Max Stirner

Stirner's egoism argues that individuals are impossible to fully comprehend, as no understanding of the self can adequately describe the fullness of experience. Stirner has been broadly understood as containing traits of both psychological egoism and rational egoism. Unlike the self-interest described by Ayn Rand, Stirner did not address individual self-interest, selfishness, or prescriptions for how one should act. He urged individuals to decide for themselves and fulfill their own egoism.[21]

He believed that everyone was propelled by their own egoism and desires and that those who accepted this—as willing egoists—could freely live their individual desires, while those who did not—as unwilling egoists—will falsely believe they are fulfilling another cause while they are secretly fulfilling their own desires for happiness and security. The willing egoist would see that they could act freely, unbound from obedience to sacred but artificial truths like law, rights, morality, and religion. Power is the method of Stirner's egoism and the only justified method of gaining philosophical property. Stirner did not believe in the one-track pursuit of greed, which as only one aspect of the ego would lead to being possessed by a cause other than the full ego. He did not believe in natural rights to property and encouraged insurrection against all forms of authority, including disrespect for property.[21]

Three pioneers of individualist anarchism

Stirner proposes that most commonly accepted social institutions—including the notion of state, property as a right, natural rights in general and the very notion of society—were mere illusions, "spooks" or ghosts in the mind.[23] He advocated egoism and a form of amoralism in which individuals would unite in Unions of egoists only when it was in their self-interest to do so. For him, property simply comes about through might, saying: "Whoever knows how to take and to defend the thing, to him belongs [property]. [...] What I have in my power, that is my own. So long as I assert myself as holder, I am the proprietor of the thing." He adds that "I do not step shyly back from your property, but look upon it always as my property, in which I respect nothing. Pray do the like with what you call my property!"[24] Stirner considers the world and everything in it, including other persons, available to one's taking or use without moral constraint and that rights do not exist in regard to objects and people at all. He sees no rationality in taking the interests of others into account unless doing so furthers one's self-interest, which he believes is the only legitimate reason for acting. He denies society as being an actual entity, calling society a "spook" and that "the individuals are its reality."[25]

Despite being labeled as anarchist, Stirner was not necessarily one. Separation of Stirner and egoism from anarchism was first done in 1914 by Dora Marsden in her debate with Benjamin Tucker in her journals The New Freewoman and The Egoist.[26] The idea of egoist anarchism was also expounded by various other egoists, mainly Malfew Seklew[27] and Sidney E. Parker.[28]

Stirner suggested that communism was tainted with the same idealism as Christianity and infused with superstitious ideas like morality and justice.[29] Stirner's principle critique of socialism and communism was that they ignored the individual; they aimed to hand ownership over to the abstraction society, which meant that no existing person actually owned anything.[30]

The Anarchist FAQ writes that "[w]hile some may object to our attempt to place egoism and communism together, it is worth pointing out that Stirner rejected 'communism'. Stirner did not subscribe to libertarian communism, because it did not exist when he was writing and so he was directing his critique against the various forms of state communism which did. Moreover, this does not mean that anarcho-communists and others may not find his work of use to them. And Stirner would have approved, for nothing could be more foreign to his ideas than to limit what an individual considers to be in their best interest."[21] In summarizing Stirner's main arguments, the writers "indicate why social anarchists have been, and should be, interested in his ideas, saying that, John P. Clark presents a sympathetic and useful social anarchist critique of his work in Max Stirner's Egoism."[21]

Daniel Guérin wrote that "Stirner accepted many of the premises of communism but with the following qualification: the profession of communist faith is a first step toward total emancipation of the victims of our society, but they will become completely 'disalienated,' and truly able to develop their individuality, only by advancing beyond communism."[31]

Stirner criticizes conventional notions of revolution, arguing that social movements aimed at overturning established ideals are tacitly idealist because they are implicitly aimed at the establishment of a new ideal thereafter. "Revolution and insurrection must not be looked upon as synonymous. The former consists in an overturning of conditions, of the established condition or status, the State or society, and is accordingly a political or social act; the latter has indeed for its unavoidable consequence a transformation of circumstances, yet does not start from it but from men's discontent with themselves, is not an armed rising, but a rising of individuals, a getting up, without regard to the arrangements that spring from it. The Revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on 'institutions'. It is not a fight against the established, since, if it prospers, the established collapses of itself; it is only a working forth of me out of the established. If I leave the established, it is dead and passes into decay."

