## 1. Stirner's Life and Work



Stirner was born Johann Caspar Schmidt on 25 October 1806, the only
child of lower middle class Lutheran parents living in Bayreuth.
"Stirner" was originally a nickname, resulting from a
large forehead, exaggerated by the way he pushed back his hair, and
only later -- in the form of "Max Stirner" --
adopted as a literary pseudonym and his preferred name. His father had
died when Stirner was only six months old, and he was brought up by
his mother (who subsequently remarried) and then later, when his
mother moved from Bayreuth, by an aunt who looked after him in order
that he could continue his schooling at the renowned local Gymnasium.
Stirner subsequently pursued his undergraduate studies, with little
academic distinction, at the universities of Berlin, Erlangen, and
Konigsberg. In Berlin, he is known to have attended three
lecture-series given by G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831): on the
philosophy of religion; on the history of philosophy; and on the
philosophy of "subjective spirit" (which concerns
individual psychology, including thinking and the will).



Towards the end of his university career, Stirner devoted much of his
time to "family affairs", possibly a euphemism for his
mother's deteriorating mental health. In 1832, he returned with
his mother to Berlin, and sought, with qualified success, to train as
a teacher. (Stirner's mother was committed to a mental home in
1837 and she would eventually outlive him by three years.) A period of
private study and irregular work followed, including eighteenth months
working unpaid as an Latin teacher. During this time he married Agnes
Butz (1815-1838), a member of his landlady's family. In
August 1838, Agnes died giving birth to a still-born child. Edgar
Bauer (1820-1886) would later maintain that Stirner had once
told him that, having caught sight of his first wife naked, he was
unable to touch her again.



Between 1839 and 1844 Stirner maintained something of a double life in
Berlin. He obtained a position at a well-regarded private girls'
school, and spent the next five years teaching history and literature,
establishing a reputation as a polite and reliable teacher in the
process. Away from his teaching post, however, Stirner began to
frequent the more avant-garde of Berlin's intellectual haunts.
He used the reading room of the novelist Willibald Alexis
(1798-1871), spent afternoons at the Cafe Stehely, and
from 1841 onwards was a regular visitor to Hippel's wine bar on
the Friedrichstrasse. The last of these was the main meeting place of
"the free", an increasingly bohemian group of teachers,
students, officers, and journalists, under the loose intellectual
leadership of the left-Hegelian Bruno Bauer (1809-1882). The
latter had recently been dismissed from his teaching post at the
University of Bonn, following an official inquiry into the orthodoxy
of his writings on the New Testament. This unconventional group
included Marie Dahnhardt (1818-1902) who became
Stirner's second wife (and the dedicatee of *The Ego and Its
Own*). In this bohemian environment, and despite his calm and
unassuming personal appearance, Stirner gained a reputation for his
hostility to religion, intolerance of moderation, and ability to
provoke fierce argument.



Stirner's earliest published writings date from this time in
Berlin. In addition to some short and unremarkable pieces of
journalism for the *Rheinische Zeitung* and the *Leipziger
Allgemeine Zeitung*, these writings include a knowing review of
Bruno Bauer's anonymous and parodic attack on Hegel in *The
Trumpet of the Last Judgement* (1842), and an article on pedagogy
entitled "The False Principle of Our Education" (1842).
The latter, in particular, adumbrates some of the themes of
Stirner's own later work; for example, contrasting the training
of individuals to an alien calling, on the one hand, with the
cultivation of the predisposition to become "sovereign
characters", on the other. During this period, Stirner is said
to have occasionally alluded to a book that he was working on, but few
of his associates took its existence seriously. The impact of *The
Ego and Its Own* on these left-Hegelian circles was considerable
as well as unexpected. Stirner had begun serious work on the book in
early 1843 and finished it in the middle of 1844. *The Ego and Its
Own* was published by the Leipzig bookseller Otto Wigand
(1795-1870) in an edition of a thousand copies. Although dated
1845 the book was widely available by November of the previous
year.



Measured by the reaction that it produced, *The Ego and Its
Own* might be described as a critical success. The book was widely
reviewed, and attracted attention from well-known figures such as
Bettina von Arnim (1785-1859), the doyenne of the Berlin
literati, and Kuno Fischer (1824-1907), later a distinguished
neo-Kantian historian of philosophy. The book also generated responses
from many of its left-Hegelian targets; Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach
(1804-1872), Moses Hess (1812-1875), Arnold Ruge
(1802-1880), and others, all ventured into print in order to
defend their own views against Stirner's polemic. (Stirner
replied to some of these left-Hegelian rejoinders in an article
entitled "Stirner's Critics" [1845].)



