Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

PART TWO

Disputations

CHAPTER 3

Marx and Stirner

Few persons familiar with Marx’s writings would deny the importance
of The German Ideology. Yet even though its prominence may be
readily admitted, this work has rarely been considered (or read) in its
entirety; its belated publication¹ and translation into English has had
the effect of obscuring the major part of its contents. In particular,
the most lengthy section of The Germany Ideology, ‘Saint Max’, the
section Marx devoted to a detailed examination of Max Stirner’s book
The Individual and his Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum), has
been almost completely ignored.² Roy Pascal’s long-standard English
language translation of The German Ideology³ completely omitted
Marx’s sustained attack on Stirner, and largely because of this omission
the assumption gained currency - almost, as it were, by default - that
‘Saint Max’ is at best of marginal importance to an understanding of
The German Ideology as a whole, let alone anything outside its covers.
This assumption is not supported by an examination of its text. The
themes that emerge from such an examination prove to be central
to an understanding not only of The German Ideology but also of
Marx’s thought taken in its entirety.

It may be unsurprising that many of the most important arguments
that have long been associated with The German Ideology should find
their fullest expression in ‘Saint Max’, its longest single section (which
takes up fully three-quarters of the manuscript). Examples are not hard
to come by; ‘Saint Max’ contains Marx’s most extended arguments
about why German liberalism was so pallid, about why German philos-
ophical speculation was so irredeemably idealist, about why Kant’s
Critique of Practical Reason was in Marx’s opinion so appropriate to
the retarded development of German liberalism and of the German
bourgeoisie alike.⁴ While these strictures, and the connections among
them, are on any reckoning integral to the general argument of The
German Ideology, we cannot rest content with merely indicating that
‘Saint Max’ contains the fullest exposition of these and other themes;
for ‘Saint Max’ indicates not only why Marx put forward the arguments
of The German Ideology in the way that he did, but also why he saw


the need to put them forward at all. ‘Saint Max’ is no mere satellite to
a parent body, The German Ideology, that can be discussed apart from
it; ‘Saint Max’ is its core.

The shortcomings of Max Stirner’s peculiarly individualist brand of
anarchism - shortcomings which, as we shall see, were in no way lost
upon Marx - should not blind us to the importance of Stirner’s The
Individual and his Own in affording Marx the inescapable opportunity
of settling accounts with the Young Hegelians and, by extension, with
his own ‘philosophical’ past. What has been overlooked about ‘Saint
Max’ is that it was Marx’s first extended critique of an anarchist theory
and also that Marx considered the theory in question to be the consum-
mation of Young Hegelian theorizing, embodying its worst features
and exemplifying them to the point of caricature. Marx’s unflattering
characterization of Stirner explains much about The German Ideology
that has hitherto passed unnoticed. The very opening words to the
‘Preface’ amount to an ironic, but not at all unjust, paraphrase of
Stirner’s argument:

Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false
conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what
they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships
according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The
phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. Let us
liberate them from the chimeras, ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings
under the yoke of which they are pining away. Let us revolt
against the rule of thoughts.⁵

The very fact that this opening salvo serves both as a precis of
Young Hegelian theorizing in general and of Stirner’s argument in
particular can tell us much: it tells us what ‘the German ideology’ is,
it tells us why this phrase was used as the title of the book, and it tells
us why Marx considered Stirner to be its touchstone. Yet because most
commentators (unlike Marx himself) have regarded Stirner as being
unworthy of critical attention, they have failed (again unlike Marx
himself) to notice Stirner’s distinctively Young Hegelian lineage. Never-
theless, it was the Young Hegelian provenance of Stirner’s anarchism
that prompted Marx to attack it as frontally and brutally as he did and
that enabled Marx to signify by this attack his public, unequivocal
rejection of Young Hegelianism in general.

