The ego and his own : the case of the individual against authority

347 Pages·2014·1.8 MB·English

by  Max Stirner

This paperback edition first published by Verso 2014
First published by the Libertarian Book Club, New York 1963
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Verso
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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-156-5
eBook ISBN: 978-1-78168210-4
eISBN (UK): 978-1-78168-519-8
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Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Editor’s Introduction
Translator’s Preface
Dedication
All Things Are Nothing to Me
Part First: MAN
I. A Human Life
II. Men of the Old Time and the New
A. The Ancients
B. The Moderns
1. The Spirit
2. The Possessed
3. The Hierarchy
C. The Free
1. Political Liberalism
2. Social Liberalism
3. Humane Liberalism
Part Second: I
III. Ownness
IV. The Owner
A. My Power
B. My Intercourse
C. My Self-Enjoyment
V. The Unique One
Editor’s Introduction
“Fifty years sooner or later can make little difference in the case of a
book so revolutionary as this.” This was the opening sentence of James
L. Walker’s introduction to the first English language issuance of Max
Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum by Benjamin R. Tucker in 1907. It
is probably as succinct and concise a summarization of the significance
of the book as has ever been uttered. But Walker has not been the only
one to speak of Stirner in this manner. Two years later James Huneker,
in his famous evaluation, referred to the book as “the most revolutionary
ever written.” “He has left behind him a veritable breviary of
destruction, a striking and dangerous book,” Huneker declared; “it is
dangerous in every sense of the word—to socialism, to politicians, to
hypocrisy.”1
There is little doubt that The Ego and His Own is one of the most
formidable assaults on authoritarianism ever launched. It may even
belong in the first position as such. It is at once a historical document, a
pamphlet of the intellectual disturbance of the mid-nineteenth century,
and a timeless classic. Its persistent reappearance in one language or
another in the last hundred years testifies to the latter.
However, the attention to Stirner has not been smooth and steady,
but, rather, irregular and spasmodic. Its appearance in English for the
first time was a product of one of these surges of interest, largely ignited
by the great impact of Friedrich Nietzsche, especially between 1885 and
1910. As a consequence Stirner was attached to the tail of Nietzsche’s
comet as a “precursor” though he had been a comet in his own right
before Nietzsche had even been old enough to learn to walk.2
It is not of prime significance that Max Stirner’s life be stressed here,
though a few items of substance may be mentioned. He was born Johann
Kaspar Schmidt in Bayreuth, Germany on October 25, 1806. The name
he adopted as a pseudonym was originally a nickname from student
days, a reference to his broad, high forehead. His career prior to the
writing of his first, and major, book was obscure, though it included
education in three universities, and half a dozen years’ experience in
teaching. His first wife died in childbirth in 1838, and he remarried in
1843, which also appears to be the date when he began to draw together
his thoughts and material into the book which was to shock and outrage
a goodly portion of intellectual Germany the year after, and
subsequently the whole Western world.
From internal evidence it appears that he completed Der Einzige
sometime in February or March, 1844. A rather expert job of book
production followed, for, although the book bore the date 1845, it was
actually in the hands of readers in November, 1844. The Leipzig house
of Otto Wigand issued it in an octavo volume of about 500 pages.3
Stirner’s book came out at a stormy time in Western and Central
European affairs. France, Italy and the whole German world were in
furious distress caused by the pressure of Liberalism upon the
monarchical structure of politics in these lands, clamoring for a voice in
the making of public policy and the running of affairs. And in the
background and the underground boiled the propaganda of socialism,
supervised by a score or more expert tenders of mainly French and
German origin. The philosophical proponents of the powerful national
secular State had also made their appearance, and the polished thought
of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in
particular the latter, had made a deep impression on the thinkers of the
whole political spectrum of the time.
