From Anarchist Studies by Sharif Gemie

'a mighty, reckless, shameless, conscienceless, proud crime': re-evaluating the criminal in Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own
JAMES WARD ABSTRACT The figure of the criminal features prominently in Stirner's Ego and his Own. This paper debates whether this figure is intended as a portrayal of an actual criminal or whether it should rather be seen as a vehicle for Stirner's critique of Hegel's and Feuerbach's ideas. In crime, the egoist has hitherto asserted himself and mocked at the sacred; the break with the sacred, or rather of the sacred, may become general. A revolution never returns, but a mighty, reckless, shameless, conscienceless, proud - crime, does it not rumble in distant thunders, and do you not see 1 how the sky grows presciently silent and gloomy? The criminal, so central to Max Stirner's project in The Ego and Its Own is, on the face of it, one of the most sensational figures ever to be promoted in a significant political work. For some, it is so sensational, it cannot be taken seriously: the first edition of Stirner' s work was seized by the censor, but quickly released when the Saxon Minister of the Interior decided it was 'too absurd' to constitute a danger. Needless to say, this assessment has not been shared by everyone. James Huneker, in one of the first texts to treat of Stirner in English, said The Ego and Its Own was 'the most revolutionary book ever written ... [Stirner] has left behind him a veritable breviary of destruction, a striking and dangerous book. It is dangerous in every sense of the word - to socialism, to politicians, 2 to hypocrisy.' Much of this kind of assessment is down to the fact that the criminal is lauded as a social and psychological type in The Ego and Its Own, and a recognition that this constitutes a radical break with the main lines of political thought since Plato. Even 3 Machiavelli in The Prince condemns the criminal, while Nietzsche nowhere considers the criminal in conjunction with the Superman, and would probably have considered criminality as an example of the 'unsublimated' will to power. However, in this essay, I will argue that Stirner's criminal has all-to-often been (mis)understood in isolation from the role it has to play in the economy of The Ego and Its Own. Understood in context, it emerges as a polemical tool, a means of responding to the thinkers that Stirner was most concerned to distance himself from: Hegel and Feuerbach. As an actual criminal, the figure described in The Ego and Its Own is not very convincing. 162

Stirner, M., The Ego and Its Own (hereafter cited in the text as EO) tr. D. Leopold, (Cambridge 1995), p.215. 2. Huneker, J., The Egoists (New York , 1909), p.371. 3. The Prince (Harmondsworth, 1999), p.30.

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MAX STIRNER'S THE EGO AND ITS OWN 1. INTRODUCTION The Ego and Its Own is Max Stirner's only major work, and was published in Leipzig, in October 1844 (although it is dated 1845). It aims to elucidate the notion of 'the Unique' (Der Einzige) and examines the relationship of this figure to his property (sein Eigentum), so that one plausible translation of the German title of the work is, 'The Unique One and His Property'. Stirner seems to think that a description of Egoism, or the Egoist, is the most effective means of elucidating the notion of 'Uniqueness', since this 4 latter is, properly speaking, beyond language. In order to properly realise his Uniqueness, Stirner anticipates that the Egoist will have to deal at least somewhere along the linewith the established authorities, most notably, in the form of the State. Thus it is that the Egoist becomes a criminal. The main thrust of The Ego and Its Own is a critique of what Stirner calls 'Fixed Ideas'. 'Fixed Ideas' are ideas that possess an idealistic force for human beings, thus pushing them to do things that unblinkered selfinterest would immediately reject as absurd. Thus, examples of fixed ideas are 'right, law, a good cause, majesty, marriage, the common good, order, the fatherland, and so on' (EO, p.43). Stirner has a variety of labels for this phenomenon, each seeking to bring out a different nuance of its problematic relation to the human race. He characterises 'Fixed Ideas' also as 'Ghosts', 'Spooks', 'The Sacred' and 'Wheels in the Head. Stirner characterises people under the influence of 'Fixed Ideas' as 'Possessed'. Those, in society, who derive political power from 'Fixed Ideas', Stirner calls 'The Hierarchy. The criminal is opposed to all these. In this essay, I argue that, although the Stirnerean criminal has a fearsome reputation in philosophical lore, this reputation belies the essentially innocuous role the criminal 5 actually plays in The Ego and Its Own. In fact, the concept of the criminal is mainly intended to enable Stirner to settle accounts with his two main philosophical forebears: Hegel and Feuerbach. The 'criminal' makes possible a unified response to the two modem philosophical notions that gave Stirner most concern: the Hegelian State and the Feuerbachian 'Man'. I argue that the fact that the' criminal' is put forward mainly to fulfill a polemical purpose compromises both its credibility as what it claims to be (i.e., as genuinely an actual 'criminal') and its credibility as a space out of the reach of 'Fixed Ideas'. The Stirnerean philosophy of the criminal is a negative philosophy: it is concerned to effect a rebuttal. Stirner's 'positive' philosophy has to be sought elsewhere. The Criminal is a central figure in The Ego and Its Own. At first sight, it looks as if Stirner wants the actual criminal to be coterminous with 'Egoist'. Thus, he says, 'Only against a