Stirner's idea of the Union of egoists was first expounded in The Ego and Its Own. The Union is understood as a non-systematic association, which Stirner proposed in contradistinction to the state.[32] Unlike a "community" in which individuals are obliged to participate, Stirner's suggested Union would be voluntary and instrumental under which individuals would freely associate insofar as others within the Union remain useful to each constituent individual.[33] The Union relation between egoists is continually renewed by all parties' support through an act of will.[34] Some such as Svein Olav Nyberg argue that the Union requires that all parties participate out of a conscious egoism while others such as Sydney E. Parker regard the union as a "change of attitude," rejecting its previous conception as an institution.[35]

Caricature of Max Stirner taken from a sketch by Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) of the meetings of Die Freien

Scholar Lawrence Stepelevich states that G. W. F. Hegel was a major influence on The Ego and Its Own. While the latter has an "un-Hegelian structure and tone" on the whole and is hostile to Hegel's conclusions about the self and the world, Stepelevich states that Stirner's work is best understood as answering Hegel's question of the role of consciousness after it has contemplated "untrue knowledge" and become "absolute knowledge." Stepelevich concludes that Stirner presents the consequences of the rediscovering one's self-consciousness after realizing self-determination.[36]

Scholars such as Douglas Moggach and Widukind De Ridder have stated that Stirner was obviously a student of Hegel, like his contemporaries Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, but this does not necessarily make him an Hegelian. Contrary to the Young Hegelians, Stirner scorned all attempts at an immanent critique of Hegel and the Enlightenment and renounced Bauer and Feuerbach's emancipatory claims as well. Contrary to Hegel, who considered the given as an inadequate embodiment of rational, Stirner leaves the given intact by considering it a mere object, not of transformation, but of enjoyment and consumption ("His Own").[37]

According to Moggach, Stirner does not go beyond Hegel, but he in fact leaves the domain of philosophy in its entirety, stating:

Stirner refused to conceptualize the human self, and rendered it devoid of any reference to rationality or universal standards. The self was moreover considered a field of action, a "never-being I." The "I" had no essence to realize and life itself was a process of self-dissolution. Far from accepting, like the humanist Hegelians, a construal of subjectivity endowed with a universal and ethical mission, Stirner's notion of "the Unique" (Der Einzige) distances itself from any conceptualization whatsoever: "There is no development of the concept of the Unique. No philosophical system can be built out of it, as it can out of Being, or Thinking, or the I. Rather, with it, all development of the concept ceases. The person who views it as a principle thinks that he can treat it philosophically or theoretically and necessarily wastes his breath arguing against it."[38]

In 1842, The False Principle of Our Education (Das unwahre Prinzip unserer Erziehung) was published in Rheinische Zeitung, which was edited by Marx at the time.[39] Written as a reaction to the treatise Humanism vs. Realism, written by Otto Friedrich Theodor Heinsius. Stirner explains that education in either the classical humanist method or the practical realist method still lacks true value. He states that "the final goal of education can no longer be knowledge". Asserting that "only the spirit which understands itself is eternal", Stirner calls for a shift in the principle of education from making us "masters of things" to making us "free natures", naming his educational principle "personalist".

