Max Stirner

Max Stirner
Stirner, drawn from memory by Friedrich Engels (1892). This is the only known likeness of him.
Born	Johann Caspar Schmidt (1806-10-25)25 October 1806 Bayreuth, Germany
Died	25 June 1856(1856-06-25) (aged 49) Berlin, Germany
Alma mater	University of Berlin
Era	19th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Young Hegelians (early); egoism
Main interests	Ethics, politics, the self
Notable ideas	Egoism; the "union of egoists"; ownness (Eigenheit)

Max Stirner (1806–1856) was a German philosopher. His real name was Johann Caspar Schmidt. He was part of the world of the Young Hegelians. They were a group of young German thinkers. At first, they followed the philosopher Hegel. Later, they turned against many of his ideas.

Stirner wrote only one important book. Its German title is Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1844). This means "The Unique One and His Property". The best-known English title is The Ego and Its Own. In this book, Stirner follows one idea as far as he can. This idea is a criticism of what philosophers call alienation. Here, alienation means this: people take something that really comes from themselves. They turn it into a great idea above them. Then they obey it, as if it were their master. The Young Hegelians had already begun this kind of criticism. Stirner wanted to push it to the end.

Stirner says that almost all Western thought makes the same mistake again and again. Christianity does this. So do idealism, belief in "Man", liberal politics, and modern socialism. Idealism is the belief that mind and ideas, not matter, are the deepest part of reality. Stirner says that each of these systems puts a general idea above the real, single person. These general ideas include God, Man, the State, Society, Morality, and Law. Here, words such as "the State" or "Society" do not name real, living things. They name general ideas. Each idea is treated as holy. The real person is then told to obey it. Against all these ideas, Stirner sets der Einzige, "the Unique One". By this, he means the living person, with a body, who cannot be reduced to any general idea.

When the book appeared, several writers attacked it at once. They included Ludwig Feuerbach, Moses Hess, and a writer called Szeliga, who wrote for Bruno Bauer. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels also wrote a long answer in their book The German Ideology. After this first debate, Stirner's book was almost forgotten. People found it again in the 1880s. Since then, it has been read in several ways. Some readers see it as one of the last works of the Young Hegelian movement. Some see it as part of the background to Marx's thought. Some see it as an early form of individualist anarchism. Some see it as close to Nietzsche, though probably not as a source for Nietzsche's ideas. In the 20th century, some readers also saw it as an early voice for some existentialist and later ideas.

Life

Johann Caspar Schmidt was born on 25 October 1806 in Bayreuth, a town in Germany. His family was Protestant and poor. His father made flutes. His father died six months after the boy was born. Two years later, his mother married again. Her new husband worked as an assistant in a pharmacy. The family moved to Kulm, in West Prussia. The boy spent his early years there.

In 1818, the boy was sent back to Bayreuth. He lived with his godfather and went to school there. He completed the town's classical secondary school, called the Gymnasium. The head of the school was Georg Andreas Gabler. Years later, Gabler took Hegel's teaching post in philosophy in Berlin. At school, the other boys gave Schmidt the nickname "Stirner". The German word Stirn means "forehead". The boys chose this name because his forehead was high and large. The nickname stayed with him. Later, he used it as his pen name, that is, his author name.

In 1826, Stirner began to study at the University of Berlin. He studied there for four terms. In Berlin, he came into direct contact with Hegel's philosophy. He went to three lecture courses given by Hegel himself. One was on the philosophy of religion, in the summer of 1827. One was on the history of philosophy. One was on the philosophy of mind, or "spirit". He also went to lectures by other well-known teachers. Schleiermacher taught ethics. Neander taught the history of the Church. Marheineke taught Christian doctrine. Later writers say that Stirner knew Hegel's main books well. This can be seen in the way The Unique One uses them.

After Berlin, Stirner went to Erlangen in 1828. There he took courses from Christian Kapp, a Hegelian teacher. Then, in 1829, he went to Königsberg. After that, there was a long break in his studies. This break was probably caused by his mother's growing mental illness. In 1832, he came back to Berlin to finish his degree.

Stirner had to pass a state exam to become a teacher. This exam was called the Staatsexamen. He took it in 1834 and 1835, but it did not go well. The main man who tested him was Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg. Trendelenburg followed the ideas of Aristotle. He did not like Hegel's logic, and he said so openly. For this reason, Trendelenburg gave Stirner only a limited right to teach. With this right, Stirner could teach. But he could not get a regular, permanent teaching job. So Stirner gave up the hope of working at a university.

