Saint Max and His Critics

The pattern of Stirner’s philosophical reception is itself a piece of evidence for his argument. No serious thinker in the German tradition could leave him alone, and almost none could engage him on his own terms. The list of his attackers reads as a roster of figures who needed his categories to be wrong in order to keep their own work running. Marx and Engels gave him hundreds of pages in The German Ideology. Buber returned to him repeatedly across decades. Lukács conscripted him as precursor to fascism. Camus filed him under nihilism. Löwith treated him as the dead end of left-Hegelianism. Heidegger glanced his way and looked off. The volume of refutation is suspicious. Cranks do not get refuted at this length. They get ignored. The persistence with which Stirner has been buried suggests his critics knew something he was not letting them forget.

The most famous burial is Marx’s. The Saint Max section of The German Ideology, composed in 1845 and 1846 with Engels, runs to roughly three hundred pages in the standard edition, longer than Stirner’s own book on some accounts. The work was not published in Marx’s lifetime, which is itself telling. He wrote three hundred pages of demolition against an opponent he supposedly considered ridiculous, and then declined to publish. The standard explanation is that the manuscript was abandoned to “the gnawing criticism of the mice,” in Marx’s own phrase, because the moment had passed and other concerns intervened. The less generous and more accurate reading is that the polemic, on close inspection, did not actually demolish what it set out to demolish, and Marx may have known it.

The Saint Max polemic operates on several levels. Rhetorically, it is sustained mockery. Marx calls Stirner “Sancho Panza” throughout, after Cervantes’ squire, assigns him the role of comic foil, and treats every claim as occasion for further sarcasm. The tone is meant to suggest that no serious argument is needed because the target is obviously absurd. This is a familiar strategy when the substantive ground is uncertain, and it sets the template for most subsequent dismissals of Stirner. Do not engage. Mock and move on.

Beneath the rhetorical surface, Marx’s substantive charges fall into four families. The first and most famous is what one might call the hoist-with-his-own-petard charge. Stirner’s Einzige, his unique singular existent, is itself an abstraction. The whole point of Stirner’s project was to dissolve abstractions in favor of the particular individual, but the moment he names the particular individual he has produced another category, another Spuk, and the gesture collapses on itself. Marx returns to this maneuver many times, evidently delighted by it. The unique, he argues, is just another general term. To say “I am unique” is to use a universal predicate that applies to anyone who utters it, and so the uniqueness is no uniqueness at all.

The charge is clever and it is wrong. Stirner is not positing the Einzige as a category to be served, in the way that Man or Humanity functions for Feuerbach, or Capital functions for Marx, or God functions for the theologian. The Einzige is the bare designation of the singular existent, the indexical referent of the act of self-reference. It does not assert that all such existents share a common nature that defines them as Einzige. It refuses, precisely, to make such an assertion. To say “I am the unique” is not to predicate a property. It is to gesture at what cannot be predicated of, what is left after every predicate has been refused. Marx mistakes the indexical for the categorical, and the entire critique on this level rests on the mistake. A signpost is not a destination because both are sticks pointing somewhere. The grammatical similarity between “I am the unique” and “I am a citizen” conceals a logical difference that Marx either could not see or chose not to.

The second Marxian charge is that Stirner represents bourgeois individualism in radical disguise. The Einzige, on this reading, is just the atomized market subject of liberal political economy dressed up in philosophical robes. The Union of Egoists is just the social contract minus the contract. Stirner imagines he is escaping bourgeois ideology when he is in fact giving it its most extreme form. This charge has had the longest career and remains the standard Marxist dismissal of Stirner today. It survives because it is plausible at first glance and because almost no one who repeats it has read Stirner carefully.

