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DER GEIST issue five features the first publication of original research, and archival materials thought lost. Steven T. Byington (first English translation of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum by Max Stirner); Thomas Common (first English translation of Friedrich Nietzsche); Georgia Replogle (first English-language journal on egoism); Malfew Seklew (the Laughing Philosopher); Arthur Desmond (author of a notorious book); Dora Marsden, S. E. Parker and more.

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.

DER GEIST, The Journal of Egoism from 1845 – 1945
ISSUE 5
Spring 2022
Paperback, 206 pages, fifteen dollars
ISBN 978-1944651244
ISSN 2639-5339

CONTENTS

Introduction by the Editor

1. Steven T. Byington

A Proofreader Looks Back | The Human Cutworm | Photo of Steven T. Byington | Biographical Note | Selected Bibliography

2. Thomas Common

Review of Survival of the Fittest | The Silent Isle: Finding the Gravesite of Thomas Common | A Memorial | Selected Bibliography

3. Ragnar Redbeard

Bertha McNamara’s Reflections on Arthur Desmond | Illustration from The Worker | John Ploughman and His Letter | The Brutalitarian: A Journal for the Sane and the Strong | Lion’s Paw Banned | Confessions of an Anarchist

4. Max Stirner / The Ego And His Own

Donald Rooum’s “Eigenheit” | An Early Literary Portrait of Max Stirner

5. Dora Marsden

Brainy Beauties | Private Places | Lover of Freedom

6. Malfew Seklew

Dan O’Brien, Social Supercrat | Victor Grayson, M.P.: A Rhapsody on a Reality | Spencella Wilkesbarre’s What Women Ought to Know | Stanley Simpoleon Says Seklew Stand-In | William Henry Powell and Malfew Seklew | Poetic Beer Drinker | A Remarkable Character | Two from Day Book

7. Free Spirits

Photo of Georgia Replogle | Photo of S. E. Parker | Letter from Denise Juin | Interview with S. E. Parker | Sophie Leppel’s “Pig Eaters Challenge” | Herbert Roseman on Laurance Labadie | Leedz Anarkyst: Greevz Fisher (1845-1931) | Holbrook Jackson on Nietzsche | Index of Der Geist | From the Library | Index to The Lumberjack / Voice of the People | A Thank-You to Patrons | Select Titles Available | About the Editors

Available from: Amazon.com | Nine-Banded Books | Underword Amusements

Marked by an incisive moral skepticism seldom encountered in libertarian discourse, Rollins’ original 1985 tract presented a blistering critique of one of the central tenets of the liberal  ⁠— and libertarian ⁠—  worldview: the idea that humans have unalienable rights merely because they are alive.

While Rollins was not the first to question the philosophical basis for natural rights, his monograph received attention for its hard-hitting style and for its confrontational engagement with the arguments of the most recognized individualist advocates of “natural law.”  The essentially “egoist” core of Rollins’ skepticism would also draw comparison to the work of Max Stirner.

As TGGP writes in his introduction:

The difference between Stirner’s The Ego and His Own and Rollins’ Myth is that the former is more deeply animated by the author’s iconoclastic elan than by the rigorous strictures of analytical discourse. Where Stirner was mirthfully content to spin logomachian webs and toss Young Hegelianisms at Young Hegelians, Rollins sets out not to declare his defiance toward an impotent God but to carefully deprive believers of their deity. And Rollins’ act of Deicide is accomplished in cutting measures, without pomp or apologies or safe, humanistic palliatives.

It would be well enough to bring The Myth of Natural Rights back into print as a standalone volume, but this new edition has been extensively supplemented with contemporaneous texts and commentaries. The definitive text of Rollins’ scathing work is thus followed by a series of essays that document a conflagration that erupted in the pages of Samuel Edward Konkin III’s journal New Libertarian in its wake. Publisher Kevin I. Slaughter, in his new preface, likens the embroilment to a similar episode that played out in Benjamin R. Tucker’s individualist-anarchist periodical Liberty more than a century ago, when advocates of objective morality clashed with the amoral egoists of the day.

Readers with a longer memory than the internet will recognize the names who leap into the fray on one side or the other: Jeff Riggenbach, Murray N. Rothbard, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert LeFevre, George H. Smith, and Sidney E. Parker.

The specter of natural rights haunts the minds of men still. This book, for the dissenting few, will serve either as ammunition for intellectual combat, or as a palliative against the brutal futility of the mass mind. As L.A. Rollins was fond of saying, “make the most of it!”

