Max Stirner

Born Johann Kaspar Schmidt in Bayreuth on October 25, 1806, Max Stirner was a German philosopher and writer associated with the Young Hegelians, a circle of radical thinkers in Berlin. He studied at the universities of Berlin, Erlangen, and Königsberg, worked for a time as a teacher, and wrote essays for reform-minded journals before publishing the book that made him famous.

That book, The Ego and Its Own (1844), argued that people should not let abstract ideals such as religion, morality, or the state rule their lives. Stirner’s fierce defense of the individual made him a controversial figure in his own time, and later readers connected his ideas with forms of anarchism, existentialism, and individualism, even though his thought does not fit neatly into any one label.

Stirner died in Berlin on June 26, 1856. Much of what is known about his life is limited, but his writing has had an unusually long afterlife: it has been discussed by philosophers, political theorists, and literary figures for generations, and it continues to attract readers interested in radical ideas about freedom and the self.