EO, p.324: 'No concept expresses me, nothing that is designated as my essence exhausts me; they are only names'. 5. In this essay, I shall use 'Stirnerean criminal' to mean 'the criminal as Max Stirner conceives him', ie, as an Egoist. I usually abbreviate this to 'criminal'. But where I mean the criminal as ordinarily understood (ie, in legal statutes and popular notions of justice quite apart from anything Stirner may have written), I shall designate this figure with the term 'actual criminal'. The problem is that Stirner (probably) thinks the Stirnerean criminal is coterminous with the actual criminal. Occasionally, it is unavoidable that we defer to this, remaining ambiguous between Stirnerean criminal and actual criminal (as for example when we discuss Hegel's criminal, which at least strongly resembles the actual criminal, but is the model for the Stirnerean criminal). But the thrust of this essay is that any strong identification of the two is unsustainable.

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sacred thing are there criminals... Crimes spring from fixed ideas' (EO, p.179). However, there is a difference of aspect. 'The criminal' is the Egoist viewed through the medium of 'Fixed Ideas' (EO, p.182). As mentioned already, we will argue in this essay that the criminal serves as the focal point of counterattack (in a way that 'Egoist' and The Unique One' are unsuited to do) on the two paradigm 'Fixed ideas' of The Ego and Its Own: 'Man' and the State.
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ANARCHIST STUDIES To begin with, can the State be called an idea at all? Firstly, we have explicit evidence that, in The Ego and Its Own, it is. Thus, on page 44, Stirner talks about 'The fixed idea of the State. Later, he declares the State to be a 'wheel in the head' (ie, a possessedness by 'fixed ideas' [EO, p.2000]). 2. THE CRIMINAL AND THE STATE Stirner's attack on the State has been of central interest to Anarchism, for obvious reasons. In some ways, it is quite modern. Thus. Saul Newman draws attentions to certain 6 parallels between Stirner's approach to the State, and that of Giles Deleuze. There are good textual reasons for calling into question the notion of the materiality of the State (as opposed to its status as a set of ideas) in Stirner. Thus, Stirner describes the State as 'the moral world' (EO, p.212). The German 'Sittliche' obviously recalls Hegel's The Philosophy of Right, where Sittlichkeitis most often translated not 'moral' but 'ethical'. Further, it is unlikely that Stirner uses the word 'State' to mean 'government' (a mistake which may underlie much Anarchist appreciation of Stirner). If he was using it this way, he could hardly say, 'Over me there will stand a government in every State (EO, p.202). Such a Statement would be tautologous at best. However, he does not appear to use State' to mean' Society' either, because the whole weight of the contrast between 'Political Liberalism' and 'Social Liberalism' in Part One of The Ego and Its Own is that

