Max Stirner Reviewed

 

On the Internet under, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, there was listed a October 2, 2012 review of a book called Max Stirner by Saul Newman, and the reviewer was C. Richard Booher.

 

Booher is a philosophy professor and Newman is a professor and post-anarchist.

 

Below I will quote from Booher’s review of Newman’s book on Stirner, and then write my responses. Booher starts off by labeling Stirner the enfant terrible in the Left Hegelian circle, and refers to him as an egoistic gadfly, and these titles seem appropriate.

 

Here is Booher referring to Newman’s book: “The present edited volume aims to bring about another resurrection of this egoistic gadfly by introducing Stirner to a broader public and demonstrating his relevance to contemporary radical theory.”

 

My response: Contemporary radical theory sounds like neo-Marxism to me, and though anarchists might not like totalitarian, centralized, scientific Marxism, they are still for revolution, likely violent, and it all ends up being Marxism at the bottom. Stirner was anti-bourgeois but he was not a Marxist, though his title as an individualist anarchist might well stick.

 

Let me skip ahead: “In his central work, Stirner attacks a series of ideas—State, Family, Man—which he describes as fixed ideas lacking in substantive reality, and which are hypostasized by individuals in such a way that they come to dominate human life.”

 

My response: Stirner is famous for his attack on concepts as hypostasized spooks, lacking concrete reality and yet they dominate life and people enslave themselves to them. People can enslave themselves to concepts, especially if the serve as an obsession, a spurious religious substitute turned ideological. I would argue that names are not real, but the ideas that they represent might well exist in the noumenal realm as patterns or archetypes in natural law, or as ideas in the mind of God, or as ontological structures in objective reality. We do need them to guide our lives and be uplifted, so I disagree with

Stirner more than I agree with him, but his warning about stifling, misleading abstractions is a significant admonition.

 

Booher continues: “According to Thomas, Marx’s argument against Stirner reveal the shortcomings of Stirner’s approach, in that they demonstrate how Stirner succumbs to ideological illusions about the nature of individuality. Stirner, on Thomas’ reading, conceives of liberation as involving simply a change of belief and ignores the material reaities of the oppressive apparatus of the state and other social and economic institutions. It was Marx, according to Thomas, who was able to see that liberation and freedom requires change in the material conditions of human society, and not merely changes in our ideas. On this account, it was the prodding of Stirner that led Marx to articulate his theory of ideology and to develop a materialist argument for the social nature of humankind. The upshot of this reading is that the development of some of the central tenets of historical materialism are in a great part a product of Marx’s engagement with Stirner.”

 

My response: It seems that Marx accuses Stirner of being deceived by too strong an emphasis on egoism, self-involvement and isolated self-consciousness, when in fact Marx regards the human alienation to be social, political and economic of the haves against the have-nots, requiring organized, collective struggle and revolution to bring about desired changes. I disagree with Marx—all his followers have brought is poverty, murder, suffering, gulags, starvation, war, colonialism, and totalitarianism to much of the world. Stirner saw through and rejected Marx’s foolish and violent group-solutions from the get-go.

 

Booher then reviews other concepts, some of which I am not concerned with. He does admit that Stirner wonders why people give voluntary servitude to political, religious, and economic structures oppressive to their lead free and satisfying lives, but he believes that that concept is discussed adequately  elsewhere in critical theory.

 

Booher is not overly impressed with Stirner: “Stirner may have been one of the first to identify the various ways in which what he called ‘fixed ideas’ can cause people to reconcile themselves to oppressive and unfree social conditions, but he doesn’t see to have a theory capable of thoroughly explaining this phenomenon.”

 

My response: Stirner is leery of prescriptive solutions to any problem so formulaic critical theory solutions are spooks themselves he counter-criticizes and I agree with him.

 

I believe people are born masochist, lazy, cowardly, fatalistic, self-loathing, slave-loving and of low such severe self-esteem so that they  believe they should voluntarily accept their servitude—as their just deserts-- rather than do their personal insurrection and maverize, thus topping the corrupt status quo without introducing totalitarian Marxism to make things much worse than ever.

 

Booher does not seem Stirner as an anarchist much either for he is against organization with a platform or set o plans. At best Stirner is an individualist anarchist.

 

I do not know if Booher is a Marxist, but I suspect he is. My intention for reading and remarking on this review is that I am trying to view  Max Stirner from many various, even contradictory points of view so that I see the full person.