Part I: Stirner's Revenge

Reading Max Stirner

Stirner is a product of his time, they say. So let us trace his roots and legacy.

Who is Max Stirner? First reading: a young Hegelian, the ultimate culmination of Hegel's philosophy, his disciple and destroyer. How is he both disciple and destroyer? The philosophy of Hegel proceeds dialectically, through the power of negation. In an incredibly intricate manner, the cunning of reason, whether in objective history as spirit or subjective consciousness as concept, elegantly progresses through stages, experiences, and thoughts until it hits a limit, gap or contradiction. This contradiction, when recognized, can negate or cancel that which initially grounded it. Another negation, one which confronts the confrontation of the original ground, propels the initial negation toward an intrinsic resolution. This determinate negation is positive, carrying within it the insight, history, and meaning of that which it negated into its new form. This dialectical logic of movement, propelled by contradiction, is repeatedly expressed in different guises throughout Hegel's analyses. From the negation of sense-certainty by consciousness to the negation of the master by the slave to the negation of religion by absolute knowledge, the negative works its way, like a vector, through all being.

However, with any consistent system there emerges a skeptical worry about a fundamental paradox: does the system belong to itself? In essence, we can ask Hegel the same question: does the system submit to its own logic? If it does, then should it not also hit a limit, a contradiction which lays bare its negative potential for overcoming? If so, then the process of dialectical logic itself would cease to be valid, since the dialectic would be subsumed under its own treatment. Dialectical dialectics, in other words, critical critique would produce ... nothing, absolutely nothing. For the negation would be absolute, as will the object of its negation. If we place Hegel's system within the limit of the person named "Hegel", then we can resolve this by stating that Hegel himself is the absolute limit, the absolute self-consciousness with absolute knowledge of the absolute idea in absolute time. But, if we abstract the system from the man, and allow it to have a life of its own, then the problem compounds. Not Hegel but Hegelianism as a system is then submitted to its own dialectical logic. If that is true, then who stars in the acting roles of its negation?

First negation: the left, young Hegelians. Already with Feuerbach, Hess, and Bauer, we hit the limit of Hegel's speculative project. The self-described "pure critique" or "critical critique" targets the theological aspects of Hegelianism as well as its political conservatism. The young Hegelians begin the descent into the metaphysics of materialism and politics of humanist socialism.

Second negation: Max Stirner. Not only philosophically but historically bringing to an end the "young Hegelian" consensus, Stirner is the perfect candidate for the title of absolute negation of absolute negation. Ending the short-lived reign of humanism, Stirner rejects all attempts at a synthesis with social, material, or human "essences."

New trajectory: Marx, who turns Hegel right side up, is the third term which opens up a new positive phase in the process, only made possible by the previous negations.

In this drama, Stirner occupies a mediating role as the catalyst who caused a paradigm shift in Hegel's wake. This shift allowed Marx to make a conceptual breakthrough towards "historical materialism". That is one story, but problems are easy to note. First off, why would this process remain dialectical? In principle, it should not, for this is supposed to be the story of the overcoming of dialectic. The transition from Hegel to Feuerbach, Feuerbach to Stirner, and Stirner to Marx should then not be seen as dialectical, for then the dialectic was not truly relinquished. Any trace of determinate negation would signal life to that which must have died. Second, even if we accept this account, can one really claim that Marx initiated a completely new sequence of thought? Marx surely transformed the content of dialectic in his analysis of political economy, yet he nonetheless retained the form of the dialectical method itself. Dialectic then did not die, only changed focus.

Second try: who is Max Stirner? Nothing more than an expression of the petty bourgeoisie. A failed student, failed teacher, failed journalist, failed translator, failed husband, and a failed businessman — Stirner was even jailed in a debtors' prison, twice. His attempted milk delivery business, funded by his wife's inheritance, collapsed because he forgot to advertise it to potential customers. Stirner's philosophy of egoism can thus be seen as an ideological reflection of his economic struggle to join the bourgeoisie. This is the classic communist reading of Stirner and — for that matter — of all the anarchists of the 19 (and 20) century by Marx, Engels and their followers. Proudhon, Bakunin, Stirner: who are they but mouthpieces of the petty shopkeepers that want to retain their "individual" capital? The bold pronouncements about the "uniqueness" and "individuality" of the ego are nothing but cries of fear and shouts of reaction against the rising swell of communism. Incapable of thinking beyond the bourgeois category of the idealized individual, Stirner should therefore be excluded from revolutionary discussion and activity. And so, Marx produced a four-hundred-page ruthless criticism of Stirner in the notebooks that became The German Ideology, similar in that sense (but not nearly in scope) to what was done to Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy, to what Marx was planning with Bakunin's Statism and Anarchy, and to what Engels did to the anarchists in his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.

Does this perspective hold any water? If class background determined the validity of one's ideas, then Marx and Engels themselves would have no credibility either. Or does this critique mean something different, namely that no matter the background of the person, the ideas themselves are petty bourgeois? This is surely possible with Stirner, since his ideas have been historically appropriated by self-described anarcho-capitalists, right-wing libertarians and fascists. However, his work has also been appropriated by left-wing socialists, bohemians, and feminists. This is the fate of all great works, and to condemn a text for opening the door to many uses precludes the potential for conflicting interpretations. Is...