Category: Today

On October 25, 1806, German philosopher Max Stirner was born. Stirner was known for his radical individualism, which under the name of “egoism” became culturally chic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In addition to Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, a major work that was famously attacked by Karl Marx, he translated into German Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (from its original English) and J.-B. Say’s A Treatise on Political Economy (from its original French).

Der Einzige und sein Eigentum has been translated into English as The Ego and Its Own and The Ego and His Own.

“Max Stirner” is a nom de plume, his birth name being Johann Kaspar Schmidt. He died in 1856, and his biography by John Henry Mackay, Max Stirner — sein Leben und sein Werk, was published in German in 1898 (enlarged 1910, 1914), and finally translated into English in 2005.

The only image we have of him was sketched by Karl Marx’s comrade, benefactor and abuse-buddy, Friedrich Engels. The portrait above has been adapted from that drawing.

On October 24, 1648, the Peace of Westphalia was signed, marking the end of the Thirty Years’ War.

Budapest (10/23/1956) — The Hungarian Uprising begins when a delegation of students enter the building of Magyar Rádió to broadcast their demands for political and economic reforms to civil society, but are detained by security guards.

On October 22, 1964, philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but turned down the honor — establishing a precedent that should have been followed by numerous Peace Prize winners, including Barack Obama and the European Union.

Sartre rejected the award on account of having rejected previous honors. In this he was not dissimilar from philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) who refused many doctorates late in life, on the grounds that such awards did an old man no good, and perhaps because he was a cantankerous old coot — a judgment that surely applied also to the later French philosopher.

Sartre is best known for his novel Nausea (1938), his play No Exit (1944) and his treatise, Being and Nothingness (1943). One of his main themes was freedom, a concept better explored at the fundamental level of the individual human being than politically, since he become a “Marxist” of sorts . . . the precise nature of which he elaborated in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). He failed to complete his tetralogy of novels, Roads to Freedom, never finishing the final volume.

On October 21, 1921, President Warren G. Harding delivered the first speech by a sitting U.S. President against lynching in the deep South.

Understand then all of you, especially the young, that to want to impose an imaginary state of government on others by violence is not only a vulgar superstition, but even a criminal work. Understand that this work, far from assuring the well-being of humanity is only a lie, a more or less unconscious hypocrisy, camouflaging the lowest passions we possess.

Leo Tolstoy, written for 1908’s The Law of Love and the Law of Violence, but published later, in 1917, as quoted by Antony Flew, Equality in Liberty and Justice (2001), p. 89.

On October 20, 1803, the United States Senate ratified the Louisiana Purchase.

Exactly 15 years later, the Convention of 1818 signed between the United States and the United Kingdom which, among other things, settled the Canada-United States border on the 49th parallel for much of its length.

On October 19, 1781, representatives of British commander Lord Cornwallis handed over Cornwallis’s sword and formally surrendered to George Washington and the comte de Rochambeau, at Yorktown, Virginia. The Revolutionary War (or War for Independence, or Colonial Rebellion, or whatever you wish to call it) was over except for the paperwork.

All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.

Leo Tolstoy, The Law of Love and the Law of Violence (1908).

On October 18, 1775, African-American poet Phillis Wheatley was freed from slavery, upon the death of her master. Widely appreciated in her day, she was the first African-American to publish a book.