#max stirner

Easily the best satire of Hegelianism (even the racism, though he doesn’t offer a critique of it) and I would argue it’s the first work of psychoanalysis and existentialism. Whenever I revisit it I notice something new and I’m like

📜 I. THE HISTORIOGRAPHICAL PROBLEM: WHY THIS DEBATE REFUSES TO DIE

The standard Marxist dismissal of Stirner as a mere "episode" in the history of Marxist philosophy is dangerously incomplete

The contention that Marx and Engels' engagement with Stirner was merely a "necessary transitional stage" obscures its actual theoretical weight

Voices across generations have insisted — wrongly or rightly — on Stirner's share in the genesis of Marxism

The near-universal underestimation of Marx's critique of Stirner is itself a historiographical scandal

From underestimation to outright falsification: one small step separates dismissal from the erasure of all principled differences between Marx and Stirner

🎭 II. THE BOURGEOIS MANIPULATION MACHINE: HOW STIRNER BECAME A WEAPON AGAINST MARX

The explicit goal of bourgeois Marx-criticism: integrate early Marxism back into bourgeois philosophy and ideology

Primary instrument: the Hegelianizing or existentialist interpretation — reducing Marxism to a footnote of Hegel's alienation theory

Growing bourgeois interest in the Young Hegelians, pursued in two modes:

Detached from the genesis of Marxism (Löwith, Stuke, Gebhardt)

In tight connection with the genesis of Marxism — the far more dangerous version

The inevitable collision: as Marxist historiography successfully pushed back against Hegelianizing interpretations without equally researching Young Hegelianism, bourgeois critics exploited the vacuum — and stumbled directly onto Max Stirner

🇫🇷 III. HENRI ARVON AND THE FRENCH ORIGIN OF THE DEPENDENCY THESIS

Henri Arvon, writing in Les Temps Modernes (1951), was the first to assert that Stirner directly influenced Marx — or at minimum accelerated and clarified the development of Marx's thought

Arvon's specific claims:

Stirner's sharp critique of ethical German socialism was decisive

Stirner's unmasking of the "idealistic residues" in Feuerbach's philosophy made him the actual link between Feuerbach and Marx

Historical materialism in the German Ideology emerged directly from the contradiction between Feuerbach and Stirner

The audacity of this thesis should not be underestimated — it effectively rewrites the birth certificate of Marxism

Arvon expanded this argument in Aux sources de l'existentialisme: Max Stirner (Paris, 1954), arguing Stirner also fathered existentialism — apparently the man was impossibly productive 🙄

🏛️ IV. THE CHAIN OF BOURGEOIS TRANSMISSION: FROM ARVON TO HIRSCH

🔗 Iring Fetscher

First to introduce Arvon's "discovery" to German bourgeois Marx-criticism

Published in Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung, Vol. 6, 1951

Initially largely without effect — Stirner literature in Germany had already peaked and existed mostly outside official scholarship

📖 J.Y. Calvez

Voluminous Marx biography (first published 1956) repeated the dependency thesis

G. Beck (1965) in turn cites Calvez as authority

📄 Rudolf Hirsch

Dissertation: Karl Marx und Max Stirner (Munich, 1956)

Attempts in "rarely primitive fashion" to play Stirner against Marx

His crowning achievement: declaring Marx's critique "senseless and mistaken" — thereby conveniently clearing the most powerful objection to the dependency thesis

Summary published as "Der erste Kritiker Marxens" in Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte, Vol. 9, 1957

📚 Marcel Reding

More careful and accurate in Der politische Atheismus (Graz/Wien/Köln, 1957)

Acknowledges the connection but in a form that "correctly hits the facts"

Yet none of these works concretely analyze the relationship through the lens of political, social, and ideological positions of both thinkers 🤦

⚖️ V. THE OBJECTIVE FACT THAT FEEDS BOURGEOIS MANIPULATION

The uncomfortable truth: the Marx-Stirner relationship was never fully theoretically clarified — and this vacuum fed the thesis that their opposition was not principled

Revisionist and existentialist Marx-criticism gleefully exploited this "ideology-free" rapprochement

Hirsch's ultimate move: dismiss Marx's critique as "senseless and mistaken" — removing the last serious obstacle to the dependency narrative

🏚️ VI. THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATS: CUSTODIANS WHO FUMBLED THE INHERITANCE

📰 Eduard Bernstein

Published relevant passages of the German Ideology for the first time in 1903/04 in Documenten des Sozialismus, Vols. III-IV

