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Title: Anarchism, Individualism and Max Stirner
Author: Anonymous
Date: 1977
Language: en
Topics: book review, EGO Journal, egoism, individualism, Max Stirner, review
Source: Retrieved 07/24/2022 from https://www.unionofegoists.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/PP1422-MinusOne-No38.pdf
Notes: Originally published in EGO #1 (1977). Article contains no byline or signature.

Anonymous

Anarchism, Individualism and Max Stirner

After a break of a few years the attack on the conscious egoism of Max

Stirner has resumed. Now Mr. Roger P. Clark has written a book entitled

“Max Stirner’s Egoism” in which he argues as one who was “once quite

sympathetic to individualism” but now has his head firmly stuck into the

tarbucket of “social anarchism”. The result is a dismissal of

“metaphysical egoism” as a “groundless superstition”.

I do not propose to deal here with the more abstruse philosophical

objections that form a large part of Mr. Clark’s indictment. To do this

properly would need a reply almost as long as his book. For the time

being, therefore, I will confine myself to certain of his views on the

relationship of Max Stirner to anarchism and individualism.

Nonetheless, before doing so, it is worthwhile noting that Mr. Clark

does not hesitate to resurrect a few hoary old philosophical chestnuts

in making out his case. One of these is the “groundless” notion that

Stirner, despite his explicit disavowals, conceived of his ego as an

“Absolute” (Mr. Clark seeks to add impressiveness to his charge by

describing it as “the mystic absolute”). And he rejects his

fellow-critic R.W.K.Paterson’s denial of this by claiming that “this is

what Stirner does when he raises the ego to an independent reality

contrary to its objective place in the course of nature”. After such a

piece of bafflegab, I am not in the least surprised that he can ascribe

some “rational significance” to “traditional mysticism”....

Like Mr. Paterson, in his much profounder work “The Egoistic Nihilist:

Max Stirner”, Roger P. Clark claims that the conscious egoist must want

everyone else to be supine and servile so that he can best take

advantage of them. In doing so he ignores, amongst other things,

Stirner’s contention that “He who, to hold his own, must count on the

absence of will in others is a thing made by these others, as the master

is a thing made by the servant. If submissiveness ceased, it would be

all over with lordship.”

But why should the egoist not enjoy testing his strength against a

worthy opponent or relish the company of shrewd and strong friends? It

is really amazing how quick moralists are to fasten upon egoists a new

categorical imperative: that they should live up to the Judeo-Christian

conception of what an egoist ought to be! Stirner himself disposed of

this particular puerility as follows:

“The egoist, before whom the humane shudder, is a spook as much as the

devil is: he exists only as a bogie and phantasm in their brain. If they

were not unsophisticatedly drifting back and forth in the antediluvian

opposition of good and evil, to which they have given the modern names

of ‘human’ and ‘egoistic’, they would not have freshened up the hoary

“sinner” into an “egoist” either, and put a new patch on an old

garment.”

Mr. Clark acknowledges Stirner to be an anarchist, but thinks that his

anarchism is of the most “inconsistent and contradictory type”. This is

because it appears that, while Stirner rejects domination over the

individual by the State, he “still accepts the authoritarian

consciousness”. Mr. Clark identifies “authority” with any form of

domination and so, when Stirner said that “might is right”, he is

immediately condemned as an authoritarian.

But authority is not the same as power, nor do all forms of domination

rest on authority. Authoritative power dominate primarily by means of

the allegiance it commands from those who believe in and support it.

Authority is therefore legitimized power. A power, as Enzo Martucci once

put it, “which all must adore and serve even if they possess the energy

and capacity to overthrow it” . While it certainly matters if some

individuals try to become authorities vis-a-vis other individuals, the

natural impulse to be dominant vis-a-vis others does not seem to me to

matter so much. Indeed, as James L. Walker observed in his The

Philosophy of Egoism, “if vigilance be the price of liberty, who will

deny that the tendency, within Egoistic limits, to vaporizing,

non-Egoistic philosophers would place tolerance upon a cloud-bank

foundation of sentiment and attempt to recompense with fine words of

praise the men who can be persuaded to forgo any advantage which they

might take of others. Like the preachers who picture the pleasure of sin

and urge people to refrain from it, their attempts are inevitably

futile.”

For me Max Stirner’s egoism has nothing to do with whether his views do

or do not fit in with someone else’s conception of an “anarchist”

utopia. It is true that, since he was still to some extent the child of

his time, his ideas are not entirely free from utopian speculations. In

this respect, although for quite different reasons, I agree with Mr.

Clark that Stirner was “over-optimistic” about his “associations of

egoists” becoming universalized. But such speculations are only froth on

the fundamentals of his philosophy and for realistic

anarchist-individualists living in the here and now they can safely be

regarded as of mere historical interest. What is important about his

magnificent defence of the individual against authority is its value as

an intellectual armoury that can be appropriated by those like myself

who view the conflict between the individual and the collective as

endless.

Mr. Clark tries to counter Stirnerian egoism by invoking certain

vagaries of Arthur Koestler about “holons” or “self-regulating systems

which display both the autonomous properties of wholes and the dependent

properties of parts” — a sort of philosophical version of the

stage-magician’s “now you see it and now you don’t”. He also refers to

Lewis Mumford’s ecologism and A.N.Whiteheads woolly-headed “philosophy

of organism”. After all this it is not surprising that he concludes by

claiming that Hegel and his ‘Whole-i-ness’ “appear to be justified”. Of

course, none of these profundities are spelt out in concrete detail,

but, then, one does not expect that purveyors of social dreamlands and

defenders of the ‘ghost of God’ would stoop to such mundane things. To

be unfashionable enough to see merit in Stirner’s radical nominalism is

obviously sufficient ground in the eyes of Mr. Clark for one to be

shoved aside as “superstitious” — but we shall see who laughs last....

Anarchism is an individualism, not a socialism!

(MAX STIRNER’S EGOISM by Roger P. Clark. Published by Freedom Press,

84B, Whitechapel High Street, London, E.1. 111pp. Price £1.50. USA 3

dollars. Paperback)