Max Stirner on the Path of Doubt

“This is an important and needed book which brings a lifetime of first rate scholarship to bear on Max Stirner’s thought, as well as the significant thinkers, critics and commentators who were active in his generation, just after the death of Hegel. While offering a well-painted picture of Stirner himself, it also astutely suggests the contemporary relevance of many of Stirner's preoccupations. The style is intelligent, very informed and informative. It evidences much impressive erudition, but it wears its scholarly learning lightly. The result is a very readable text, engaging, and illuminating, as well as being full of significant touches of wit and irony. Very warmly recommended.”

-- William Desmond, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

In this highly engaging study, Lawrence Stepelevich makes the counterintuitive but highly compelling argument that Max Stirner is the legitimate heir and standard-bearer of Hegel’s dialectical logic. Stirner’s signature work from 1844, The Ego and His Own, has been dismissed by establishment Hegelians, satirized by Marx and Engels, and called "absurd" by the likes of Lukács, Derrida, and Habermas. And yet, as Stepelevich shows, there is good reason to hold that it is Stirner, and not the usual crew of Hegel-epigones, who represents the genuine fulfillment of Hegel’s philosophy and the true maturation of spirit in history (beyond the various forms of unhappy, adolescent consciousness). Even if it is accurate to characterize Stirner’s thinking as “nihilistic,” Stepelevich shows that Stirner’s “nihilism” is a surprisingly productive or creative kind which anticipates various strands of postmodern thought while at the same time avoiding the self-undermining strategies of contemporary postmodernism as commonly deployed. This book, a model of historically-sensitive philosophy and philosophically-astute history, will inform, provoke, and invigorate the thinking of experts and beginners alike.

-- Michael Baur, Fordham University

"A lively, witty, and erudite defense of Max Stirner from one of the most respected authorities on his thought. Stepelevich sets Stirner’s work in the context of Hegel and the Young Hegelians and makes a bold and intelligent case for its enduring significance. All readers interested in the aftermath of Hegel and the development of nineteenth-century thought will learn much from this informative and thought-provoking book."

-- Stephen Houlgate, University of Warwick

In Max Stirner on the Path of Doubt, Stepelevich unfolds a picture of the much misunderstood, and much ignored, German philosopher Max Stirner (1806–56). Stepelevich attempts to align Stirner as the natural inheritor and fulfiller of Hegel's dialectical logic. What is distinctive about Stirner, as Stepelevich argues in the introduction, is that he was from the beginning "neither an 'Old Hegelian' dedicated to the exhaustive autopsy of the Hegelian corpus nor a 'Young Hegelian' bent on employing it to a further purpose.".... This book will be of great interest in those working on the history of German idealism. Highly recommended.

* Choi