Max Stirner

Max Stirner, the pen name of Johann Caspar Schmidt, was a German philosopher associated with the Young Hegelians in Berlin. His one major book, The Ego and Its Own, attacks every authority that claims to stand above the individual: God, the state, society, morality, humanity and even the liberal and socialist ideals of his fellow radicals. He called such abstractions 'spooks' and urged the unique individual to treat them as his own property. Long neglected after a brief stir, the book was later revived as a source of individualist anarchism and egoism.

Key ideas

• Ideals such as God, humanity, morality and the state are 'spooks' or 'fixed ideas' that dominate the individual.
• The individual is 'unique', a creative nothing that no concept or category can capture.
• What is mine is what I have the power to take and hold; rights come from might, not from nature.
• Instead of a state or society, egoists can form voluntary 'unions' that last only while they serve their members.

Major works

• The Ego and Its Own (1844)
• The False Principle of Our Education (1842)
• Stirner's Critics (1845)

In the Book corner

• The Ego and Its Own 1844 (dated 1845) · Intermediate
  The only major book by Max Stirner, the pen name of Johann Caspar Schmidt, a Berlin teacher on the edge of the…

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