Max Stirner

Later, Marx and Engels wrote a major criticism of Stirner's work. The number of pages Marx and Engels devote to attacking Stirner in the unexpurgated text of The German Ideology exceeds the total of Stirner's written works. In the book Stirner is derided as Sankt Max (Saint Max) and as Sancho (a reference to Cervantes' Sancho Panza). As Isaiah Berlin has described it, Stirner "is pursued through five hundred pages of heavy-handed mockery and insult." The book was written in 1845–1846, but it was not published until 1932. Marx's lengthy ferocious polemic against Stirner has since been considered an important turning point in Marx's intellectual development from idealism to materialism. It has been argued that historical materialism was Marx's method of reconciling communism with a Stirnerite rejection of morality.

Possible influence on Friedrich Nietzsche

The ideas of Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche have often been compared and many authors have discussed apparent similarities in their writings, sometimes raising the question of influence. During the early years of Nietzsche's emergence as a well-known figure in Germany, the only thinker discussed in connection with his ideas more often than Stirner was Arthur Schopenhauer. It is certain that Nietzsche read about The Unique and Its Property, which was mentioned in Friedrich Albert Lange's History of Materialism and Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious, both of which Nietzsche knew well. However, there is no indication that he actually read it as no mention of Stirner is known to exist anywhere in Nietzsche's publications, papers or correspondence. In 2002, a biographical discovery revealed it is probable that Nietzsche had encountered Stirner's ideas before he read Hartmann and Lange in October 1865, when he met with Eduard Mushacke, an old friend of Stirner's during the 1840s.

As soon as Nietzsche's work began to reach a wider audience, the question of whether he owed a debt of influence to Stirner was raised. As early as 1891 when Nietzsche was still alive, though incapacitated by mental illness, Hartmann went so far as to suggest that he had plagiarized Stirner. By the turn of the century, the belief that Nietzsche had been influenced by Stirner was so widespread that it became something of a commonplace at least in Germany, prompting one observer to note in 1907 that "Stirner's influence in modern Germany has assumed astonishing proportions, and moves in general parallel with that of Nietzsche. The two thinkers are regarded as exponents of essentially the same philosophy."

From the beginning of what was characterized as "great debate" regarding Stirner's possible positive influence on Nietzsche, serious problems with the idea were nonetheless noted. By the middle of the 20th century, if Stirner was mentioned at all in works on Nietzsche, the idea of influence was often dismissed outright or abandoned as unanswerable. However, the idea that Nietzsche was influenced in some way by Stirner continues to attract a significant minority, perhaps because it seems necessary to explain the oft-noted (though arguably superficial) similarities in their writings. In any case, the most significant problems with the theory of possible Stirner influence on Nietzsche are not limited to the difficulty in establishing whether the one man knew of or read the other. They also consist in determining if Stirner in particular might have been a meaningful influence on a man as widely read as Nietzsche.

Rudolf Steiner

The individualist anarchist orientation of Rudolf Steiner's early philosophy—before he turned to theosophy around 1900—has strong parallels to and was admittedly influenced by Stirner's conception of the ego, for which Steiner claimed to have provided a philosophical foundation.

Notes

References

Stirner, Max: Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1845 [October 1844]). Stuttgart: Reclam-Verlag, 1972ff; English translation The Ego and Its Own (1907), ed. David Leopold, Cambridge/ New York: CUP 1995.
Stirner, Max: "Recensenten Stirners" (September 1845). In: Parerga, Kritiken, Repliken, Bernd A. Laska, ed., Nürnberg: LSR-Verlag, 1986; English translation Stirner's Critics (abridged), see below.
Max Stirner, Political Liberalism (1845).

External links

General

, an extensive introduction
Svein Olav Nybergs website on Max Stirner, with extensive links to texts and references
Max Stirner within the LSR project (English section)
Max Stirner Project by H. Ibrahim Türkdogan
Library of Egoism , an extensive depisitory of free books, essays and journals concerning egoism

Relationship with other philosophers

"Max Stirner, a durable dissident – in a nutshell – 'How Marx and Nietzsche suppressed their colleague Max Stirner and why he has intellectually survived them'
Stirner Delighted in His Construction – "loves miracles, but can only perform a logical miracle", by Karl Marx
Nietzsche's initial crisis due to an encounter with Stirner's "The Ego", by Bernd A. Laska (2002)
"At the End of the Path of Doubt: Max Stirner", By Lawrence S. Stepelevich (Owl of Minerva 41:1–2 (2009–2010) pp. 85–106)

Texts

Online book Der Einzige und sein Eigentum
The complete original text in German of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum
The complete English edition of "The Ego and his Own", in the translation of Steven T. Byington.
Some of Stirner's illuminating "Shorter Essays", translated into English
Recensenten Stirners / Stirner's Critics bilingual: full text in German / abridged text in English (trans. Frederick M. Gordon)
Stirner's Critics by Max Stirner translated by Wolfi Landstreicher, with an introduction by Jason McQuinn (2013 revision of the only full-text English translation of both "Stirner's Critics" and "The Philosophical Reactionaries" by Wolfi Landstreicher published by CAL Press)
Archive of texts on Stirner at RevoltLib