Stirner, Max (1806–56)

Max Stirner is the author of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and Its Own), first published in Germany in 1844 and best known for its idiosyncrasies of argument and idiom. Stirner condemns modernity as entrenched in religious modes of thought and envisages a positive egoistic future in which individuals are liberated from the tyranny of those ideas and social arrangements which restrict autonomy. The Ego and Its Own was an impulse to the decline of the Hegelian left as a coherent intellectual movement, and played an important role in the genesis of Marxism; Stirner has also been variously portrayed as a precursor of Nietzsche, an individualist anarchist and a forerunner of existentialism.