Political Liberalism has created the State, whereas Social Liberalism champions 'society'. If the two words are synonymous, clearly this distinction cannot work. Moreover, Stirner appears to make a further explicit distinction between State and society in the section 'My Intercourse'. Talking about dueling in North America, he says that the State stamps it as a crime, whereas society leaves it to the individual's decision. The State 'behaves in exactly the reverse way' to society (EO, p.212). Almost certainly, the State in Stirner is to be understood in terms deriving from Hegel, specifically The Philosophy of Right, where 'The State is the actuality of the 7 ethical idea'; where membership of the State is not optional 'We are already citizens of the State by birth' (PR 75); where the State is the creation of mind, and is close to the divine - 'Man must therefore venerate the State as a secular deity' (PR 272). That Stirner was intimately acquainted with The Philosophy of Right is shown by his familiar and adroit discussion of it at several places in The Ego and Its Own, and by his frequent reference to the State via the concept of 'Right' (recht). If we accept that the Hegelian notion of the State is the one extant in The Ego and Its Own, we can immediately see Stirner's point that the State is 'a moral world', a 'system of morality', and 'a fixed idea'. For in Hegel, the State is defined in terms of mind, will, religion, custom, knowledge and so on, all of which are ideas. Similarly significant for Stirner, is Hegel's notion that human beings find the 'universal' in the State that they cannot find in civil society (PR 261). This allows
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Newman, S., 'War on the State; Stirner's and Deleuze's Anarchism', Anarchist Studies 9 (2001), pp.147-63. 7. Hegel, G. W. F., Hegels Philosophy of Right, (hereafter cited in the text as PR) tr. T. M. Knox (Oxford 1945), 257 p.l55.

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MAX STIRNER'S THE EGO AND ITS OWN Stirner to link his critique of the State to his critique of the Feuerbachian Man, and make them both part of a single critique. Stirner says: 'The kernel of the State is simply 'man', this unreality... The world which the believer (believing spirit) creates is called church, the world which man (human or humane spirit) creates is called State' (EO, p.261). To a large extent, the move of tying the two things State and 'Man' together was not new to Stirner. It had already been done by Feuerbach himself. Thus, in his Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy, Feuerbach writes: 'The human being is the ev kaipan (One and all') of the State. The State is the realized, cultivated, 8 explicit totality of the human essence.' Stirner is not innovating here: in some of his 1842-43 writings, for example, Marx insists that 'The real human being is the private 9 individual of the present-day State constitution.' On such an interpretation, the essential human is discovered in the State.

Stirner's objection to the Feuerbachian 'Man' is well known. As far as Stirner is concerned, Feuerbach sets 'Man' up to become a new ideal, a new religious standard, at least as oppressive as any previous religious standard (EO, p.34). It seems likely that
8. 9.

Stepelevich, L. S. (ed.), The Young Hegelians: An Anthology (Cambridge 1983), p.170. Marx, K. and Engels, F. Collected Works Volume 1 (Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), p.81.

Stirner is using the criminal in The Ego and Its It Own as a counterblast both to Hegel's idealist notion of the State and to Feuerbach's (idealist, Stirner thinks) notion of 'Man', That the criminal is well suited to fulfill the former task is suggested by Hegel himself in the Philosophy of Right, There, Hegel characterises as 'crimes of the worst kind, crimes 'against the State in general, or against the sovereignty, majesty and person of the prince' (PR 282). So this is one very significant sense in which the criminal serves as a focal point of counterattack on the Hegelian notion of the State. It gains its effect through a kind of 'turning on its head' (to borrow a phrase from Marx) of Hegelian politics. The criminal is exalted, the State is demonised. We now need to examine the sense in which the criminal serves as an attack on Man, although in doing so, we should bear in mind the fact that the State and 'Man' are part of the same package for Stirner. 3. THE CRIMINAL AND 'MAN' In Part One of The Ego and Its Own, Stirner is fairly specific about the sorts of existing social groups that he might include under the rubric 'criminal', in a way that finds no parallel in Part Two (this latter being the section where the notion of 'the criminal' receives its most extended treatment by far). Thus, under 'The Free, we read that the commoner feels disturbed by 'innovating and discontented' poverty, that of the vagabond (Vagabonden), the prostitute (das Freudenmdchen) and the gambler (der Spieler). 'All who appear to the commoner suspicious, hostile and dangerous might be comprised under the name "vagabonds" (Vagabonden); every vagabondish way of living displeases him.' (EO, p.102) For Stirner, I am an ego, and as an ego I seek to extricate myself from your dominion. One legitimate way in which I may do this (if I feel so inclined), is by

