During the course of his mission, Mackay soon noticed something strange. He had published an announcement asking anyone who had had dealings with Stirner to contact him. Hardly any response. His leads vanished the moment they appeared. The information he received related to people who had died, those who had moved elsewhere, to files lost. Raising his head with puzzled dignity, Mackay wondered: “Must such a great life not also have been rich in exterior, great events?” Well, yes.⁵⁵⁰ While Stirner’s specter seems to have canceled every possible record of his life, not even a portrait (other than the sketch by his enemy Engels) and barely a signature, what little remains emerges in a clear and unambiguous light: that of drab penury, an anonymous and humiliating life that takes up just a line or two in the municipal records and the school archives. That was all, indeed, that Mackay could find.

His biographical researches went on for years. Only in 1898 did Mackay publish his Max Stirner. Sein Leben und sein Werk (Max Stirner: His Life and Work) in Berlin—so far, the only biography. In the meantime a “Stirner affair”—a venomous sequel of the “Nietzsche affair”—had blown up. And as Nietzsche’s sister was nursing him at Weimar, allowing only a few select visitors to see him sitting glassy-eyed in his armchair, wrapped in a long thick white gown, likewise the pathetic Mackay wanted to be the First Apostle of Stirner. But arguments over precedence arise in every sect. Mackay was upset when the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann claimed it was he who had been the “rediscoverer” of Stirner through what he had written in Philosophie des Unbewussten (Philosophy of the Unconscious) of 1869, and Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins (Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness) of 1879, though it was clear that Hartmann was elevating Stirner only to diminish Nietzsche. He was also upset by Paul Lauterbach’s preface to the edition of The Ego and Its Own published by Reclam (from 1893 onward) in the Universal-Bibliothek series at just a few pfennigs, which marks Stirner’s triumphal return among those authors who were required reading.

Lauterback’s scholarly gesture of comparing Stirner with those writers with whom he seemed to have an “affinity” was regarded by Mackay as an act of lèse-majesté, for it had to be acknowledged, prior to all else, that Stirner’s book was the gospel. Fortunately, there were now “individualist anarchists,” and Mackay’s friend Benjamin Tucker in the United States who had invented this term for the joy of all future historians of ideas. Stirner’s legacy, Mackay warned, rested in their “faithful and strong hands,” rather like the way in which Marx and Engels entrusted their legacy to a proletariat whom they urged to be blunt and sincere.⁵⁵¹