Max Stirner

1806-1856 · German · Egoist Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Critique of Ideology, Post-Hegelian Polemics

Nothing is more to me than myself.

A schoolteacher at a Berlin girls' academy, scribbling the most explosive book of his generation between lessons — that was Johann Caspar Schmidt, who signed it Max Stirner. He moved among the Young Hegelians at Hippel's wine bar alongside Marx, Engels, and Feuerbach, then in 1844 published Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and Its Own) and detonated the whole circle. He died poor in 1856, twice jailed for debt, killed by an infected insect bite — a quiet end for the most radical writer of the Hegelian aftermath.

Topics Max Stirner addresses

• the unique one (der Einzige)
• the creative nothing
• spooks (fixed ideas)
• ownness (Eigenheit)
• property as power
• the union of egoists
• egoism as description, not prescription
• the egoist's withdrawal from authority
• humanism as inverted Christianity
• Man (Mensch) as spook
• the State as spook
• liberalism as political humanism
• communism as social humanism
• the critique of morality
• the critique of political authority
• the dissolution of all essences
• the inhumane (Unmensch)
• egoist enjoyment (Genuss)
• the bourgeois individual vs the unique
• Feuerbach and the religious inversion
• the Marx-Engels Saint Max polemic
• the Young Hegelians (Die Freien)
• Bruno Bauer and self-consciousness
• the ancient / modern / Christian periodization

Converse with Max Stirner on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Max Stirner's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.