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ANARCHIST STUDIES trying to convert you and your property into my property (mein Eigentum). (EO, p.228) For this reason, the notion of property is central to The Ego and Its Own. It is complementary to the concept of the criminal. The criminal is one who takes what he

wishes for his own enjoyment without regard for the moral, legal or religious frameworks supposedly governing property. Thus, at first sight, there is a very strong obvious point of overlap between the Stirnerean criminal and the actual criminal. The Stirnerean criminal 'steals' others' property, so does the actual criminal. From the point of view of the Stirnerean criminal, obviously there is no such thing as property. Thus, Proudhon is wrong to say that property is theft (EO, p .223). And in the end, there can be no such thing as property: 'Property and possession coincide. It is not a right lying outside my might that legitimises me, but solely my might: if I no longer have this, the thing vanishes away from me' (EO, p.223, cf. pp.173-4). Here as elsewhere, Stirner appears to be endorsing an acceptance of what is, whatever it is (ie, whether it is Egoism or not) something that might seem to involve him in a contradiction. His book seems concerned to advocate Egoism, yet he is forced into an endorsement of things as they are. But we should note that Stirner, according to his own account, is not actually preaching Egoism. 'Do I write out of love to men? No... I sing because - I am a singer. But I use you for it because I - need ears. (EO, p.262-3) This desire not to be seen to be proselytising might make plausible a claim to the effect that the Egoist is only achievable against the backdrop of a society whose legal, religious and moral norms remain broadly unchanged. The Egoist really can only expect to win where others remain transfixed by their illusions, and Stirner is only apparently going about the business of stripping people of these illusions. Our perception that he is doing so rests on a misunderstanding on our part. There are indications that Stirner recognises the need to retain a stable social backdrop as the only possible canvas on which the ideal of the Unique One can be brought to fruition. For example, he wishes to retain the institution of money (EO, p.243). The retention (or reinvention) of money would seem to require a fairly high degree of background social stability. The Egoist cannot decide that his 100 Deutschmark bill will be worth 1000 Deutschmarks - to the extent that it is money at all, its value is surely 10 beyond his power to decide. Similarly, Stirner is famously hostile to the idea of 'revolution', preferring 'insurrection' instead. Revolution, in Stirner's eyes, is a corporate affair motivated and guided by ideals about the kind of society which will emerge; 'insurrection' is a throwing off of all yokes, without regard for consequences, and it is not a corporate matter, but an egoistic one (EO, p.280). Clearly, however, in order that the concept of insurrection should be a meaningful one, it can only take the form of practical hostility to a fixed set of norms. In a society which was in a State of complete flux, insurrection would not be possible; because against what could I, or anyone else, define my activity as insurrectionary? All this would mean that there is only a limited sense in which the criminal has an interest in abolishing 'Fixed Ideas' generally. Indeed, an argument can be put

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10.

A point Marx seems to want to make also. Marx and Engels Collected Works 5, pp.84-85.

