Max Stirner

Max Stirner (1806 to 1856), born Johann Caspar Schmidt in Bayreuth, is the author of Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (1844), usually known in English as The Ego and Its Own. Stirner was originally a nickname, given for his large forehead, and he later adopted it as a literary pseudonym. His book mounts a sweeping attack on the modern world as increasingly dominated by religious modes of thought and oppressive social institutions, and it sketches, much more briefly, a radical egoistic alternative in which individual autonomy might flourish. He had attended Hegel's lectures in Berlin, and his work had an immediate and destructive effect on the left-Hegelian movement, played a part in the intellectual development of Karl Marx, and later influenced the political tradition of individualist anarchism.