Max Stirner
German post-Hegelian philosopher (1806–1856), pseudonym of Johann Kaspar Schmidt, born in Bayreuth, a schoolteacher for girls in Berlin and a peripheral member of the circle of radical young Hegelians known as 'The Free Ones' (Die Freien), where he crossed paths with Bruno Bauer and a young Friedrich Engels, though he never became a central figure within it. His only major work, The Ego and Its Own (1844), is one of the most radical and corrosive texts in all nineteenth-century philosophy: in it he carries the Hegelian Left's critique to its ultimate conclusions, denouncing that behind all the abstract 'spooks' demanding sacrifice and submission from the concrete individual — God, Humanity, the Nation, the State, even supposedly emancipatory concepts such as Feuerbach's 'Man' or nascent socialism's 'society' — there always lurks a new form of ideological domination, a new absolute demanding the obedience of the real, singular human being. Against all this, Stirner proposes 'consistent egoism': only the unique, concrete and irreplaceable individual — 'the Ego' — is real; all general ideas, however noble they may seem, are abstract constructs that must be unmasked and 'devoured' in order to reclaim one's own sovereignty. He proposes not a new morality but the dissolution of all universal morality in favour of the radical affirmation of individual will, and conceives of property not as a legal right but as whatever each person has the effective power to use and dispose of. The work received little attention during the author's lifetime, who died in utter poverty, but exerted a decisive — though often denied or minimised — posthumous influence on Nietzsche, and is regarded today as one of the most direct precursors of individualist anarchism and of certain existentialist currents.