MAX STIRNER'S THE EGO AND ITS OWN forward to show that he has an interest in retaining them in society broadly. This raises the question: How convincing is the Stirnerean criminal, as a criminal? One of Stirner' s purposes in exalting the criminal in The Ego and Its Own is apparently to enable him to show what the Egoist is, without having recourse to an idea that might become 'fixed'. This is trickier than it sounds, but it is necessary, given that the Unique One - the only phenomenon in Stirner's positive philosophy that is beyond the possibility of becoming a 'Fixed idea' - is essentially beyond speaking of. Language cannot describe him (EO, p.305). It is this, among other points, that leads Andrew M. Koch - almost 11 certainly rightly - to describe Stirner as 'the First Poststucturalist'. But if Stirner wishes to show what the Unique one is, why does he not just describe himself! After all, Stirner does apparently identity himself as The Unique One (EO, 12 p.319). But even if we assume that The Ego and Its Own is 'an exercise in confessional 13 autobiography . . . masked in the opaque idiom of a profoundly reticent personality', then we have to acknowledge the fact that Stirner describes no events in his life. Even the name 'Max Stirner' is something of a mask, for Stirner was born Johann Caspar Schmidt. In fact, the author of The Ego and Its Own makes no attempt to plot the description of the Unique One onto autobiographical incidents, in the way that, for example, Kierkegaard's thought is plotted onto his autobiography, The result of this is that the author of The Ego and Its Own could be anyone. There is an excellent reason for this, of course. Stirner can hardly describe facts about himself - either referring to events in his life or privileging his introspective concerns in a manner that will not lead him straight into the trap described in the 1842 essay 'Art and Religion', in which he warns against setting up aesthetic 14 'objects' that can, and will, then be appropriated by religion. This still leaves two courses open to him. Firstly, he could show the kind of thing the Unique One is, by citing the names of historical individuals or literary heroes who have exemplified one or another of His properties; secondly, he could show the kind of thing the Unique One is by referring the reader to certain social groups who supposedly exemplify these properties. The latter course has undoubted shock-value (thus, undoubted potential to challenge 'Fixed Ideas, particularly moral ones). But there is another, equally strong reason for choosing this path, which we shall examine in a moment. The fact is that Stirner did choose to hold up, as archetypically outside the purview of 'Fixed Ideas, persons of dubious respectability (clearly those who are either actual criminals, or whose precarious the whore, the thief, robber, and murderer, the gambler, the penniless man without a position, the frivolous man' (EO, p.l0l). In similar vein, we are told that the 'un-

man' (Stirner's nominalist label for real individual human beings, and which functions as a synonym for the Egoist) forms at least a part of that class of persons confined in prisons and asylums (EO, p.159). Michel Foucault's remark, in position might be thought to dispose them to actual criminality): 'The swindler, Discipline and Punish, that the object of punishment since about 1760 has been
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M. KOCH, ANDREW, 'Max Stirner: The Last Hegelian or the First Poststructuralist? Anarchist Studies 5 (1997), pp.95-97. 12. Paterson argues this. Cf. Paterson, R. W.K., The Nihilistic Egoist: Max Stirner (Oxford, 1971), p.273. 13. Paterson, Nihilistic Egoist, p.286. 14. 'Art and Religion' can be found in the collection, Stepelevich, The Young Hegelian, pp.327-34. In the original German, it can be found in Mackay, J. H., (ed.) Max Stirner's kleinere Schriften und seine Entgegnungen auf die Kritik seines Werkes: 'Der Einzige und sein Eigentum', Aus den Jahren 1842-48, (Berlin, 1914) pp.258-268.

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ANARCHIST STUDIES the 'soul' rather than the body finds strong resonance in Stirner. Stirner's criminal is distinguished by a certain attitude of 'soul' (rather than just errant behaviour), and the wider issue - though there is not room to pursue it here - is that it is perhaps Stirner's position in history (ie, well after 1760) that allows him to think the criminal in the way he does. He was unconsciously obeying a trend that was already well established in current legal ideology. We can now see the double sense in which the Stirnerean 'criminal' constitutes an attack on the Feuerbachian 'Man' and the State. It is not just that these persons refuse to bend the knee, or only make a pretence of doing so. It is that as categories, 'criminal, 'vagabond', 'whore', 'gambler' are both considerably less abstract than the Feuerbachian 'Man', and can credibly be said to represent the antithesis of it. If we take 'Man' as being the 'Fixed idea' par excellence that The Ego and Its Own is out to demolish (The most oppressive spook is man' [EO, p.69]), we begin to see why the Stirnerean critique of 'Fixed ideas' cannot do without the criminal. To say that 'criminal', 'whore' and 'vagabond' are intended by Stirner as a counterblast to the Feuerbachian Man may sound like a plausible thesis, but do we have any grounds for thinking it true, other than its instinctive plausibility? Firstly, Stirner himself seems to appreciate the contrast and be concerned to ram it home explicitly: 'The thief and man are in my mind irreconcilable opposites; for one is not truly man when One is a thief: (EO, p.72) Secondly, it is a fact worth remarking on that each time Stirner introduces the subject of the criminal, it is explicitly juxtaposed with a negative 16 assessment of Man.' That this constant appearance of the two discussions in juxtaposition is pure coincidence cannot be discounted. However, it does inevitably suggest that there was a connection between the two things, along the lines we have suggested, in Stirner's mind. This would be reinforced by a consideration of the evidence
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of juxtaposition in the light of the last quote, where an explicit connection is made by Stirner himself. To say that Stirner's discussion of the criminal sits side by side with a discussion of Man needs clarification. The Man in question is not always Feuerbach's, as is often
Discipline and Punish (Harmondsworth, 1977), p, 16. By way of showing this, we cannot take every reference to crime in Stirner's work, since some of them are too fleeting. We need only look at the major references, and fortunately David Leopold has done a good job of identifying them for us in the Cambridge edition of The Ego and its Own (1995). In the Index of Subjects, Crime is dealt with, says Leopold, on (Cambridge) pp. 45, 67, 71-2, 1734,176, 178-83, 212-15, 256.
16. 15.

