Break-out from the Crystal Palace;: The anarcho-psychological critique; Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky

Rouledge Library Editions: Friedrich Nietzsche

by John Carroll

Before Marcuse and Laing, before Heidegger and Sartre, even before Freud, the way was prepared for the anarcho-psychological critique of economic man, of all codes of ideology or absolute morality, and of scientific habits of mind. First published in 1974, this title traces this philosophical tradition to its roots in the nineteenth century, to the figures of Stirner, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and to their psychological demolition of the two alternative axes of social theory and practice, a critique which today reads more pertinently than ever, and remains unanswered.

To understand this critique is crucial for an age which has shown a mounting revulsion at the consequences of the Crystal Palace, symbol at once of technologico-industrial progress and its rationalist-scientist ideology, an age whose imaginative preoccupations have telescoped onto the individual, and whose interest has switched from the social realm to that of anarchic, inner, 'psychological man'.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology

188 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

John Carroll is a professor of sociology at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, and a fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University.

Reviews

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high recommendation.

[Sergei Moska]

Legitimate five-star book. Wonderful.

[Yanick Punter]

Nicely written and intriguing.

[Mitchell Chatfield]

A mixed bag. I came to this book wanting a focus on Stirner and Nietzsche’s work. My interest in Dostoyevsky is passing at best. As a general ‘vibe’ overview, the book seemed to get stuck on the friction of attempting to push one of the primary focusses through the lenses of the other. A lot of time seemed to be spent jumping between Stirner-Neitzche on one hand and Dostoyevsky on the other. This did not seem to advance the view on either side of the dichotomy very much.

As a structure, this SN-D distinction was used as the typical example of anarcho-psychology, and was again contrasted against liberal-rationalism which is said to be culturally and economically dominant.

While this needs review with further distance from the book, it seemed that it tried to do too much and failed a bit at all of it. It attempted an integration of an economic analysis akin to Marx. This is something which Stirner and Nietzsche would at least partly reject on grounds of self-subjugating against supra-individual powers (which the book itself suggests).

Is it a good read? Sort of. I think it stands best to be read as extracts. Some chapters were to my mind pointless to the task attempted by the author (the critique of knowledge seemed particularly floppy). Some subsections were quite illuminating (Stirner’s redefinition of property — finally someone attempts to answer what egoistic property is). The book is better than plenty of other Stirnerian secondary literature, but that’s only saying the pool of comparison is relatively poor.


NB: start date is wrong

[Julian Stephenson]

Carried it around with me for months.
I regularly recommend it.
Free PDF's (scans) of the full book that are easily found.

[Alvaro de Menard]

A fairly shallow exegesis, written in an indefensible style. Just go straight to the primary sources.