In 1835 and 1836 he worked at a school in Berlin, but he was not paid for it. In December 1837 he got married. His wife was Agnes Clara Kunigunde Butz. She was the daughter of his landlady (the woman he rented his room from). His young wife died in August 1838. She died while she was giving birth to a baby. The baby was also dead when it was born. In October 1839 Stirner at last found a job with pay. He taught at a private school for girls. A woman called Madame Gropius ran this school. Stirner taught literature and history at this school for five years. He kept the job almost until his book came out.

From late 1841, Stirner often spent time with a group called "the Free Ones" (die Freien). They were young Hegelians who lived in Berlin. They met in a wine bar called Hippel's, on a street called the Friedrichstraße.

The most important thinker in the group was Bruno Bauer. Other people in the group were Edgar and Egbert Bauer, Ludwig Buhl, Eduard Meyen, and Arnold Ruge. Karl Marx was part of the same world of young Hegelians. He also knew Bauer's circle of friends. But it is not clear how much Marx really took part in this group. It is also not clear how well he knew Stirner. More is known about Stirner's link with Friedrich Engels. Engels knew Stirner in person. Engels even drew the only picture of Stirner that still exists. He did not look at Stirner while he drew it. He drew the picture from memory, in London, in 1892.

In some of his letters, Engels says that he and Stirner often talked about Hegel's way of thinking (his dialectic). In 1841 and 1842, Stirner also went to a class about Hegel's Logic (one of Hegel's books). A teacher called Karl Werder gave this class. Other people who went to it were Engels, Bakunin, Kierkegaard, and the writer Turgenev. One scholar points out that, overall, Stirner had studied Hegel at least as much as most of the other young Hegelians had.

Before he wrote his big book, Stirner wrote several articles for left-wing magazines. He wrote a review of a short book by Bruno Bauer, printed without the author's name (January 1842). He wrote a long essay on education, Das unwahre Prinzip unserer Erziehung ("The False Principle of Our Education", April 1842). He wrote a study called Kunst und Religion ("Art and Religion", June 1842). He also wrote about the idea of a state based on love (1843). He reviewed a novel by Eugène Sue, The Mysteries of Paris (1843).

On 21 October 1843 he married for the second time. His new wife was Marie Wilhelmine Dähnhardt (1818–1902). She was a free young woman from Gadebusch. She also visited the Free Ones, and she had inherited much money. The wedding was strange and playful. Bruno Bauer was a witness. The wedding rings were made there and then from copper taken from his purse. This is one of the few stories that we still have about Stirner's life.

The Unique One and His Property (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum) came out in Leipzig at the start of November 1844. The title page gave the date 1845. The first printing had one thousand copies. The authorities in Leipzig took two hundred and fifty of them. But the Saxon minister of the interior soon ended the ban. He said that the book was "too absurd" to be dangerous. The book quickly caused a sharp argument. Szeliga (for Bauer), Moses Hess, and Feuerbach each printed an answer against it. Marx and Engels wrote The German Ideology, a long manuscript that was not printed until 1932. In it they spend almost three quarters of the book attacking Stirner. They make fun of him by calling him "Saint Max". Stirner answered his critics in September 1845 in a piece called Rezensenten Stirners ("Stirner's Critics"). In 1847 he answered the philosopher Kuno Fischer in another piece, signed with the clear pen name "G. Edward".

Stirner's grave in the Sophien Cemetery in Berlin

The first excitement was strong but short. Stirner left his teaching job just before the book came out. In 1845 he tried to run a business selling milk in the suburbs of Berlin. The business failed and used up his wife's money. Marie Dähnhardt left him at the end of 1846, and they divorced in 1850. Now poor, Stirner kept himself alive by translating into German the works on economics of Jean-Baptiste Say (1845–1846) and Adam Smith (1846–1847). This made eight volumes of honest work, but without the translator's notes that he had promised. His last book was a History of the Reaction (1852). It was little more than a set of extracts from Burke, Comte, and other conservative writers. Stirner went to prison twice for debt (1853 and 1854). In May 1856, in his rooms on the Philippstraße, a poisonous insect stung him on the neck. He died on 25 June from the blood poisoning that followed. Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Buhl were among the few people at his funeral.

Hegel and his followers

Stirner's work is easiest to understand when we know its background. This background is the break-up of Hegel's school in Germany in the 1830s and 1840s. Hegel had died in 1831. After his death, his followers split into two groups.