supposed: other champions of 'Man' are also attacked. Thus, the major targets are Bruno Bauer, Wilhelm Christian Weitling, the German Utopian socialist, and Bettina von Arnim, a German reformist writer. Despite this diversity of authorship however, the four conceptions of' Man' have in common that the entity proposed is considered an ideal one, moral and complete, so that in contrast (Stirner thinks) with the concrete lives of actually existing men, it posits itself as an essentially religious ideal. Stirner counterposes the criminal to all four of them. Certainly, The Ego and Its Own is as concerned to demolish 'Man' as it is to advance Egoism. The two concerns are obviously deeply interconnected, but can still be distinguished. One concern is destructive, the other constructive. The first is concerned with 'Fixed ideas', the second with their antithesis. Thus, The Ego and Its Own divides into two parts, the first called 'MAN', the second 'I'. Both parts are prefaced by pertinent quotations, and in each case, the Subject of the
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MAX STIRNER'S THE EGO AND ITS OWN quotations is 'Man' not the ego. We are suggesting here that Stirner drafted in vagabonds, thieves and gamblers as a concrete riposte to 'Man'; that he felt that the presuppositionless Ego - the central idea at the close (and climax) of The Ego Its Own was too abstract, and that Man might ultimately be salvaged from it. We should note here the nature of the link between the criminal and the lone ego in Stirner. It is power, the major theme of The Ego and Its Own. The Ego becomes its Own in despite of the powers of others; the criminal represents the limits of the chief empirical source of power, the State. We should also note Stirner's materialist treatment of the issue of power. To the idealistic power of the State is counterposed not an ideal (of any sort), but an empirically identifiable class of persons. We can now return with an answer to the question we asked earlier. How convincing is the Stirnerean criminal, as an actual criminal? Firstly, the does not have to be an actual criminal, by any means. Stirner's line of thought is as likely to lead to Stoic

self-detachment from the World as it is to criminality and vagabondage; indeed Stirner himself was not an actual criminal or a vagabond, but was 'self-absorbed and reticent 18 almost to the point of complete withdrawal'. This is not to say that there is no connection whatsoever between the Stirnerean criminal and the actual criminal. Clearly, if I am concerned solely with my 'selfenjoyment' and am prepared to totally disregard all ethical and legal norms that stand in the way of my self-enjoyment, it does seem possible that I will break the law at some
17. 18.

17

This argument is also to be found in Paterson, Nihilistic Egoist, pp.286-31O. Paterson, Nihilistic Egoist, p.3.