In a way, Stirner was both a product and a victim of these factors. His
book came out of them, and it was buried in the avalanche of the
revolutions of March 1848 and thereafter. But in the interval between its
publication and the uprising of the ’48ers, a lively intellectual conflict
spread. Few books have aroused such hostility and general
disparagement as Stirner’s, though it was not the author’s intent to avoid
a battle, by any means.4 His spirited polemics against the principal
figures among the so-called Left Hegelians, the Junghegelianer,
particularly Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, invited reprisal, let
alone his equally rousing tilt with the socialists, especially Wilhelm
Weitling and Moses Hess. Stirner represented a “third force” in these
agitated times, neither a defender of the theological or monarchical
State, nor a protagonist of the secular models advanced by the Liberals
and socialists. His views were as shocking and repellent to the latter as
to the former. And Stirner went into almost total eclipse in the following
forty years, while the modern secular State took shape, with its
distinctive homogenization of the new nationalism and socialism, and
the surviving but mutated strains of the earlier divine right and
ecclesiastical authority, plus the ingredients consisting of the
enfranchised and compulsorily armed masses which the French
Revolution contributed.
Stirner’s principal intellectual and social company had been the
Berliners of Hegelian inspiration and tendencies whom he had
encountered at Hippel’s restaurant, who were known as “Die Freien,” in
some circles. These “bold spirits” included Ludwig Buhl, C.F. Köppen,
Arthur Müller, and the brothers Bruno, Edgar and Egbert Bauer. And
there were others. It was assumed Stirner was one of them, and the
largest part of the critics in the subsequent half-century generally
lumped him in the Hegelian Left. But Stirner’s book is the Anti-Hegel, as
Victor Basch elaborated nearly sixty years ago.5 And in an important
sense a thorough reading and understanding of Hegel is necessary to
understand Stirner. The assault on the master was not an explicit one,
however. Hegel is mentioned sparingly, though significantly, in a direct
sense. It is through his younger exponents that Stirner propels his
critique of their State and its related personifications and generalized
ideas.
It was in the company of these persons that such previews of Stirner as
exist made their appearance. He published a few articles in the Hallische
Jahrbücher and the Deutsche Jahrbücher, ephemeral journals edited by
Arnold Ruge6 in the years just previous. They were largely ignored at the
time, and not made generally available for over half a century. It is in
these that the germs of his anti-Hegelian revolt are first discerned.7
The history of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum is worthy of a glance. After
its first appearance, it sank out of sight for nearly four decades. The
original publishing house of Wigand brought out a second edition in
1882, and a third in 1901.8 These latter two were separated
chronologically by the 1892 Universal-Bibliotek edition of Philipp
Reclam, Jr., also of Leipzig, in the famous “Miniatur-Ausgaben” series,
which found Stirner in the company of world-famous literature. The
publication of a full-scale biography of Stirner by John Henry Mackay in
1893 preceded two translations in French which were published one
after the other in Paris in 1900 under the title L’Unique et sa Propriété.
These set the stage for the English translation and publication.
The first American to dwell at length on Stirner was James L. Walker,
a Texas newspaperman and later physician, and an associate of Tucker.
Walker brought Stirner’s “egoism” into the pages of Tucker’s world-
famous anarchist weekly, Liberty, with increasing frequency during the
1890s, and himself prepared a strongly Stirner-influenced book, The
Philosophy of Egoism,9 published posthumously, Walker having died in
Mexico in 1904. His introduction to the Tucker edition of Stirner was
written in 1902 or 1903, evidence that Tucker planned to release the
book in that time, though some unknown circumstance delayed its
issuance. In a publishing career which went back to 1875, Tucker
insisted that making Stirner available in English was his most important
contribution in the entire time.10
After Tucker’s property was burned out in the fire of January, 1908
his work ended,11 but apparently the plates of this book were salvaged,
because editions in the identical format with that of 1907 came out in
London and New York in 1913–15 under different auspices, and a third
by still another publisher was produced in New York in 1918.12 The
history of Stirner’s book in languages other than those examined above
is obscure; there were Italian and Russian translations, and possibly in a
Scandinavian language, as Stirner was very familiar to Henrik Ibsen and
the Danish critic Georg Brandes,13 the latter having written at some
length on Stirnerism.
Huneker declared that the translation, by the erudite philologist
Steven T. Byington, was “admirable,” which is indeed a fact. He was
aided in his work by Walker and by Emma Heller Schumm and George
Schumm, all expert in German, so in one sense it was a cooperative
project. Byington did the greater part of the work, however. His preface
to the original edition is preserved here in order to illuminate some of
the difficulties encountered in Stirner’s frequently diffuse style, and his
etymological references are preserved throughout the book in the
original footnotes. His choice of the English title, The Ego and His Own, is
specially felicitous.
