Whitlow, an early posmodernist and General Semanticist, wrote a famous and influential paper in the Summer, 1950 on: "Max Stirner And The Heresy Of Self-Abundance". He based his reflections about Stirner on what he read and studied in the classic, 1907 translation of Stirner's The Ego And Its Own, translated by Steven T. Byington.
On Page 1 and 2 of his paper on Stirner, Whitlow writes: "For like Nietzsche, Stirner has been all things to all men. He is known . . . as a 'subjective idealist' whose only appeal is to 'the decadent bourgeoisie,' as a spokesman for the 'young atheist school,' as a petty bourgeois in revolt; . . ."
Stirner is a subjective idealist, a subjective materialist and what I refer to as a taoist individualist. But, he betrays his middle class roots and affinity. He worked as a school teacher, and though a revolutionary, he fiercely rejected calls for violent, system changing revolution as pushed the violent socialists, and the radical Communists of his day, like Karl Marx, whom he so deeply upset.
On Page 228 and Page 229 of his book mentioned above, Stirner writes: "Revolution and insurrection (Emporung) must not be looked upon as synonymous. The former consists in overturning conditions, of the established condition or status, the state of society, and is accordingly a political or social act; the latter has indeed for its unavoidable consequence a transformation of circumstances, yet does not start from it but from men's discontent with themselves, is not an armed rising, but a rising of individuals, a getting up, without regard to the arrangements that spring from it. The Revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection, leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on 'institutions'. It is not a fight against the established, since if it prospers, the established collapses of itself; it is only a working forth of me out of the established. If I leave the established, it is dead and passes into decay. Now, as my object is not to overthrow an established order but my elevation above it, my purpose and deed are not a political or social but (as directed towards myself and my ownness alone) an egoistic purpose and deed.
The revolution commands one to make arrangements, the insurrection (Emporung) demands that he rise or exalt himself (empor-, aufrichten). What constitution was to be chosen, this question busied the revolutionary heads, and the whole political period foams with constitutional fights and constitutional questions, as the social talents too were uncommonly inventive in societary arrangements (phalansteries and the like). The insurgent strives to be constitutionless."
Stirner the bourgeois, more gentle, moderate revolutionary, was not backing revolution as did the violent Communists of his day. Rather, he was a self-styled insurgent, uninterested in overturning the established condition of society, but who plotted, not through armed uprising, but starting from self-discontent, to rise up against the existing arrangement, by refusing to be owned, bossed or directed by elites running the status quo at that time. Regime change, even institutional change is not revolutionary, but only a change in style, a mere coup d'etat. By extracting oneself from the establishment, it will wither away. By elevating oneself as an egoist anarchist, his pursuit of and fulfillment of his owness triggers the only real and lasting revolution.
Further down on Page 229, Stirner identifies Jesus Christ as a fellow insurgent: "But why was he not a revolutionist, not a demagogue, as the Jews would have gladly seen him? But why was he not a liberal? Because he expected no salvation from a change of conditions, and this whole business was indifferent to him. He was not a revolutionist, like Caesar, but an insurgent; not a state-overturner, but one who straightened himself up."
In other words, Jesus, like Stirner, like any egoist anarchist, as an insurgent is a radical revolutionary, because they realize and accept that real change is an internal, transformation, revolutionary and radical. To change external conditions is just rearranging cars in a used parking lot. After all the noise, effort and fuss, no genuine change has been achieved--it is still a parking lot. External, political restructuring of governmental machinery is shallow, transitory change at best. Violence and noise are impressive, but largely useless to bring about significant, lasting change. Only a gentle, bourgeois revolutionary would settle for self-transformation, a quiet, private, gentle sort of change that is the most radical change in the world, as more and more little people adopt this approach. This Stirner knew, and Marx never caught on to.
On the bottom of Page 229 and on the top of Page 230, Stirner explains how Christ the gentle insurgent, the gentle revolutionary, paradoxically, turned the ancient, heathen arrangement on its ear: ". . . precisely because he put from him the upsetting of the established, he was its deadly enemy and real annihilator; for he walled it in . . ."
Now let me turn to a book, "The Syndicated New Articles", the collection of newspaper articles written by Eric Hoffer and assembled in this volume by Christopher Klim. I was surprised and pleased to discover that not only Jesus, Stirner and I are convinced that nonviolent insurgency, reform as self-applied to upgrade the self, is true transformation, but I read that Hoffer too refers to revolutionaries and non-revolutionary, and the middle class as the classless revolutionaries (Page 229: Is a Revolution Revolutionary? March 1, 1970)): "One of the startling discoveries of our times is that the non-revolutionary countries are far more revolutionary than the revolutionary countries. . . .It is now a truism that countries are transformed more dramatically by Americanization than by a Communist revolution."
Hoffer and Stirner seem to converge towards each other in terms of the ultimate transformational power of insurgency as a private, personal act, when alluding to bourgeois, gentle reform as powerful, when worrying that people will worship an abstraction, a word, whose magical sway will subjugate them to serve it unquestionably as true believers. Eric Hoffer little directly alludes to egoism, or anarchism, but there are hints of his support for these concepts.
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