stage. However, there is no necessary connection between the Stirnerean criminal and the actual criminal. I t depends on what constitutes my 'enjoyment'. My enjoyments might all lie within the bounds of the law, and I might not want them to excess. Secondly, however, and more seriously, the danger posed to the State by the Stirnerean criminal is always going to be assuaged by the fact that the Egoist is not supposed to be 'possessed' by 'Fixed Ideas' in any way. So he cannot hate the State, he cannot hold, as a matter of principle, that it should not exist. He can only brush it off, when it attempts to interpose itself, as an irritant (EO, pp.207-8). If it is true to say that the Egoist need not be an actual criminal, it is equally true to say that the actual criminal need not be an Egoist. Stirner is all too aware that one can be a criminal because one wishes to pursue some end viewed as moral. Such a criminal can only be viewed as contemptible, and has nothing to do to with Egoism. This is the meaning of the story of the imaginary 'French revolutionary of 1788', who utters a treasonous sentiment and is judicially beheaded because he refuses to pretend he did not. He is a 'coward' because he did not have the courage to lie (EO, pp.264-5). It also appears to be the meaning behind Stirner's reading of with the story of Francis I and Karl V (EO, pp.266-7). None of this is surprising. We would expect that idealist criminals would not count as Stirnerean, but we might be rather surprised to discover that actual criminals who operate in a brutal, apparently conscienceless way to achieve selfish
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ANARCHIST STUDIES ends do not necessarily count as Stirnerean criminals, either. We can deduce that this is so from an examination of Stirner's response to Eugene Sue's novel, The Mysteries of Paris, where such criminals are depicted in detail. Stirner wrote a review article of this novel, in 1843, and refers to the novel again in The Ego and Its Own. 4. THE STIRNEREAN CRIMINAL VS. THE ACTUAL CRIMINAL: THE MYSTERIES OF PARIS

The Mysteries of Paris was published, in magazine instalments, in France in 1842-43 and it immediately caught the public imagination, not only in France, but also in Germany. It was the first work to describe in detail the Parisian underworld of cut-throats, thieves and gangsters, and their characteristic mode of speaking - Argot - was accurately reproduced in a way which shocked many. Speaking twenty years later, in Les Misrables, Victor Hugo spoke approvingly of Sue and described Argot as 'the ugly, restless, sly, treacherous, venomous, cruel, crooked, vile, deep, deadly 19 The Mysteries of Paris is perhaps marred by its simplistic language of misery'. dualism, the way in which it divides the characters rigidly into the 'good' and the 'bad' . But it does contain one criminal character of note: the Brigand. The Brigand is a ruthless, calculating and highly intelligent gang leader. He is so impressive that Karl Marx devoted an entire section of The Holy Family to him. But when Stirner came to review The Mysteries of Paris in the Berliner Monatsschrift in 1843, he made no special mention of the Brigand. Indeed, he concluded that the characters in the novel, where they were not 20 humdrum, were all enslaved by their desires. That Stirner's thinking about The Mysteries of Paris is unchanged in The Ego and Its Own is shown, through significant omission, by his discussion of it on page 258. He repeats the gist of the criticism of 'the virtuous philistine prince Rudolph' that he made in the original review article and comments no further on any aspect of the book. This may be taken as negative evidence that his view of it had not changed, for had it changed, here would have been the ideal place to say so. So the Stirnerean criminal cannot be motivated by 'Fixed ideas'; but 'drives' too are a symptom of possession. Although the Egoist is concerned with his property, simple acquisitiveness is a symptom of possession. Stirner says that when people think of Egoism, they immediately think of money and one who does things for the sake of money. This association is fallacious (EO, p.266). The truth is that 'an avaricious man is not a self-owned man', rather he is 'precisely like the godly man' (EO, p.266). So the Stirnerean criminal cannot act against the State for idealistic reasons - either conceived 21 positively or negatively ('Crime as well must have its fanatics who believe in it' - nor can he be driven by his instincts (his 'drives'), nor can he be driven by a simple desire to accrue wealth ('filthy lucre'). It is clear that, when it comes to the 'criminal', what Stirner appears to be giving with one hand, he is, as frequently, taking away with the other.

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19. 20.

Hugo, V., Les Misrables (London: Everyman, 1998), p.968. Mackay, Stimer's kleinere Schriftell, p.293. 21. Mackay, Stirner's kleinere Schriften, pp.292-93.