Table of Contents

• 2019 Publisher’s Preface Kevin I. Slaughter
• 2008 Publisher’s Preface Chip Smith
• 2008 Introduction TGGP
• The Myth of Natural Rights
• New Libertarian Debates
• Author’s Note
• Natural Outlaws vs Natural Lawmen Samuel Edward Konkin III
• Libertarians: Natural Outlaws, Natural Bastards Jeff Riggenbach
• On the Duty of Natural Outlaws to Shut Up Murray N. Rothbard
• Roughing-Up Rights George H. Smith
• A Letter Sidney E. Parker
• Natural Law Robert Anton Wilson
• Natural Rights! Robert LeFevre
• Kranky Notions Jeff Riggenbach
• A Reply to My Reviewers
• Instead of an Afterword
• Acknowledgements
• Recommended Reading
• Cover Gallery

Order: Underworld Amusements

The Walford-Parker Exchange, originally published in Ideological Commentary, is gathered here for the first time with a new introduction. In one corner we have George Walford (1919 – 1994) representing “Systematic ideology,” and in another corner Sidney E. Parker (1929 – 2012) representing “Stirnerite egoism.” Is “egoism” contradictory nonsense, or a self-evident description of the world? See these two articulate authors at odds in a friendly, informative exchange.

Podcast RSS: https://www.unionofegoists.com/feed/podcast

This episode features readings from the work of three figures associated with the history of egoism: Benjamin DeCasseres, Sidney E. Parker, Voltairine de Cleyre.

Though de Cleyre was not an egoist per se, she was at one point and individualist and through her life struggled between individualism and altruism, trying to reconcile the two. Her writing and life has influenced other egoists and individualist anarchists.

Pieces read, in order:
1:04 – Hate by Benjamin DeCasseres
8:08 – Philosophic Spleen by Benjamin DeCasseres
13:50 – Archists, Anarchists and Egoists* by Sidney E. Parker
29:10 – You and I (poem) by Voltairine de Cleyre

*NOTE: The version read is an is an edited version as presented in the Ardent Press title Enemies of Society: An Anthology of Individualist & Egoist Thought. The original essay was published in Parker’s journal EGO (1982), issue number 8, 1986. The piece as read lacks the initial three paragraphs of the original, and includes, at the end, an additional two paragraphs culled from Parker’s response to a critique of his essay by Fritz R. Ward from the next issue, No 9, published in 1987. I thought something was different when I read the essay, but didn’t realize that material was both subtracted from and added to it in the book form. It was, unfortunately, not made clear in the book and the episode is compiled and ready for release. Though I may have still used Ardent Press’s version, I would have made note in the podcast itself, rather than appending this note to the blog post.

MAN! Journal was a revival of a journal by the same name, and S.E. Parker edited the first three issues. The first issue was published in 1955, the same year as a United Kingdom general election. If Sid did not write the text, then he certainly was responsible for publishing it, and using it to promote the new publication.

In a 1993 interview, Sid gave some background on the Journal and his involvement:

“What it was was an attempt to revive an American publication which had existed in the 1930’s edited by a man called Marcus Graham, whose real name was Shah Marcus. He was somebody who still had a deportation order over his head from the 1930’s but they couldn’t deport him because he refused to tell them which country he was born in, so they didn’t know where to send him. He got very paranoid as a result of this thing hanging over his head and wouldn’t come out into the open; but I had written to him and he asked me if I could revive the paper over here, which I did, and edited three issues. It came out every month. When I got involved with pacifism I decided that Marcus Graham’s brand of apocalyptic “up the masses” anarchism wasn’t compatible with what I was talking about and I handed it over to Arthur Uloth who edited a further three issues. There were other people involved in this, a group of people including Leah Feldman and Jim Peake.”

VOTE – WHAT FOR?