However, *The Ego and Its Own* was neither a popular nor a
financial success. Stirner had left his teaching post shortly before
the book was published, and by 1846 he was reduced to advertising in
the *Vossische Zeitung* for a loan. By then, Stirner had also
squandered much of his second wife's inheritance (losing money
on a failed dairy business), and she left him towards the end of the
same year. Many years later Marie Dahnhardt was traced to England
by Stirner's loyal biographer, the poet and novelist John Henry
Mackay (1864-1933). She refused to meet Mackay in person but
wrote to him characterising Stirner as a very sly man whom she had
neither respected nor loved, and describing their relationship
together as more of a cohabitation than a marriage.



From 1847, Stirner's life was characterised by social isolation
and financial precariousness. He remained detached from contemporary
events -- for example, he seems to have largely ignored the
revolutions of 1848 -- and his daily life was dominated by
domestic routine and economic hardship. Stirner continued to write
intermittently, but commentators have generally found his later work
to be of little independent interest; that is, of little interest
apart from its disputed potential to illuminate *The Ego and Its
Own*. He translated into German some of the economic writings of
Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832) and Adam Smith (1723-1790),
and may have written a series of short journalistic pieces for the
*Journal des oesterreichischen Lloyd*. In 1852, he published a
*History of Reaction* in two parts; a work consisting mainly of
excerpts from other authors -- including Edmund Burke
(1729-1797) and Auguste Comte (1898-1857) -- excerpts
which are not always easily distinguished from his own occasional
commentary. Its intellectual purpose remains uncertain, although there
are some continuities with Stirner's critical account of
revolution in *The Ego and Its Own* (Stepelevich 2021:
161-169). Stirner's main strategy for economic survival in
this period seems to have involved repeatedly changing addresses in
order to evade his creditors, although not quickly enough to avoid two
brief periods in a debtors' prison in 1853 and 1854.



In May 1856, still living in reduced circumstances in Berlin, Stirner
fell into a "nervous fever", seemingly after being stung
in the neck by an insect. Following a brief remission, he died on 25
June (aged 49 years and 8 months). His death went largely unnoticed by
the outside world.



It might look as if there is a stark contrast between the often
melodramatic and provocative tone of Stirner's best-known work,
on the one hand, and the more mundane, sometimes poignant, events of
his own solitary life, on the other. However, commentators often
strive to link his life and philosophical views more closely. John
Henry Mackay, for example, emphasizes the
"ataraxic"dimension of *The Ego and Its Own*, and
portrays Stirner's life as an authentic embodiment of the
emotional detachment that the egoist must cultivate in order to avoid
being enslaved by their own passions and commitments. Even the pathos
of Stirner's death is said to reflect the egoist's refusal
to love life, or fear death, excessively (Mackay 1914: 212). Such
claims are not without interest, but the lack of direct evidence
regarding Stirner's own interior life makes them difficult to
evaluate and endorse.


## 2. *The Ego and Its Own*


### 2.1 Form and Structure



Modern readers hoping to understand *The Ego and Its Own* are
confronted by several obstacles, not least the form, structure, and
central arguments, of Stirner's book.



Much of Stirner's prose -- crowded with aphorisms,
emphases, and hyperbole -- appears calculated to disconcert. Most
striking, perhaps, is his use of word play. Rather than reach a
conclusion through the conventional use of argument, Stirner often
approaches a claim that he wishes to endorse by exploiting words with
related etymologies or formal similarities. For example, he associates
words for property (such as "*Eigentum*") with
words connoting distinctive individual characteristics (such as
"*Eigenheit*") in order to promote the claim that
property is expressive of selfhood. (Stirner's account of
egoistic property -- see 2.4 below -- gives this otherwise
orthodox-looking Hegelian claim a distinctive twist.)



This rejection of conventional forms of intellectual discussion is
linked to Stirner's substantive views about language and
rationality. His distinctive style reflects a conviction that both
language and rationality are human products which have come to
constrain and oppress their creators. Stirner maintains that accepted
meanings and traditional standards of argumentation are underpinned by
a conception of truth as a privileged realm beyond individual control.
As a result, individuals who accept this conception are abandoning a
potential area of creative self-expression in favour of embracing a
subordinate role as servants of truth. In stark contrast, Stirner
insists that the only legitimate restriction on the form of our
language, or on the structure of our arguments, is that they should
serve our individual ends. It is the frequent failure of conventional
meanings and received forms of argument to satisfy his interpretation
of this criterion which underpins the remorselessly idiosyncratic form
of Stirner's prose.



*The Ego and Its Own* has an intelligible, but scarcely
transparent, structure. It is organised around a tripartite account of
human experience, which is first introduced in a description of the
stages of an individual life. The first stage in this developmental
narrative is the *realistic* one of childhood, in which
children are constrained by material and natural forces such as their
parents. Liberation from these constraints is achieved with what
Stirner calls the self-discovery of mind, as children find the means
to outwit those extrenal forces in their own determination and
cunning. The resulting *idealistic* stage of youth, however,
contains new internal sources of constraint, as individuals once more
become enslaved, this time to the spiritual forces of conscience and
reason. Only with the adulthood of *egoism* do individuals
escape both material (external) and spiritual (internal) constraints,
learning to value their personal satisfaction above all other
considerations.