MAX STIRNER'S THE EGO AND ITS OWN Finally, we should note that in putting forward the criminal as the archetypal Egoist, Stirner is making the assumption that enjoyment consists in having that category of things that the law forbids. But this implies a static view of human nature - ie, it assumes that if I enjoy staying at home minding my own business, I cannot be a 'real' Egoist. This would be inconsistent with Stirner's view elsewhere on the complete incommensurability of different egos (EO, p.319). At this point it is worth returning, with a further question, to Stirner's review of The Mysteries of Paris. One would have thought that this review would have provided Stirner with an excellent opportunity to State, even if in the sparsest outline, his own thinking on the criminal. Indeed, if he possessed any distinctive thinking on this subject, one might even go so far as to suggest that it is incumbent on him to introduce it here, for by doing so, he can the more effectively point up how ineffectual Sue's treatment of the criminal really is. But Stirner does not introduce us to his thinking on the criminal in his review article. This may lead us to suspect that he did not yet have any distinctive thinking about the criminal, that the distinctively Stirnerean criminal was created sometime after the writing of this article. Yet by contrast, his critique of religion as 'fixity' was more or less complete a year earlier, in 1842, in the essay we have already referred to: 'Art and Religion. 5. CONCLUSION All this allows us to suggest that Stirner's The Ego and its Own operates on two levels, not entirely complementary. On one level, it is an existentialist work dealing with the relation between the I and the normative realm which seeks to guide and control me; on the other, it is a settling of long-standing accounts with his two principal philosophical forebears, Hegel and Feuerbach. The criminal is the vanguard of this attack, and it allows Stirner to fight two battles on a single front. Part of its appeal for Stirner almost certainly lay in its shock-value. He deliberately plays this up in passages such as the one that stands at the beginning of this essay. Yet, for all its advantages, it is negative: it is concerned with a rebuttal. Stirner's positive philosophy is more metaphysical. The figure of the Stirnerean criminal fails to live up to the more stringent requirements of this positive philosophy, because it cannot capture the nuances of existential Egoism. Indeed, the closer to the Egoist one pushes the Stirnerean criminal, the less like an actual criminal he appears - as we have seen. So The Ego and Its Own consists of two tiers. One sets forward a positive philosophy, the other settles accounts. There is a meeting place between them in The Ego and Its Own, but the two accounts are not necessary to one another: the Egoist could be a bookish recluse, never transgressing the law; the Stirnerean criminal would generally be more effective, as an actual criminal, if he was possessed by 'Fixed ideas, or drives, or both. However, perhaps we should be wary of suggesting that The Ego and Its Own has a fault-line running down the middle. For this is to read the book with the

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ANARCHIST STUDIES 'understanding' (Verstand), which looks for separateness. A better alternative might be that we see the criminal as somehow 'completed' in the Egoist, in a progression of consciousness (though not a temporal one) modelled on Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind. This would allow a Hegelian solution to the problem of the 'two tiers', which does not see that duality as constituting any absolute fact about The Ego and Its Own, and which is surely more plausible. It would have the advantage that we could retain the criminal as a necessary feature of the book, and not some posterior idea somehow 'supplementary' to the 'real' book, the latter being about the Egoist, and eventually 'the Unique One. Looking more widely afield, we noted above that the Stirnerean criminal may well have been a product of the shift in emphasis in punishment since the middle of the eighteenth century (assuming the veracity of Michel Foucault's analysis in Discipline and Punish), emphasising the 'soul' of the criminal. Such a notion of criminality is perhaps also implicit in The Mysteries of Paris, as well as in anarchist thinking that is fundamentally at odds with Stirner's thinking, such as the compassionate reflections on 'man who looked/ With such a wistful eye/ Upon that little tent of blue/ Which prisoners call the sky' in Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol. So the criminal, in Stirner's The Ego and Its Own, does not live up to the bombastic claims that are made for it, and have been made for it since. It is not the radical concept it has all-too-often been perceived as being, although it does succeed in fulfilling the limited, but significant, polemical purpose that was originally assigned to it. Stirner's major work, where it is thought of at all today, continues to be thought of as the book of the violent lawbreaker, implacably opposed to all authority. If this essay has succeeded in its purpose, it will have shown that the genuine interest of The Ego and Its Own lies in a more historically sensitive assessment of this feature of Stirner's magnus opum.

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