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Max Stirner
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Anarchism
In this course, Professor Ruth Kinna (Loughborough University) explores the idea of anarchism. In the first five modules, we introduce five key figures in anarchist thinking: Max Stirner (1806-65), Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-65), Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876), Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921), and Emma Goldman (1869-1940). After that, we spend five modules exploring four key principles in anarchism: rejection of the state, liberty, economic freedom and utopianism. In the eleventh, twelfth and thirteen modules, we think about six different types of anarchism – individualism, collectivism, communism, egoism, social anarchism and syndicalism – before turning in the final four modules to explore seven key concepts in anarchism: power, authority, government, the state, altruism, autonomy and direct action.
Max Stirner
In this module, we introduce the figure of Max Stirner (1806-65), focusing in particular on: (i) Stirner’s affiliation with a group known as the Young (or Left) Hegelians, which also included Karl Marx (1818-83) and Friedrich Engels (1820-85); (ii) Stirner’s 1844 work ‘The Ego and its Own’ and the concept of dialectical egoism; and (iii) the rediscovery of Stirner’s work in the 1890s by John Henry McKay.
Hello. My name is Ruth Koerner. I'm a professor of political theory at
00:00:06the university,
00:00:09and I'm going to be talking to you about anarchism.
00:00:10So we're going to start by thinking about some key thinkers.
00:00:13They are Max Turner,
00:00:16PJ Prudent,
00:00:18Michael Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin
00:00:19and Emma Goldman.
00:00:22What I'm gonna do is go through them in turn and just give
00:00:23you an overview of their lives and the key works that they produced.
00:00:25So we start with Max Turner.
00:00:29Max Turner's dates are 18 Oh 6 to 18, 56.
00:00:31Sterner was a philosopher, and he was active in Berlin.
00:00:35He was linked to a group of philosophers called sometimes
00:00:38called the Left Leg Aliens or the Younger Galleons.
00:00:41And this was a group of people who met
00:00:44and discussed political philosophy, socialism
00:00:46and political change. And it included people like Marx and Engels who
00:00:50sterner at first considered as friends.
00:00:54So Sterner published some of his work in Marxist newspaper.
00:00:57He thought of Engels as a personal friend until he
00:01:00wrote this book called The Ego and Its Own.
00:01:03And the ego in its own was a book which Marx and Engels really didn't like.
00:01:05Um and Eventually they wrote a long critique of it
00:01:10in the German ideology, and they referred to him rather scathingly as ST Max.
00:01:13Now the reason they didn't like the German ideology was that
00:01:17Sterner had a go at socialism as much as he did
00:01:21autocracy or reactionary thought.
00:01:24And what he argued was that any ideal that
00:01:27was set against the individuals interests was potentially tyrannous.
00:01:30So the notion of the good of humanity or the
00:01:34common good or the revolution were all ideas that could
00:01:38in some way coerced individuals to behave in
00:01:42ways that they wouldn't otherwise want to do.
00:01:44And what Sterner defended was an idea of what he called uniqueness.
00:01:47And according to this,
00:01:50the idea that the principle of human action was to find
00:01:52what individual motives were best suited to those individuals themselves.
00:01:55So they had to assert themselves in the world in order to discover their own freedom.
00:02:01And this was something that was only limited by the actions of other individuals.
00:02:06So this is why sterner is called an egoist.
00:02:11His ideas at the time were very, they attracted a lot of attention,
00:02:15and they got a lot of critical sort of reviews.
00:02:18But Sterner died quite young, and he didn't inspire any kind of movement,
00:02:21at least not until the 18 nineties, when he was rediscovered
00:02:25by another German thinker called John Henry Mackay.
00:02:29Mackay republished his ideas and popularised them,
00:02:32and at that point,
00:02:36stern or ism or egoism became a definite current within the anarchist movement.
00:02:36
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Kinna, R. (2020, February 17). Anarchism - Max Stirner [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/anarchism/altruism-and-autonomy
MLA style
Kinna, R. "Anarchism – Max Stirner." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 17 Feb 2020, https://massolit.io/courses/anarchism/altruism-and-autonomy