The right wing was led by Marheineke and Gabler. It kept Hegel's system close to Christianity. It also defended the power of the rational state. The left wing used Hegel's method against Hegel's own conclusions. David Friedrich Strauss, in his Life of Jesus (1835), treated the Gospel stories as myths. Bruno Bauer went further. He made self-consciousness, that is, the mind that knows itself, the only true starting point of philosophy. Ludwig Feuerbach, in The Essence of Christianity (1841), changed the study of religion into the study of human nature. For Feuerbach, God is only an image that human beings make of their own nature. People take their own shared nature, put it in the sky, call it God, and then feel small before it. Feuerbach called this shared human nature the "species-being" (Gattungswesen).

Stirner wrote his book above all against Feuerbach. Feuerbach thought that he had completed the criticism of religion. Stirner says that he had not. By putting "Man" in the place of God, Feuerbach did not end the holy. He only moved it. Feuerbach's "humanity" became a new idol. It stands above the single, real person and tells that person to bow down. So it does the same work as the old God.

This leads to the main claim of The Unique One and His Property. The claim is this: the whole tradition of philosophy keeps making one move. From Christianity to liberalism and socialism, through idealism and godless humanism, thinkers keep raising some general idea above the single person. The idea may be God, Spirit, Man, Society, Humanity, Morality, or Law. Then they tell the single person to serve it. Stirner sums this up in a famous line. He says that the newest rebellions against God are only theological insurrections. (Theological means "to do with God and religion".) In other words, even the people who fight God still think in the old religious way.

Stirner's link to Hegel has been read in opposite ways. Henri Arvon, in a book of 1954, saw The Unique One as the logical end of Hegel's philosophy. Others read it as a plain, mocking rejection of Hegel's method. Newer research suggests a more careful answer. Lawrence Stepelevich calls Stirner the "true heir" of Hegel. In his view Stirner stands at the closing point of Hegel's great circle of thought. Jeff Spiessens reads the book as a "departure" from Hegel made with Hegel's own tools. Stirner takes over Hegel's language and logic and treats them as his own property. He uses them to turn around the link between the thinker and his thoughts. In Hegel's system the single person gets his meaning from the growth of Spirit. Stirner puts the single, real person back in charge, as the owner of his thoughts and the maker of his ideas.

The book and how it is built

Title page of the first edition of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, Leipzig, 1844 (the title page is dated 1845).

The book opens and closes with the same line. The line comes from a poem by Goethe (Vanitas! Vanitatum vanitas!, 1806). In German it is Ich hab' Mein' Sach' auf Nichts gestellt. The French translator R. L. Reclaire put it as "I have based my cause on nothing." This repeated line frames the whole work. The book returns to its starting point after passing through everything in between.

The book has two parts. The split between them copies the break that Stirner is trying to make. The first part is called "Man" (Der Mensch). It tells the history of the chains that have been put on the single person, both in real history and in philosophy. The second part is called "I" (Ich). It sets out Stirner's own position. Each of the two parts divides into three. Because of this, the book has a shape that is strangely close to Hegel's own model, even though its content claims to reject that model. The second part moves through three steps: Eigenheit (ownness, being one's own; Reclaire calls it "property"), Der Eigner (the owner), and Der Einzige (the Unique One). The middle chapter again divides into three: Meine Macht (my power), Mein Verkehr (my dealings with others), and Mein Selbstgenuß (my enjoyment of myself).

The first part opens with a chapter called "A Human Life" (Ein Menschenleben). This chapter matters more than it may seem. It gives a pattern of three ages: childhood, youth, and grown adulthood. This pattern shapes the whole book. It is also a clear re-use, and twist, of Hegel's own account of the ages of life. The child lives in a "realist" way. The child is ruled by things, by a strict father, and by the stick. This lasts until the child finds its own cleverness and inner life. The young person then discovers "the mind" or "spirit" (Geist) and enters an "idealist" stage. The young person breaks free from the outside world. But now the young person becomes a servant to his own ideas, his beliefs, and his conscience. Only the grown adult, the egoist, reaches the place where neither things nor ideas rule any more. The adult holds power over both.

The second chapter is "The Ancients and the Moderns" (Menschen der alten und der neuen Zeit). It moves the same pattern onto world history. The Ancients are the world before Christianity, both Greeks and Romans. They match the childhood of mankind. They are "realists" who fight a world that pushes back. Christianity opens the modern age and the youth of mankind. It teaches that the real enemy is no longer the outside world but the inner self: the passions, the "old Adam". So the Christian fight is the fight of spirit against flesh. The Moderns are the Christians and those who came after them. They live in a "world of ghosts" (Gespenster). In this world unseen ideas hold the single person more tightly than nature ever did.