Renounced any theoretical-philosophical assessment of Marx's critique

Left the door wide open for bourgeois manipulation

🔀 Max Adler

In Wegweiser: Studien zur Geistesgeschichte des Sozialismus (Stuttgart, 1920)

Neutrality collapsed into direct accommodation

Extraordinary falsification: Stirner and Marx are made into comrades-in-arms

Petty-bourgeois reasoning forcibly welded to Marxist theory

Stirner "reforged" into a proletarian ideologist and pioneer of socialism 😂

Adler's motives: supporting his own political illusions while mirroring the instability of German Social Democracy against bourgeois softening attempts

📝 Franz Mehring

Early position: granted Stirner significance as "a piece of philosopher and a piece of revolutionary" — placed him "beside Marx and Engels in a certain sense"

Source: Geschichte der deutschen Sozialdemokratie, Vol. I, p. 248

Twenty years later, silently corrected himself in his Marx biography: "no intellectual connections between Marx and Stirner existed"

Source: Karl Marx: Geschichte seines Lebens, p. 24

But even then: dismissed Sankt Max as "far-fetched over-polemics" and the critique as "hair-splitting and word-chopping" — a judgment that has not yet died 💀

🧠 VII. KARL LÖWITH AND THE EXISTENTIALIST ERASURE

Karl Löwith (1940), in Von Hegel zu Nietzsche (5th ed., Stuttgart, 1964, pp. 80ff.)

Explicit goal: separate Marxism from its political content and sociologically neutralize it

Method: place both Marx and Stirner as Young Hegelians within the dissolution of the Hegelian school

The devastating sleight of hand: all confrontations of the 1840s dismissed as determined by "chance" — "chance decides at which moment they face each other as enemies"

This single sentence renders Marx's entire polemic self-dissolving — brilliant, cynical, and completely wrong 🎩

🗑️ VIII. THE CHORUS OF DISMISSAL: BOURGEOIS CRITICS WHO COULDN'T BE BOTHERED

Critic Work Dismissal of Marx's Critique J.H. MackayMax Stirner: Leben und Werk, 2nd ed., Berlin 1910, p. 251 Called the German Ideology "the utmost in silly and empty wordplay" H. SchultheißStirner, 2nd ed., Leipzig 1922, p. 37 Called the critique a "Hanswurstiade" (buffoonery); "unenjoyable and tiring" A.W. Schulze Dissertation, Freiburg 1955 Thin theological dismissal, ignored substance entirely Paul KägiGenesis des historischen Materialismus, Vienna 1965, p. 338 Claims Marx and Engels "do not do justice to the real content of the book"

The common thread: all defend the thesis — especially Hirsch — that the classics never understood "The Unique One" and therefore struck at thin air 🎯❌

What this actually accomplishes:

Denies the dynamic of Marxist philosophy's formation

Refuses to understand the German Ideology as the final break with idealist philosophy

Arrogantly claims "equal standing" for both positions

Accuses Marxist philosophy of "misunderstanding all existential problematics"

Demands a protected inner sanctuary for thinkers like Stirner — immune from Marxist critique 🏰

🏗️ IX. THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: WHAT WAS AT STAKE IN 1844

🌋 The Young Hegelian Movement at Its Limits

By autumn 1844, the Young Hegelian movement had reached the boundaries of its oppositional effectiveness

As reaction intensified, the critique of religion and politics via negative dialectics produced no practical results

Rapid dissolution ensued:

The bourgeois wing (around Ruge) had reached its political limits — no real base, no principled resolve

Part of the Berlin "Freien" defected to the camp of reaction

The remaining opposition rejected its former intentions and turned to individualistic revolution-propagandizing

Theoretical platform: grotesquely thin — an inflated overestimation of "negative dialectics" that believed mere rejection of conditions would automatically revolutionize them

🔴 Marx and Engels' Advancing Position

By this moment, Marx and Engels had already traversed:

Overcoming speculative idealism ✅

Breaking with Young Hegelian former comrades ✅

Transition to socialist positions ✅

Appropriation of materialist conceptions of history ✅

Their goal: the first closed theory of scientific communism — representing a principled opposition to all preceding philosophy