Stirner’s The Individual and his Own did not lack for attention, or
even applause, among his fellow Young Hegelians upon its appearance
in 1844; and largely for this very reason, the myth that Stirner merits
an easy dismissal on the grounds that he moved ‘merely on the fringes
of Hegelian circles’⁶ badly needs putting to rest. William Brazill’s
recent, painstaking study of the Young Hegelians, seeking in the interests




of accuracy to distinguish this school, properly so-called, from the more
amorphous Left Hegelians, awards the nomenclature of Young Hegelian
to only six people other than Stirner.⁷ Brazill’s distinction has much to
commend it. Stirner was in reality a characteristic, if eccentric, member
of the Young Hegelian ginger group in Berlin who delighted in the name
of ‘the free’ (die Freien). For all his carefully cultivated character as an
enfant terrible, Stirner’s Young Hegelian credentials were never called
into question as the result of his book’s appearance - least of all by
Marx. Indeed, The Individual and his Own enjoyed on its appearance
a certain succes de scandale in the Young Hegelian circle. Arnold
Ruge commended Stirner for having given up Fichtean metaphysics
and the Feuerbachian ‘theology of humanism’ - Stirner had indeed
relinquished both - and proceeded to insist that ‘[Stirner’s] book must
be sustained and propagated. It is liberation from the stupidest of
stupidities, the “social artisans’ dogma” . . . which preaches . . . the
salvation of absolute economics'. Ruge’s pinpointing Stirner’s opposition
to revolutionary socialism may be the most significant part of his
response; he also thought for a time (and with doubtful consistency)
that The Individual and his Own was the ultimate in Young Hegelian
thought - Marx mutatis mutandis was to agree - and that its very appear-
ance signalled a decisive shift in human history from thought to action.⁸
Moses Hess argued, less apocalyptically and rather more coherently,
that Stirner had earned his place among those who had expressed the
opposition of individuality and collectivism in its most extreme form.
The theoretical impasse to which this tension has led, Hess went on to
argue, could be resolved not by Ruge’s ‘action’ but only by his own
‘socialism’, the communal organization of society⁹ - a conclusion with
which Sitrner, an arch-individualist, would never have agreed.

Ruge and Hess, however, were not the only writers who attempted
to appropriate the undoubted eclat and shock-effect of Stirner’s book
of purposes of their own. The initial reaction of Engels is particularly
striking. While he considered Stirner’s egoism to be ‘merely the essence
of present-day society and of present-day men brought to the level of
consciousness’, Engels was nevertheless quick to insist (in a letter to
Marx) that this very egoism ‘can be built upon even as we invert it’.
He went on to compare Stirner to Bentham, only to argue that Stirner’s
egoism must forthwith be transmuted into communism (gleich in
Kommunismus umschlagen)\ and in the same breath Engels ventured
the opinion that ‘only a few trivialities’ needed to be stressed against
Stirner ‘but what is true in his principles we have to accept.’¹⁰ Marx’s
reply from Paris to Engels’s surprisingly favourable first impression of
Stirner’s book has not been preserved, but we have more than the
central part of a major book written by Marx to indicate that he
disagreed; in a later letter Engels was to say that he had come round
to Marx’s viewpoint and that Hess had done so also.¹¹




The responsiveness of the various members of the Young Hegelian
circle (other than Marx) to Stirner’s arguments indicates that Marx
was not wrong in identifying this milieu as Stirner’s true setting. Marx
considered that the issues Stirner had raised, and the way in which he
had raised them, were extreme but characteristic examples of the
shortcomings of Young Hegelian ‘theoretical bubble-blowing’. Young
Hegelian thought in all its various manifestations tended in Marx’s
opinion to issue in the injunction that ‘people have only to change
their consciousness to make everything in the world all right’.¹² Such
a remonstrance can indeed be levelled against Stirner, among others;
but this tells us nothing about the specific arguments of The Individual
and his Own, or about why Marx, for his part, saw fit to devote the
lengthiest portion of a major work to their demolition. Stirner’s argu-
ments first of all demand to be outlined if we are to appraise Marx’s
phrase-by-phrase dissection of them, and to adjudicate the issues
dividing the two.