Read carefully, Stirner is as devastating to the liberal subject as he is to the socialist collective. The market individualist of liberal economics is exactly the kind of abstract category Stirner dissolves. So is the rights-bearing person of liberal jurisprudence. So is the rational utility-maximizer of microeconomic theory. So is the Lockean property-holder grounding her claims in natural law. Each of these is a Spuk in the same sense as Man or the Proletariat. They are abstractions to which the actual person is supposed to conform, ideal-types that take precedence over the singular existents they supposedly describe. The accusation that Stirner is a bourgeois ideologist only works if one cannot distinguish the singular existent from the liberal subject, which requires reading badly. They are different in exactly the way that mattered to Stirner, and the elision is what allows the dismissal to seem plausible.

The third charge is the materialist one. Material conditions produce consciousness, not the reverse, and Stirner does not address how the Einzige is materially constituted. He acts as though the singular existent simply springs into being, fully formed, capable of recognizing its Spuk and casting them off. Where is the analysis of how this consciousness was produced, by what relations of production, in what historical conjuncture? Without such analysis, Stirner’s entire enterprise floats free of the social reality it claims to liberate us from.

This charge has more substance than the others, and it is also more revealing of Marx’s own position. Material conditions matter, and Stirner does not deny that they do. What he denies is that material conditions exhaustively explain consciousness, or more precisely, that the recognition of one’s possession by Spuk is itself merely an ideological phenomenon to be dissolved by further materialist analysis. Marx’s own intellectual gesture, the recognition that ideology mystifies material relations, is itself a Stirnerian move. He is noticing the Spuk. The structure of the analytical move is identical. What differs is that Marx wants to use the recognition selectively, against the bourgeois Spuk of liberal political economy, without admitting that the same recognition can be turned against his own categories of Proletariat, History, and Communism. Once you have learned to see ideology, you cannot unsee it, and Marx’s preferred abstractions are no less abstract than the ones he dissolves. The selective application is the giveaway. A genuinely materialist analysis would have to be applied to Marxism itself, and Marx could not do this without dissolving his own project. So he drew a circle around his own categories and forbade them to be examined. Stirner refused the circle, which is the real reason Marx needed three hundred pages.

The fourth charge is that the Union of Egoists is socially incoherent. Without class analysis as the basis for politics, without the recognition that material interests structure collective action, what Stirner offers is at best a description of how isolated individuals occasionally collaborate, not an account of social organization that could replace existing institutions. The Union is a fantasy, a romantic gesture, a non-program.

This is half right and half question-begging. The Union of Egoists is not a program. Stirner is not in the program-writing business. He is doing something logically prior to program-writing, which is examining what kind of creature is doing the programming. But the social account is not incoherent. It says that durable cooperation among self-possessed adults does not require the sacralization that Marx, and most other social theorists, take to be its precondition. The Tongan boys on ʻAta did not have class analysis. They had each other and a problem, and they organized themselves. Real cooperation, in the historical record, has often emerged from much closer to Stirner’s model than to Marx’s. The mutual aid societies of nineteenth-century workers, the voluntary associations Tocqueville described in America, the rotating credit associations across cultures, the open-source software movements, the hundreds of thousands of small acts of coordination that constitute civil society, run on the Union of Egoists logic far more than on the social-contract logic, and they do not collapse when the sacralization is removed because the sacralization was never doing the work the theorists imagined it was doing. Marx’s incoherence charge confuses the absence of his preferred apparatus with the absence of social organization.

Engels later softened. In a letter to Marx in November 1844, before The German Ideology, Engels had written that Stirner’s book contained much that was valuable and that the egoism Stirner described was the unavoidable basis from which any future communism would have to start. The conversion to total demolition came when Marx took over, and one can read the Saint Max polemic as in part a settling of accounts between Engels’s earlier interest and Marx’s need to expel Stirner from the field. After Marx’s death, Engels was more measured. He acknowledged that Stirner had identified something real about the structure of ideological possession, while maintaining that the analysis was crippled by its lack of materialist foundation. The asymmetry between the early polemic and the late acknowledgment is itself evidence of how the polemic functioned, not as a refutation but as a clearing operation to make room for the project Marx wanted to build.

