In what respect do Marx and Engels mislead, when discussing Stirner? In more or less every respect. In a book like The Ego and Its Own, where paradox is the purpose of the text, where everything is incoherent and wanders away from every path it takes, it is easy to pretend not to notice that the incoherence, the paradoxes, and the deviation were not accidental, but were the very aim of the discourse; it is easy to refuse to see that this raving is no more than the final step toward silence—and the destruction job is complete. At that point it is perfectly easy to say that The Ego and Its Own is incoherent, paradoxical, deviant, and delirious. This, of course, could be said in just two or three pages. And the fact that Marx and Engels repeat it for more than three hundred pages is at least evidence of their ill-will. Evidence also of their foresight. Now united by the Sacred Bond of the Cause, they could hardly avoid denouncing the book which, more than any other, mocks the Cause, the Bond, and above all the Sanctity of the Cause and the Bond. Supposing (though not accepting for one moment) that the force of their “criticism” had already managed to dispel any sacred aura, this didn’t mean that Marx and Engels were prepared to reveal it exoterically. The working class needed its own holy icons, the Cause would be guarantor of decency, of ordered and industrious lives, dedicated above all to increasing abnegation in the struggle and conflict with the Enemy. In no circumstances should it be revealed that Free Thought—a way of being that seemed purged at last of all chimeras—was the true church mouse of modern times. Stirner’s prussic acid, even the smallest dose of it, would have been enough to produce an irreversible spasm on the mighty body of the Worker, a sad anthropological figment on which Marx and Engels sought to build their own practices, before being replaced by fervent “engineers of the human soul.” In the leaden prose of Stirner’s book, in its obsessive repetitions and its indecorous arguments, Marx-Engels, who now sought to speak to the whole mass of proletariats, saw before their eyes another terrible mass—not that mass of Pellizza da Volpedo’s workers, marching proudly to be shot down by mustachioed officials, but an infernal, shapeless, ragged, incorrigible collection of vagabonds, incapable of class loyalty, rootless from the womb, violent, inarticulate, irreverent enemies of labor and learning, that mass which the newspapers described with a shiver of dismay as the “dregs of society.” It was the underground emerging into the open, and the “reserve army” of shadows threatened to strangle the proletariat before the proletariat managed to strangle the bourgeoisie.