Stirner portrays this dialectic of individual growth as an analogue of
historical development, and it is a tripartite account of the latter
which structures the remainder of the book. Human history is reduced
to three successive epochs of: realism (the ancient, or pre-Christian,
world); idealism (the modern, or Christian, world); and egoism (the
future world). Part One of *The Ego and Its Own* is devoted to
the first two of those historical epochs, providing a negative
critique of the past. And Part Two is concerned with the third of
these epochs, providing a positive account of the future.



In both individual and historical forms, the second stage of this
tripartite developmental narrative is presented as a negation of the
first, and the third stage, in turn, as the negation of that negation.
The triadic structure of this narrative has been read as confirming
Stirner's Hegelian formation and commitments (Stepelevich:
1985), but can also be seen as embodying a self-conscious parody of
Hegelianism. In this context, Stirner has plausibly been understood as
offering both a provocation and a knowing attempt at humour, utilising
a dialectical structure in order to advance his own anti-Hegelian
position (De Ridder: 2008). There is little doubt about the
provocation, but assessing Stirner's seriousness is a harder
task.


### 2.2 The Ancient and Modern Worlds



Part One of *The Ego and Its Own* is backward-looking and
negative. It is backward-looking in that it is concerned with the
ancient and modern worlds rather than with the future. And it is
negative in that its primary aim is to demonstrate the failure of
modernity to escape from the very religious modes of thought which it
claims to have outgrown. The bulk of Stirner's genealogical
account is devoted to the modern epoch, and the ancient world is only
discussed insofar as it contributes to the genesis of modernity. In
both cases, however, the majority of his examples are taken from the
cultural and intellectual spheres. Cumulatively these examples are
meant, not only to undermine historical narratives which portray the
modern development of humankind as the progressive realisation of
freedom, but also to support an account of individuals in the modern
world as increasingly oppressed by the spiritual. For Stirner, the
subordination of the individual to spirit -- in any of its guises
-- counts as a problematic form of religious servitude.



Stirner's account of the historical development of modernity
largely revolves around a single event, the Reformation. He attempts
to show that, from the perspective of the individual, the movement
from Catholic to Protestant hegemony is not a liberating one, but
instead constitutes both an extension and intensification of the
domination of spirit. The Reformation extends, rather than contracts,
the sphere of religious control over the individual because it refuses
to recognise the distinction between the spiritual and the sensuous.
Rather than preventing priests from marrying, for example,
Protestantism makes marriage religious, thereby extending the sphere
of the spiritual to include the sensuous. The Reformation also
intensifies, rather than relaxes, the bond between individuals and
religion. The more inward faith of Protestantism, for example,
establishes a perpetual internal conflict between natural impulses and
religious conscience. In a typically vivid and combative metaphor,
Stirner describes this internal conflict in the individual -- in
which natural impulses battle with religious conscience -- as
analogous to the struggle between the populace and the secret police
in the contemporary body politic.



Stirner's claim that the modern world reproduces, rather than
abolishes, religious modes of thought provides the opportunity for a
sustained attack on the writings of his left-Hegelian contemporaries.
Ludwig Feuerbach, in particular, is singled out for failing to
overcome the subordination of the individual to spirit.



The centrality of the critique of Feuerbach to Stirner's project
is clear from the form of *The Ego and Its Own* which embodies
a structural parody of Feuerbach's best-known work. Where the
two halves of Feuerbach's *Das Wesen des Christentums*
had been entitled *God* and *Man* -- with the first
attacked and the second celebrated -- the two corresponding parts
of Stirner's opus are named *Man* and *I*. More
substantively, Stirner seeks to challenge the contemporary verdict of
progressives concerning Feuerbach's achievement. Stirner
maintains that the contemporary celebration of Feuerbach for having
completed the critique of religion, is not merely mistaken but nearer
the opposite of the truth. Far from undermining religion, the
Feuerbachian problematic is said to reproduce and amplify its central
features.



For Feuerbach, the primary error of Christianity is that it takes
human predicates and projects them into another world as if they
constitute an independent being. He sees religious belief as a
necessary step in the progress of humankind to self-understanding.
More precisely, it is through transformative criticism --
recovering the correct relation of subject and predicate from its
inversion in Christianity -- that we first come to understand
what human nature is. Moreover, Feuerbach maintains that, once
liberated from their otherworldly form, these essential human
characteristics -- and especially perhaps our love for others
-- would quickly come to form the basis of the unalienated social
and political life of the future. This emancipatory ambition also
helps to clarify Feuerbach's insistence that he should be seen
as a friend, and not an enemy, of religion; in particular, he sought
not to destroy Christianity, but to liberate its content from
otherworldly forms. This claim is also at the heart of his distinctive
-- and perhaps idiosyncratic -- denial that he was an
atheist. Feuerbach maintains that true atheism requires the rejection
not only of God as subject, but also of those predicates -- love,
wisdom, justice, and so on -- traditionally associated with
divinity.