The pattern reproduces in later receptions. Nietzsche is the most interesting case because the family resemblance between the Einzige and the Übermensch is too close to be coincidence, and the question of whether Nietzsche read Stirner has occupied scholars for a century. The historical record suggests Nietzsche knew of Stirner through his friend Heinrich von Stein, through Eduard von Hartmann’s discussions, and through Friedrich Albert Lange’s History of Materialism, though direct firsthand reading is contested and Nietzsche never cites him. What matters is less the question of influence than the question of divergence. Nietzsche shares Stirner’s diagnosis of Christian and humanist self-sacrifice as covert servitude to abstractions, and shares the project of recovering the singular existent from this servitude. But Nietzsche then reinstates a different set of consecrations. The Übermensch is supposed to embody certain virtues. The will to power is supposed to have an objective character that makes some forms of life higher than others. The aristocratic values are supposed to be defensible against the slave morality, not merely preferred. Stirner refuses every such reinstatement. The Einzige is not higher or lower. She is just this one, here, owning her decisions. Nietzsche could not finally rest with this, which is why his project has been so much more easily absorbed into academic and even reactionary uses than Stirner’s. Nietzsche could be made to serve as a new master. Stirner cannot. He vetoes the office.

Martin Buber’s engagement with Stirner is the most sustained twentieth-century treatment, particularly in the essay “The Question to the Single One” in Between Man and Man. Buber’s strategy is to position Kierkegaard’s single one, the individual standing before God in faith, against Stirner’s Einzige, the singular existent standing before nothing, and to argue that only the former produces genuine relation, the I-Thou. Stirner’s solitary egoist, on Buber’s reading, is incapable of real encounter because she has refused the sacred ground that makes encounter possible.

The Buber critique fails because it imports as its premise what Stirner refused as an assumption. Buber needs the sacred ground (God, the I-Thou as ontological category, dialogical relation as primordial) to be the precondition of real encounter. Stirner denies that this ground is needed for the encounter to be real. Two singular existents can meet, can love, can build things together, can disagree, can part, without the sacralization of their relation into an ontological structure. The empirical record supports Stirner here. Real love between real people is not made more real by being theologized. The theology is added by people who cannot trust their own relations without an external warrant. Buber’s I-Thou is itself a Spuk in Stirner’s exact sense, an abstraction to which the actual relation is supposed to conform. Buber felt this objection coming and tried to preempt it by insisting that the I-Thou is not an abstraction but a primordial reality, but this insistence is precisely the move every theologian makes about his preferred abstraction. The objection is not answered. It is restated as a creed.

Georg Lukács’s treatment of Stirner in The Destruction of Reason is the lowest point of the philosophical reception. Lukács, by then deep into Soviet orthodoxy, conscripted Stirner into a lineage running from Schelling and Schopenhauer through Nietzsche to Heidegger and culminating in fascism. The argument is that any philosophy that turns away from rational, social, materialist analysis toward the irrational, the individual, or the immediate is on the road to Berchtesgaden. Stirner is convicted by association. The charge is preposterous on inspection. Fascism is the apotheosis of the State, the People, the Nation, the Race, as sacred objects demanding sacrifice from the individuals who compose them. Stirner is the most thoroughgoing critic of exactly these abstractions. He cannot be a precursor to a movement whose entire substance he had already rejected. Lukács made the charge because Stirner could not be incorporated into the Marxist scheme and had to be expelled to the other side of the ideological line, but the expulsion required misreading what was being expelled. The Lukácsian dismissal survives in some quarters because few people read either The Destruction of Reason or Stirner attentively enough to notice the mismatch.

Albert Camus in The Rebel treated Stirner as a key figure in metaphysical rebellion turning into nihilism and totalitarianism. The metaphysical rebel rejects the existing order in the name of a higher value, then discovers there are no higher values, then concludes that everything is permitted, then commits to whatever movement seems to embody the negation. Stirner fits the second and third steps of this narrative and so gets assigned the role of preparing the ground for the destructions of the twentieth century. The reading is, again, exactly inverted. Stirner is not the philosopher of “everything is permitted.” He is the philosopher of declining the consolations that drive people into the totalitarian movements Camus rightly feared. The person who has read Stirner well is the one least susceptible to ideological possession, not most. She has already noticed that the sacred objects are constructions, and so she does not need to consummate her loss of one sacred object by sacrificing herself to a new one. Camus needed Stirner to fit a narrative about rebellion turning into tyranny, and the fit is bad, because the actual Stirnerian recognition is the recognition that immunizes against tyranny rather than the recognition that prepares for it.

