Max Stirner 1806 – 1856

Johann Kaspar Schmidt, who wrote under the pen name Max Stirner, was a German philosopher and the principal exponent of philosophical egoism. A regular at the Berlin circle of the Young Hegelians known as Die Freien, he taught for many years at a girls' academy in Berlin and translated Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say into German. His one major philosophical work, The Ego and Its Own, attacked every form of supposed higher cause, whether God, humanity, the state, or the moral law, as a spectral abstraction at the expense of the unique individual. Marx and Engels devoted a long section of The German Ideology to refuting him, and his thought has shaped individualist anarchist and existentialist currents.

Johann Caspar Schmidt, who wrote under the name Max Stirner, was born at Bayreuth in October 1806, the only child of an instrument-maker who died the year after his birth. He studied philology, theology, and philosophy at Berlin under Hegel, Schleiermacher, and Marheineke, then briefly at Erlangen and Königsberg, and in 1835 passed the state examinations to teach. From 1839 he taught at a private girls' school in Berlin and frequented the radical Freie circle at Hippel's wine cellar alongside Bruno and Edgar Bauer, Arnold Ruge, and the young Friedrich Engels.

His one philosophical work, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (The Unique and Its Property), appeared in late 1844 and was almost immediately answered by Feuerbach, Hess, and Szeliga; Stirner replied with the short Recensenten Stirners (1845). After his second wife, Marie Dähnhardt, left him, he survived by translating Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and Say's Treatise on Political Economy and by failed business schemes, including a doomed attempt to set up a milk shop.

Stirner argued that all fixed ideas — God, the state, humanity, society, morality — are 'spooks' that the unique individual must dissolve in his own ownness, replacing duty with self-interest and association with the voluntary 'union of egoists'. Marx and Engels devoted the bulk of The German Ideology to refuting him, and his book later became a touchstone for individualist anarchism, post-anarchism, and debates about Nietzsche's originality. He died of a spider-bite infection in Berlin in June 1856.