Wayne Bradshaw

The Ego Made Manifest (eBook, ePUB)

Max Stirner, Egoism, and the Modern Manifesto

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

From Karl Marx to Wyndham Lewis, this book examines Max Stirner's influence on the modern manifesto.

Max Stirner has long proven to be an elusive figure at the fringes of 19th-century German idealism. He has been portrayed as the father of the philosophical dead end that was egoistic anarchism: a withered branch of an ineffectual movement, remembered largely because of its suggestion that crime was a valid form of revolutionary action. From this perspective, egoists subscribed to extreme forms of anarchism and defended acts of theft, assault, and even murder; egoism only held lasting appeal to rebels, nihilists, and criminals; and Stirner's ideas could - and should - be consigned to the dustbin of history accordingly.

The Ego Made Manifest argues that many of the accepted truisms about Stirner and his reception are false and that his contribution to modernist and avant-garde manifesto-writing traditions has been overlooked. Beginning with his influence on Marx's Communist Manifesto, Wayne Bradshaw reinserts Stirner into the history of manifestos that not only rebelled against tradition but sought to take ownership of history, culture, and people's minds. This study documents the trajectory of Stirner's reception from mid-19th-century Germany to his rediscovery by German and American readers almost 50 years later, and from his popularity among manifesto writers in fin de siècle Paris to the birth of Italian Futurism. Finally, it considers how American and British interest in egoism helped inspire Vorticism's satirical approach to revolt, and how, in an age of extremism, Stirner's ideas continue to haunt the modern mind.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
• Seitenzahl: 224
• Erscheinungstermin: 7. September 2023
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9798765102589
• Artikelnr.: 68529165

Autorenporträt

Wayne Bradshaw is a research associate at James Cook University, Australia, where he completed a PhD in literary studies. He is the founder of James Cook University's postgraduate cultural magazine, Sudo Journal, and has also published a chapter on the importance of philosophical egoism to the terrorist persona in Metaphysical Sociology: On the Work of John Carroll (2018).