Allegations and Denials: The First Hundred Years

Since the first examples of the polemical use of the term nihilism in reference to Stirner following the publication of Der Einzige—namely by Karl Rosenkranz in late 1844 or early 1845, and by an anonymous journalist in 1847—the echoing voices have been both numerous and at times venomous, at least once the hiatus of almost half a century of Stirner's near total obscurity had passed. From the time of the first Stirner renaissance in the 1890s until the present day, the accusations of nihilism have been relentless, to the point where the alleged connection has arguably become a self-perpetuating truism. In this period, there have been at least half a dozen published examples in German alone per decade of Stirner and his ideas being linked to nihilism, and sometimes more than double that. It is not only the prevalence of the accusations of nihilism against Stirner that is remarkable but also the changing usage of the term over time in the relevant books, dissertations, and articles.

That Stirner did not disappear entirely from intellectual memory in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions is evidenced by his brief appearance in two important philosophical works of the 1860s, Lange's Geschichte des Materialismus and Hartmann's Philosophie des Unbewussten. However, as Laska remarks, the few references to Stirner in this period are terse and evasive. One such mention can be found in Karl Grün's 1874 edition of Feuerbach's correspondence and posthumous writings. In his introduction, Grün puts the word nihilism into Feuerbach's mouth: “Thus Max Stirner called him a ‘pious atheist’ and claimed: ‘Feuerbach fled from faith into love.’ … Feuerbach's initial response to Stirner was that his nihilism was also dogmatic.” Feuerbach does use the word Nihilismus in 1860 to describe the ideas of Schopenhauer, but neither in the essay by Feuerbach to which Grün is alluding, which was written fifteen years earlier in 1845, nor elsewhere in his published writings does Feuerbach connect Stirner with nihilism. One can only assume that Grün (1817–1887), who was a Young Hegelian journalist, political theorist, and socialist politician, was applying the increasingly popular term with a combination of poetic license and the benefits of hindsight.