Review: Max Stirner by Saul Newman

Saul Newman (ed.)
Max Stirner
Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2011. 240pp., £57.50 hb
ISBN 9780230283350

Max Stirner was the enfant terrible of the left Hegelian circle, often referred to as the ‘young Hegelians’, that arose in Berlin in the 1840s. In his lifetime, Stirner’s sole book, The Ego and Its Own, sent shockwaves through left Hegelian intellectual circles, inciting critical responses by the likes of Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and the young Karl Marx. By the end of Stirner’s life, however, he and his book were almost completely forgotten. Efforts have been made to revive Stirner several times, most importantly by the nineteenth-century anarchist John Henry Mackay, who is responsible for collecting and preserving Stirner’s writings and authoring a comprehensive biography of Stirner.

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. It contains a substantial introduction, six essays on Stirner’s thought and influence, a brief biography of Stirner by David Leopold, as well as a translation of an essay published in 1847 under the name G. Edward, which may have been authored by Stirner himself. The essays contained in this volume would serve as a helpful aid to those encountering Stirner for the first time, though there are also essays that will be of interest to scholars of Stirner, anarchism, and Marxism.