The German Ideology

Marx and Engels analyze Max Stiner’s 1844 book The Ego and Its Own. The literal translation from German is “The Individual and his Property.” Stirner advances an individualist critique of Christianity, humanism, and contemporary thought. He is concerned with freedom, truth, and mankind. The book is divided into two sections, “The Law and the Prophets” and “The Gospel of the Kingdom of God.” Marx and Engels note that the Bible is also divided into two sections.

First, they analyze part one, under the subheading “The Book of Genesis, i.e., “A Man’s Life.” Stirner describes “man” as an abstract category, not an individual. His argument analyzes the development from child to youth to man, through which he becomes increasingly concerned with the spirit and ideas. He learns to obey his own rational consciousness. Stiner argues that the youth becomes a man once he recognizes the need to improve his spirit and no longer take the world as it is. The man learns to arrive at the ideas that hide behind things. For example, a beer ceases to be a beer, and the adult understands the symbolism behind beer.

Stirner notes,

If, however, the spirit is recognised as the essential, nevertheless it makes a difference whether the spirit is poor or rich, and therefore […] one strives to become rich in spirit; the spirit wishes to expand, to establish its realm, a realm not of this world, which has just been overcome (133).