Check out the Vagabond Theorist blog for a translation of the “Introduction” to the 2001 edition of the Italian version of Max Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. The translation is obviously approximate in a couple of places, but Massimo Passamani’s provocative reading of Stirner is sufficiently clear. Thanks to the Vagabond Theorist himself for making this available.
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Echoes and Fragments: Collective Egoism
One of the elements of Proudhon’s social theory which sometimes strikes people as odd or objectionable is his emphasis on “collective force” and his insistence on the existence of collective beings or individuals. I’ve had some understandably skeptical responses to my claim that Proudhon’s philosophy is essentially a philosophy of individualism—but encompassing individuals at every conceivable scale. That is, of course, a bit of a simplification—even a simplism—if we neglect to mention that, for Proudhon, individualism had a tendency to lead into socialism, and vice versa. Recall, for instance, that he expected an absolutely free and individualistic society, based on […]
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Victor Yarros, “‘Egoism’ Bedeviling Anarchism”
Benjamin R. Tucker’s rather sudden conversion to Max Stirner’s philosophy of Egoism was a calamitous accident. There is nothing in common between individualist and philosophical Anarchism as Tucker developed it on the foundations laid by Jefferson, Thoreau, Emerson, Warren, Spooner, Spencer, Herbert, Green and Andrews, and Stirner’s German political metaphysics. Some of Tucker’s adherents uncritically swallowed. Egoism and persuaded themselves that it was a corollary, if not a logical deduction from anarchistic premises. This was a gross error. Egoism is half platitudinous, half fallacious.
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Maxime Leroy, Stirner vs. Proudhon (1905)
I’ve posted a working translation of Maxime Leroy’s essay, “Stirner vs. Proudhon,” which originally appeared in 1905 in La Renaissance latine. The essay is really not much about Proudhon, and is perhaps ambivalent in its approach to Stirner, but it is certainly interesting enough to have been worth the work.