Max Stirner Archives - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Alfred Fouillée, “Immoralism and the Absolute Individualism of Stirner” (1902)

May 4, 2021 Shawn P. Wilbur

NIETZSCHE ET L’IMMORALISME […] INTRODUCTION NIETZSCHE AND IMMORALISM […] INTRODUCTION CHAPITRE PREMIER l’immoralisme et l’individualisme absolu de Stirner. I. — Selon Stirner, ce n’est pas l’homme qui est la mesure de tout, c’est le moi. Stirner croit trouver le vrai point d’appui universel dans la conscience individuelle, dans ce moi toujours présent, qui se retrouve en toute pensée. Feuerbach avait proposé l’Homme à notre adoration ; c’est là, répond Stirner, un nouvel Être suprême ; l’Homme n’a aucune réalité ; tout ce qu’on lui attribue est « un vol fait à l’individu ». Feuerbach avait dit : Le Dieu dont parle Hegel après Platon n’est autre […]

John Henry Mackey, “L’Œuvre de Max Stirner: L’Unique et sa propriété”

July 10, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

Qu’est-ce que L’unique et sa propriété ? — Que nous apporte ce livre ? — Où résident sa grandeur, son importance, son immoralité ? — En un mot, quel est le secret de la puissance qu’il exerce « sur nous » ?

A toutes ces questions, l’œuvre elle-même est la seule qui peut naturellement donner une réponse adéquate. Seule son étude approfondie et réitérée peut nous en approcher, et rien ne saurait et ne doit remplacer et ce travail et cette jouissance.

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Property and the Essence of Mutualism

November 5, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_2third] “My principle, which will appear astonishing to you, citizens, my principle is yours; it is property itself.”—P.-J. Proudhon In my writings on mutualist property theory, I have been attempting to supplement a somewhat strange lacuna in Proudhon’s theory, his failure—in at least one important sense—to ever really directly answer the question posed in his first major work, What is Property? In order to do that, I’ve been drawing on the work of Max Stirner, which, despite Stirner’s sense that he was opposing Proudhon’s position, seems to primarily address “property” in precisely the senses that Proudhon didn’t even make much […]

Maxime Leroy, Stirner vs. Proudhon (1905)

May 26, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

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.

Stirner’s Critics

April 28, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

Hurry over to the Vagabond Theorist page and check out the full translation of “Stirner’s Critics,” Max Stirner’s reply to Szeliga, Hess and Feuerbach. There’s a lot of very valuable clarification in the essay. Bravo! for making the entire thing available.

What is property? — Some thoughts about how to proceed

October 29, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve had a couple of useful discussions of property over the last few weeks—over coffee and ale with Apio Ludicrus and online with Derek Wittorff—where the question of the points of contact between Proudhon and Stirner have come up again. There is work being translated that will eventually help to clarify similarities and differences, but there’s also a bit of analytic preparing of the terrain that needs to be done, and could easily be done right now. What I want to try to do right now is to differentiate some of the things that “property” means in these two […]

“property must justify itself or disappear”

October 23, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] Once more into the breach. Proudhon’s The Theory of Property is one of those books I have been wrestling with for several years now. It’s a complicated, frustrating work, being both an attempt to summarize, clarify and rectify errors in Proudhon’s many previous writings on property and an 11th-hour departure into new territory, inspired by the major works of history and sociology which occupied much of his later career. As a posthumous work, it lacks the careful revision and finishing that Proudhon habitually gave his […]

W. Curtis Swabey, “The Ethics of Stirner” (1912)

August 3, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

When I first encounter the French version of this text, I was aware that I might be translating a translation, but the article was interesting enough to make the work worth the bit of time it took—and it was quite a while before I finally tracked down the original English version. Now that I have the original text, it’s interesting to see to what extent the sense of the work survived the double-translation, so I have simply added the original to the post containing my translation. [ezcol_1half] The Ethics of Stirner To all who have been fortunate enough to read […]

Property is impossible?

July 4, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third] Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] [/one_third][two_third_last] We’re getting closer to the river’s edge, but we’re not quite prepared to “take our draught” yet. It has always seemed to me that libertarian property theory is prone to leaping straight to property’s defense—the occasions for legitimate use of force—without lingering overlong on just what it is defending. The broader the discussion—and terms like “left-libertarian” and “market anarchist” attempt to cover pretty broad swathes of ideological territory—the more pronounced the problem. The left-libertarian theory of a “spectrum” of abandonment theories seems to me pretty sound, and useful, but I have my doubts […]

Newly translated commentary on Stirner

June 20, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

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.