Translated from Indonesian.
In The German Ideology, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels devoted hundreds of pages to attacking a single man: Max Stirner. They called that section “Sankt Max”—Saint Max, mockingly. They never published it during their lifetime. The manuscript was only discovered and published long after both men were dead.
Some interpret this as evidence that even they themselves felt the section was unfinished—not strong enough to publish. And when it was finally read more widely, many readers did not come away thinking “Marx successfully refuted Stirner,” but rather the opposite: just how much energy had been spent avoiding the questions that actually needed answering.
Except, of course, for Leftists, who desperately defend Marx and Engels without ever having read the work of the ‘Saint’ targeted by their intellectual idols. And if they have read it, I suspect they sweated through trying to decipher The Ego and Its Own in Byington’s English translation from the original German—a translation already notorious for interpretive distortions. It is absurd, obviously, to read and claim to understand a response while failing to understand what that response was actually responding to.
But setting that aside—what really happened there? Continue reading “Saint Max: The Heretic Marx Couldn’t Silence”