Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (44 page)

Godwin looks to thoughtful and benevolent guides who will speak the truth and practise sincerity and thereby act as catalysts of change. The kind of organization he recommends is the small and independent circle, the prototype of the modern anarchist ‘affinity group’. In the anarchist tradition, Godwin thus stands as the first to advocate ‘propaganda by the word’. By stressing the need for moral regeneration before political reform, he also anticipates the idea that the ‘political is the personal’.

While Godwin’s gradualism shows that he was no naive visionary, it does give a conservative turn to his practical politics. He criticized the kind of isolated acts of protest that Shelley engaged in. He felt it was right to support from a distance any movement which seemed to be going in the right direction. In his own historical circumstances, he declared: ‘I am in principle a Republican, but in practice a Whig. But I am a philosopher: that
is a person desirous to become wise, and I aim at this object by reading, by writing, and a little conversation.’
⁸⁰
He thought at one time during the 1790s that he might be in Parliament, but quickly dismissed the idea since it would infringe his independence and would grate against his character which was more fitted for contemplation than action.

Godwin failed to develop an adequate praxis. His cautious gradualism meant that he was obliged to abandon generations to the disastrous effects of that political authority and economic inequality which he had so eloquently described. While he demonstrated vividly how opinions are shaped by circumstances, he sought only to change opinions rather than to try and change circumstances. He was left with the apparent dilemma of believing that human beings cannot become wholly rational as long as government exists, and yet government must continue to exist while they remain irrational. His problem was that he failed to tackle reform on the level of institutions as well as ideas.

As a social philosopher, Godwin is undoubtedly on a par with Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Mill. He was the most consistent and profound exponent of philosophical anarchism. With closely reasoned arguments, he carefully drew his libertarian conclusions from a plausible view of human nature. He believed that politics is inseparable from ethics, and offered a persuasive view of justice. His criticisms of fundamental assumptions about law, government and democracy are full of insight. From a sound view of truth, he developed one of the most trenchant defences of the freedom of thought and expression.

In place of existing tyrannies, Godwin proposed a decentralized and simplified society consisting of voluntary associations of free and equal individuals. In his educational theory, he showed the benefits of learning through desire. In his economics, he demonstrated the disastrous effects of inequality and outlined a system of free communism. If Godwin’s practical politics were inadequate, it is because he was primarily a philosopher concerned with universal principles rather than their particular application. By the intrepid deduction from first principles, he went beyond the radicalism of his age to become the first great anarchist thinker.

M
AX
S
TIRNER
STANDS
FOR
the most extreme form of individualist anarchism. He denies not only the existence of benevolence but also all abstract entities such as the State, Society, Humanity and God. He rebels against the whole rational tradition of Western philosophy, and in place of philosophical abstraction, he proposes the urgings of immediate personal experience. His work stands as a frontal assault on the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment, with its unbounded confidence in the ultimate triumph of Reason, Progress and Order.

Stirner’s place in the history of philosophy is as controversial as his status as an anarchist. It has been argued that he is more of a nihilist than an anarchist since he destroys all propositions except those which fulfil a purely aesthetic function in the egoist’s ‘overriding purpose of self-enjoyment and self-display’.
¹
Camus saw Stirner’s metaphysical revolt against God leading to the absolute affirmation of the individual and a kind of nihilism which ‘laughs in the impasse’.
²
Others place Stirner in the existential tradition, stressing his concern with the ontological priority of the individual; Herbert Read called him ‘one of the most existentialist of philosophers’.
³

Certainly Stirner offered a root-and-branch attack on existing values and institutions. Like Kierkegaard, he celebrated the unique truth of the individual and sought to liberate him from the great barrel organ of Hegelian metaphysics. In his attack on Christian morality and his call for the self-exaltation of the whole individual, he anticipated Nietzsche and atheistic existentialism. But while there are nihilistic and existentialist elements to his work, Stirner is not merely a nihilist, for he does not set out to destroy all moral and social values. Neither is he, strictly speaking, a proto-existentialist, for he rejects any attempt to create a higher or better individual. He belongs to the anarchist tradition as one of its most original and creative thinkers. While many may find his views shocking and distasteful, every libertarian is obliged to come to terms with his bold reasoning.

Marx and Engels took Stirner seriously enough to devote a large part of their
German Ideology
to a refutation of the infuriating thinker whom they dubbed ‘Saint Max’, ‘Sancho’ and the ‘Unique’.
⁴
In fact, Stirner shares many points with Marx: his dialectical method, his criticism of abstractions and the ‘human essence’, his analysis of labour, his rejection of static materialism, and his stress on human volition in social change. Engels even admitted to Marx that after reading Stirner’s book he was converted to egoism, and although it was only temporary, he still maintained that ‘it is equally from egoism that we are communists’.
⁵

In his principal work
Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum
(1845), usually translated as
The Ego and His Own
, Stirner offers the most consistent case in defence of the individual against authority. He presents a searching criticism of the State and social institutions, and proposes in their place a ‘union of egoists’ who would form contractual relationships and compete peacefully with each other. Stirner’s defence of personal autonomy not only influenced Benjamin Tucker and the American individualists, but also the social anarchists Emma Goldman and Herbert Read in our own century. Kropotkin had little time for his anti-social thrust and what he called his ‘superficial negation of morality’, but the early Mussolini in his socialist days wanted to make his celebration of the ‘elemental forces of the individual’ fashionable again.
⁶
Stirner continues to inspire and exasperate libertarians of both the Left and the Right.
⁷

Max Stirner’s life was as timid as his thought was bold. Born in 1806 at Bayreuth in Bavaria, his real name was Johann Kaspar Schmidt. His parents were poor. After the death of his father, his mother remarried and followed her husband around north Germany before they settled once again at Bayreuth. She eventually became insane. Her son attended the University of Berlin from 1826 to 1828 where he studied philosophy and listened to the lectures of Hegel. But his academic career was far from distinguished.