The main lineaments of the argument of The Individual and his Own
have been expertly traced by Sir Isaiah Berlin. ‘Stirner believed’, he
says,

that all programmes, ideals, theories as well as political, social
and economic orders are so many artificially built prisons for
the mind and the spirit, means of curbing the will, of concealing
from the individual the existence of his own infinite creative
powers, and that all systems must therefore be destroyed, not
because they are evil, but because they are systems, submission
to which is a new form of idolatry; only when this has been
achieved would man, released from his unnatural fetters, become
truly master of himself and attain to his full stature as a human
being.¹³

What distinguishes Stirner both from other anarchists and from other
egoists is the Young Hegelianism that underlies these beliefs-his Young
Hegelian notion that men throughout history have been whoring after
false gods was counterbalanced by its equally Young Hegelian corollary:
that all we need do to change reality is to master our thoughts, instead
of letting them master us.

Egoism and anarchism

Max Stirner may be best known as ‘the egoistic anarchist’; yet both
terms, egoism and anarchism, admit of much elasticity. Engel’s immedi-
ate comparison of Stirner and Bentham might serve as a reminder of
how supple a term ‘egoism’ can be. Indeed, Stirner’s particular brand




of egoism is distinct from most other variants. It seems very different,
for example, from the argument of Mandeville (and by extension the
early political economists) that ‘private vices’ add up to ‘public benefit’,
if only because Stirner regarded the notion of public (as opposed to
private) benefit as nonsensical. Stirner’s egoism, again, seems irreducible
to Romantic notions of subjectivity if only because Stirner was a forth-
right foe of all teleological categories - of goals, purposes, ends, even if
these are imposed upon the individual by the individual himself. Stirner’s
aggressive egoism superficially might seem closer to the assertiveness
propounded by theorists like Spinoza and Hobbes than to Romantic
striving; but even this resemblance is more apparent than real. Stirner
denied the possibility of any autocratic (or even political) outcome of
the free play of personal, self-defined forces, and in any case did not
share the psychological determination of a Spinoza, a Hobbes or an
Helvetius. These theorists had maintained that the assertive ego could
act only on its own behalf, whereas Stirner - a Young Hegelian to the
last - despairingly maintained that quite to the contrary men through-
out history had submitted themselves voluntarily to what he calls ‘hier-
archy’ -a sequence of oppressive, outside belief-systems and institutions.
All such systems and structures, Stirner insisted, had struck at men’s
uniqueness, originality and singularity.

David McLellan has pointed out, aptly, that Stirner’s ‘analysis of
the modern age is a sort of demonology of the spirits to which humanity
has been successfully enslaved’;¹⁴ The Individual and his Own takes
the form of a diatribe against the effects of these successive idees fixes,
against what Stirner’s translator called ‘wheels in the head’ (Stirner’s
own term had been die Sparren), against beliefs that had worked
successfully and remorselessly to prevent the ego from working on its
own behalf. Stirner’s aim was to tear away the veils, to remove the
blinkers from men’s eyes; the autonomous individual was in his con-
ception not a descriptive category but a hoped-for goal of future
human endeavour - a goal that is presaged only among the outcasts of
modern society, only among its criminals and paupers. The obstacle to
the final emergence of individual autonomy according to Stirner has
proved to be consciousness - consciousness conceived in the Young
Hegelian manner as being alien, oppressive and imposed.

Stirner has much more in common with his fellow Young Hegelians
than with those who have (always loosely) been termed egoists, and if
we fail to see this we are likely to misconstrue his argument, as have
several of his anarchist admirers. The Individual and his Own takes the
form of an inventory of obstacles to the free play of the ego, obstacles
grounded in consciousness, which are attacked so broadly that the
theories of most other ‘egoists’ would not escape condemnation. The
‘absolute ego’ of Fichte is a case in point; Stirner attacks it frontally
because it is a postulated goal that might dominate individuals and feed




on their autonomy, and because the goal in question was said to consist
in the realization of rational universality, a project Stirner regarded as
senseless. If Stirner’s egoism were to be made operative, he never tires
of telling us, it would not ‘realize’ anything; it would destroy all known
forms of society once and for all.

