 28.
[76] Brudney (1998) : 272.
[77] Stirner (1995) : 64–5
[78] Stirner (1995) : 88
[79] Marx (1976) : 36–37.
[80] Stedman-Jones (2002) : 144.
[81] Marx (1972–73) 1 : 19, 20.
[82] Collingwood (1956) : 125.
[83] Collingwood (1956) : 125.
[84] Kolakowski (1978) 2 : 403.
[85] Stedman-Jones (2002): 145.
[86] Marx (1976): 31.
[87] Cf. Stirner’s anonymously published article, “Recensenten Stirners”
in Wigands Vierteljahrsschrift 3 (1845) 183. Cf. MECWvol 3. cf. 248.
[88] Lobkowicz (1978) : 412.
[89] Lobkowicz (1978) : 415.
[90] Lobkowicz (1967) : 413.
[91] Marx (1972–73) 2 : 863.
[92] Lobkowicz (1967) : 413.
[93] Stirner (1995) : 5, 7.
[94] Preface to The German Ideology, Lev Churbanov, Institute of
Marxism-Leninism in Marx, K, The German Ideology, MECW 5 : xiii.
[95] Stedman-Jones (2002) : 146.
[96] Hook (1962): ch.5, sec. II, I (a).
[97] Hook (1962) : 165.
[98] Buber (1949) : 10.
[99] Marx (1976) : 247.
[100] Stirner (1995) : 45.
[101] Hook (1962) : 171–172.
[102] Stirner (1995) : 286.
[103] Stirner (1995) : 317.
[104] Hook (1928) : 121.
[105] Hook (1962) : 51
[106] Popper (2002) : 187–8
[107] Tucker (1972) : 22.
[108] Stirner (1995) : 217.
[109] Stirner (1995) : 215.
[110] Stirner (1995) : 215.
[111] Tucker (1972) : 22.
[112] 1844, cited by Tucker (1972).
[113] Tucker (1972) : 22.
[114] However, Tucker like so many others, misses the importance of The
Ego. Stirner not only voiced essentially moderncriticisms of communist
ideology, but he did so long before Marx’s thought was formally
consolidated in The Communist Manifesto.
[115] Stirner (1995) : 106.
[116] Arnold Ruge’s thought was influenced in the same way, and
expressed his admiration in his work entitled Our Last Ten Years.
[117] Stirner (1995) : 131.
[118] Stirner (1995) : 271.
[119] Stirner (1995) : 273.
[120] Stirner (1995) : 274.
[121] Stirner (1995) : 34.
[122] Stirner (1995) : 32.
[123] Stirner (1995) : 154.
[124] Stirner (1995) : 151.
[125] Stirner (1995) : 151.
[126] Stirner (1995) : 190.
[127] Stirner (1995) : 228.
[128] Stirner (1995) : 228.
[129] Stirner (1995) : 216.
[130] Hook (1967 ): 176.
[131] Brazill (1970) : 177–225.
[132] Hook (1962): 227.
[133] Stirner (1995) : 299.
[134] Brudney (1998) : 287
[135] Brudney (1998) : 163.
[136] Brudney (1998) : 318.
[137] Brazill (1970) : 224.
[138] Brudney (1998) : 224.
[139] Stern (2002).
[140] Brazill (1970) : 271.
[141] Marx (1976) : 489, 493
[142] Clark (1997) : 53.
[143] Stirner (1995) : 224–227.
[144] Cited by Clark (1997) : 53.
[145] Marx (1976) : 28.
[146] Derrida (1994) : 139–140.
[147] Myers (1976) : 193.
[148] Deleuze (1985) : 161.
[149] Calasso, R. “Accompagnamento alla lettura di Stirner”, in Max
Stirner, L’Unico e la sua proprietà, Adelphi, (Milan 1999), 412.
[150] Stirner (1995) : 286.
[151] Stirner (1995) : 293, 294.