Max Stirner

• 1. Introduction

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  Max Stirner was born Johann Caspar Schmidt, and the name history remembers began as a joke about the size of his forehead. He later adopted that nickname as his pen name, and it outlasted the man himself. Almost everything we know about his life comes from one biography, written by the Scottish-born German writer John Henry Mackay. In October 1844, a book of his appeared in Leipzig under the title The Unique and Its Property. Philosophers, anarchists, feminists, and even some of his fiercest enemies have been wrestling with it ever since. How did a Berlin schoolteacher produce a work that thinkers on opposite sides of nearly every political divide still claim as their own? What does it mean to call yourself a "creative nothing"? And why did the book's author fade into obscurity while his ideas refused to die?

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• 2. The Free Ones of Berlin

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  Johann Caspar Schmidt was born in Bayreuth, Bavaria, on the 25th of October 1806. He was the only child of Albert Christian Heinrich Schmidt and Sophia Elenora Reinlein, a Lutheran couple. His father died of tuberculosis on the 19th of April 1807, at the age of 37. In 1809 his mother married a pharmacist named Heinrich Ballerstedt. The family then settled in Kulm in West Prussia, a town now called Chełmno in Poland.

  At the age of 20, Stirner arrived at the University of Berlin to study philology. There he attended Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's lectures on the history of philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and the subjective spirit. Hegel became a source of inspiration for his thinking. Stirner then moved to the University of Erlangen, where Ludwig Feuerbach was studying at the same time.

  Back in Berlin, Stirner earned a teaching certificate, but the Prussian government never gave him a full-time teaching post. In 1841 he began joining the conversations of a circle of young philosophers called Die Freien, or The Free Ones. Historians have since filed them under the label Young Hegelians. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Bruno Bauer, and Arnold Ruge all moved in this world. Some members embraced Hegel's dialectical method, while the left-wing members, led by Feuerbach and Bauer, broke with Hegel.

  Hippel's, a wine bar on Friedrichstraße, was where many of these debates took place. Marx and Engels attended, and both were followers of Feuerbach at the time. Stirner met Engels many times, and Engels later remembered them as "great friends." Whether Stirner ever met Marx remains unclear. Stirner seems to have said little, but he was a faithful member of the club and an attentive listener.

  Forty years later, Engels drew a cartoon of Stirner from memory at Mackay's request. That cartoon is the most reproduced portrait of Stirner. Together with a group sketch of Die Freien at Hippel's, it is probably one of only two firsthand images of him. Mackay's biography, titled Max Stirner, sein Leben und sein Werk, appeared in German in 1898 and was enlarged in 1910 and 1914. An English translation followed in 2005. During these Berlin years Stirner earned his living at a school for young girls owned by Madame Gropius. He wrote his major work there.

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• 3. Copper Rings and Spilled Milk

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  On the 12th of December 1837, Stirner married Agnes Burtz, the daughter of his landlady. She had been born in 1815. She died in 1838 from complications of pregnancy.

  In 1843 he married again, this time to Marie Dähnhardt, an intellectual connected with Die Freien. The wedding was improvised in Stirner's apartment. The guests dressed casually, and copper rings stood in for wedding rings that nobody had remembered to buy. The party then had to search the whole neighborhood for a Bible, because the household did not own one. In 1844 Stirner dedicated his book "to my sweetheart Marie Dähnhardt."

  Marie's inheritance next funded a business. Stirner opened a dairy shop that handled the distribution of milk from dairy farmers into the city. He could not find enough customers to keep it afloat, and it failed quickly. The collapse drove a wedge between the couple, and they separated in 1847. Marie later converted to Catholicism and died in London in 1902.

  Translation was Stirner's next attempt at a living. He rendered Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Jean-Baptiste Say's Traité d'economie politique into German, but the work brought him little money. His later years passed in relative obscurity.

  Stirner died in Berlin on the 26th of June 1856 from a tumor, which was alleged to have grown from an infected insect bite. Only two Young Hegelians, Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Buhl, attended his funeral at the Friedhof II der Sophiengemeinde Berlin.

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• 4. Ghosts and Creative Nothing

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  Leipzig was the city where The Unique and Its Property, or Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, came out in October 1844. The title page carried the year 1845. In it Stirner launched a radical, anti-authoritarian attack on Prussian society and on modern Western society as a whole.

  The book presents its author as "the unique one," a "creative nothing" that language can never fully capture. He summed up his stance in one line: "All things are nothing to me." Every religion and ideology, he argued, rests on empty concepts. The same went for institutions that claim authority over a person, including the state, the law, the church, and universities.

  Feuerbach and Bauer, his own contemporaries, were among his chosen targets. So were communism, liberalism, nationalism, capitalism, and humanism. Stirner saw humanism as a religion in disguise, with the abstract figure of Man or humanity enthroned as the supreme being.