Art and Religion (Kunst und Religion) was also published in Rheinische Zeitung on 14 June 1842. It addresses Bruno Bauer and his publication against Hegel called Hegel's Doctrine of Religion and Art Judged From the Standpoint of Faith. Bauer had inverted Hegel's relation between "Art" and "Religion" by claiming that "Art" was much more closely related to "Philosophy" than to "Religion", based on their shared determinacy and clarity, and a common ethical root. However, Stirner went beyond both Hegel and Bauer's criticism by asserting that "Art" rather created an object for "Religion" and could thus by no means be related to what Stirner considered—in opposition with Hegel and Bauer—to be "Philosophy", stating:

[Philosophy] neither stands opposed to an Object, as Religion, nor makes one, as Art, but rather places its pulverizing hand upon all the business of making Objects as well as the whole of objectivity itself, and so breathes the air of freedom. Reason, the spirit of Philosophy, concerns itself only with itself, and troubles itself over no Object.[40]

Stirner deliberately left "Philosophy" out of the dialectical triad (Art–Religion–Philosophy) by claiming that "Philosophy" does not "bother itself with objects" (Religion), nor does it "make an object" (Art). In Stirner's account, "Philosophy" was in fact indifferent towards both "Art" and "Religion." Stirner thus mocked and radicalised Bauer's criticism of religion.[37]

Stirner's main work, The Unique and Its Property (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum), appeared in Leipzig in October 1844, with as year of publication mentioned 1845. In The Unique and Its Property, Stirner launches a radical anti-authoritarian and individualist critique of contemporary Prussian society and modern western society as such. He offers an approach to human existence in which he depicts himself as "the unique one", a "creative nothing", beyond the ability of language to fully express, stating that "[i]f I concern myself for myself, the unique one, then my concern rests on its transitory, mortal creator, who consumes himself, and I may say: All things are nothing to me".[41]

The book proclaims that all religions and ideologies rest on empty concepts. The same holds true for society's institutions that claim authority over the individual, be it the state, legislation, the church, or the systems of education such as universities. Stirner's argument explores and extends the limits of criticism, aiming his critique especially at those of his contemporaries, particularly Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, also at popular ideologies, including communism, humanism (which he regarded as analogous to religion with the abstract Man or humanity as the supreme being), liberalism, and nationalism as well as capitalism, religion and statism, arguing:

In the time of spirits thoughts grew till they overtopped my head, whose offspring they yet were; they hovered about me and convulsed me like fever-phantasies—an awful power. The thoughts had become corporeal on their own account, were ghosts, e. g. God, Emperor, Pope, Fatherland, etc. If I destroy their corporeity, then I take them back into mine, and say: "I alone am corporeal." And now I take the world as what it is to me, as mine, as my property; I refer all to myself.[42]

Stirner's Critics (Recensenten Stirners) was published in September 1845 in Wigands Vierteljahrsschrift. It is a response, in which Stirner refers to himself in the third-person, to three critical reviews of The Ego and its Own by Moses Hess in Die letzten Philosophen (The Last Philosophers), by a certain Szeliga (alias of an adherent of Bruno Bauer) in an article in the journal Norddeutsche Blätter, and by Ludwig Feuerbach anonymously in an article called On 'The Essence of Christianity' in Relation to Stirner's 'The Ego and its Own' (Über 'Das Wesen des Christentums' in Beziehung auf Stirners 'Der Einzige und sein Eigentum') in Wigands Vierteljahrsschrift.

The Philosophical Reactionaries (Die Philosophischen Reactionäre) was published in 1847 in Die Epigonen, a journal edited by Otto Wigand from Leipzig. At the time, Wigand had already published The Ego and Its Own and was about to finish the publication of Stirner's translations of Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say. As the subtitle indicates, The Philosophical Reactionaries was written in response to a 1847 article by Kuno Fischer (1824–1907) entitled The Modern Sophists (Die Moderne Sophisten). The article was signed G. Edward and its authorship has been disputed ever since John Henry Mackay "cautiously" attributed it to Stirner and included it in his collection of Stirner's lesser writings. It was first translated into English in 2011 by Widukind De Ridder and the introductory note explains:

