Sankt Max's Avant-Garde Critique of Marx's Philosophy

Max Stirner is certainly one of the most atypical and controversial philosophers in the history of philosophy, whose criticism found fertile ground among Left Hegelians, the young Karl Marx being particularly striking. The aim of this study is to understand why Marx, within his Die Deutsche Ideologie of 1846, dedicated an entire chapter to `Sankt Max', who published the destructive Der Einzige und sein Eigentum just two years earlier. This work challenged, in its critique of Hegel's philosophy, those authors who tried to reinterpret the latter. It will be shown how Stirner's words and his indirect criticisms of the concept of the `superstructure' led Marx to defend himself when his work was close to publication, as if Stirner had brought down the logic of Marxian philosophy shortly before it was transcribed on paper.