Phantoms and fixed ideas

Two ideas stand at the heart of Stirner's criticism: the "phantom" (Spuk or Gespenst) and the "fixed idea" (fixe Idee).

A phantom is any general idea that is raised into a holy power above the single person, so that the person must kneel before it. Such ideas include God, Man, Freedom, Justice, Law, Morality, Society, and Humanity. God was the chief phantom of the Christian age. But, for Stirner, the modern, godless words are only more hidden phantoms that do exactly the same work. Reason, Spirit, Humanity, Society, History: all of these still rule the person from above.

A "fixed idea" is an idea that owns a person without the person knowing it. It is a belief that has taken hold so deeply that the person can no longer separate himself from it. Stirner says the right link to thought is the other way round. A person should own his ideas. He should not be owned by them.

Stirner's most surprising claim is about the modern age. Modern philosophy did not free people from Christianity, he says. It only carried Christianity further. Luther's Reformation made religion more inward, and so it gave spirit an even firmer grip on the person. The Enlightenment put Reason in the place of God, but it left the power of Reason just as large. German idealism made the world fully spiritual, with Spirit as the very ground of what is real. And when Feuerbach says that the secret of religion is human nature, he only swaps one phantom for another. He puts "Man" where God used to be. Modern humanism, Stirner says, is a religion that has changed its object but not its shape.

Stirner spreads this criticism across the whole politics of his time. He sorts the politics of freedom, called liberalism, into three kinds.

The first is political liberalism. It was born from the French Revolution. It declares that all citizens are free and equal. But this freedom is only on paper. By making the State the one ruling power, it ties the person to the citizen, and the citizen to the State.

The second is social liberalism, that is, the socialism and communism of his day. It tries to fix the gaps in political liberalism by ending private property. But it only puts Society in the place of the State as the new ruler. Now the person must obey the group and shape his life to fit the needs of social work.

The third is human, or humanitarian, liberalism. This is the kind held by Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer. It wants to free man by stripping away everything special about him, such as his religion, his nation, and his social place. It keeps only his bare humanity. For Stirner this is the deepest loss of all. It asks the person to be nothing but "a human being", a sample of the species. In doing so, it takes away everything that makes the person this one, single person.

Next to the split between Ancients and Moderns, Stirner uses a second map of history. This second map shows his link to Hegel clearly. It rests on a way of sorting human "races" that Hegel had set out in his Encyclopaedia (section 393). This was a racist scheme, and it ranked the so-called races in order. Stirner takes it over. He speaks of a "Negro" age, a "Mongol" age, and a "Caucasian" age. He writes that "the history of mankind is really only the history of the Caucasian race." This passage is racist. It also puts Europe at the centre of history. Stirner took this way of thinking from Hegel. Stirner treats these "ages" as stages of the spirit rather than as fixed facts of biology. So it is not racism in the strict biological sense. But it is still plainly racist, and it puts Europe at the centre. Stirner then uses the same scheme inside European history. He calls the "Negro" stage the time when people depend on the world of the senses and on nature. He ties this to the ancient world. He calls the "Mongol" stage the time when people obey custom and the spirit fixed in laws and institutions. He ties this to the Christian age. The last stage is the rise of a person's own selfhood, which would let him master both of the others. As Spiessens shows, Stirner uses Hegel's philosophy of history in order to turn its meaning upside down. Hegel had described history as the slow growth of the awareness of freedom. Stirner reads the same history as the growing slavery of the person to ideas that press on him harder and harder.

The Unique One

The second part of the book, called simply "I", sets out Stirner's own position. Its central idea is "the Unique One" (der Einzige). But the Unique One is not a concept (a general idea) in the usual sense. Stirner writes that, of "Me" as of God, no concept can express him; nothing that people give as his essence (the fixed inner nature a thing is supposed to have) catches all of him; these are only names. The Unique One is not an essence, not a type of person, and not a quality shared by all people. It is the single, real person, just as that person cannot be put under any heading. The Unique One is, in Stirner's phrase, "the creative Nothing, the Nothing out of which I myself make everything." The book's founding line, "I have based my cause on nothing", now becomes clear. The single person has not based his cause on God, or on Man, or on Truth, or on any idea given in advance. He has based it on himself, as a "nothing" with respect to every essence one might name.

