Max Stirner on the Path of Doubt

by Lawrence S. Stepelevich

Max Stirner on the Path of Doubt examines Stirner's incisive criticism of his contemporaries during the period from the death of Hegel, in 1831, to the 1848 German Revolution. Stirner's work, mainly the Ego and His Own, considered each of the major figures within the German school known as "The Young Hegelians." Lawrence S. Stepelevich argues that for Stirner, they were but "pious athiests," and their common revolutationary ideology concealed an ancient religious ground - which Stirner set about to reveal. The central doctrine of this school, that Mankind was its own Savior, was initiated in 1835 by the theologian, David F. Strauss's in his Life of Jesus, and it progressed with August von Cieszkowski's mystical recasting of history, followed by Bruno Bauer's absolute atheism and Ludwig Feuerbach's statement that "Man is God." This soon found reflection in the "Sacred History of Mankind" declared by Moses Hess. Within a decade, the result was the secular reformulation of this theological ideology into the "Scientific Socialism" of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Although linked to it, Max Stirner was the most relentless and feared critic of this school. His work, never out of print, but largely ignored by academics, has inspired countless "individualists" set upon rejecting any form of religious or political "causes," and finding Stirner's assertion that he had "set his cause upon nothing" took this as their own case.

Genres: Philosophy

236 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2020

Reviews

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Appropriately for a text about Max Stirner, not a single punch is pulled. Every reader of Stirner has their own unique version of him: Stepelevich’s is a free-market capitalist, a true Hegelian, more a quietist than an anarchist. By the time the book is over this Stirner, despite the odds, is actually rather likeable.

Let’s get the “capitalist” thing out of the way: Was he? Maybe. Discussions of Stirner’s political allegiances tend to degenerate pretty fast into all parties calling each other “spooked” and selectively quoting Der Einzige. Let’s just lay out what we know: on one hand, Stirner was a translator of Adam Smith, an opponent of socialism and communism, and a “might makes right” proponent of private property. On the other hand, he insisted repeatedly that his egoism provided the sole authentic basis for love and mutual aid, and declared that the only thing standing between the labourers and the commodities they produced was the insipid moral values he dedicated his book to destroying. Let’s call it a draw. After all, the whole debate (really any political debate) would likely be a source of amusement for Stirner, who evidently did not give a shit about either maintaining the status quo or revolting against it.

Stepelevich spends most of the book juxtaposing Stirner against his Hegelian and post-Hegelian contemporaries to demonstrate two things: (1) that most of them, upon contact with Stirner and his Der Einzige, kinda just stopped doing critical philosophy (having been DESTROYED by UNFACTS and SPECULATIVE LOGIC); (2) Stirner was the only one who read Hegel properly—not only this, he was also the one who brought Hegelianism (and by extension, apparently, philosophy itself) to a close. The book presents a pretty agreeable argument for both claims. Marx and Feuerbach, especially, come off looking pretty bad—but only if you’re already inclined to accept Stirner’s decomposition of all humanist and Christian-socialist idea(l)s into ghosts and other things that go bump in the night.

In the end, this book is an enjoyable and satisfying monograph putting Stirner in context—and not too much else. Given the title, I’d hoped for a lot more detail about Der Einzige itself, how it parallels Hegel’s corpus, how important “doubt” and the path of despair are to Stirnerite egoism, how his philosophy and politics intersect, why a quietist would even write such a book, and so on. Max Stirner *and* the Path of Doubt may have been the better title for a book about the encounters he made along that path, the end of which only he reached, but in any case, it’s good to see a scholar take Stirner seriously, and this is a very worthwhile read.

[Mitchell Chatfield · Rating 2 out of 5]

Finished book at page 175. The further addenda might be returned to later, but I do not currently wish to indulge in further internecine debates from the 1840’s.

A more thorough review will come shortly. At brief, the score is reflective of just how meandering and not-about Stirner the book was. For every page about Stirner there seemed to be 8 or 10 about an adjacent author, concluding with an attempt to link the two: even if such an attempt was only ‘this might’ve happened’.