* * * *

Caspar Schmidt--for this is Stirner's real name[1]--was born at
Baireuth on the 25th October, 1806, and, like Strauss, Feuerbach,
Bruno Bauer, and other thinkers of the same kind, devoted his time to
theological and philosophic studies. After completing these, he took
the modest position of a teacher in a high school, and in a girls'
school in Berlin. In 1844 there appeared, under the pseudonym "Max
Stirner," a book called _The Individual_ _and his Property_, with the
dedication which, under these circumstances, is touching: "To my
Darling, Marie Doehnhardt." The book appeared like a meteor; it caused
for a short time a great deal of talk, and then sank into oblivion for
ten years, till the growing stream of Anarchist thought again came
back to it in more recent times. A _History of the Reaction_, written
after the year 1848, is esteemed as a good piece of historical work;
and, besides this, Caspar Schmidt also produced translations of Say,
Adam Smith, and other English economists. On the 26th of June, 1856,
he ended his life, poor in external circumstances, rich in want and
bitterness. That is all that we know of the personality of the man who
has raised the idea of personality to a Titanic growth that has
oppressed the world.

[1] Stirner's chief work, _The Individual and his Property_
(_Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum_, Leipsic, 1845), has been
reprinted by P. Reclam, at Leipsic, with a good introduction
by Paul Lauterbach. The literature about Stirner is almost
exclusively confined to a few scattered remarks in larger
works, which are not always very appropriate. J. H. Mackay is
said to be working at a biography of Stirner. The monograph
by Robert Schellwien, _Max Stirner und Friedrich Nietzsche_
(Leipsic, 1892), is quite worthless for our purpose.

Stirner proceeds from the fact, the validity of which we have placed
in the right light at the beginning of this book, that the development
of mankind and of human society has hitherto proceeded in a decidedly
individualistic direction, and has consisted predominantly in the
gradual emancipation of the individual from his subjection to general
ideas and their corresponding correlatives in actual life, in the
return of the Ego to itself. Starting from the school of Fichte and
Hegel, he pursued this special individualistic tendency till close
upon the limits of caricature; he formally founded a cultus of the