  God, Emperor, Pope, and Fatherland were the examples Stirner gave of thoughts that had grown until they towered over the people who invented them. He called these ideas ghosts, or "spooks." His answer was to pull them back inside himself, announcing "I alone am corporeal." The world then became his property, and he referred everything to himself.

  Underneath this attack lay Stirner's egoism. He believed that every person is driven by their own desires, whether or not they admit it. A willing egoist accepts this and feels free to live by those desires. Law, rights, morality, and religion, which he regarded as sacred but artificial truths, no longer bind such a person. An unwilling egoist, by contrast, imagines they are serving some higher cause while quietly chasing their own happiness and security.

  This is not the self-interest later preached by Ayn Rand. Stirner offered no program for how anyone should behave, and he urged each person simply to decide for themselves. He also rejected blind greed, since fixating on one appetite would leave a person possessed by a cause other than the whole ego. Natural rights to property did not exist for him. Property, he said, belongs to whoever knows how to take and defend it.

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• 5. Union and Insurrection

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  A "Union of egoists" was Stirner's alternative to the state, and it first appears in The Unique and Its Property. A union differs from a community, which obliges its members to take part. Stirner's union would be voluntary and purely instrumental, held together only while each member finds the others useful. It must be renewed constantly by an act of will. Scholars disagree about what that means. Svein Olav Nyberg argues that every participant must act from conscious egoism. Sydney E. Parker reads the union as a "change of attitude" rather than an institution.

  The Anarchist FAQ reports that many anarchists in Glasgow, Scotland, took the union literally. In the 1940s and beyond, they used it as the basis for their anarcho-syndicalist organising.

  Revolution was a word Stirner distrusted. "Revolution and insurrection must not be looked upon as synonymous," he wrote. A revolution overturns the established order and aims at new arrangements. He saw it as secretly idealist, since it replaces one ideal with another. Insurrection starts from a person's discontent with themselves and is a rising of individuals rather than an armed uprising. Stirner put it this way: "If I leave the established, it is dead and passes into decay."

  Communism drew the same suspicion. Stirner thought it carried the idealism of Christianity and the superstitions of morality and justice. His central complaint was that socialists and communists ignored the individual. They handed ownership to the abstraction of society, so no actual person owned anything. Daniel Guérin wrote that Stirner accepted many communist premises but believed people would be fully freed only by moving beyond communism. The anarchist historian Max Nettlau went further, saying Stirner could be read only in a socialist sense. Stirner did attack the division of labour, and he wrote that "the laborer is the egoist."

  Whether Stirner was an anarchist at all was first questioned in 1914. Dora Marsden, writing in her journals The New Freewoman and The Egoist, separated Stirner and egoism from anarchism during a debate with Benjamin Tucker.

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• 6. Hegel's Long Shadow

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  Lawrence Stepelevich describes The Unique and Its Property as having an "un-Hegelian structure and tone." Even so, he considers Hegel a major influence. In his reading, the book answers a question Hegel left open. What becomes of consciousness once it has passed from "untrue knowledge" to "absolute knowledge"?

  Douglas Moggach and Widukind De Ridder see Stirner as a student of Hegel, like Feuerbach and Bauer, but not necessarily a Hegelian. Stirner scorned any attempt to criticize Hegel from within. He also rejected the emancipatory claims of Bauer and Feuerbach. Hegel regarded the world as it stands as an inadequate form of reason. Stirner left the world intact. He treated it as something to enjoy and use, which he called "His Own." Moggach concludes that Stirner abandoned philosophy altogether. The self became a "never-being I" with no essence to fulfil. In Stirner's own words, "There is no development of the concept of the Unique."

  Stirner's shorter pieces show his thinking in motion. In 1842 The False Principle of Our Education appeared in the Rheinische Zeitung, which Marx edited at that moment. It answered a treatise by Otto Friedrich Theodor Heinsius called Humanism vs. Realism. Stirner argued that neither the classical nor the practical approach to schooling had real value. "The final goal of education can no longer be knowledge," he declared. He wanted pupils turned from "masters of things" into "free natures" and named his principle "personalist."

  Art and Religion ran in the same newspaper on the 14th of June 1842. It responded to Bauer's attack on Hegel, which had placed Art closer to Philosophy than to Religion. Stirner went further. Art, he said, creates an object for Religion. Philosophy, by contrast, puts a pulverizing hand on all object-making and breathes the air of freedom.

  Stirner's Critics came out in September 1845 in Wigands Vierteljahrsschrift. Writing about himself in the third person, he replied to three reviews of his book. They were by Moses Hess, by a writer calling himself Szeliga, who was an adherent of Bauer, and by Feuerbach, who wrote anonymously. Stirner's attacks on Feuerbach's humanism had forced Feuerbach into print.

