Max Stirner

Johann Kaspar Schmidt, known as Max Stirner, was a German philosopher of the early nineteenth century who belonged to the circle of the Young Hegelians. His pen name came from a nickname that referred to the width of his forehead (Stirn, in German). He is remembered above all for The Ego and Its Own (1844), a book often regarded as one of the roots of individualist anarchism and as an influence on movements as different as nihilism, existentialism and postmodern thought.

He was born in Bayreuth in 1806, in a region that would soon be drawn into the Confederation of the Rhine. The only child of a flute maker, he lost his father as an infant. His mother remarried and moved to Kulm, in West Prussia, while he was left in the care of relatives in Bayreuth. As a young man he studied philology, philosophy and theology in Berlin, where he attended Hegel's lectures, and he continued his studies at other German universities. He later trained as a teacher and worked at a girls' school in Berlin, a job he combined with an active life in the city's cafés and intellectual gatherings.

Around 1841 he joined a group of young philosophers known as Die Freien (The Free Ones), where he took part in debates alongside Bruno Bauer, Friedrich Engels and others. His thought began with a critique of Hegel and of the ideas that, in his view, subjected the individual: the state, religion, morality, natural rights, and the abstract notion of humanity. Against these, Stirner defended the unique self, the ego that cannot be reduced to general concepts. His egoism was not a simple defence of greed but the claim that each person must decide for themselves, and that property rests on the power to take and defend it. Instead of society as a higher entity, he proposed a union of egoists, a voluntary association that would last only as long as it served its members. He opposed capitalism and communism alike, since both seemed to him forms of authority over the individual.

His personal life was unsettled. He married twice: first to Agnes Burtz, who died in 1838 while giving birth; then to Marie Dähnhardt, from whom he separated around 1846 after an unconventional marriage. A business distributing milk failed and left him with little money. He then turned to replying to his critics and to translating works by Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say into German. He died in Berlin in 1856, almost forgotten. It was only decades later, chiefly through John Henry Mackay's biography of 1898, that his work began to be read closely.

His influence is broad and often indirect. He is regarded as a forerunner of nihilism, existentialism and the postmodern critique of the grand categories of modernity, as well as of individualist anarchism and post-anarchism. His suspicion of institutions that shape personal conscience still serves as a reference for those wary of ideologies that claim to speak for everyone.