Stirner might be said to pick up this -- perhaps idiosyncratic
-- characterisation of "true atheism" and run with
it. Stirner maintains that religion, properly understood, is
characterised by the subordination of the individual to
"spirit" in any of its guises. Consequently, the rejection
of God as a transcendental subject leaves the essential character and
failing of religion intact. Feuerbach's perfectionist
problematic, Stirner remarks, might have altered "*the
tinsel*" (the divine subject) but it leaves "the main
thing" (the divine predicates) unchanged (56). (Page references
in parenthesis are to the 1995 Cambridge edition of *The Ego and
Its Own* cited in the Bibliography below.) The sacred is allowed
to remain, if not as God, then as "*Man with a capital
M*" in Byington's inspired English rendering of
Stirner's "*Der* Mensch". In short, rather
than describing human nature as it is, Feuerbach is said to have
deified a prescriptive account of what being human involves. As a
result, the real kernel of religion, the positing of an "essence
over me" (46), has been left intact. Indeed, Stirner suggests
that Feuerbach's achievement was to have effected a
"change of masters" (55) which actually made the tyranny
of the divine over the individual even more complete. More complete
because it extends and intensifies domination. It extends domination
because this new deity is no longer the preserve of the faithful, but
can possess everyone, believers and unbelievers alike. And it
intensifies domination because the scrutiny of our own conscience is
much harder to evade than that of a transcendental subject that a
flutters "over our heads as a dove" (86).



Stirner extends this critique to the work of all the left-Hegelians,
including those with whom he had associated in Berlin. Individual
left-Hegelians disagree about the content of human nature. Thus for
"political liberals" like Arnold Ruge human nature is
identified with citizenship, for "social liberals" like
Moses Hess human nature is identified with labour, and for
"humane liberals" like Bruno Bauer human nature is
identified with critical activity. However, notwithstanding those
differences, all these left-hegelians reproduce the basic Feuerbachian
error: separating the individual from their human essence, and then
setting that essence above the individual as something to be striven
for. In contrast, Stirner maintains that because it has no universal
or prescriptive content, human nature cannot ground any claim about
how we ought to live. His own intellectual project--which he
describes as an attempt to rehabilitate the prosaic and mortal self,
the "un-man"(124) for whom the notion of a calling is
alien--is intended as a radical break with the work of these
contemporaries.



It might seem obvious that Stirner subscribes to a resolutely
anti-perfectionist position here. However, this reading has been
challenged. Stirner certainly rejects what might be called
"essentialist perfectionism"; that is, those ethical
theories which value certain characteristics of the individual
precisely because they realise some aspect of human nature. However,
he himself continues to embrace a character ideal, a picture of a
self-ruling individual whose perfection is valuable apart from any
happiness or pleasure that it might bring. The Stirnerian egoist must
not only avoid submission to external powers, but must also cultivate
a kind of emotional detachment towards their own thoughts and
feelings, ensuring that the latter do not subjugate the egoist, or
make the egoist an instrument of their own realisation. In short, the
suggestion here is that an "anti-essentialist
perfectionism" survives in this ideal of character, in
Stirner's celebration of the "un-man" and the egoist
(Leopold 2019).


### 2.3 The Egoistic Future



Part Two of *The Ego and Its Own* is forward-looking and
positive. It is forward-looking in that it is concerned with the
egoistic future rather than with the ancient or modern worlds. And it
is positive in that it aims to establish the possibility that
Stirner's contemporaries can be liberated from the tyranny of
religion.



Stirner's account of the developing historical relationship
between the individual and society is advanced in a series of
parallels which are designed to portray egoism as the embodiment of a
more advanced civilisation. At one point, he takes the early modern
idea of a social contract, in which progress traditionally consists of
a move from an atomistic state of nature to a communal civil society,
and neatly inverts it. It is membership of society, and not individual
isolation, Stirner suggests, which is humankind's "state
of nature" (271); that is, an early and problematic stage of
development whose inadequacies are, in due course, outgrown.
Elsewhere, he describes the developing relationship between the
individual and society as analogous to that between a mother and her
child. As the individual (the child) develops a mature preference for
a less suffocating environment, they must throw off the claims of
society (the mother) which seeks to maintain them in a subordinate
position. In both cases, Stirner draws the lesson that the individual
must move from social to egoistic relationships in order to escape
subjection.



