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19 of 19 found the following review helpful:
 It's about time! Mar 06, 2005
By Einzige
"Just a dude"
I remember hearing once that Guglielmo Marconi (the inventor of the radio) believed that sound waves never completely die away--they just get quieter and quieter. He thought that, with a sensitive enough microphone, mounted in the appropriate position, and with the just the right amount of amplification, you could recapture events from history. It was his life-long dream, apparently, to record the sermon on the mount. When I sit and ponder this, for some reason it evokes in me a sense of desperate loss--a heart-wrenching, unquenchable longing for a past that is irretrievably gone.
There is something of that feeling in John Henry Mackay's biography of Max Stirner. The book is as much about Stirner as it is about the search for Stirner--or what paltry fragments of him remained, 40+ years after his untimely (and rather gruesome) death. Stirner left no progeny, and very few acquaintances were still living when Mackay began his research. Worst of all, Stirner's ex-wife refused to even discuss him, beyond answering a few basic questions. Meanwhile, other pathways in the search would appear to open up, only to reveal themselves as dead ends, for one reason or another.
I suppose, though, we ought to be happy that at least Mackay's search wasn't postponed another 5 or 10 years, for by that time Stirner's candle would have been completely extinguished. I see it as also very fortunate for us that it was a poet--rather than a philosopher or historian--who took up the cause of preserving the memory of Stirner.
As for the book itself, what really needs to be said? Without Mackay we wouldn't even know the name Max Stirner today. Mackay treats his subject with the respect and love that you would expect from a person willing to devote 25 years to it (What Mackay says of Stirner applies equally well to Mackay himself: "He did what he did for himself, because it gave him pleasure. He asks for no thanks, and we owe him none"). Obviously, the work is indispensable for anyone with more than a passing interest in Stirner.
Mackay divides Stirner's life into three periods, which he designates as "rise, height, fall." The first includes his youth and his life up to the end of his teaching activity; the second his years in the company of "The Free" at Hippel's pub (Trivia: Stirner apparently chain-smoked cigars), which lead up to the publication of _Der Einzige_; the third, the "period of forgetfulness and solitude up to his death."
The one complaint that I have about this edition (the first available in English) is that, apparently for "technical reasons," all figures and photographs, and a number of appendices, have been left out. So, if you have a desire to see things like the facsimile of one of Stirner's manuscripts, as well as a complete bibliography of Stirner's known published works, you'll need to get a copy of the German edition. I certainly hope that Hubert Kennedy will have occasion to publish a definitive English edition in the near future, which will include all those items--and perhaps there's even reason to hope for a translation of Stirner's "Kleinere Schriften"!
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
 Mackay's Max Stirner in English at Last Mar 08, 2007
By David Westling
John Henry Mackay's Max Stirner: His Life and his Work first appeared in German in 1898. There was no English translation until 2005, with the appearance of John Hubert Kennedy's translation of the third (1914) edition, befitting the obscure carreer of this unparalleled thinker Max Stirner. How could one invent a more poignant story, epic in its dimensions, than that of the rise and fall of Max Stirner? This is the only full account, and Mackay's recounting of the tribulations of his research into the life of Stirner is an epic saga in itself; he goes so far as to claim that if another twenty years had passed, even the meagre details of Stirner's biography he managed to turn up in a ten-year effort would have been irretrievably lost. Such was the power of the passing of fifty years.
Mackay's account is most interesting to me as he recreates the milieu Stirner inhabited in the decade between 1840 and 1850, when an intellectual struggle worthy of the Diadochi, as a young Karl Marx sardonically put it at the time, moved through its bewildering permutations. Begun in the hallowed halls of academia, in no less a bastion of scholarly endeavour than the University of Berlin, where Hegel had held court in a crucial period of intellectual history, it moved out into the more exoteric world of left-wing journalism and the informal, even raucous atmosphere of the tavern as the currents which culminated in the 1848 European revolutions took shape. The debates which would shake the intellectual foundations of Europe, in a seismic cataclysm which has still not abated, played out in one of these taverns primarily, a certain Hippel's Weinstube in central Berlin. Between 1842 and 1845, tendencies which had first seen the light of day in Ludwig Feuerbach's seminal Essence of Christianity (1841) rapidly mutated at the hands of this rather rag-tag band of erstwhile university instructors, fledgeling journalists, and various other sympathizers possessed with the urge for social change. As Mackay states at the outset of his description of this milieu, "To characterize 'The Free' in a few words is not very easy", since, for one thing, they never drew up any charters, and embarked on their meetings with no stated purpose. There was an inner circle, to which Stirner belonged, but its larger membership was according to Mackay "enormously large". Debates on the burning issues of the day typically began in the reading room at university, progressed to Stehely's stationery store and then on to Hippel's in the evening, every evening. And so it was in this atmosphere that Stirner formulated and composed his magnum opus, The Ego and Its Own (1844). Mackay relates some choice anecdotes about the nature of the gatherings at Hippels' where a game of cards often took precedence over anything resembling serious intellectual discussion, even and especially among the most prominent members of the inner circle of "The Free".
Notable also are the accounts of Stirner's formative years and that of his precipitous fall. After a brief and intense explosion on the intellectual scene, Stirner was plunged into one difficulty after another, financial and personal, and was already dead only 11 years after the appearance of The Ego and Its Own, at the tender age of 49.
Mackay's biography, though betraying a tendency towards hero-worship at times, is nevertheless an indispensable contribution to the understanding of this singular man and this crucial period in intellectual history. The translation is servicable, at times perhaps a bit too literal, but which, I believe, conveys essential elements of the flavor of the original.
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