This does not mean that Stirner considered himself a revolutionary
or his doctrine a revolutionary doctrine. He saw revolution-as Arnold
Ruge perceived - in the same, unsparing light in which he saw religious
faith, moral duty, political organization and social institutions. All
such beliefs, all such insititutions Stirner regarded as demands upon
the individual self which displace its ‘particularity’ (Stirner’s Eigenheit)
with various conceptions of the purportedly ‘true’ self to which the
real, empirical self must first aspire and subsequently adhere. Stirner
aimed to undermine all such demands for self-sacrifice by spelling out
their inadmissible implications, and the demands of revolutionaries
were not excepted. Stirner believed that what most needs to be safe-
guarded is the core of irreducible individuality or singularity (Eigenheit
again) on which all known forms of society and state, and all kinds of
revolutionary organization, had fed. Only the association (Verein) of
egoists, which was to be the outcome not of revolution but of a very
different form of uprising - which Stirner termed ‘rebellion’ - would
not have the individual model himself upon some formative principle
that is supposed to be greater than himself. The association of egoists
which Stirner rather puzzlingly proffers was to come into being specifi-
cally in order to preserve, and not to usurp, the self-defined privileges
and prerogatives of the sovereign individual. According to Stirner,
indeed, the association will somehow positively preserve and enlarge
the individual’s self-assertive particularity, which is to be untrammelled.
Assertiveness and particularity stand in no need of mediation; Stirner
was resolute in his concern to attack any mentality, revolutionary or
not, that relied on moral postulates or depended in any way on the use
of the word ‘ought’ (sollen). He believed that evil resided in the very
notion of such ideals or ‘vocations’.

The constraints against which Stirner’s polemic was directed may be
internal, external or both at once. Enslavement to the dictates of
consciousness involves a loss or alienation of the individual self that may
be as severe or demeaning as that entailed by regulation from without,
by external moral codes. To follow commands is to allow one’s actions
to be determined: in Stirner’s unorthodox lexicon, to ‘find oneself
in thought, or in ‘spirit’, is to ‘lose oneself in ‘reality’.

The loss of self involved is not uniform. It has taken different
successive forms at different historical stages, stages which Stirner lists
in a curious but paradigmatic opening section, ‘The Life of a Man’ (Ein
Menschenleben), with which he sets the tone of The Individual and his
Own. In the elaboration of this part of his argument - which has some




interesting ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications that cannot
concern us here - Stirner has recourse to a muted, Hegelian theory of
history. The ‘spirituality’ he so detested, the way in which thought,
by determining human action from without, had dominated history
in successive stages, had served a potentially progressive and liberating
function. The dominance of successive waves and consciousness had
made the individual master of his natural environment, for instance,
even if consciousness or spirit had done so not for the benefit of the
individual but for its own sake. The culmination of the process of
history according to Stirner was to be not the perpetuation of the
reign of spirit but its utter subversion; it was to consist in the supremacy
of the assertive ego. Even so, Stirner considered the historical process
up to that point in Hegelian terms, as the autogenesis of man pro-
pelled by spirit or consciousness. Whatever his understanding of Hegel
- which was to be called into question by Marx - it remains true that
Stirner did appropriate a broadly Hegelian approach to history. While
he may have been Very weak on history’,¹⁵ he did allow for the develop-
ment of spirit and self-consciousness; and while it may be true, as
Marx thought, that Stirner had ‘cribbed’ his history from Hegel, Stirner
himself aimed to turn his evident borrowings from Hegel to what he
considered good account.

