Discover rare photographic glimpses of pioneering egoists such as Dora Marsden and Benjamin R. Tucker, and delve into the visionary project to produce a Braille edition of Max Stirner’s magnum opus for the indomitable Helen Keller. Unearth a plethora of fascinating artifacts pertaining to Malfew Seklew, and be riveted by the astonishing revelation of Ragnar Redbeard’s brief yet impactful foray as a Canadian Socialist Provocateur.

This sixth issue of Der Geist is sure to delight and offend, but most of all, serve as an essential philosophical reference work for centuries to come.

DER GEIST: The Journal of Egoism from 1845 – 1945 | ISSUE 6 | Winter 2023
Paperback, 212 pages, $15
ISBN 978-1-944651-29-9, ISSN 2639-5339

Der Geist, (Trevor Blake, editor; Kevin I. Slaughter, co-editor) is an English-language journal for an international audience, publishing original scholarship on the philosophy of egoism. The journal is descriptive of the first century of egoism in print (from the 1845 publication of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum by Max Stirner to the end of 1945), not prescriptive in advocacy of egoism.

CONTENTS

Introduction by the Editor  2

1. Max Stirner   7

Max Stirner’s Anarchist Gospel | A Dutch Review of Stirner’s Work | Anarchist Black Dragon | Max Stirner vs. Wahrheit-Sucher | “Celine Adele Marillier” | Pity and the Future | Max Stirner and the Grisette | Steven T. Byington’s Triple Score

2. Malfew Seklew  29

On “Bérnard’s Tour” | Minister Mocks Malfew  | Stern Critique of Christian Socialist  | Seklew Asks: Nietzsche to Blame?  | Social Aristocrat Socialist Secretary | A Freak Among Reformers  | No Guide for Anybody | Proletarians in Purgatory | No Justice for Malfew Seklew  | “We’re All More or Less Nutty” | Not Seeking Work  | Seklew Scolds Simpoleons, Supplies Sample Shilling Sericine Silk Set | No Detail Too Small!

3. Ragnar Redbeard   51

Redbeard in Canada | Desmond Selling George  | Give the New Hand a Show! | A.D. in the O.E.D.  | A Bogus Book | Australian Socialist Drinking Club | Redbeard’s Rough Stuff |“We Understand the Redbeard Philosophy” | Voima On Oikeus | Etc.

4. Dora Marsden  95

Dora Marsden for the Prosecution | The Freewomen of New York | Dora Marsden, unser aller Mutter  | Dora Marsden Ephemera | Rare Portraits

5. Benjamin DeCasseres   107

Emmeline Pankhurst | Pyrrhonism and Acatalepsy | Balzac | The Borrowed Mirror

6. Friedrich Nietzsche   117

Nietzsche and a Braille Stirner for Hellen Keller | “Will Nietzsche Come Into Vogue…” | The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche | Alexander Tille Reads Egoism

7. Enzo Martucci   135

A Sketch of Martucci | An Excerpt from The Red Sect | Martucci on Stirner

8. Free Spirits  159

Peter Lamborn Wilson Has Passed  | Hakim Bey: Real and Unreal | Vox Populi Vox Dei | Thompson at Rudolf Steiner Hall | Speakers’ Corner Anthology | Among the Anarchists | The True Comarade | Is This What You Call “Living?” | The Thirteenth Paragraph | Greeves Fisher, A Sketch | Dominance vs. Egoism | More Individualism | Individualism and Property | Why I am a Right-Wing Anarchist | Opening and Closing the Dil Pickle | Christmas a Joke! | “I” a poem  | “I GO” a poem| A Letter to the Editors of Freedom | Enrico Arrigoni Bibliography | Photo of Benjamin R. Tucker | About the Editors

The Mutualist & the Moralist

Libertarian Broadside No 7: Selected Essays by Laurence Labadie, introduction and appendices by James J. Martin $1.50; Libertarian Broadside No 8: Uncivil Liberty by Ezra Heywood. Introduction by James J. Martin $1.00. Published by Ralph Myles Publisher Inc, Colorado Springs.

When Benjamin Tucker left the USA in 1908 and went into self-imposed exile in Europe, propaganda for his brand of anarchist mutualism did not cease. Articulate associates such as Clarence Lee Swartz, John Beverley Robinson, E.H. Fulton, Joseph A. Labadie and others kept up the work he had begun over thirty years before. By the 1930s, however, old age, death or disillusionment had silenced them. They had no successor – except one: Laurence Labadie (1898-1975), the son of Joseph.

A self-taught industrial worker, Laurence Labadie issued a series of pamphlets and leaflets which he printed on the small hand press he inherited from his father. In addition, he occasionally managed to get articles published in such libertarian journals as Man, Resistance , A Way Out and The Indian Libertarian. Towards the end of his life he even made the columns of a university publication called the Journal of Human Relations – a somewhat ironic event in view of his often expressed scorn for academics.

Like other Tuckerians, Labadie was a firm believer in the mutualist economics promulgated by Proudhon and Wm. B. Greene. Communism, even of the “anarcho” variety, he regarded as a species of infantilism. The only economy worthy of free individuals was, he thought, one in which private property and free competition prevailed: “When ail forms of private property are abolished, exchange hampered or or prohibited, competition wiped out, and money forbidden, the liberty and independence of the individual is gone, and there remains a tyranny as totalitarian and despotic as can be imagined.” (Reflections on Socio-Economic Evolution) , Economic exploitation did not come from private property, but from monopolies created by the State. The three main forms assumed by these monopolies are ” the control of the circulating medium – money and credit, private property in land not based on occupancy and use, patent rights and copyrights, and tariffs.” (Anarchism applied to Economics) Abolish the State, establish freedom of credit and competition and an anarchist society would result.

Such a society would not, however, be equalitarian, for Labadie regarded inequality of ability as inevitable and any attempt to artificially produce equality as tantamount to authoritarianism. The only “equality” he saw as both possible and desirable was “equality of opportunity”. He subscribed to Proudhon’s view that communist egalitarianism might well do away with the exploitation of the weak by the strong, but only in order to substitute the exploitation of the strong by the weak.

Laurence Labadie was a little-known figure during his lifetime. This first collection of selected essays, which fittingly appears in the Libertarian Broadside Series edited by his friend James J. Martin, should serve as a means of introducing a wider public to this purgent and provocative advocate of anarchy. Dr Martin also contributes a fascinating memoir of Labadie, together with one of their mutual friend Agnes Inglis, for many years curator of the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan.

Ezra Heywood’s Uncivil Liberty, first published, in 1873, has a certain curiosity value as an example of an early tract advocating woman’s suffrage and equality of legal rights. However, its overblown rhetorical style, heavily charged with appeals to abstract and unverifiable principles, its irritating moral meanderings which almost qualify the author as the Mary Whitehouse of “free love” (at one point he denounces women who have abortions as “perverted”), do not endear it to this reviewer….

S.E. PARKER