The Trouble with Stirner 

Guest post written by Tim Dowdall author of Max Stirner and Nihilism: Between Two Nothings

I stumbled across Max Stirner on a rainy day in the mid-seventies while browsing through the books on nineteenth-century philosophy in my university library. Nietzsche had been my point of entry to this period of philosophical history, and I was fresh from Zarathustra and the Will to Power. One book at the left-hand edge of the highest Nietzsche shelf stood out from all the rest, firstly with its lurid green dust jacket, and then with its enigmatic title, The Nihilistic Egoist: Max Stirner. I glanced inside, registered no diminution of my interest, and took the book home to my student digs for a closer look. 

What I discovered was an evangelical diatribe levelled at a thinker who seemed, at least from the perspective of the devout believer, to be none other than the devil incarnate. Driven by the youth’s rebelliousness as much as the student’s inquisitiveness, I needed no further encouragement to learn about this obscure German philosopher, but this time from a less partisan perspective, namely from the proverbial horse’s mouth. With some difficulty, I found an abridged English translation of Stirner’s magnum opus, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, and thus, after a somewhat inauspicious start, my true journey of discovery began. 

The thinker that emerged from the pages of his one full-length book (he otherwise only published translations, compilations and newspaper or journal articles) seemed devilish to me only in his humour, which had the playful, irreverent, iconoclastic qualities of British comedy in the decade in which I was then living. Otherwise, it was an intellectual pioneer that appeared before my mind’s eye, a philosopher of startling originality who chose to unveil the unspoken secret of the emperor’s new clothes and hold up a mirror to Homo mythologicus in all its nakedness. 

I had, of course, already come across the coruscating criticism of religion that first finds its voice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the clandestine writings of Łyszczyński, Knutzen, Meslier and d’Holbach; then going public, if not exactly mainstream, in the publications of Stirner’s contemporaries, Strauss and Feuerbach; and reaching a sort of poetic culmination in the disdainful denunciations of Nietzsche. I knew of the cause of anti-monarchism expressed, for instance, by both Machiavelli and Spinoza, and most bloodily demonstrated on the guillotines of revolutionary France. And I was equally aware of the anti-statist views of Godwin, Weitling, Proudhon and Kropotkin, and had already spent some time examining the complex history of anarchist thought. 

To my surprise, what I found in Stirner’s writing was a determination not to focus his critique on any one specific issue, but to step back from the narrow debates of his radical peers in order to express a blanket denunciation of all man’s sacred causes, including not only religion, monarchy and the state, but also communism, nationalism, justice, truth and morality itself. Unlike his Young Hegelian colleagues, Stirner confronted not just one particular element of the prevailing ideology, but instead assailed the entire edifice of human dogma that, according to his analysis, is constructed from man’s myths and fictional beliefs, which exercise hegemonic control over people’s thoughts and actions, diverting them from their true interests. 

I must confess that, for reasons too banal to mention, a long hiatus in my studies ensued soon after I had started formulating my ideas on the subject. More than anything else, it was Harari’s Sapiens that, more than forty years later, prompted me, metaphorically speaking, to take up my pen again. Why, I asked myself, was this book about man’s mythopoeia a bestseller, while Stirner’s was so little known? Why, notwithstanding all the criticisms, was Harari considered a beacon of informed reason and liberal thought, while Stirner languished in the dark obscurity of the damned as an insignificant herald of nihilism, cynicism and eccentricity? Why, in short, did Stirner appear to be a dead end in the evolutionary tree of intellectual thought? It was with these questions in mind that I set out to complete my investigation into the philosophy of Stirner, and my book, Max Stirner and Nihilism: Between Two Nothings, is the result. 

TIM DOWDALL received his PhD from the University of Birmingham, UK, in 2021.

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