 Stirner’s insistence that his radical Hegelian contemporaries had failed to break with religious modes of thought prompted most of the leading left-Hegelians to defend their own work in public against this attack. In perhaps the most important of these replies, Feuerbach — who appeared defensive and irritated (suspecting Stirner of trying to make a name for himself at his own expense) — was widely seen as struggling to maintain a besieged and outdated position. Bruno Bauer also offered a critical response, seeking to defend his own philosophy of self-consciousness against what he saw as Stirner’s inadequate form of subjectivity. (Moggach and de Ridder, 2013.) Stirner replied directly to three of these left-Hegelian reviews—the defence of Bauer’s “humane liberalism” by “Szeliga” (the pseudonym of Franz Zychlinski (1816–1900)); the defence of socialism by Moses Hess; and the defence of Feuerbach by Feuerbach himself—in an article entitled “Stirner’s Critics” (1845). In this confident rejoinder, Stirner reiterated some of the central themes of The Ego and Its Own and clarified the character of his own commitment to egoism. Stirner may also have provided a final reply to contemporary critics in a pseudonymous article entitled “The Philosophical Reactionaries”, in which the author responds to a young Kuno Fischer. (The caution is needed since the identification of “G. Edward” as Max Stirner is plausible but not incontrovertible.) 