👤 X. MAX STIRNER: BIOGRAPHY OF A DEAD END

📚 His Origins

Attended Hegel's own lectures directly

Attempted, unsuccessfully, to establish himself as a bourgeois teacher

Joined the Young Hegelians as Prussian liberalism rose

Member of Bruno Bauer's circle — developed into an atheist and radical critic

Friendship with Engels during this period — certainly exposed to socialist ideas

🔄 His Intellectual Debts

Strongly under Feuerbach's influence — especially the alienation doctrine

Did not connect to Feuerbach's humanism — developed an individualist standpoint early

Related to Bruno Bauer's "critical self-consciousness" and even more to Edgar Bauer's individualism

Plundered Hegel like most Young Hegelians — interpreted him subjectively, turned his dialectic into pseudo-revolutionary glorification of negation

⚔️ His Political Positions: Radical Pose, Zero Substance

Shared Young Hegelian political convictions initially — demanded the overthrow of State and oppressive conditions

By 1842 writing: "Truth consists in the revealing of oneself... which requires liberation from all that is foreign, the utmost abstraction or divesting of all authority"

Source: Kleinere Schriften, 2nd ed., Berlin 1914, p. 249

Corresponded for the Rheinische Zeitung and Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung — fighting censorship, church, authority

Took the same position against bourgeois philanthropism as the authors of the Holy Family — against Eugène Sue

🚪 The Break and the Retreat

After breaking with the Young Hegelians (marked by ceasing his correspondences end of 1842)

Withdrew completely from daily political struggle

Developed a war of all against all — out of which emerges as the sole beneficiary the egoistic "Unique One" who regards the world as his "property" to exploit for his "self-enjoyment" 😏

Engels noted retrospectively in 1890 that Stirner was actually far more easy-going than his "Unique One" suggested

🏰 XI. STIRNER'S CLASS POSITION: THE PETTY BOURGEOISIE IN PHILOSOPHICAL DRAG

The double frontal position characterizes Stirner's actual social location — thoroughly petty-bourgeois and middle-class

The social anxiety of the middle strata, facing annihilation between bourgeoisie and proletariat, produced only two apparent escapes:

Proudhon's approach: defer revolution, refuse to acknowledge existing conditions, continuously criticize and patch their defects

Stirner's approach: reject all realities, withdraw from them, and at least shatter them mentally into a thousand pieces — at the cost of total outer powerlessness and inaction

Stirner did exactly this, and nothing more — he articulated the self-consciousness of strata that had neither capital nor the power of associated labor

Source: H.G. Helms, Die Ideologie der anonymen Gesellschaft, Cologne 1966, p. 69

His "revolt" is a coquetry with violence that excludes every actual action, since any real action would be directed against the very "rebels" he admires

💡 The Paradox of the "Unique One"

Stirner attacks liberalism, humanism, socialism, Feuerbach, Bauer, Heß, and Marx

Develops no alternative — neither theoretical nor practical

Insofar as he doesn't actually disturb existing conditions → he sanctions them practically

Insofar as he attacks the prevailing ideologies → he exposes their weaknesses and drives them to their extreme consequences, thereby initiating their dissolution

Source: Plekhanov, Anarchismus und Sozialismus, 3rd ed., Berlin 1911, pp. 22ff.

The Suggestive Power of Vacuity: precisely because Stirner offers no content, no real position — only facade — his ideology is perfectly compatible with practical opportunism and requires no actual alternative 🎭

⚡ XII. THE IDEOLOGICAL FERMENT OF 1844: THE CROWDED BATTLEFIELD

🌐 The Fragmented "Socialist" Camp

Feuerbach: communism = simple inversion of existing relations of domination

Weitling and Bakunin: secret societies (in which the proletariat was barely represented)

The "True Socialists" and Proudhon: essentially reforms and agitation

Moses Heß and Bakunin: communist propaganda in Germany and Paris

Marx and Bakunin: making each other's acquaintance

Weitling: offering Marx his friendship

🔑 The Decisive Distinction

Only Marx and Engels recognized the historical role of the working class in the future transformation of society

This discovery of the real driving forces of social development meant:

Formation of a scientific conception of communism

Simultaneous revolutionizing of the philosophy of history

Emergence of historical materialism

The new position fixed in the Holy Family and the Manuscripts was still marked by transitional features:

Alienation, Feuerbach's influence, unhistorical conception of the human being, insufficient explanation of idealist philosophy

🔬 XIII. MARX AND ENGELS' IMMEDIATE REACTIONS TO STIRNER

📬 Engels' First Response (Letter to Marx, November 19, 1844)