  The Philosophical Reactionaries followed in 1847 in Die Epigonen, a journal edited by Otto Wigand. It answered an article by Kuno Fischer about sophists, signed G. Edward. Whether Stirner wrote it has been disputed ever since Mackay cautiously attributed it to him. Fischer himself had identified Edward as Stirner, and Stirner never denied it. In the piece, the author asks: "Have you philosophers really no clue that you have been beaten with your own weapons?" The translator's introduction adds that Stirner called his great book partly clumsy, the hard work of his best years.

  Stirner's last major project was History of Reaction, in two volumes at the start of the 1850s. Austria banned it immediately. It was written after the revolutions of 1848 in the German states and was mostly a collection of other people's texts. Stirner selected and translated them, with Edmund Burke and Auguste Comte standing for two opposed views of revolution.

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• 7. Marx, Engels, Nietzsche

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  In November 1844, Engels wrote to Marx after visiting Moses Hess in Cologne, where Hess handed him a press copy of Stirner's new book. Engels promised to send it along, since Stirner "had obviously, among the 'Free Ones', the most talent, independence and diligence." At first he was enthusiastic. Part of Stirner's principle was true, he said, and had to be accepted. Before anyone acts for a cause, "we must make it our own, egoistic cause."

  The mood soon turned. Marx and Engels wrote The German Ideology in 1845-1846. It ridiculed Stirner as Sankt Max, or Saint Max, and as Sancho, a nod to Cervantes' Sancho Panza. The pages they spent on him in the full text outnumber everything Stirner ever wrote. Isaiah Berlin said Stirner "is pursued through five hundred pages of heavy-handed mockery and insult." The manuscript was not published until 1932. The polemic is often seen as a turning point in Marx's move from idealism to materialism, and Marx's mockery helped keep Stirner's name alive.

  Twenty years after the book appeared, Friedrich Albert Lange called it the most extreme work he knew. He wished it had been given a second, positive part. Some people think Friedrich Nietzsche supplied one. George J. Stack reports that Nietzsche read Lange's History of Materialism "again and again," so he knew the passage on Stirner well. Another book Nietzsche knew, Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious, also mentions Stirner.

  Yet nobody has found a mention of Stirner anywhere in Nietzsche's publications, papers, or letters. A biographical discovery in 2002 made contact more probable. In October 1865, before reading Hartmann and Lange, Nietzsche met Eduard Mushacke, who had been a friend of Stirner in the 1840s.

  Hartmann went so far in 1891 as to suggest plagiarism, while Nietzsche was still alive but incapacitated by mental illness. By 1907 one observer wrote that Stirner's influence in modern Germany had reached "astonishing proportions." Doubts grew, though. By the middle of the 20th century, many works on Nietzsche dismissed the idea or called it unanswerable. A deeper problem is whether Stirner could have mattered much to so widely read a man. In Nietzsche's early years of fame, only Arthur Schopenhauer was linked to his ideas more often than Stirner.

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• 8. Stuck in the Gizzard

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  Herbert Read, an art critic and Stirner admirer, said the book had remained "stuck in the gizzard" of Western culture. It had gone out of print, and its notoriety had faded, many years before Stirner died. Since his death it has been republished in multiple languages. Edmund Husserl once warned a small audience about its "seducing power" but never mentioned it in his writing.

  Rudolf Steiner, Gustav Landauer, Victor Serge, Carl Schmitt, and Jürgen Habermas all read it in their youth. Few admit any debt. Ernst Jünger's book Eumeswil built a character, the Anarch, on Stirner's Einzige. Jacob Blumenfeld lists the labels pinned on Stirner: left-Hegelian, petit-bourgeois ideologue, solipsist, nihilist, first poststructuralist, existentialist, individualist anarchist, proto right libertarian, fascist, and simply insane.

  Benjamin Tucker's magazine Liberty carried Stirner into American individualist anarchism, and its circle dropped natural rights in favor of egoism. Papers such as I, The Ego, and The Egoist followed. The Eagle and the Serpent, published in London from 1898 to 1900, was the most prominent English-language egoist journal. In Europe he influenced Émile Armand, Han Ryner, Renzo Novatore, Miguel Giménez Igualada, and Lev Chernyi. Social anarchists such as Emma Goldman and Federica Montseny drew on him too.

  Adolf Brand, a German Stirnerist, launched Der Eigene in 1896. It was the first ongoing homosexual publication in the world and ran until 1931. Its name came from Stirner's idea of self-ownership. Mackay was an early homosexual activist influenced by Stirner. Dora Marsden founded The Freewoman, and Armand championed free love and the idea of unions of egoists in early 20th century France.

  In the 1970s an American Situationist collective called For Ourselves published The Right To Be Greedy. It advocated a "communist egoism." Post-left anarchists such as Jason McQuinn, Bob Black, and Wolfi Landstreicher took up his critique of ideology. Saul Newman called Stirner a proto-poststructuralist whose "creative nothing" anticipated Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, and Derrida. Derrida himself examined Stirner's spooks in Specters of Marx. Albert Camus gave Stirner a section in The Rebel, but most English editions, including Penguin's, leave it out.

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