Friedrich Nietzsche was a few months old when Stirner’s book was
published, but no other thinker has been compared more to Stirner than
Nietzsche, and perhaps with less evidence for it. A critical controversy
raged among philosophers and academic people over this issue, in
particular between 1890 and the first World War, and a literature of
large enough scope exists on this subject alone to warrant a substantial
book. Albert Lévy, in his careful study Stirner et Nietzsche,14 points out
that Stirner is not mentioned in either the works or the correspondence
of Nietzsche at any time, and with the exception of a single instance,
Nietzsche appears not to have been aware of him at all. In the case of
every writer who has tried to establish such a relationship, the method
has consisted of dependence on inference and the coincidental
similarities which can be established by superficial content analysis. This
is the approach of a considerable number of over-simplifiers, of whom
Paul Carus is one of the best examples.15
Stirner was an uncommonly keen student of classical antiquity, the
French Revolution, and the Bible, in particular. The latter is his most
quoted source by a wide margin. In one sense this appears
incomprehensible, considering Stirner’s position on religion. Of this,
more will be said shortly. An attempt has been made to annotate as
many of Stirner’s literary references and allusions as seems practicable,
in view of their number and his careless documentation. The latter in
particular suggests the contemporary polemic part of his book; the
sources are thrown about carelessly like so much spare lumber, and the
overall impression conveyed is that his readers are fully aware of their
nature or have read them.16
The Ego and His Own is a piece of fierce writing, in an “icy, relentless,
epigrammatic style,” as Huneker describes it. Nothing distracts Stirner
from his pursuit of the exposition of freedom; he is for freedom for
everyone, not just himself. And he is consistent in not shrinking from the
consequences of this pursuit. It may very well be that the largest number
of midtwentieth century individualists does not have the stamina to stick
with Stirner to the bitter logical end. The various libertarians are free to
decamp at that point of the journey beyond where they no longer care to
proceed. But it is their responsibility to know whence individualism
stems and where its logic goes. No one has surpassed Stirner in dealing
with these two aspects of the problem. There are uncanny portions of
this work; one might cite in particular his discussion of the semantics of
“freedom” and compare them with the similar dissertations by George
Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-four and Eugen Zamyatin in We, those most
exquisitely anti-Stirner worlds. Stirner in a sense was a pioneer in the
area of general semantics.
Stirner wanted all to be free; he was not arguing just for himself or for
a special segment of mankind. But he stressed over and over the part the
one desirous of freedom had to play; freedom was not something
someone else gave you. All freedom is essentially self-liberation, says
Stirner. His concern is with the individual rebel, not the revolution. It is
as such that he respected Jesus, a rebel who concerned himself not a
whit with the politics and the State of his time. But for organized
Christianity, and for all other organized religions, Stirner had
particularly harsh words. Personal insurrection rather than general
revolution was his message; he recognized the futility of meeting the
authorities at street barricades with broom handles at a time when the
Romantics were still enamored with this concept. The age of automatic
arms and instantaneous communication was just around the corner. The
general revolution brought either “Socialism or a tyrant,” in his view;
the revolutionist merely exchanged masters, often for the worse.
There are only five chapters in Stirner, three very short ones,
separated by two very long ones, and it is in the latter that he has
packed the very largest part of his message. Though he assaults religion,
philosophy, morals, every source of inspiration for authority, as for his
principal target Victor Basch remarks, “L’État, voilà le grand ennemi,
voilà l’éternel tyran du Moi.”17 All authority materials end up as arms
and nutriment for the State, and Hegel and his chief disciples were the
agents of his time who appeared to be doing the most thorough job of
preparing the world for the new secular Leviathan. Stirner was scornful
of the German national unity fervor of the 1840s. He was almost
completely untouched by one of the most uproarious political
fermentations in the history of Central Europe. In his view, unity would
just be the superimposing of a far more grim and ferocious monster for
the existing thirty-eight separate weaker ones of the existing states. He
saw no net gain in replacing the ecclesiastic or monarchical State with
the new secular product in the making; in fact, he was sure that the
latter had immeasurably superior means and capabilities for
oppressiveness.