ABSTRACT
there are several reasons why the centenary of Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own should not pass without commemoration, the least important being the merely historical fact that it played a decisive part in the philosophical discussions out of which emerged Marxism. Marx devoted three-quarters of Die Deutsche Ideologie, an immense work, to a refutation of Stirner’s philosophy, and Marx was not given to wasting his time on trivialities. Marx triumphed over Stimer as he triumphed over Feuerbach and Bakunin: he had the last word and it is still echoing in the political events of the present day. But after a sleep of a hundred years the giants whom Marx thought he had slain show signs of coming to life again. “The issues which Stirner raised and Marx met,” Sidney Hook observes in a brilliant book which he devoted to the intellectual strife of this period, 1 “have a definite relevance to the conflict of ideas and attitudes in the contemporary world in Europe and America today. Indeed, we might even say that this is due to the fact that Stirner and Marx are here discussing the fundamental problems of any possible system of ethics or public morality.” That was written in 1936, and now, after a second world war which has brought all these fundamental problems into sharper focus, the relevance of Stirner’s philosophy is all the more apparent.