Karl Löwith’s From Hegel to Nietzsche treats Stirner with more philosophical seriousness, placing him as the radical conclusion of the left-Hegelian dissolution of Hegelian system. For Löwith, Stirner is what happens when the negative moment of Hegelian dialectic is pushed past every possible reconciliation. Bauer dissolved God into self-consciousness. Feuerbach dissolved self-consciousness into Man. Stirner dissolved Man into the singular existent, and the singular existent has nothing further to dissolve into. The end of the road. This reading is more accurate than the others, but it still treats Stirner as primarily a moment in a history of philosophy, a logical endpoint of a particular dialectical movement, rather than as a thinker whose primary work is the recovery of something the dialectical movement had concealed all along. The Hegelian frame absorbs Stirner as the last station before the system collapses, but Stirner was not riding the Hegelian train. He was pointing out that the train was not actually going anywhere.

The pattern across all these receptions is recognizable. Each critic preserves the apparatus that Stirner was diagnosing. Marx preserves the materialist apparatus, with its categories of class, mode of production, and history, and uses these to convict Stirner of insufficient materialism. Buber preserves the dialogical apparatus, with its categories of I, Thou, and primordial relation, and convicts Stirner of solipsism. Lukács preserves the rationalist-socialist apparatus and convicts Stirner of irrationalism. Camus preserves the ethical apparatus, with its categories of revolt, value, and limit, and convicts Stirner of nihilism. Löwith preserves the philosophical-historical apparatus, with its categories of dialectic and developmental logic, and assigns Stirner a place in it. In every case the move is the same. The critic stands inside the apparatus Stirner was pointing at, looks out from inside it, and reports that Stirner is missing something which the apparatus uniquely supplies. The reports are not wrong from inside the apparatus. They are wrong about whether the apparatus is doing what it claims to do.

The mature reading developed in the preceding essay, supplemented by the naturalistic grounding of morality and by the demonstrations from Sandel and Kohlberg that the academic apparatus of moral reasoning collapses on inspection, dismantles each of these critiques by the same operation. Marx’s materialist circle around his own categories falls when one extends the materialist analysis to Marxism itself, which is what Stirner had effectively done a hundred and twenty-five years before the post-Marxists of the late twentieth century made it fashionable. Buber’s dialogical primordiality dissolves when one notices that real relations between actual people do not require theological underwriting to be real, and that the naturalistic account of cooperation explains everything Buber wanted his I-Thou to explain without the metaphysical apparatus. Lukács’s anti-Stirnerian fascism narrative inverts the actual lineage, because the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century required precisely the sacralizations Stirner had taught his readers to refuse. Camus’s nihilism charge confuses the loss of the apparatus with the loss of the things the apparatus pretended to underwrite, which is exactly the priestly conflation Stirner spent his book diagnosing. Löwith’s dialectical placement collapses when one notices that Stirner was not contributing to the dialectical sequence but stepping out of it.

The naturalistic morality argument is particularly devastating to the Marxian critique. Marx needed morality to be ideology in order to dismiss the Stirnerian critique of his own moralized categories, but he also needed the proletariat’s struggle to be historically and ethically grounded in something more than preference. The contradiction was managed by treating bourgeois morality as ideology and proletarian morality as the dawning recognition of the universal interest, a move that worked rhetorically but could not survive examination. The naturalistic account dissolves this whole problem differently. Morality is neither bourgeois ideology nor proletarian recognition. It is the behavior of a cooperative species refined by experience, articulated by the more lucid among us, oriented toward shared ends, and constantly subject to revision as conditions and understanding change. There is no transhistorical class subject whose interests carry universal moral weight. There are people, with overlapping interests in flourishing, who can cooperate when they can identify the means that serve those interests. The categories Marx needed in order to give his project moral force are precisely the Spuk Stirner had diagnosed, and the naturalistic alternative renders them unnecessary even for the work Marx wanted them to do.

