In 1844 Max Stirner published The Ego and Its Own, a book doomed to cause uproar, but which failed to seriously antagonize the authorities. No reservations about its printing were voiced, mainly because it was judged that the book contained ideas so absurd as to pose no threat to the public order. K. Marx and F. Engels took exception and criticized The Ego mercilessly, making fun of Stirner’s theoretical ideas in their German Ideology. The critique is much longer than the book itself and it seems rather puzzling that so much space was devoted to an undeserving piece of work. One cannot help but wonder why that seemingly worthless book was made an object of a lengthy analysis. I try to disguise their motives and show why Marx and Engels felt threatened by the utopian and absurd figure of Stirner’s Ego. Against this background I describe Marx’s ideas on man and society.

The article traces Bertrand Russell’s interest in anarchist thought. I take his The Roads to Freedom as the main reference point, because that was the book where Russell applied himself most consistently to the study of the ideas put forward by anarchist thinkers. Those ideas – as he points out – undertake to conceive more imaginatively a better ordering of the human society than one finds in ʻthe destructive and cruel chaos in which mankind has hitherto existed’. He emphasizes that across the ages individuals had to face harsh conditions in which state ensnared them. The conflict between freedom and enslavement was the most important aspect of that condition. Bertrand Russell i anarchizm 513