So the Unique One is sharply different from Feuerbach's "Man", from the "Subject" of idealism, and from the "citizen" of liberal politics. All of these are general ideas. Each one claims to grasp what the person is deep down. So each one ties the person to a rule from outside. As Stirner writes near the end of the book, he is not one "self" beside other "selves"; he is the only self; he is Unique. Each person is a Unique One who cannot be compared with any other. This is not because the person has rare gifts. It is because his single existence goes beyond every idea. The Unique One is neither good nor bad, neither free nor enslaved, neither selfish nor giving in the moral sense of these words. He is the one who stands on himself as his own ground, and who allows no power above him the right to judge him.

Ownness and freedom

One of the book's main joints is the difference between freedom (Freiheit) and ownness (Eigenheit; Reclaire renders it as "property").

Freedom, as modern political and philosophical movements ask for it, is mostly a "no" word. It means the lack of outside chains, the escape from a master. But, Stirner notes, freedom of this kind is a wish that never ends. Once a person is free of one master, he finds another. When old kinds of rule are pulled down, new ones go up. More deeply, freedom always depends on the very thing it wants to be free from. It is Befreiung, a process of getting free, and so it stays tied to its enemy.

Ownness works the other way. It is not a state to reach but a power to use. The German word is hard to put into English. It can be rendered as "ownness", "selfhood", or "being one's own". It joins three ideas: what is one's own (eigen), having oneself, and being one single, unrepeatable person. Freedom always hangs on outside conditions. Ownness hangs only on the person himself. It is not a far-off goal to chase. It is a strength to put to work. So Stirner changes the basic question. The question is no longer "Am I free?" but "Do I own myself?" A person does not win this self-ownership through political revolutions or social reforms. He wins it through a practical taking-back of himself, an act that frees him from being ruled. This act changes both his inner attitude and his behaviour towards the State, the law, the institutions, and his promises.

Insurrection and revolution

The difference between revolution (Revolution) and insurrection (Empörung, "a rising up", sometimes also put as "revolt") cannot be split from the last one. Stirner states it in plain words. He says that revolution and insurrection are not the same. A revolution overturns the standing order, the set-up of the State or of Society. So it has only a political or social meaning. An insurrection does lead, as a side effect, to the same overturning of standing institutions. But that is not its aim. It grows only out of people's discontent. It is not a taking-up of arms. It is the act of single people who rise, who stand up straight. A revolution aims at a new order. An insurrection leads people to stop letting themselves be ruled, and to rule themselves instead. A revolution tells people to build a new order. An insurrection tells them to rise and stand up.

The point of this difference goes beyond politics. Every revolution, because it wants to set up a new order, stays caught in the logic of ruling. It swaps one master for another, one phantom for another. The French Revolution ended the monarchy only to set up the rule of the people and the power of the State. Socialist revolutions plan to end private property only to set up shared property. In both cases the single person stays under a power above him. An insurrection is different. Its aim is not to change the standing order. Its aim is to assert the person against the order, whatever the order is. It is not a group rising in the name of some higher ideal. It is the act by which the person stops recognising any power above him.

Property

Stirner's idea of property (Eigentum) is not the same as the legal "private property" that the liberals defend. It is also not the same as the property the socialists attack. It grows out of ownness. For Stirner, property is everything that the person can take and hold by his own power. He writes that what he can get hold of, he seizes and makes his own. What gets away from him, he has no right to. He does not boast of any "rights" he might claim over it, and he takes no comfort in them. So Stirner rejects two things at once. He rejects property guaranteed by law, which he sees as only a legal phantom. He also rejects the socialist attack on private property, which only hands the same job to "society", a new holy thing. "My property", he writes, "is what is in my power."

This idea goes past money and goods. Thoughts too can become a person's property. Or, and this is the mark of the enslaved person, the person can be owned by his thoughts. The religious man is owned by the idea of God. The moral man is owned by the idea of the Good. The patriot is owned by the idea of the nation. Each time, an idea has seized the person, instead of the person seizing the idea. The Unique One does the opposite. He owns his ideas instead of being owned by them. He uses them as tools that serve his enjoyment and his power. Thought stops being a holy calling and becomes a tool.

Morals and the sacred

Stirner's attack on morals is one of the central parts of the book. He throws out the whole moral vocabulary, such as duty, obligation, virtue, right, sin, and the sacred. He sees these words as leftovers from religion. Moral thinking always has the same shape, he says, whether it comes from religion, from Kant, or from humanism. It sets up a rule outside the person. The rule may be a command from God, Kant's "categorical imperative" (his supreme moral law), or the demand of human nature. Then it orders the person to obey. Every "you shall" (du sollst), Stirner says, is a holy command. It claims a power over the person that the person never agreed to.