We who issue this leaflet are believers in liberty. To us liberty is not a political catch-phrase, something with which to deceive people into putting us into power; to us it is a way of living, a concrete thing without which our lives would be the lives of slaves.
A free man is one who is not dominated by his fellows, one who controls his own life and owes no allegiance to any authority external to himself. In a word, a free man is one who wishes neither to govern nor to be governed. Government is coercion, invasion, an institution which by force and fraud maintains the domination of a privileged and exploiting class. Government and liberty are opposites; where government exists there can be no real freedom.
Look at the world today after thousands of years of government.
Organised mass murder called “war”—conquest and plundering of nations called “liberation”—conscription and regimentation of human beings called “patriotism”economic exploitation and poverty called “free enterprise,” “nationalisation” or “socialism”—the twisting and thwarting of natural human desires called “morality” and “christianity”—these are the warp and woof of present-day society. What happiness and dignity we. enjoy is obtained, not because of the world we live in, but in spite of it.
These things exist because a small group of politicians, militarists, bankers, industrialists and landowners, controlling the means of life, is able to compel people into submission, to buy their minds and bodies, and hire them to kill and imprison each other. These things exist because people are trained from early childhood to obey authority, are made servile by the dog-eat-dog struggle for existence; because people cling to ancient myths of religion, patriotism, law, race and property, and let hirelings of the ruling group do their thinking for them.
Government cannot bring an end to these evils because it is a product of them, of the class-divisions and the antagonisms between man and man which disfigure and debase our lives today.
To vote for a government is to vote for a continuation of this world of fear, insecurity and poverty.
To vote for a government is to authorise a group of men to decide your lives for you; is to say that you are not capable of controlling your own lives; that you are prepared to go on living in a society of wage slavery and exploitation, a society in which some live at the expense of others.
To vote for a government is to sanction your subjection to the tyranny of authority. By voting you strangle your will and initiative in the noose of politics. No government, be it conservative, liberal, labour or communist, can make man free. All, that government can do is to keep the people in subjection to the evils of power and privilege.
To vote for a government is not to have a voice in the running of your affairs, it is merely to have a voice in choosing your masters, to become a slave to men in power.

Therefore :—
REFUSE TO VOTE !
Instead :—

Join with us as workers, as consumers, as victims of war, conscription and race hatred; above all, as HUMAN BEINGS, in order to create a world of free men and, women; a world in which the domination and exploitation of man by man has been ended, and injustice and wrong have no soil in which to grow, since their causes, the institutions of property and government, have been abolished.
Without property in the means of production, all individuals would be economically equal. This means production for use instead of profit, and free access for all to the means of life.
Without government all would he free; that is each individual would have complete sovereignty over himself, and would be able to co-operate freely with others for the satisfaction of common needs.
Without the coercion of law, without the authority of man over man, each individual would be able to develope his life in a complete and creative manner, his liberty to do so being guaranteed by the liberty of all.
We who issue this pamphlet are anarchists, believers in liberty. We say to you Refuse to give your power to politicians, assert your own will and learn that only by your own direct action can liberty and justice be realised amongst men.

REFUSE TO VOTE
GOVERNMENT IS FOR SLAVES, FREE MEN GOVERN THEMSELVES !
LONG LIVE ANARCHY !

Issued by the MAN! GROUP (London) c/o L. Feldman, 56,
Lordship Park, London, N.16.

A note on Ernst Jünger’s Eumeswil

By Sid Parker

Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) was one of the most controversial figures in twentieth-century Germany.

At eighteen he ran away from home and joined the Foreign Legion.

Brought back by his father, at nineteen he became an infantry officer at the outbreak of the first World War. He was wounded several times and was awarded Pour le Mérite, Germany’s highest medal for bravery.

After the war ended he wrote several books about his battle experiences in which he glorified the warrior as the new elite.

He became a “conservative revolutionary,” was active in the nationalist movement and was invited by Adolf Hitler (who greatly admired his war books) to join the National Socialists. Jünger refused.

When the National Socialists came to power he withdrew from politics, maintaining a detached attitude as an “internal emigrant.”

In 1939 he wrote his perhaps most famous work On Marble Cliffs, an allegorical story of the triumph of barbarism. It became a bestseller before the National Socialists, much alarmed, suppressed it. Jünger, however, remained unharmed due, it is said, to Hitler’s explicit instructions.

The second World War saw him back in the army with the rank of captain. He took part in the invasion of France, won another Iron Cross and spent most of his time as a staff officer in occupied Paris. Here he met many of the literary figures of the time.

Although he took no part in the plot to kill Hitler in 1944, he was on friendly terms with some of the conspirators. For this he was dismissed from the army.

When Germany fell to the victorious Allies he was regarded with suspicion by the British occupying powers and his books were banned. Undeterred he continued to write and refused to appear before a de-Nazification tribunal on the grounds that he had never been a Nazi.

Once the ban on the publication of his works was lifted, he produced a steady stream of novels, essays and journals.

By now he had evolved far beyond his erstwhile political militancy, becoming more and more content to be an observer.

At eighty-five he wrote one of his last major works: Eumeswil. Although described as a novel it is difficult to fit into this category.

It is set in an unspecified future. Nations have disappeared, giving way to world government. This in turn has collapsed and been replaced by empires and city state.

Eumeswil is one of the city states and is ruled by a benevolent tyrant called the Condor. Its narrator is a young historian named Martin Venator who is also night steward at the tyrant’s citadel, the Casbah. Here he records the observations of the tyrant and his entourage and develops them into reflections upon power and history.