1 receive with thanks what the centuries of culture have acquired
for me; I am not willing to give up anything of it; / have not
lived in vain. The experience that I have power over my nature
and need not be the slave of my appetites need not be lost upon
me; the experience that I can subdue the world by culture’s means
is too dearly bought for me to be able to forget it. But I want
still more.¹⁶

Young Hegelian theories of the dominance of concepts in history
normally emphasize religion in general and, following Strauss and
Feuerbach, Christianity in particular as exemplars of the process.
Stirner’s account is no exception. Stirner, indeed, gives an altogether
original twist to the notion that ‘Christianity begins with God’s be-
coming man and carries on its work of conversion and redemption
through all time to prepare for God a reception in all men and every-
thing human, and to penetrate everything with the Spirit’.¹⁷ The
Christian Sollen, he insists, denigrates the individual in an unusually
forceful way. Disdain for the world and devaluation of the individual
were in Stimer’s eyes the idees mattresses of Christian spirituality.
One characteristic expression of this disdain (at least according to
Stirner’s unorthodox view of the matter) was the belief of Descartes
that only as mind is man alive. In loving the spiritual alone the Christian
can love no particular person. The concern of Christianity ‘is for the




divine’, and while ‘at the end of Heathenism the divine becomes the
extramundane, at the end of Christianity it becomes the intramundane’.¹⁸

What brings about Stirner’s intramundane divinity is, of course,
Protestantism. Whereas the Catholic according to Stirner is content
with carrying out commands proceeding from an external, authoritative
source, the Protestant is his own Geistlicher using his own ‘internal
secret policeman’, the private conviction of conscience and its inward
imperatives, to watch over every motion of his mind and to stifle every
natural impulse.¹⁹ Stirner perceives that the shift to Protestantism is
political and religious all at once; liberalism considered as a character-
istically modern political form entails the absence of intermediaries
between citizen and state just as Protestantism involves their absence
from the individual’s relationship to the deity. The individual, as
Stirner proceeds to put it, becomes a political Protestant in relation
to his God, the modern state, the state which Hegel himself had called
a ‘secular deity’ which ‘men must venerate’ as such.²⁰

The section of The Individual and his Own that deals with political
liberalism clearly bears the imprint of Marx’s essay ‘On the Jewish
Question’, an article which Stirner cites;²¹ he repeats Marx’s argument
that just as religious freedom means that religion is free, and freedom
of conscience that conscience is free, political freedom means that the
state (not man himself) is free. Stirner, however, twists this argument
in a direction that is all his own. ‘Liberalism’, he declaims, ‘simply
[introduced] other concepts - human instead of divine, political instead
of ecclesiastical, scientific instead of doctrinal, real conflicts instead
of crude dogmas.’ What these shifts all mean is that ‘now nothing but
mind rules the world’;²² political liberalism according to Stirner accen-
tuates and institutionalizes the ‘Christian’ depreciation of the individual.
‘The rights of man . . . have the meaning that the man in me entitles
me to this and that. I as individual am not entitled but “man” has the
right and entitles me.’²³ After all, as far as Stirner was concerned, any
general concept, task or ‘vocation’ demeans and tyrannizes over the
individual; its liberty is (and is paid for by) his slavery. With the advent
of modern citizenship (Burgerthum), Stirner argued, ‘it was not the
individual man -and he alone is man -that became free, but the citizen,
the citoyen, the political man, who for that very reason is not man’.
Although what Stirner called Burgerthum requires an impersonal
(sachliche) authority, the ‘Protestant’ absence of intermediaries be-
tween state and individual citizen that this requires has the effect not
of diminishing but of increasing individual submissiveness.²⁴ Without
the denigration of the individual for the sake of what is an abstract
Sollen, the state cannot subsist. This is why, on Stirner’s logic, the
uprising of the enraged individual would suffice to destroy the state,
root and branch. Denigration of the individual is the principle of
the state, its raison d’etre. The kernel of the state, like the kernel of




‘morality’, was in Stimer’s view the abstraction ‘man’; every corrective
category or concept respects and validates only the ‘man’ in the in-
dividual.

