Max Stirner

Born Johann Kaspar Schmidt in Beyreuth in 1806, Stirner is one of the most controversial anarchists, by turns celebrated as the seminal anarchist theorist and marginalised as a political philosopher only tangentially related to the anarchist movement. The nineteenth-century commentator E.V. Zenker billed Stirner as the German Proudhon, one of the movement’s two intellectual forerunners; Paul Eltzbacher listed him as one of the seven exponents of anarchist philosophy. His reputation has fared less well over time and recently anarchist-communists have rejected him from anarchism’s history....