Against morals Stirner sets what he calls conscious egoism. But Stirner's egoism has little to do with common selfishness, the simple chase after money or pleasure. The egoist, in Stirner's sense, is not always the person who wants riches or low pleasure. He is the person who knows no measure but himself. He makes his own enjoyment and power the only test of what he does. Such an egoist can still be kind, caring, and ready to help others. He does these things not because he "must", but because he "wants" to, because it pleases him, because it serves his enjoyment. The difference between morals and egoism is not in what people do. It is in why they do it. In the first case the person acts from duty, under an outside rule. In the second case the person acts from enjoyment of himself (Selbstgenuß), as the owner of his own deeds. As the writer Saul Newman notes, Stirner's egoism is less a teaching about self-interest than a form of ruling oneself and being master of oneself.

Stirner's stand against religion goes past plain atheism. The Young Hegelians worked to show that God does not exist, that religion is a false belief, and that the holy must dissolve into the everyday. Stirner agrees with this, but he thinks it does not go far enough. The atheist attack on religion, he says, stays caught in the holy. This is because it sets up new absolutes, such as Reason, Man, Science, and Society. These do the same job as the old God. Feuerbach's atheism is a religion turned inside out. Humanism is a religion that has changed its object but not its shape. So Stirner attacks not only God but the holy as such. He attacks everything that claims to stand above the person and to ask from him respect, worship, or sacrifice. In another famous phrase of Stirner, Feuerbach's criticism is only a "theological insurrection": a rising-up against the old god that ends by setting up a new one.

The State, law and the union of egoists

Stirner's attack on the State cannot be split from his attack on law. The State, in any form, is always a power that sets itself above people and forces its will on them by strength and by law. This is true of a kingdom, a democracy, or a socialist state. Law (Recht, also "right") is, for Stirner, only a will that is foreign to the person but that the person is told to obey. Natural law, human rights, written law: all are forms of one trick. They all claim that certain rules bind the person whatever he wills and whatever power he has. For Stirner, the only real ground of any power is the actual strength of the one who uses it. He writes that force is himself, the one who is powerful, the one who holds the power. Law, he says, is only the power of others, dressed up as a holy rule and called "right". The "others" are the State, society, or the ruling class.

This leads Stirner to reject every kind of political order built on law. He rejects the liberal State, which guarantees freedoms on paper at the price of obeying the law. He rejects the socialist State, which plans to guarantee material equality at the price of obeying society. More deeply, he rejects the very idea of society (Gesellschaft) as a thing with a being and a power of its own. Society, as modern political thinkers picture it, is a new phantom. It does not exist apart from the people who make it up. Yet it claims to rule over them.

Against all these forms of grouping, Stirner sets what he calls the union of egoists (Verein von Egoisten). The union is sharply different from society and the State. It rests on no principle, no goal, and no contract that would give it a being apart from its members. Reclaire, in a translator's note, points out that the German Verein means an active, willing working-together, while Gesellschaft means a passive grouping forced on its members. The union is a freely chosen link between people who join to serve their own interests. They can break the link at any time, once it no longer suits them. It has no constitution, no laws, no rights. It does not own its members; its members own it. In society the person is a means that serves the whole. In the union the whole is a means that serves the persons. Stirner adds that the person must always be "more than" the union. If the union ever swallowed him, it would itself turn into a phantom.

The union of egoists is not a political programme in the usual sense. Stirner does not offer a model of a new kind of group to replace the present institutions. The union is, first of all, a way of describing a kind of link between Unique Ones. It is a link of power and enjoyment, built not on law or duty but on interest and desire. The Unique One joins with other Unique Ones not because a contract or a command forces him, but because the link adds to his enjoyment. As soon as it stops serving him, he leaves it. So the union does not have to last. It can end when its members no longer want it. It is the opposite of society, which wants to be lasting and binding. In The German Ideology, Marx saw this union as just a copy, in ideas, of middle-class civil society. Later writers have often found this reading too simple, since Stirner's union does not fit neatly into the liberal picture of a contract.

