Max Stirner
God, humanity, the state and morality are mere ideas that haunt us – nothing is real except the unique individual and what it can call its own.
Placement
Young Hegelian provocateur: God, humanity and the state are “spooks” – only the unique individual and what it owns remain.
Key ideas
- The unique one
- Egoism
- Spooks (fixed ideas)
Teachers: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Influence
Influenced by 1
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel studied with
studied with ✓
Stirner studied in Berlin from 1826 to 1828 and attended three of Hegel’s lecture series – on the philosophy of religion, the history of philosophy and the philosophy of subjective spirit. Lecture attendance, no closer contact is known. SEP “Max Stirner”; J. H. Mackay, Max Stirner. Sein Leben und sein Werk (1898)
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel › 1770–1831
Criticism
Criticized by 1
Karl Marx
criticised by
In ‘Saint Max’, the longest part of The German Ideology (1845–46), Marx and Engels mocked Stirner’s Unique One as a petty-bourgeois abstraction from real social relations. K. Marx & F. Engels, Die deutsche Ideologie (1845–46; publ. 1932), vol. I, part III “Sankt Max”; SEP “Max Stirner”
Evidence: AI draft
Karl Marx › 1818–1883
Criticizes 1
Ludwig Feuerbach
criticised
Stirner charged that Feuerbach had merely replaced God with ‘Man’, another sacred spook set above the individual (The Ego and Its Own, 1844). M. Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1844), Part I; SEP “Max Stirner”
Evidence: AI draft
Ludwig Feuerbach › 1804–1872
Works
Setting one’s cause on nothing: against God, humanity and every fixed idea.
Position
Stirner pushed the Young Hegelian critique of religion to its limit. Feuerbach had dissolved God into the essence of humanity – but “humanity”, “morality”, “the state” and “society”, Stirner argued, are only new gods, “spooks” or fixed ideas to which the individual is sacrificed. Against them he set the “unique one”: the concrete, finite self that recognizes no cause above itself and treats everything, ideas included, as its own property. Instead of states and parties he imagined voluntary unions of egoists. Marx and Engels attacked him at length in The German Ideology; later he was claimed by individualist anarchists and read as a forerunner of Nietzsche and existentialism.
Life & context
Max Stirner, born Johann Caspar Schmidt in Bayreuth in 1806, studied in Berlin, where he heard Hegel, as well as in Erlangen and Königsberg. He taught at a private girls’ school in Berlin and joined the Young Hegelians known as “the Free”. After his one major book appeared in 1844 he lived in poverty, failed in business and was twice imprisoned for debt. He died in Berlin in 1856.
Further main works
- The False Principle of Our Education (1842)
- Stirner’s Critics (1845)
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