by subjecting capital to the natural law of competition, thus bringing the price of its own use down to cost". Max Stirner Johann Kaspar Schmidt, better known as Max Stirner (the pen name he adopted from a schoolyard nickname he had acquired as a child because of his high brow, Stirn in German), was a German philosopher who ranks as one of the literary fathers of nihilism, existentialism, post-modernism and anarchism, especially of individualist anarchism. Stirner's main work is The Ego and Its Own, also known as The Ego and His Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum in German, which translates literally as The Only One and his Property). This work was first published in 1844 in Leipzig, and has since appeared in numerous editions and translations. Authors, philosophers and artists have cited, quoted or otherwise referred to Stirner. They include Albert Camus in The Rebel (the section on Stirner is omitted from the majority of English editions including Penguin's), Benjamin Tucker, Dora Marsden, Emma Goldman, Georg Brandes, Rudolf Steiner, John Cowper Powys, Émile Armand, Han Ryner, Renzo Novatore, Karl Marx, Robert Anton Wilson, Italian individualist anarchist Frank Brand, Russian-American philosopher Ayn Rand, Bob Black, antiartist Marcel Duchamp, several writers of the Situationist International, and Max Ernst, who titled a 1925 painting L'unique et sa propriété. The Ego and Its Own has seen periodic revivals of popular, political and academic interest, based around widely divergent translations and interpretations—emphasizing psychological or political views. Today, many ideas associated with post-left anarchy's criticism of ideology and uncompromising individualism are clearly related to Stirner's. Individualist feminism claims him as a pioneer, since his objection to any absolute concept also counts gender roles as "spooks". His ideas were also adopted by post-anarchism, with Saul Newman largely agreeing with many of Stirner's criticisms of classical anarchism, including his rejection of revolution and essentialism. Egoism Stirner's philosophy, sometimes called "egoism", is the most extreme form of IA. He was a Hegelian philosopher whose "name appears with familiar regularity in historically-orientated surveys of anarchist thought as one of the earliest and best-known exponents of IA." Stirner does not recommend that the individual try to eliminate the state but simply exploit it to further the individual's interests. He says that the egoist rejects pursuit of devotion to "a great idea, a good cause, a doctrine, a system, a lofty calling", saying that the egoist has no political calling but