Max Stirner

Stirner, Max (1806–56)

Max Stirner is the author of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and Its Own), first published in Germany in 1844 and best known for its idiosyncrasies of argument and idiom. Stirner condemns modernity as entrenched in religious modes of thought and envisages a positive egoistic future in which individuals are liberated from the tyranny of those ideas and social arrangements which restrict autonomy. The Ego and Its Own was an impulse to the decline of the Hegelian left as a coherent intellectual movement, and played an important role in the genesis of Marxism; Stirner has also been variously portrayed as a precursor of Nietzsche, an individualist anarchist and a forerunner of existentialism.

Stirner (born Johann Caspar Schmidt on 25 October 1806 in Bayreuth, Germany) had a largely unpropitious start to adult life, passing through university without distinction, before becoming a teacher at a respectable private girls’ school in Berlin. However, in his spare time he became increasingly involved with ‘the free’ (a group of left Hegelians led by Bruno Bauer), before leaving his teaching post in 1844 and publishing Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and Its Own), his most important and influential work. Following a brief period of unremunerative notoriety, Stirner settled into a somewhat indigent and solitary lifestyle. Hack journalism, translation work and (before she left him) his second wife’s dwindling inheritance failed to avert two brief spells in a debtors’ prison. Stirner contracted a fever after an insect bite on his neck, and died on 25 June 1856.

Insisting on the relativity of rationality, truth and language, Stirner rejects traditional forms of expression and modes of exposition. The consequent employment of aphorism and metaphor, neologisms, relentless paronomasia and juxtaposition of words with formal similarities or related meanings to present his views makes The Ego and Its Own a stylistically striking, if idiosyncratic, text. The only limitation which Stirner places upon use of language and mode of argument is that it should serve our individual ends.

The Ego and Its Own is structured around a tripartite division of human experience into categories of ‘realism’ (where individuals are dominated by external forces), ‘idealism’ (where individuals are dominated by ideas), and ‘egoism’ (where individuals escape domination by dealing with things and ideas as they wish, setting their personal satisfaction above all else). This tripartite division is elaborated and exemplified in accounts of individual development (in which childhood, youth and adulthood correspond to stages of realism, idealism and egoism), of human history (in which the ancient, Christian and future worlds are portrayed as epochs of realism, idealism and egoism respectively) and in a racial (and racist) analogue of that historical account (in which the Caucasian race passes through the realist stage of ‘Negroidity’ and the idealist stage of ‘Mongolism’ before reaching the ‘truly Caucasian’ future in which the race is liberated from the hegemony of natural forces and ideas).

Part One aims to demonstrate that modernity, the epoch of idealism, fails to escape from that which it claims to have outgrown, namely religious modes of thought. Thus Stirner rejects the contemporary consensus that Ludwig Feuerbach (§2), the leading figure of the Hegelian left, had completed the critique of religion (see Hegelianism §2). For Stirner, the errors of religion are not overcome by a rejection of God as transcendent subject, but by opposing the subordination of the individual to ‘spirit’ in any form. Feuerbach’s anthropological reduction had not revealed human nature as it was, but rather deified an abstract and prescriptive account of what being human involved, thus leaving the ‘real kernel’ of religion, the positing of an ‘essence over me’, intact. This continued immurement within religious thinking is portrayed as paradigmatic of modernity. Liberals, socialists (including the young Karl Marx) and contemporary critics of all kinds are convicted of separating individuals from their real natures and positing some fictitious essence as their goal. In contrast, Stirner seeks to rehabilitate the concrete and diverse ‘un-man’ (unmensch) in each of us, to whom this ‘foolish mania to be something else’ is completely alien.

Part Two elaborates Stirner’s conception of egoism by relating it to ‘ownness’ (Eigenheit), a form of substantive individual autonomy valued above all else. ‘Ownness’ is violated by any desire or action which involves waiving or suspending individual judgment, and thus conflicts with any conception, however grounded, of obligation or duty. Even the legitimacy of self-assumed obligations, incurred, for example, by the act of promising, is denied. Perhaps most importantly (not least in establishing his anarchist credentials), Stirner maintains that a relationship of absolute hostility exists between the individual and the state, based on the incompatibility of ‘ownness’ and any obligation to obey the law. The notorious adjunct is that crime is applauded as an assertion of ‘ownness’ against its chief usurper, weakening the ‘cement’ (respect for law) which holds the state together.

Morality, defined by its positing of duties on the individual, is also sacrificed to ‘ownness’. For those (including Stirner) who dispute the idea of an exclusive opposition between morality and immorality, it does not follow that the egoist is immoral. Nor is Stirner inconsistent in stressing the evaluative superiority of egoism over other modes of experience and action. Stirner’s rejection of morality is grounded in an affirmation of the nonmoral good of egoism and not in a repudiation of values: that is, he allows a realm of actions and desires, which although not moral (because they involve no obligations to others) are still to be assessed positively. Stirner’s conception of morality is in this sense a narrow one, and his rejection of its claims is not coextensive with a denial of the validity of all evaluative judgment.

The escape from social relations which conflict with ‘ownness’ is not the end of all contact between persons, only the end of binding rules for resolving conflicts between competing interests, and the end of constraints, other than ‘ownness’, upon the pursuit of individual enjoyment. Stirner consistently characterizes the resulting relationship between egoists and their objects (including other individuals) in proprietorial terms, although, in contrast to traditional juridical conceptions of ownership, ‘egoistic property’ largely collapses into a notion of instrumental treatment. The ‘union of egoists’ is established as the only form of association which does not violate ‘ownness’ and so can constitute a suitable vehicle for advancing individual interests. In the historical maturity of egoism, community survives only in the form of this constantly shifting alliance which enables egoists to unite without loss of sovereignty, a purely instrumental combination whose good is solely the advantages which individuals derive from the pursuit of their interests – there are no final ends and association is not valued in itself.