After a brief spell at two other universities, Stirner returned to Berlin in 1832 and just managed to gain a teaching certificate. He then spent eighteen months as an unsalaried trainee teacher, but the Prussian government declined to appoint him to a full-time post. In 1837, he married his landlady’s daughter but she died in childbirth a few months later. It is difficult not to put down his misanthropy and egoism to a lonely childhood, unsuccessful career and bad luck. His fortunes only began to turn a little when he landed a post at Madame Gropius’s academy for young girls in Berlin. During the next five years Johann Kaspar had a steady job and began to mix with some of the most fiery young intellectuals of the day. They called themselves
Die Freien
– the Free Ones — and met in the early 1840s at Hippel’s Weinstube on Friedrichstrasse. Bruno Bauer and Edgar Bauer were the leading lights of the group but Marx and Engels occasionally
attended. Engels has left a sketch of the Young Hegelians during a visit by Arnold Ruge which depicts Johann Kaspar as an isolated figure, looking on at the noisy debate.

It was during this period that he wrote ‘The False Principle of Our Education’, which was published in Marx’s journal,
Rheinische Zeitung
, in 1842. The essay shows the libertarian direction Stirner was already taking. Distinguishing between the ‘educated man’ and the ‘freeman’, he argued that, in the former case, knowledge is used to shape character so that the educated become possessed by the Church, State or Humanity, while in the latter it is used to facilitate choice:

The Free Ones came to be known as the Left Hegelians because they met to discuss and eventually oppose the philosophy of the great German metaphysician. It was in reaction to Hegel and the habitués of the Free Ones that Johann Kaspar wrote his only claim to fame,
The Ego and His Own.
The work is quite unique in the history of philosophy. Its uneven style is passionate, convoluted and repetitive; its meaning is often opaque and contradictory. Like a musical score it introduces themes, drops them, only to develop them at a later stage; the whole adds up to a triumphant celebration of the joy of being fully oneself and in control of one’s life — something Stirner himself never achieved.

Stirner has an almost Wittgensteinian awareness of the way language influences our perception of reality and limits our world. ‘Language’, he writes, ‘or “the word” tyrannizes hardest over us, because it brings up against us a whole army of
fixed ideas’.
He stresses that the ‘thrall of
language’
is entirely a human construct but it is all-embracing. Truth does not correspond to reality outside language: ‘Truths are phrases, ways of speaking … men’s thoughts, set down in words and therefore just as extant as other things.’
⁹
Since truths are entirely human creations expressed in language they can be consumed: ‘The truth is dead, a letter, a word, a material that I can use up.’
¹⁰
But since this is the case, Stirner recognizes the possibility of being enslaved by language and its fixed meanings. It also implies that it is extremely difficult to express something new. Ultimately, Stirner is reduced to verbal impotence in face of the ineffable, of what cannot be said or described. He calls the ‘I’ ‘unthinkable’ and ‘unspeakable’: ‘Against me, the unnameable, the realm of thoughts, thinking, and mind is shattered.’
¹¹

The author of
The Ego and His Own
adopted the
nam de plume
Max
Stirner so as not to alarm Madame Gropius, the owner of the highly respectable academy for young girls where he taught. The German word ‘Stirne’ means ‘brow’, and the would-be philosopher felt that it was appropriate not only because he had a prominent forehead but because it matched his self-image as a ‘highbrow’. His denunciation of all religious and philosophical beliefs which stood in the way of the unique individual earned him instant notoriety and inspired among others Ludwig Feuerbach, Moses Hess, and Marx and Engels to refute him.

Whilst writing his
magnum opus
, Stirner married Marie Dähnhardt, an intelligent and pretty member of the Free Ones. It proved the happiest period of his life. Madame Gropius was apparently unaware of the writings of the subversive and inflammatory thinker she was harbouring in her genteel establishment. But that still did not prevent her from firing her timid employee. He was then obliged to do hack work to earn a living, translating several volumes of the work of the English economists J. B. Say and Adam Smith. After the failure of a dairy scheme his wife left him, only to recall years later that he was very egoistical and sly. He spent the rest of his life in poverty, twice landing in prison for debt. He attended occasionally the salon of Baroness von der Goltz, where his radical philosophical opinions caused considerable surprise, especially as he appeared outwardly calm. The only work to emerge from this period was a
History of Reaction
(1852)
(Geschichte der Reaction)
, as dull and ordinary as the author’s own end in 1856. Stirner was the author of one great work: it proved to have been a desperate but unsuccessful attempt to escape from the stifling circumstances of his life and times.