What is meant by "egoism", however, is not always clear.
Stirner is occasionally portrayed as a psychological egoist, that is,
as a proponent of the descriptive claim that all (intentional) actions
are motivated by a concern for the self-interest of the agent.
However, this characterisation of Stirner's position can be
questioned. Not least, *The Ego and Its Own* is structured
around the opposition between egoistic and non-egoistic modes of
experience. Indeed, he appears to hold that non-egoistic modes of
experience have predominated historically (in the epochs of realism
and idealism). Moreover, at one point, Stirner appears explicitly to
consider adopting the explanatory stance of psychological egoism only
to reject it. In a discussion of a young woman who sacrifices her love
for another in order to respect the wishes of her family, Stirner
remarks that an observer might be tempted to maintain that selfishness
has still prevailed in this case since the woman clearly preferred the
wishes of her family to the attractions of her suitor. However,
Stirner rejects this hypothetical explanation, insisting that,
provided "the pliable girl were conscious of having left her
self-will unsatisfied and humbly subjected herself to a higher
power" (197), we should see her actions as governed by piety
rather than egoism.



It would also be a mistake to think of Stirner as advocating a
normative proposition about the value of self-interested action as
ordinarily understood. Stirnerian egoism needs to be distinguished
from an individual's pursuit of conventional self-interest. In
*The Ego and Its Own*, Stirner discusses the important example
of an avaricious individual who sacrifices everything in pursuit of
material riches. Such an individual is clearly conventionally
self-interested (they act only to enrich themselves) but it is an
egoism which Stirner rejects as one-sided and narrow. Stirner's
reason for rejecting this form of egoism is instructive. He suggests
that the avaricious individual has become enslaved to a single end,
and that enslavement is incompatible with egoism properly
understood.



Stirnerian egoism is then perhaps best thought of, not in terms of the
pursuit of conventional self-interest, but rather as a variety of
individual self-rule or autonomy. Egoism properly understood is to be
identified with what Stirner calls "ownness
[*Eigenheit*]", a type of autonomy which is incompatible
with any suspension, whether voluntary or forced, of individual
judgement. "I am my own", Stirner writes, "only when
I am master of myself, instead of being mastered ... by anything
else" (153). As previously noted, this Stirnerian ideal of
self-rule has external and internal dimensions, requiring not only
that we avoid subordinating ourselves (externally) to others, but also
that we escape (internally) being "dragged along" (56) by
our own appetites. In short, Stirner not only rejects the legitimacy
of any subordination to the will of another but also recommends that
individuals cultivate an ideal of emotional detachment towards their
own appetites and projects.



Judged against this account of egoism, characterisations of Stirner as
a "nihilist"--in the sense that he rejects all
normative judgement--would also appear to be mistaken. The
popular but doubtful description of Stirner as a
"nihilist" is encouraged by his explicit rejection of
morality. Morality, on Stirner's account, involves the positing
of obligations to behave in certain fixed ways towards others. As a
result, he rejects morality as incompatible with egoism properly
understood. However, this rejection of morality is not grounded in the
rejection of values as such, but in the affirmation of what might be
called the non-moral good of autonomy. That is, Stirner allows that
there are actions and desires which, although not moral in his sense
(because they do not involve obligations to others), are nonetheless
to be assessed positively. Stirner is clearly committed to the
non-nihilistic view that certain kinds of character and modes of
behaviour (namely autonomous individuals and actions) are to be valued
above all others. His conception of morality is, in this respect, a
narrow one, and his rejection of the legitimacy of moral claims is not
to be confused with a denial of the propriety of all normative or
ethical judgement. There is, as a result, no inconsistency in
Stirner's frequent use of an explicitly evaluative vocabulary,
as when, for example, he praises the egoist for having the
"courage" (265) to lie, or condemns the
"weakness" (197) of the individual who succumbs to
pressure from their family.



Two features of Stirner's position emerge as fundamental. First,
he values "ownness" not as one good amongst many, but as
the most important good, a good which trumps all others. Second, he
adopts an account of self-rule which is incompatible with the
existence of any legitimate obligations to others, even those which an
individual has voluntarily undertaken; thereby rejecting perhaps the
most familiar (contractual) way of reconciling individual autonomy
with the existence of binding obligations. In short, Stirner appears
to value individual self-rule above all else, and he interprets that
individual self-rule in a stringent and idiosyncratic manner.


### 2.4 Some Consequences of Egoism



The consequences of Stirner's position look extreme and
far-reaching. As the example of morality already suggests, egoists are
likely to find themselves in conflict with some cherished social
institutions and practices. Stirner consistently associates
(non-egoistic) society with relationships of "belonging",
which he treats as involving the subjugation of individuals. For
example, he maintains that "the forming of family ties binds a
man" (102). Stirner never seriously considers the possibility
that belonging might, at least potentially or in some cases, have more
positive associations; for example, of being at home or of feeling
secure. Confronted with the conflict between egoism and
"society", Stirner is not prompted to re-examine his
commitment to, or understanding of, self-rule, but instead confidently
denies the legitimacy of those conventional institutions and
practices. Two examples of this radical response may noted here.



