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.