Max Stirner: The Ego and His Own (review)

230 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Along with these aids, the entire Edition is destined to become, as it grows, a model of scholarly access to a body of writings in a variety of unambiguous and sharply classified ways. The old necessity forced upon students of Leibniz to search for needles in the enormous haystacks of his writings is destined to end. L. E. LOEMKER Emory University Max Stirner: The Ego and His Own, ed. and intro, by John Carroll (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971. Pp. 216+biblio. $7.70) In November 1844, Friedrich Engels sent his newly-found friend Karl Marx a press copy of Max Stirner's Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum. One year later, they had finished a long and hectic reply to this anarchist classic, The German Ideology. This was neither the first nor the last response to Stirner's provocative masterwork. The English-speaking public had its opportunity to reply when, in 1907, the work appeared under the title of The Ego and His Own. Since then, eight other editions have appeared in a more or less regular cadence. John Carroll's is the latest in this English series, and it--as all the others---employs the translation of Steven T. Byington. Although this translation is at times somewhat florid, it would be difficult to improve upon it as a vehicle for Stirner's proto-Nietzschean declamations and word-play. Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum has been translated into French, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Dutch, and Japanese, and in most cases more than one edition has appeared. There has been a spectacular number of German editions. For example, seven different publishing houses marketed the book between 1927 and 1930. Still, the work remains relatively unknown, and if the name Stirner occurs at all in philosophical literature, it is linked with the other obscure figures almost lost in the background of early Marxism. However, this long neglect of Stirner's thought by serious students of philosophy seems to be drawing to a close if recent studies such as William Brazill's The Young Hegelians 1 and David McLellan's The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx 2 are to be taken as an index of revival. Both works, particularly the former, present Stirner as someone considerably more substantial than the straw-man of Hook's From Hegel to Marx. Further, as the last edition of The Ego and His Own has been out of print for several years, Carroll's edition, with its fine introduction and bibliography, will certainly contribute to a rediscovery of Stirner's individualistic philosophy. Stirner was not the only figure dimmed by his proximity to the political fireworks ignited by Karl Marx. It was an unhappy obscurity shared by all of the Young Hegelians, and in some measure even Marx himself was obliterated as a philosopher by the same political pyrotechnics. Only within the last few years have these thinkers emerged as philosophic figures worthy of philosophic considerations. Previously, they were generally viewed as but a series of faltering politicians in thin philosophic garb. The reason for much of this is to be found in the peculiar character of the times. The nineteenth century, as the century which witnessed the final dissolution of u. Gisela Kronert (Ver6ffentlichungen des Leibniz-Archivs, Band II) (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1969. Pp. xxiv+ 329). i New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970, pp. 282+biblio. and index. 2 London: Macmillan, 1969, pp. 161+biblio. and index. BOOK REVIEWS 231 Medieval Europe, was obsessed with politics to the extent of "politicizing" philosophy out of existence as an autonomous discipline. The young disciples of Hegel were more often than not in favor of this reduction, as is evident in the thought of Marx or Hess. As a case in point, David F. Strauss, at the beginning of the Young Hegelian "movement," hopelessly confused the categories of politics and philosophy by dividing the young thinkers into schools of the "Left" and of the "Right." It has since become somewhat of a historical habit, although remaining a philosophic absurdity, to label certain Hegelian philosophers as "Left," while others stand as unreconstructed "Right." Johann Caspar Schmidt, who wrote as Max Stirner, can find himself as easily designated...