The Ego and lts Own (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 147 philosophers and historians of philosophy often publish some of their best work in collections like this, so it is not enough to scan the journals to keep up with that work. This volume is expensive, but belongs in all research libraries. JOHN CHRISTIAN LAURSEN University of California, Riverside Max Stirner. TheEgo andlts Own. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Edited, Introduced, and Annotated by David Leopold. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xl + 386. NP. When The Ego and Its Own first appeared in the fall of 1844, one of its first readers was Karl Marx. Within a year, Marx and Engels had cranked out, in The German Ideology, more angry pages against Stirner than Stirner himself had written. However, it has been maintained that from this reading young Marx immediately turned from being Feuerbach's disciple into Feuerbach's critic. In any case, Stirner's work seemed destined from the start to provoke heated responses from its subsequent readers. It has appeared in hundreds of editions, and has been translated into at least eight languages . The first English translation was published in 19o7--having been preceded by Danish, Spanish, Russian, and French translations. This first and only English translation is by Steven T. Byington, and it is this upon which the present Cambridge edition is based. David Leopold, although refining the Byington translation, found its merits far outweighed its faults. Certainly the Byington translation does capture much of Stirner's emotional intensity as reflected in what Leopold terms Stirner's "unyielding prose," a prose "calculated to unnerve." Indeed, Stirner's excited style, although sometimes compared to Nietzsche's, is a model of Young Hegelian polemical literature. For Leopold, "despite its appearance as an inchoate melange of aphorisms and word plays, The Ego and Its Own has a decipherable, if complex architecture, structured around Stirner's tripartite division of human experience into the categories of Realism, Idealism, and Egoism." Leopold perceives a "dialectic of progression" that links the realistic child to the idealistic adolescent and then to the egoistic adult. It was the "adolescence" of the socialist humanists that became the foil of Stirner's egoistic "maturity ." Now, the Hegelian character of this process is evident. Although unmentioned by Leopold, in the spring of 1827 Stirner had heard Hegel lecture on the Philosophy of Spirit, and he seems to have directly employed Hegel's own dialectical treatment of the three stages of life as found in these lectures. It is certainly difficult, when faced with the excellence of Leopold's Introduction, to find any point of criticism. Nevertheless, this reviewer wishes there had been a bit more emphasis on Hegel's influence upon Stirner. It is this which gives Stirner's work its substance and perennial appeal. The Ego is prefaced by the programmatic intention to "take a more careful look" at both Feuerbach's and Bruno Bauer's recent "discovery" and elevation of "Man" into "the supreme being." This "more careful look" turns out to be a relentless critique of socialist humanism, a critique set upon reducing the most advanced expressions of modernism into nothing more than a r~chauff~ of old polemical Christianity. For 148 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 35: a JANUARY 1997 Stirner, "our atheists are pious people," since modern socialist humanism offers nothing more than the old Christian agenda: repression of concrete individual interests for the sake of abstract ideals. As Marx has it, Stirner is a Hegelian who joined Hegel in a total critique of all "fixed ideas." These ideas, in their most abstract and oppressive forms, are such mental abstractions as "Humanity," "Mankind," "God," and "State." Stirner designated himself , and anyone else who could work free from modern political pieties, as an EinZiger--a self-defining "Unique One," incapable of being subsumed into a higher meaning or idea. Despite the many editions of his work, Stirner's work is litde appreciated among tenured academics, finding a more sympathetic readership among displaced and, from a Marxist perspective, "alienated" intellectuals. He nevertheless remains as one of the primal theoretical sources of that antipolitical posture sometimes termed "anarchistic individualism." This edition of Stirner's Ego is distinguished from all others...