Max Stirner

Independent activity 1806–1856 ○ Illness

Philosopher whose The Ego and Its Own called state, society and humanity “spooks” and turned on Hegel and the Young Hegelians alike

Born Johann Caspar Schmidt at Bayreuth in 1806, he took his pen name from a nickname for his high forehead. He heard Hegel at Berlin but found no state post and taught at a private girls' school; from 1841 he frequented the Freien, the circle of the Bauer brothers that the young Engels also joined. In The Ego and Its Own (1844) he declared the state, property as a right and society itself mere "spooks" in the mind, turning chiefly against Feuerbach and Bauer. Marx and Engels answered him at length in the "Saint Max" chapter of The German Ideology. He is often counted a forerunner of anarchism, though anarchists always disputed the claim. He translated Smith's Wealth of Nations into German and died poor in Berlin in 1856.

Also known as: Johann Caspar Schmidt · Johann Kaspar Schmidt