Table of contents

1 Biography 2 Philosophy 3 Influence 4 External Links

Biography

Max Stirner as portrayed by Friedrich Engels.

Stirner worked as a German schoolteacher employed in a Berlin academy for young girls when he wrote The Ego and Its Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum) (1844), although he resigned this position in anticipation of the controversy he expected with its publication. Stirner had associations with the Young Hegelians who clustered around Arnold Ruge and Bruno Bauer, and attended some of the same debates as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. One of the few portraits we have of Stirner consists of a cartoon by Engels. However, as Stirner's writing makes abundantly clear, he had little or no political or philosophical common-ground with his contemporaries, and his reported silence at all of these debates seems to indicate that he had little interest in disputing the positions of Marx and Engels. The pair did not reciprocate: Marx wrote a histrionic indictment of Stirner spanning several hundred pages (in the original, unexpurgated text) of his book The German Ideology, co-authored with Engels and written in 1845 - 1846. Nevertheless, some biographical evidence suggests that Stirner could co-operate with these friends, despite their political differences.

Stirner married twice; his first wife died due to complications of pregnancy in 1838, and the second abandoned him just prior to the publication of The Ego and Its Own. The heartfelt dedication to her on the first edition's title page served also as a plea for her return.

In one of most curious events in the history of 19th century philosophy, Stirner planned and financed (with his wife's inheritance) a short-lived attempt by the Young Hegelians to own and operate a milk-shop on co-operative principles. This enterprise failed because the German dairy farmers harboured suspicions of these well-dressed intellectuals with their confusing talk about profit-sharing and other high-minded ideals. Meanwhile, the milk shop itself appeared so ostentatiously decorated that most of the customers felt too poorly dressed to buy their milk there.

In 1856, Stirner died from an infected insect bite. After The Ego and Its Own he published his German translation of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations in 1847 and a History of Reaction (1852).

Philosophy

Discussion of Stirner's philosophy appears in the article on The Ego and Its Own -- although one can chart the development of his philosophy through a series of articles that appeared shortly before this central work (the article On Education furnishing particular interest).

The publication of The Ego and Its Own unleashed a flurry of popular, political and academic interest. Over the course of the next hundred-and-fifty years, the text has seen periodic revivals of interest based around widely divergent interpretations -- some psychological, others political in their emphasis -- and has experienced some rather revisionist "translations" to suit various political movements. The book proclaims that all religions and ideologies rest on superstition and it explicitly includes nationalism, statism, liberalism, socialism, communism and humanism in its set of superstitions.

Marx's lengthy, ferocious polemic against Stirner assured The Ego and Its Own a place of permanent interest among Marxist readers. Communists have considered the critique of Stirner a turning point in Marx's intellectual development from "Idealism" to "Materialism".

At present, Stirner remains at the centre of a diffuse but highly charged debate spanning Europe; ample secondary literature appears in German, Italian, French, and Spanish. English sources lag in number, and tend to reflect either anarchist or existentialist interpretations.

Influence

Several authors, ideologistss and philosophers have cited, quoted or otherwise referred to Max Stirner. They include:

• Benjamin Tucker
• Dora Marsden
• Robert Anton Wilson
• Max Ernst (who titled a 1925 painting L'unique et sa propriété)
• Several writers of the situationist movement.
• We don't know for sure whether Søren Kierkegaard read Stirner or not, but it seems highly plausible.
• It has been recently established that Nietzsche did read Stirner, although the signs of Stirner's influence were such that this had been previously presumed without historical evidence.
• The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini read and was inspired by Stirner, and made several references to him in his newspaper articles (prior to rising to power). His later writings would uphold a view opposed to Stirner.
• As noted, Marx and the other Young Hegelians were influenced by, and wrote critiques of Stirner.