Recognized Stirner's "egoism" — like Heß — as "the essence of present-day society brought to consciousness"

Critiqued the "idealist nonsense" in Heß' polemic with Stirner

Proposed: "We must exploit it as the complete expression of existing madness and, by inverting it, build upon it"

Wanted to prove that Stirner's people "must become communists out of pure egoism"

Still operating within Feuerbach's argumentation — a significant limitation

❌ Marx's Swift Rejection

Marx had to immediately recognize Stirner's position — it was a repetition of an old problem he had already encountered in his dissertation on Epicurus

The Epicurean lesson: the supposed freedom of the individual achieved by turning away from the real world leads to impotence before the world

Since his recognition (however insufficiently grounded) of the proletariat's historical role, Marx had to oppose every act of private indignation that brought the actual abolition of private property not one step closer

Stirner was Bruno Bauer's critique taken to its most extreme form

🔄 Engels' Correction (Letter to Marx, January 20, 1845)

A few days in his father's factory made him see clearly again

Distinguished more sharply between Stirner's seemingly realistic starting point (an empirical-looking "I") and his completely voluntarist conclusions that could no longer conceal the idealism

Now counted Stirner among the already-dismissed Bruno Bauer

Still reluctant to fully abandon Feuerbach — still tried to win him for their goals (Letter to Marx, February 22-26, 1845)

🎯 XIV. THE THEORETICAL BREAKTHROUGH: WHY THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY CRITIQUE IS DECISIVE

🏗️ The New Methodological Foundation

Marx and Engels count Stirner in the camp of Bauer and Feuerbach — the entire dissolution of Hegelian philosophy appears as a completed process that reaches its end in Stirner

Against the self-overestimation of their opponents: expose the "tragicomic contrast between the actual achievements of these heroes and their illusions about these achievements"

First time asking the question of "the connection of German philosophy with German reality" → the class character of this philosophy is revealed

🔑 The Critical Advance Beyond the Holy Family

In the Holy Family: traced Bruno Bauer back to Hegel

Now in the German Ideology: traced Max Stirner back to his social foundation — ultimately responsible for the entire configuration of Stirnerian thought

The revolutionary insight (Fourth Thesis on Feuerbach): criticism of a theory is not yet its refutation — the theory is an expression of its "worldly foundation," which must itself be understood in its contradiction and practically revolutionized

The class-based understanding of egoism: not Stirner's "egoism" but egoism understood in class terms becomes the central analytical object

🎭 The Language-Critical Method

Marx recognized: "language is a product of the bourgeoisie" — and therefore "the relations of commerce are made the basis of all other relations, in reality as in language"

Source: German Ideology, MEW Vol. 3, p. 212

Marx demonstrates how Stirner's language — no longer Hegel's or Feuerbach's — is conditioned by his social position and its resulting political intentions

The devastating irony: reducing Stirner's linguistic statements to their factual presuppositions — simultaneously hilarious and absolutely devastating 😂🔪

H.G. Helms: "The Revelation of John the Theologian" section of Die Ideologie der anonymen Gesellschaft, Chapter V

🗡️ XV. WHY FEUERBACH AND HEß COULD NOT DEFEAT STIRNER — BUT MARX COULD

📉 Feuerbach's Failure

Responded to Stirner's attacks by remaining on the defensive

Interested only in the theoretical problem of individual vs. species — not the political or social dimension

Could demonstrate: no abstract individual exists; every individual leads necessarily to the species

The embarrassing conclusion: derived from his critique of Stirner's "I" that he himself was a "communal human being" or "communist"!

Source: Feuerbach, Kleine Schriften, ed. M.G. Lange, Leipzig 1950, p. 196

Result: only revealed more clearly than ever the limitations of Feuerbachian anthropology

📉 Moses Heß' Insufficient Attack

Went further than Feuerbach — understood Stirner from the social side

Correctly identified the practical solution: social supersession of the individual-species contradiction in socialism

Perceptively characterized Stirner's intentions: "He wants nothing at all. He only boasts... means in the end only — a peaceful vegetating"

Source: Heß, Die letzten Philosophen, in Philosophische und sozialistische Schriften 1837-1850, ed. Cornu/Mönke, Berlin 1961, p. 392

But: cleverly attacked, not refuted — Heß lacked the analytical instruments and above all could not expose Stirner's ideological function

✅ Why Marx Succeeded

Exposed Stirner's construction principles — where Stirner still philosophized in Hegelian tracks, Marx proved the superior critic

