Research article: Max Stirner, Hegel and the Young Hegelians: a reassessment

Max Stirner is generally considered a nihilist, anarchist, precursor to Nietzsche,
existentialism and even post-structuralism. Few are the scholars who try to
analyse his stands from within its Young Hegelian context without, however,
taking all his references to Hegel and the Young Hegelians as expressions of
his own alleged Hegelianism. This article argues in favour of a radically
different reading of Stirner considering his magnum opus Der Einzige und
sein Eigentum as in part a carefully constructed parody of Hegelianism
deliberately exposing its outwornness as a system of thought. Stirner's alleged
Hegelianism becomes intelligible when we consider it as a formal element in
his criticism of Bauer's philosophy of self-consciousness. From within this
framework it becomes quite clear what Stirner meant with such notions as
ownness and egoism. They were part of his radical criticism of the implicit
teleology of Hegelian dialectics as it found according to him its highmark in
Bauer. In short, this article puts the literature on Stirner into question and tries
for the first time in 30 years to dismantle Stirner's entire undertaking in Der
Einzige und sein Eigentum by considering it first and foremost a radical
criticism of Hegelianism and eventually the whole of philosophy while fully
engaged in the debates of his time.