The body and enjoyment

Stirner puts great weight on the body and on the matter of the single person. This plays a large part in his fight against idealist ideas. Again and again he brings the person back to his real, dying, feeling existence, against the essences that the tradition wants to give him. He does not build a full philosophy of the body, like the ones later worked out by Feuerbach, Nietzsche, or Merleau-Ponty. For Stirner the body works rather as a weapon in argument. It is the hard, real test on which the great moral and metaphysical ideas break. (Metaphysical means "having to do with the deepest nature of reality, beyond what the senses show".) In this sense he writes that, when the world stands in his way (and it always does), he consumes it to still the hunger of his egoism. The picture of eating comes back again and again. The person's link to the world is a link of eating, taking, and enjoyment. It is not a link of calm knowing or of spiritual sharing.

This link between the body, eating, and self-enjoyment (Selbstgenuß) holds the book together. For Stirner enjoyment is not a calm looking-on, and it is not pleasure in the low sense. It is the active use of a power that feels itself in taking. It is the movement by which the person spreads out as he takes hold of the things, thoughts, and links that are open to him. The idealist tradition, from Plato to German idealism, makes thought a stepping-back from the world of the senses. It treats calm looking-on as the highest link to the world. Stirner turns this judgement around. Thought has worth only as a tool of the bodily person who uses it. The world has reality only as matter to be consumed. This prepares the last part of the book, Mein Selbstgenuß ("my enjoyment of myself"). There the egoist appears as the one who "uses himself up" as he spreads out, without saving himself for some higher cause that would justify him in advance.

Later influence

After the short flash of 1844–1846, The Unique One and His Property fell into almost complete forgetting. The Revolution of 1848 failed. Stirner took no part in it, and he had already condemned its liberal and social aims in advance. With the failure of 1848, the debates of the young Hegelians sank too. The ideas Stirner had fought against had themselves gone under. So interest in his book, which was mostly about those debates, faded. Only a few mentions of it remained. They appear in Erdmann (1866), in Lange's History of Materialism (1866), and in Eduard von Hartmann.

The book was found again from 1888. The poet John Henry Mackay (a German in spite of his Scottish name) was caught by the title, which he had seen named in Lange. He spent ten years putting Stirner's life back together. He asked for witnesses in the newspapers. In 1898 he printed a life of Stirner that is still the main source for all later ones: Max Stirner. Sein Leben und sein Werk. One event helped to spread Stirner's name to the wider public. On 28 March 1892, after a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the conductor Hans von Bülow said Stirner's name out loud in public and linked it to that of Bismarck.

The rise of Nietzsche's philosophy at the same time led people to link the two men. But this link has been argued about ever since. From the late 19th century, many writers compared The Unique One with Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Yet there is no clear proof that one came from the other. One late and second-hand report says that Nietzsche told a student, Adolf Baumgartner, to read Stirner in 1874. Nietzsche had probably learned the name from Lange. But Nietzsche never names Stirner in his writings or his letters. The list of books he borrowed from the Basel library between 1869 and 1879 does not include the book. As Arvon concludes, there is no document that lets anyone say Stirner had an influence on Nietzsche.

Stirner's afterlife runs along several lines. Individualist anarchism is one. In its American form, Benjamin Tucker brought out the first English translation in 1907, under the title The Ego and His Own. Tucker called it the most important book he had ever published. Anarchists of this kind claimed Stirner as a forerunner. Yet Stirner himself never accepted the label "anarchist", and his thought goes beyond the limits of any political programme. Paterson points to the gap between Stirner's egoism, which has no principles, and Tucker's moralised idea of a contract. Stirner's links with the great names of historical anarchism are slight at most. These names include Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Tolstoy. He shares with them only the stand against the State. His selfish individualism stays foreign to their social and ethical concerns.

In the 20th century Stirner's thought fed several different readings. Henri Arvon, in his book of 1954, made Stirner a forerunner of French existentialism. Stirner puts existence before essence. He refuses any fixed human nature. He gives a central place to insurrection. All these points bring Stirner close to some themes in Sartre and Camus, even if no direct line can be proved. Later, some Situationist and "post-anarchist" readers brought Stirner's themes back to life. Saul Newman in particular sees Stirner as a forerunner of Michel Foucault's criticism of power, and of how people are shaped into subjects. Some recent writers read Stirner in another way. They say that he still belongs to the world of Hegel's philosophy. They show that his ideas, such as the Unique One, ownness, insurrection, and the union, get their real meaning only when read against the dialectic that they both use and turn around.