On Stirner's account, there is a necessary antipathy between the
egoistic individual and the state. This inevitable hostility is based
on the conflict between Stirner's conception of autonomy and any
obligation to obey the law. "Own will and the state", he
writes, "are powers in deadly hostility, between which no
'perpetual peace' is possible" (175). Since
self-rule is incompatible with, and valued more highly than, any
obligation to obey the law, Stirner rejects the legitimacy of
political obligation. Note that this rejection stands irrespective of
the foundation of that political obligation, and whatever the form of
the state. "Every state", Stirner insists, "is a
despotism, be the despot one or many" (175). Even in the
hypothetical case of a direct democracy in which a collective decision
had been made unanimously, Stirner denies that the egoist would be
bound by the result. To be bound today by "my will of
yesterday", he maintains, would be to turn my
"creature", that is "a particular expression of
will", into my "commander"; it would be to freeze my
will, and Stirner denies that "because I was a fool yesterday I
must remain such" (175).



Promise-keeping is another early victim of this commitment to, and
understanding of, self-rule. Stirner associates the institution of
promising with illegitimate constraint, since the requirement that
duly made promises be kept is incompatible with his understanding of
individual autonomy. Stirner rejects any general obligation to keep
promises as just another attempt to bind the individual. The egoist,
he suggests, must embrace the heroism of the lie, and be willing to
break even his own word "in order to determine himself instead
of being determined" (210). Note that Stirner's enthusiasm
for lying excludes those who break their word in the service of some
larger goal -- as Luther, for example, became unfaithful to his
monastic vows for God's sake -- and is reserved only for
those individuals who are willing to break their word for their own
sake.



As well as a negative account of the institutions and practices that
egoists must reject as incompatible with autonomy, *The Ego and Its
Own* also contains some positive suggestions about the possible
shape of egoistic relationships which do not conflict with individual
self-rule. In particular, Stirner provides a brief sketch of what he
calls the "union of egoists [*Verein von
Egoisten*]" (161).



The egoistic future is said to consist not of wholly isolated
individuals but rather in relationships of "uniting", that
is, in impermanent connections between individuals who themselves
remain independent and self-determining. The central feature of the
resulting "union of egoists" is that it does not involve
the subordination of the individual. The union is "a son and
co-worker" (273) of autonomy, a constantly shifting alliance
which enables individuals to unite without loss of sovereignty,
without swearing allegiance to anyone else's "flag"
(210). This union of egoists constitutes a purely instrumental
association whose good is solely the advantage that the individuals
concerned may derive for the pursuit of their individual goals; there
are no shared final ends and the association is not valued in itself.
In his reply to "Stirner's Critics", he imagines two
pleasingly familiar street scenes to illustrate this model of egoistic
union: in the first, children happen upon each other and spontaneously
engage in the "comradeship of play
[*Spielkameradschaft*]"; and, in the second, Moses Hess
(one of the critics in question) bumps into friends before all decide
to adjourn for a drink, not out of loyalty, but in the expectation of
pleasure (Stirner 1914: 295-6).



Stirner sometimes seems torn as how best to elucidate this basic
account of egoistic social relations. At least, in *The Ego and Its
Own*, his elaboration of egoistic relations can appear to
equivocate between: on the one hand, downplaying the social and
psychological impact of a shift to egoistic relationships, and on the
other hand, acknowledging and defending the dramatic and perturbing
consequences of such a move.



In the first, and less predominant, of these moods, Stirner strives to
moderate the suggestion that his views might have radical and
unforeseen consequences. More precisely, he suggests that certain
familiar and worthwhile relationships -- such as
"love" -- can continue into the egoistic future. This
suggestion is presumably aimed at making that egoistic future appear
less disruptive and more attractive, not least to those attached to
these familiar and worthwhile relationships.



That said, it is far from certain that all of the relevant
relationships would survive intact from their reincarnation in
egoistic form. Consider, for example, Stirner's contrast between
two different kinds of love: the "bad case" where
"ownness" is sacrificed, and the good case of egoistic
love in which self-rule is retained. Egoistic love allows the
individual to deny themself something in order to enhance the pleasure
of another, but only because their own pleasure is enhanced as a
result. The object of egoistic love, in other words, remains the
individual themself. The egoist will not sacrifice their autonomy and
interests to another, but rather loves only as long as "love
makes me happy" (258). At one point, Stirner characterises this
relationship as one in which the individual "enjoys" the
other (258). The description is a revealing one, since enjoying
another person and loving them would appear to be rather different
matters. Loving another person in the conventional (and non-egoistic)
sense might be thought to include the desire to promote the welfare of
that person, even when it is not in our interests, or when it
conflicts with our own wants and happiness. In this respect, it stands
at some distance from Stirner's account of egoistic love. The
point here is not a terminological one--Stirner rightly cares
little whether we call egoistic love "love" and
"hence stick to the old sound" (261) or whether we invent
a new vocabulary--but rather that a world without this experience
would be an unfamiliar and impoverished one. Stirner has not obviously
succeeded in establishing that this particular familiar and worthwhile
relationship would survive reestablishment on egoistic premises. (For
a more positive verdict, see Cleary 2015.)