Venator embodies Jünger’s concept of “the anarch”, whom he carefully differentiated from “the anarchist.” The anarch is a self-owner, who is liberated from all ideologies, and intent on protecting himself from their blandishments.

Throughout the book there are echoes, varying in strength, of Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own, together with some sometimes puzzling attempts by the author to distinguish his views from those of Stirner. “Puzzling” because these take the form of criticisms he does not clarify.

Several pages of Eumeswil are devoted to Stirner himself, and here Jünger displays a rather curious ambivalence. He writes, for example, that Stirner’s life “was banal … misspent in profession and business, a failed marriage, debts, a regular tavern table with the standard blabber preceding the German revolution, a high-level philistine – the usual stuff.”

Yet he remarked about Marx and Engels labelling him “Saint Max” “all derision contains a speck of truth … the characteristic feature of great saints – of whom there are very few – is that they get to the very heart of the matter. The most obvious things are concealed in human beings, nothing is harder to evince than what is self-evident, Once it is uncovered or rediscovered it develops explosive strength. Saint Anthony recognized the power of the solitary man, Saint Francis the power of the poor man, Stirner that of the man alone. At bottom everyone is ‘solitary’, ‘poor’ and ‘alone’ in the world.”

And: “the discoverer has his delights – what had touched me so deeply?”

As a work of art, as a philosophical meditation, as a reaction to the “explosive power” of The Ego and His Own, Eumeswil is well worth reading.

S.E. Parker

There is also a transitionary stage where I’ve put information is online, but in an ugly way, just to get it there. I had, at one point, a disclaimer that the website was “under construction”, but my wise co-editor Trevor Blake suggested “everyone should understand that the internet is a work in progress”.

This transitional design is currently evident on The Storm! (1976) page, where I’ve just published two PDFs. The listing for the first two individual issues are in our “final style”, but the rest of the page is a bit of a wreck. Slowly but surely it is all being fixed and updated.

Here are the recent PDFs:

The Storm | Issue 1 | April, 1976 | PDF
This individualist anarchist/egoist journal comes thirteen years after Sidney Parker‘s Minus One (1963), and a year before Michael Coughlin begins publishing The Dandelion (1977). This issue was scanned from a LMP microfiche.

The Storm | Issue 2 | October 1976 | PDF
Our pal Sidney Parker drops a letter to the editor in this issue, as well as Peter McAlpine of The Occult Technology of Power, an oddball libertarian/conspiracy classic. This issue was scanned from a LMP microfiche. The Storm! states explicitly that it was “anti-copyright” in this issue, though I have done due diligence to track down the publisher for permission before posting scans online. Seel note with red text below!

“The Anarchism of Max Stirner” by Sidney Parker |  PDF
Freedom Anarchist Review | Vol. 41 No. 23 | November 22, 1980

Twice | Issue 1 | 1963 | PDF
Edited by S.E. Parker, 14 pages, 8×10″. A one-off creative writing journal that he edited with his wife Pat. It seems Twice was only published once.

Minus One | Issue 6 | Jan-Feb 1965 | PDF
UoE member Benjamin DeCasseres makes an appearance here.

Minus One | Issue 22 | June 1968 | PDF
The strange thing here is the actual copy is dated 1967, but Bernd Laska’s original bibliography shows it as being published in 1968. Because the issue before it is still on microfiche, I can’t confirm what is the right year.

If you have any corrections, additions or would like to make a contribution, please use our contact form.
Underworld Amusements is distributing many titles relating to Egoism and Individualist Anarchism.

His own biographical sketch from Svein Olav Nyberg’s Non Serviam (1992), issue #13 is as follows:

 Sidney E. Parker: “Born 1929, Birmingham, England. Now retired after thirty three years with British Rail. Has worked his way through the Young Communist League (1944-1946), the British Federation of Young Co-operators (1946-1947), and virtually all the different varieties of anarchism (1947-1982), to emerge as his own man, the penny of conscious egoism having finally dropped. Editor and publisher of Minus One/Ego/The Egoist/Ego 1963-1994.”

If you are interested in reading some of Sidney Parker’s writing, we recommend “Enemies of Society: An Anthology of Individualist and Egoist Thought” by Ardent Press. It is usually available from Underworld Amusements (US).

The UoE podcast will be posted sporadically as episodes are produced, and we expect them to consist of both archival and newly recorded material. If you know of any archival Egoist related audio material, or have any other suggestions or comments, please contact us.

The song you hear through the episode and in full at the end is “Depth of my Ego” by Matt McGinn, “one of Scotland’s greatest song writers”. “Depth of My Ego” was “inspired by the ideas of Max Stirner as introduced to Matt by ‘Bobby’ Lynn.” It is also on YouTube.