For a long time Stirner stayed pushed to the side of the official history of philosophy. He was often cut down to the cartoon that Marx and Engels drew in The German Ideology. Today he looks like one of the end points of the break-up of Hegel's school. He is the one who pushes the criticism of alienation to its limit. He refuses to let any essence at all, even human nature, be the ground of the person. His thought stays a challenge to every kind of making-holy. The holy thing may be God, Man, Society, the Market, or any other power that claims to stand above the single, real person and to demand from him respect, obedience, or sacrifice.

Books

Works by Stirner

• Stirner, Max. Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1845 [published November 1844]. The first edition.
• Stirner, Max. Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. Ausführlich kommentierte Studienausgabe. Ed. Bernd Kast. Freiburg im Breisgau / Munich: Karl Alber, 2009. The standard scholarly edition in German, with full notes. It is the working text for today's studies.
• Stirner, Max. Kleinere Schriften und seine Entgegnungen auf die Kritik seines Werkes "Der Einzige und sein Eigentum" aus den Jahren 1842–1848. Ed. John Henry Mackay. 2nd enlarged ed., Berlin, 1914. Reprint: Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, Frommann-Holzboog, 1976. This collection brings together the early articles (reviews of Bauer and Sue, essays on education and religion) and the answers to his critics (Rezensenten Stirners, 1845; Die philosophischen Reactionäre, 1847).
• Stirner, Max. L'Unique et sa propriété. Trans. R. L. Reclaire. Paris: P.-V. Stock, 1899. The first full French translation. It was the only one for a long time, and most common French quotations still come from it.
• Stirner, Max. L'Unique et sa propriété. Trans. Henri Lasvignes. Paris: Stock, 1900 (repr. La Table Ronde). A second French translation, sometimes liked for its smoother style.
• Stirner, Max. The Ego and Its Own. Trans. Steven T. Byington (1907), ed. David Leopold. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. The standard English edition, with an introduction and notes by David Leopold.

Early answers to Stirner

• Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. Die deutsche Ideologie [1845–1846, published 1932], in Marx-Engels Werke (MEW), vol. 3. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1958. English title: The German Ideology. Its central section, "Saint Max", fills nearly three quarters of the book. It is the first full criticism of The Unique One.
• Feuerbach, Ludwig. "Über das 'Wesen des Christentums' in Beziehung auf den 'Einzigen und sein Eigentum'". Wigands Vierteljahrsschrift, 1845.
• Hess, Moses. Die letzten Philosophen. Darmstadt, 1845.
• Szeliga [Franz Zychlin von Zychlinski]. Der Einzige und sein Eigentum von Max Stirner. Review in the Norddeutsche Blätter, 1844.

Later studies

• Mackay, John Henry. Max Stirner. Sein Leben und sein Werk. Berlin, 1898; 2nd ed. 1910; 3rd ed. Leipzig, 1914. The founding biography of all Stirner studies. It is still the main source of facts, though its tone is admiring.
• Arvon, Henri. Aux sources de l'existentialisme : Max Stirner. Paris: PUF, 1954. A classic French study. It presents Stirner as a forerunner of existentialism, while it carefully rejects the idea of a direct influence on Nietzsche.
• Paterson, R. W. K. The Nihilistic Egoist Max Stirner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. The main English book of the 20th century. It joins biography, a study of the book, and a close look at his afterlife, both anarchist and existentialist.
• Welsh, John F. Max Stirner's Dialectical Egoism: A New Interpretation. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010. A full reading of Stirner as a dialectical thinker of the modern age, in dialogue with the American individualist line (Tucker, Rand).
• Newman, Saul (ed.). Max Stirner. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. A collection of essays by Newman, Widukind De Ridder, Paul Thomas, and others, from the point of view of post-anarchism and present-day political thought.
• Spiessens, Jeff. The Radicalism of Departure. A reassessment of the Hegelianism in Max Stirner's "Der Einzige und sein Eigentum". Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018. The fullest study of Stirner's link to Hegel. It argues that The Unique One is a "departure" from Hegel's philosophy made with Hegel's own tools.
• Stepelevich, Lawrence S. Max Stirner on the Path of Doubt. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020. A defence of the view that Stirner is the "true heir" of Hegel, standing at the closing point of his circle of thought. It includes translations of several of the Kleinere Schriften.
• Laska, Bernd A. Ein dauerhafter Dissident. Eine Wirkungsgeschichte des "Einzigen". Nuremberg: LSR-Verlag, 1996. A history of how Stirner was received, with special care for the silences of the Marxist tradition.
• Kast, Bernd. Die Thematik des "Eigners" in der Philosophie Max Stirners. Bonn: Bouvier, 1979. A systematic German study of the idea of property in Stirner.