In the second, and more predominant, of these moods, Stirner
celebrates the radical and unfamiliar consequences of adopting an
egoistic order. Indeed, in places, he seems to revel in the clam that
his views have startling consequences from which few of his readers
will take any solace. This is one of the sources of the melodramatic
and provocative tone that permeates many parts of *The Ego and Its
Own*.



Stirner describes the appropriate relation between the egoist and
their objects -- which include, of course, other persons as well
as things -- as a property relation. The egoist properly stands
in a relation of "ownership" to the wider world. This
notion of "egoistic property" is not to be confused with
more familiar juridical concepts of ownership (such as private
property or collective ownership). These more familiar forms of
property rest on notions of right, and involve claims to exclusivity
or constraints on use, which Stirner rejects. Egoistic property is
rather constituted by the "unlimited dominion" (223) of
individuals over the world, by which Stirner appears to mean that
there are no moral constraints on how an individual might relate to
these persons and things. Stirner sometimes describes the resulting
association between people as involving relationships "of
utility, of use" (263). The egoist, he suggests, views others as
"nothing but--my food, even as I am fed upon and turned to
use by you" (263). Stirner embraces the stark consequences of
this rejection of any general obligation towards others, insisting,
for example, that the egoist does not renounce "even the power
over life and death" (282). Over the course of the book, Stirner
variously declines to condemn the officer's widow who strangles
her child (281), the man who treats his sister "as wife
also" (45), and the murderer who no longer fears his act as a
"wrong" (169). In a world in which "we owe each
other nothing" (263), it seems that acts of infanticide, incest,
and murder, might all turn out to be justified.



At one point, Stirner acknowledges that few readers of *The Ego and
Its Own* will draw any comfort from this vision of an egoistic
future, but insists that the welfare of this audience is not of any
interest to him. Indeed, Stirner suggests that, if he had been
motivated by a concern for others, then he would have had to conceal
rather than propagate his ideas. As it is, Stirner maintains that even
if he had believed that these ideas would lead to the "bloodiest
wars and the fall of many generations" (263) he would still have
disseminated them.


## 3. Stirner's Influence



At the time of his death, Stirner's brief period of notoriety
was long over, his book had been out of print for several years, and
there was little sign that his life or work might have any longer term
impact.



However, in the years since, *The Ego and Its Own* has been
translated into at least eight languages, and appeared in over one
hundred editions. Stirner and his work have been associated with a
huge variety of causes, including many of which he would have been
unaware. Stirner has been variously characterised as: a left-Hegelian;
a petit-bourgeois ideologue; a solipsist; a nihilist; the first
poststructuralist; an existentialist; an individualist anarchist; a
proto right libertarian; a fascist; and as simply insane (Blumenfeld
2018: 5-10). Interest in the connections between Stirner and
other thinkers -- both philosophical affinity and historical
influence -- are also strikingly varied. For example, at the
beginning of the twentieth century, Stirner was frequently portrayed
as a precursor of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), as having
anticipated, if not influenced -- it is far from certain that
Nietzsche had read any Stirner -- both the style and substance of
Nietzsche's work (Carus 1914: 74-99). In the 1960s and
early 1970s, Stirner was rediscovered as a forerunner of
existentialism, whose anti-essentialist concept of the self as a
'creative nothing' was portrayed as having affinities with
the notion of human nature employed by Jean-Paul Sartre
(1905-1980) (Paterson 1971). More recently, Stirner has been
identified as a nascent poststructuralist; linked not least with
Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), who also rejects the idea of a
universal human nature, employs a genealogical critique of humanist
discourses of power and identity, and opposes various forms of
state-centric thought (Newman 2009, and Feiten 2019). These parallels
can be plausible and interesting, although the sceptic might wonder
whether they don't track intellectual fashion as much as they
illuminate aspects of Stirner's own thought.



Stirner's most significant historical influence is perhaps
threefold.



