Against the Behemoth

From Autonomies

The scandal that is Donald Trump’s administration – from the gutting and/or paralysing of federal government agencies, justified in the name of eliminating and controlling government waste of public monies due to indulgent, corrupt government workers and government policies, to budget plans for rampant privatisation and parallel tax benefits for the private companies that will substitute for government agencies, to an ideological war against the already modest US “welfare state”, to mass racist deportations, to a foreign policy driven by a logic of “strong men” competing for spheres of influence irrespective of the resulting human sacrifices – is shocking only to liberal sensibilities enamoured of the rule of law.

Price on Blumenfeld

From H-Socialisms by Wayne Price

'All Things Are Nothing to Me: The Unique Philosophy of Max Stirner'

Max Stirner was the pen name of Johann Kasper Schmidt (1806-56). He was part of a milieu of young philosophers who sought to develop further the philosophy of the great German thinker Georg W. F. Hegel, who had died in 1831. This milieu has been referred to as the Young Hegelians or Left Hegelians. While Hegel’s system had solidified into a reactionary form, they mainly tried to rework it in more humanistic, naturalistic, and democratic directions. The most well-known of these young men today (there were women in the grouping, but their names have dropped out of history) are Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. (Engels had been a personal friend of Stirner’s for a time.) Michael Bakunin—later a founder of revolutionary socialist-anarchism—also studied Hegel and was in contact with this milieu.

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