Sandel’s parade of dilemmas, similarly, is a posthumous vindication of Stirner against every philosophical framework that has tried to refute him. The frameworks fail. The frameworks have always failed at the limits. The frameworks function as social rituals of moral seriousness, ways of demonstrating that one has thought about ethics, without actually doing the work that hard ethical situations require. The Stirnerian point that the framework is a Spuk is now empirically confirmed by the curricular procedure of Sandel’s own course. Every framework breaks under stress, and the careful student finishes with the recognition that the apparatus is theater. The actual moral labor was always elsewhere, in the situated judgment of the particular person owning her particular decision. Marx, who needed an ethical framework to motivate revolutionary action, could not afford to acknowledge this. So he attacked Stirner for refusing the apparatus that the apparatus’s own failure now confirms was never doing what Marx needed it to do.

Kohlberg’s evasive Stage Six functions as the developmental-psychological version of the same problem. The Marxian project required something like Stage Six, an apex of moral development at which the proletarian subject would recognize her universal interest and act on it. The evasion at Stage Six in Kohlberg’s empirical work is the same evasion at the apex of Marx’s theoretical work. In both cases the highest stage cannot be specified because there is nothing there to specify. The apex is a structural requirement of the system, not a phenomenon of the world. Remove the requirement and the hierarchy collapses into a flat inventory of postures, none higher than the others on any non-question-begging criterion. This is what Stirner had said about every consecrated hierarchy. Kohlberg empirically rediscovered the point a hundred and twenty years later, and Marx had every reason to want the rediscovery never to happen.

What all the critics have in common is that they could not let Stirner be right because if he were right their projects would be exposed as elaborated Spuk. Their refutations are therefore not analyses but defenses, and the defenses give themselves away by their length, their tone, and their refusal to engage what Stirner was actually saying. Marx’s three hundred unpublished pages of mockery are the most visible instance, but the same structure recurs in each subsequent attempt. The genuinely confident response to a crank is silence. The response to a thinker whose analysis threatens to dissolve the categories your own work depends on is volume.

This is also why the mature reading cannot be dismissed in the same way the standard interpretations of Stirner have been dismissed. The standard reading makes Stirner an adolescent rebel, an early nihilist, a proto-fascist, a bourgeois ideologist in disguise, whatever caricature lets the critic move on. The mature reading takes seriously what Stirner actually said. The entire philosophical apparatus that frames most discussion of ethics, politics, and identity is performing no necessary work, and the actual labor of being a person happens outside the apparatus, in the unromantic ownership of particular decisions by particular people. This claim can be refuted only by demonstrating that the apparatus does perform necessary work, which the empirical and historical record now makes very difficult. The naturalistic grounding of morality shows that ethics works without metaphysical underpinning. Sandel and Kohlberg show that the academic apparatus of moral reasoning collapses on inspection. The Tongan boys show that cooperation does not require the sacralization theorists posit. The history of moral progress shows that the adult institutions Stirner critiqued were repeatedly the obstacles to be overcome rather than the agents of correction. Every line of evidence converges on the same conclusion that Stirner reached by philosophical argument in 1844.

The critics knew. That is why they wrote so much. Marx wrote three hundred pages and did not publish. Buber returned to the question across decades. Lukács conscripted Stirner into a lineage where he obviously did not belong. Camus assigned him a role in a narrative where he obviously did not fit. Each of them sensed that the analysis had to be neutralized, and each of them produced a neutralization that could only have looked successful to readers who had already accepted the apparatus Stirner was diagnosing. To readers who have not, the neutralizations look like what they are. Confessions of dependency on the very Spuk Stirner had named.