Review of The Ego and Its Own (1844)
Max Stirner (writer).
Read in 2024.
Read in Steven T. Byington’s 1907 translation to English, heavy on the word “ragamuffin”.
A general critique of socially contructed shared ideas, including Christianity, as “spooks” in the minds of individuals.
That society which Communism wants to found seems to stand nearest to coalition. For it is to aim at the “welfare of all,” oh, yes, of all, cries Weitling innumerable times, of all! That does really look as if in it no one needed to take a back seat. But what then will this welfare be? Have all one and the same welfare, are all equally well off with one and the same thing?
In the unpublished The German Ideology, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels attacked Stirner along with at least two of the same people that Stirner himself polemicizes against in The Ego and Its Own: Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach. Stirner also treats other writers—including the utopian socialists Wilhelm Weitling and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon—alongside a number of current events. He mentions Marx only in a footnote.
Stirner’s casual immersion in then-current events does nothing to improve the reading experience more than a century later. Marx and Engels may have been right lumping him in with Bauer and Feuerbach as composing one German ideology following Kant and Hegel, both of whom emphasized private property rights. There is certainly undigested older material in Ego, including traces of antisemitism and sexism, suggesting a corridor of thought. Stirner’s thought, where it is original, is somewhat poorly organized across the book, and it has a sardonic tone that may remind you of a college sophomore who likes to hang around in pubs and argue against others, not so much for his own theories. The book opens with a sustained metaphor for personal philosophical development as a human life, so I have to think Stirner was aware of how his own iconoclasm is typically associated with youth, not maturity.
Underneath this surface, Stirner is many good things. He’s a skeptic, an intelligent substance monist, and an opponent of unjustified authority, including that of the church and the state. He’s an anarchist but not a utopian thinker. He doesn’t write much about future goals, for the same reason that Dao De Jing (ca. 400 BCE) is not an agenda, but his basic attitudes are humanistic. One goal he does propose is self-knowledge. Another is “the enlargement of your competence”. He assumes, with or without a shared state of self-knowledge, a fundamental equality of human value. This is not based on moral debts, rights, elegant parsimony, “Man”, or other ideals, and not on competence, but on the shared bedrock of post-Enlightenment personhood. Other thinkers, including Rousseau and later libertarians, have envisioned societies built on this individualist bedrock that are lonely, competitive, or treacherous, but Stirner is refreshingly unprejudiced in how he expects people to behave. For his own part, he leans in a cautiously optimistic direction:
I love men too, not merely individuals, but every one. But I love them with the consciousness of egoism; I love them because love makes me happy, I love because loving is natural to me, because it pleases me. I know no “commandment of love.” I have a fellow-feeling with every feeling being, and their torment torments, their refreshment refreshes me too; I can kill them, not torture them.
By “torture”, Stirner means punitive justice and other such paradoxic attacks on the individual for the sake of an abstract community. He doesn’t get bogged down inventing qualia or speculating about the details of natural human inclinations. You could still write a Candide (1759) that satirizes him, but his higher-level conclusions remain remarkably compatible with the lower-level study of humankind that would emerge after Darwin, including scientifically-minded successors to the gullible Freud.
Engels apparently found much to like here. As for Marx’s criticism, Stirner’s own emphasis on private property is indeed inherited from Kant and Hegel in a self-serving and class-warring bourgeois tradition. Stirner denies that rich rentiers are to blame for poverty. He imagines that all menial servants can immediately bargain individually for fair wages, with the argument that “we plowmen are no longer doing otherwise”, and without doing any harm to the rich. This line of argument is compatible with craft unionism, but Stirner, having no concept of game theory, seems to imagine that it will happen without formal organization or political ideology. Among his salvoes against the practical work of political ideologists is this little gem:
All attempts to enact rational laws about property have put out from the bay of love into a desolate sea of regulations.
This is naïve not only in its assumption that legislators are loving, but in its distrust of abstraction as alien and desolate because it does not immediately deliver on the intention. Like other German philosophers in his tradition, Stirner wants a solution that is more pure and direct than “regulations” or “juridical” concepts: He wants a profound liberty that is not a permission. Unlike others in his tradition, he denies himself the opportunity to escape into idealism, so instead, he escapes into the process of philosophy itself. “What then is my property?” he asks, hypophorically. “Nothing but what is in my power!” This is a little bit of Proudhon’s material power to reserve goods for one’s own use but—much more centrally—it is Voltaire’s power to think: “In my thoughts, which I get sanctioned by no assent, grant, or grace, I have my real property, a property with which I can trade.” Because material property is more abstract, even at the private level, Stirner comes close to denying the validity of the concept, as Proudhon did: “But my property is not a thing, since this has an existence independent of me; only my might is my own.”
Ultimately, I think, Stirner did important and inspiring work. However, his criticism of idealism would only pay off later, when it was mounted atop a foundation of scientific methods and results. Without that foundation, Stirner’s skepticism was pure philosophy. It could only exist as more ideology.
References here: Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867/1887).