The Fascist, Communist, and Islamic Movements All Learned That It Is Not Enough to Seize State Power, Private Property, and Subordinate Markets to the Demands of the “Common Good”

Stirner's critique of humane liberalism presents an eerie warning about the totalitarian ideologies, movements, and regimes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The ideologues and apparatchiki of the fascist, communist, and Islamic supremacist movements and regimes all learned that it is not enough to seize state power, private property, and subordinate markets to the demands of the “common good,” as they define it. Thanks to the theoretical contributions by intellectuals such as Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs, totalitarians realized that they must also seize the “hearts and minds” of their subjects. Gramsci and Lukacs theorized that Marxism failed as a revolutionary ideology because it underestimates the importance of culture and consciousness in the revolutionary transformation of society and individuality. In practical terms, this means that revolutionaries must not only seize state power and confiscate private property, they must control as many forms of communication, cultural production, and symbolic interaction as possible. Those who witnessed history since the rise of the totalitarian states in the twentieth century, have seen the concrete meaning of “humane liberalism” and the consequences of the appropriation of property, particularity, and subjectivity on behalf of the state, society, and humanity. Stirner's warnings about the reduction of persons to ragamuffins or nullities anticipates the historical facts that appeared with the rise of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and continue in the totalitarian Islamic states and the consumerist welfare states. To the extent that contemporary science and philosophy function as propagandists for political, social, and humane liberalism, Stirner's exclusion from polite discourse becomes understandable. 

--John F. Welsh, Max Stirner's Dialectical Egoism: A New Interpretation (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), 79n39.