Max Stirner

Max Stirner was the pen name of German philosopher Johann Kaspar Schmidt (1806–1856). His book The Ego and Its Own argued that unique individuals should reject fixed ideas and institutions that claim authority over them.

The Ego and Its Own: Max Stirner’s 1844 book argues that the unique individual can free themselves from imposed abstractions and authorities. This book is Stirner’s fullest statement of the ideas associated with his name.
Young Hegelians: A group of nineteenth-century German thinkers who used Hegelian philosophy to criticize religion and political authority. Stirner debated and socialized with this circle before publishing his best-known work.
Karl Marx: A German philosopher and political economist who co-founded modern communist theory. Marx and Engels answered Stirner at length in The German Ideology, criticizing his individualism.
Individualist anarchism: A current of anarchism that gives priority to individual autonomy and voluntary association. Later individualist anarchists drew on Stirner’s suspicion of imposed collective obligations.
Philosophical egoism: The view that an individual’s own interests or self are the basis of moral or practical action. Stirner’s distinctive position is often classified as a radical form of egoism.
Bruno Bauer: A German theologian and philosopher associated with Young Hegelian criticism of Christianity. Stirner’s book directly challenged Bauer’s account of critical self-consciousness.
Anarchism: A political tradition opposing coercive hierarchy and advocating forms of voluntary association. Stirner is often grouped with anarchists, though he rejected binding political ideals and collective doctrines.
Benjamin Tucker: An American individualist anarchist and editor of the nineteenth-century journal Liberty. Tucker helped popularize Stirner’s work in English-language individualist anarchist circles.
Unique (Stirner): Stirner’s term for the irreducible individual, not fully captured by concepts, identities, or shared ideals. The unique is Stirner’s alternative to treating people as instances of universal categories.
Ludwig Feuerbach: A German philosopher who explained religion as a projection of human qualities onto a divine being. Stirner argued that Feuerbach’s humanism replaced God with another abstract ideal, ‘Man.’

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NihilismRelated: His radical critique of sacred ideals offers an early, distinct strand of nihilistic thought.