First, *The Ego and Its Own* had a destructive impact on the
confidence and coherence of Left-Hegelianism. Stirner's
insistence that his radical Hegelian contemporaries had failed to
break with religious modes of thought prompted most of the leading
left-Hegelians to defend their own work in public against this attack.
In perhaps the most important of these replies, Feuerbach -- who
appeared defensive and irritated (he suspected Stirner of trying to
make his name at Feuerbach's own expense) -- was widely
seen as struggling to maintain a besieged and outdated position. Bruno
Bauer also offered a critical response, seeking to defend his own
philosophy of self-consciousness against what he saw as
Stirner's inadequate form of subjectivity (Moggach and de
Ridder, 2013). Stirner replied directly to three of these
left-Hegelian reviews -- the defence of Bauer's
"humane liberalism" by "Szeliga" (the
pseudonym of Franz Zychlinski (1816-1900)); the defence of
socialism by Moses Hess; and the defence of Feuerbach by Feuerbach
himself -- in an article entitled "Stirner's
Critics" (1845). In this confident rejoinder, Stirner reiterated
some of the central themes of *The Ego and Its Own* and
clarified the character of his own commitment to egoism. Stirner may
also have provided a final reply to contemporary critics in a
pseudonymous article entitled "The Philosophical
Reactionaries", in which the author responds to a young Kuno
Fischer. (The caution is needed since the identification of "G.
Edward" as Max Stirner is plausible but not incontrovertible.)




Second, Stirner's work played a related and significant role in
the evolution of the thought of Karl Marx. The latter was a
contemporary associate of Bauer and his entourage, and was mentioned
indirectly in a footnote in *The Ego and Its Own.*
(Stirner's footnote treats Marx as a minor, if radical,
Feuerbachian.) Between 1845 and 1847, Marx collaborated with Friedrich
Engels (1820-1895) on a group of manuscripts now usually called
*The German Ideology*, which included a fierce and sustained
attack on their erstwhile philosophical contemporaries. Most of these
texts were not published at the time, and it was 1932 before this
critical engagement with the work of Bauer, Feuerbach, and Stirner,
appeared fully in print. The account of Stirner contained in the
so-called *The German Ideology* takes up over three hundred
pages of the published text -- abridged editions have been known
to omit much of this dense but fascinating material -- and,
although Marx is remorselessly critical of Stirner's position,
it scarcely follows that *The Ego and Its Own* was without
influence on the former's ideas. Not least, Stirner's book
appears to have been decisive: in motivating Marx's break with
the work of Feuerbach (whose considerable influence on many of
Marx's earlier writings is readily apparent); in making Marx
reconsider the role that concepts of human nature should play in
social and political philosophy; and in forcing Marx to think much
more clearly about whether, and in what ways, communism should be
individualistic.



Third, and finally, Stirner's best-known work later became one
of the founding texts of the political tradition of individualist
anarchism. The affinity between Stirner and the anarchist tradition
lies in his endorsement of the claim that the state is an illegitimate
institution. His elaboration of this claim is an interesting and
distinctive one (Leopold 2006). For Stirner, a state can never be
legitimate, since there is a necessary conflict between individual
self-rule and the obligation to obey the law (which stirner equates
with the legitimacy of the state). Given that individual self-rule
trumps any competing consideration, Stirner concludes that the demands
of the state are not binding on the individual. However, he does not
think that individuals have, as a result, any general obligation to
oppose and attempt to eliminate the state (insofar as this is within
their power). Rather the individual should decide in each particular
case whether or not to go along with the state's demands. Only
in cases where there is a conflict between the autonomy of the egoist
and the demands of the state, does Stirner recommend seeking to evade
the requirements of law. That said, whilst individuals have no duty to
overthrow the state, Stirner does think that the state will eventually
collapse as a result of the wider spread of egoism. The cumulative
effect of a growing egoistic disrespect for law, he suggests, would be
to "scuttle" the "ship of state" (54).
Anarchists influenced by Stirner's individualism and his
suspicion of the state can be found in many countries. In Great
Britain, for example, his ideas influenced Dora Marsden
(1882-1960), and her journals *The New Freewoman* and
*The Egoist*. In America, James L Walker (1845-1904),
author of *The Philosophy of Egoism* was interested in, and
influenced by, Stirner's thought, although his best-known
anarchist admirers in America were in the circle around Benjamin R.
Tucker (1854-1939) and the remarkable journal *Liberty*
(founded in 1881). (For a defence of the claim that Stirner, Marsden,
Tucker, and others share a theoretical framework, see Welsh 2010.)
However close the connections here, it has often been individualist
anarchists who have proved most effective at keeping Stirner's
ideas available, producing and distributing many of the editions and
translations of his work.



Stirner is unlikely to have regretted these various disputes about the
nature and influence of *The Ego and Its Own*. In considering
some diverse interpretative accounts of the Bible, Stirner declines to
adjudicate between the judgement of the child who plays with the book,
the Inca emperor Atahualpa (c.1502-1533) who threw it away when
it failed to speak to him, the priest who praises it as the word of
God, and the critic who dissects it as a purely human invention. The
plurality of interpretations of his own work might similarly have
amused Stirner and encouraged him in his view that there could be no
legitimate constraints on the meaning of a text. Stirner certainly
appears relaxed about the proper interpretation of his own work. He
insists that he wrote only to procure an existence in the world for
his thoughts, adding that what subsequently happened to those ideas
"is your affair and does not trouble me" (263).