Stirner’s anarchism pays a kind of back-handed tribute to Hegel’s
conception of the state as the historical embodiment of morality; by
rejecting both the state and morality on the same grounds - both are
to be overturned by ‘rebellion’ - Stirner underscores the connection
between the two. The state to Stirner at one and the same time exer-
cised domination and remained an idee fixe, an ‘apparition’, as he was
wont to put it, by which men are ‘possessed’. It is in his portrayal of
the state, indeed, that Stirner is at his most Young Hegelian; his frankly
contradictory view of the state recalls nothing as much as Feuerbach’s
view of the way Christianity oppresses mankind although - or because -
its content is illusory. The Young Hegelianism of Stirner’s discussion
makes his critique of the state per se rather less forceful than those of
most other anarchist theoreticians. His critique, compared with those
of other anarchists, lacks specificity; while he presents the state through-
out his argument as an agent or agency of sacredness and morality, he
presents society and religion (not to mention revolution) in almost
identical terms. Indeed Stirner never distinguishes state from society
very clearly, although he does provide some rather incoherent pointers:
while society denies the liberty of the individual, the state denies his
peculiarity or uniqueness (Eigenheit); whereas society rests content
with making the individual the bondsman of another, or of itself, the
state can be maintained only if the supposedly valueless individual
is made the bondsman of himself; society, which is as it were man’s
state of nature, man’s natural condition from which man must never-
theless escape by asserting his Eigenheit, is not an illusion in the way
the state is said to be one; society, unlike the state, is never linked with
pauperism; and nothing in society is said to correspond to the inter-
nalization of the commands of law or to the total surrender of man that
the state requires - the taking over, that is to say, by the Protestant-
liberal state of the ‘whole man’ with all his attributes and faculties.

Stirner, similarly, says very little about forms of the state, beyond
the propositions that any state is a despotism even if all men who belong
to it despotize over one another, and that the liberal state reinforces
the coercive power of conscience. That it is able to do so, indeed, is
what accounts for its power; in itself the liberal state, Stirner insists,
is no more than a mechanical compound. The state machine moves the
clockwork of individual minds, the wheels in people’s heads, but only
so long as none of them move autonomously. An upsurge of Eigenheit,
which will remove and undercut the individual’s destitution of will,
would destroy the mechanism, once and for all. This is to be the task
-although Stirner would not have called it a ‘task’- of ‘rebellion’.

As part of this upsurge of individual rebellion, which we are to




encounter again in the writings of Bakunin, who in a sense collectivized
it, Stirner insisted that men would discover for themselves that the state
is, in the last analysis, an illusion; and as an authority for this assertion
he was emboldened to cite (of all people) Marx. Stirner, who had
absorbed Marx’s message in ‘On the Jewish Question’ that the state
considered as a community was illusory and that citizenship considered
as a measure of community was likewise more apparent than real,
proceeded to go one better than Marx and assert that the state, not as
a collective moral force, but as an alien physical force - as the repressive
embodiment of the police, military and bureaucracy - was likewise an
illusion. To Marx such a conclusion was preposterous. The idea that
men obey the state because they are deluded does not lead to the
proposition that the state itself is a delusion. Marx in ‘On the Jewish
Question’ had seen the difference very clearly and drawn the line with
some care; but Stirner, who had read and gained much from Marx’s
article, still believed that the rule of the state was a blatant, paradig-
matic case of men’s being ruled by their own illusions. His argument,
which leads into his assertion of ‘rebellion’ as opposed to ‘revolution’,
is that since man is by nature not a political animal, not a zoon politikon,
and that since only the political in man is expressed in the state, political
life is a fabrication. This leads to the further proposition that law
embodies no coercive force except in the minds of those who obey it
- a proposition rightly ridiculed by Marx. ‘In every institution in our
society’, writes one of our own contemporaries, wittingly or unwittingly
echoing Stirner,

people must be helped to realize that the power of the ruling elite
and its bureaucracy is nothing, nothing but their [people’s]
refusal and externalized power. Then it is a matter of
recuperation of this power, and the recuperative strategy is
quite simple; act against the rules, and the act itself converts
the illusory power in them into real power in us.²⁵

That such a Stirnerian argument can be trotted out again does nothing,
however, to make it any less ridiculous.