Even where Stirner constructed freely — his own terminology, his own style of proving and refuting — Marx uniquely laid bare his thought processes and refuted them in the only convincing way

The new quality of Marxist ideology critique — formed within the reckoning with Young Hegelian philosophy — became henceforth one of the main weapons of Marxism against bourgeois philosophy

🌟 XVI. THE POSITIVE THEORETICAL GAINS FROM MARX'S CRITIQUE

🧑 A Deeper, Historical Determination of the Human Being

Stirner's individualism attacked Feuerbach's "deification" of the human species-being

Marx's response: drove him to a deeper, now historically grounded determination of the human being

Decisive for Marx and Engels: any question about the "real human being," as long as it remains decided in theory — as Stirner's polemic against Feuerbach does — grasps only the abstract, not the empirical human being

Self-critique embedded in the critique: simultaneously a critique of their own past philosophical determinations

Only now, with materialist clarity regarding this last refuge of theology and idealism, can the break with the philosophical past be considered complete for Marx and Engels 🏁

🔄 The Correct Formula (G. Beck)

"Not Stirner's influence on Marx, but the confrontation of Marx and Engels with Stirner has left its mark in Marxist theory"

Source: G. Beck, Die Stellung des Menschen zu Staat und Recht bei Max Stirner, Cologne 1965, p. 133

🌊 XVII. THE LASTING EFFECTS: FROM PROUDHON TO BAKUNIN

🇫🇷 The Reckoning with Proudhon

Simultaneously with the reckoning with the German ideology, the break with Proudhon was developing

Marx recognized essential features of Stirner in Proudhon

Unlike Stirner, Proudhon was a recognized spokesman of the petty bourgeoisie — hence far greater public resonance

Like Stirner: criticized bourgeois society without going beyond "dogmatic criticism"

Recognized private property as the fundamental evil — but invented only "dogmatic formulas" for overcoming it

Rejected the bourgeois state — but in practice was "a declared enemy of all political movements"

Content with stirring protests and polemicizing — refused a real alternative

Marx used Proudhon's next theoretical work to publicly dismiss him — demonstrating that the critique of Stirner was not in vain

🏴 Bakunin and the Anarchist Resurgence

In the 1860s and 1870s, with Proudhonism renewed in France and Bakunin — after a long prison sentence for participation in the 1848/49 revolution — drawing on Stirner

Bakunin disorganized parts of the European labor movement with adventurous-anarchist ideas

Quickly exposed by Marx and Engels and expelled from the labor movement

Anarchism nonetheless became one of the most dangerous accompaniments to the labor movement

After the founders' deaths: principled confrontation with anarchism largely ceased — the principled opposition between Marx and Stirner was blurred

Only with Plekhanov (1894) and Lenin (1901) did consistent theoretical struggle against anarchism that had penetrated the labor movement resume

Lenin's assessment of anarchism completed the task Marx had begun

🏛️ XVIII. STIRNER'S ACTUAL HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE: INVOLUNTARY SELF-DISSOLUTION

Stirner was the ideologist of the pre-revolutionary German petty bourgeoisie — Marx assessed him as such and refuted him theoretically

His role and significance consist not in the "execution" of Hegel or Marx — as Hirsch tries to suggest

His actual significance: the involuntary self-dissolution of pre-revolutionary progressive bourgeois ideology

Stirner could only advance the decomposition process of that ideology

And thereby also help accelerate the formation of Marxist social theory

Engels in 1850: the dissolution period of German philosophy "supplied the democratic party in Germany with the majority of its general phrases" — carried as "general catchword" into susceptible circles

Source: Engels, Über die Losung der Abschaffung des Staates und die "deutschen Freunde der Anarchie", MEW Vol. 7, pp. 417-420

🔥 XIX. WHY THIS CRITIQUE REMAINS URGENTLY RELEVANT TODAY

Marx's struggle against Stirner proves its value even now in assessing the actions of the "extra-parliamentary opposition" in Western Europe

H.G. Helms, regarding the situation in the Federal Republic: "The vehemence and the fundamental character of their controversy with Stirner smolders on to this day"

Source: Die Ideologie der anonymen Gesellschaft, p. 97

The core principle endures: as long as any part of the opposition engages only intellectually and believes it can reach social transformation through the destruction of bourgeois consciousness alone, the Marxist critique of the Young Hegelians remains current