Mackay based his attribution of this text to Stirner on Kuno Fischer's subsequent reply to it, in which the latter, 'with such determination', identified G. Edward as Max Stirner. The article was entitled 'Ein Apologet der Sophistik und "ein Philosophischer Reactionäre"' and was published alongside 'Die Philosophischen Reactionäre'. Moreover, it seems rather odd that Otto Wigand would have published 'Edward's' piece back-to-back with an article that falsely attributed it to one of his personal associates at the time. And, indeed, as Mackay went on to argue, Stirner never refuted this attribution. This remains, however, a slim basis on which to firmly identify Stirner as the author. This circumstantial evidence has led some scholars to cast doubts over Stirner's authorship, based on both the style and content of 'Die Philosophischen Reactionäre'. One should, however, bear in mind that it was written almost three years after Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, at a time when Young Hegelianism had withered away.[43]

The majority of the text deals with Kuno Fischer's definition of sophism. With much wit, the self-contradictory nature of Fischer's criticism of sophism is exposed. Fischer had made a sharp distinction between sophism and philosophy while at the same time considering it as the "mirror image of philosophy". The sophists breathe "philosophical air" and were "dialectically inspired to a formal volubility". Stirner's answer is striking:

Have you philosophers really no clue that you have been beaten with your own weapons? Only one clue. What can your common sense reply when I dissolve dialectically what you have merely posited dialectically? You have showed me with what kind of 'volubility' one can turn everything to nothing and nothing to everything, black into white and white into black. What do you have against me, when I return to you your pure art?[44]

Looking back on The Ego and Its Own, Stirner claims that "Stirner himself has described his book as, in part, a clumsy expression of what he wanted to say. It is the arduous work of the best years of his life, and yet he calls it, in part, 'clumsy'. That is how hard he struggled with a language that was ruined by philosophers, abused by state-, religious- and other believers, and enabled a boundless confusion of ideas".[45]

History of Reaction (Geschichte der Reaktion) was published in two volumes in 1851 by Allgemeine Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt and immediately banned in Austria.[11] It was written in the context of the recent 1848 revolutions in German states and is mainly a collection of the works of others selected and translated by Stirner. The introduction and some additional passages were Stirner's work. Edmund Burke and Auguste Comte are quoted to show two opposing views of revolution.

Twenty years after the appearance of Stirner's book, the author Friedrich Albert Lange wrote the following:

Stirner went so far in his notorious work, 'Der Einzige und Sein Eigenthum' (1845), as to reject all moral ideas. Everything that in any way, whether it be external force, belief, or mere idea, places itself above the individual and his caprice, Stirner rejects as a hateful limitation of himself. What a pity that to this book—the extremest that we know anywhere—a second positive part was not added. It would have been easier than in the case of Schelling's philosophy; for out of the unlimited Ego I can again beget every kind of Idealism as my will and my idea. Stirner lays so much stress upon the will, in fact, that it appears as the root force of human nature. It may remind us of Schopenhauer.[49]

Some people believe that in a sense a "second positive part" was soon to be added, though not by Stirner, but by Friedrich Nietzsche. The relationship between Nietzsche and Stirner seems to be much more complicated.[50] According to George J. Stack's Lange and Nietzsche, Nietzsche read Lange's History of Materialism "again and again" and was therefore very familiar with the passage regarding Stirner.[51]

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Stirner's philosophy was important in the development of modern anarchist thought, particularly individualist anarchism and egoist anarchism. Although Stirner is usually associated with individualist anarchism, he was influential to many social anarchists such as anarcha-feminists Emma Goldman and Federica Montseny. In European individualist anarchism, he influenced its major proponents after him such as Émile Armand, Han Ryner, Renzo Novatore, John Henry Mackay, Miguel Giménez Igualada and Lev Chernyi.

In American individualist anarchism, he found adherence in Benjamin Tucker and his magazine Liberty while these abandoned natural rights positions for egoism.[65] Several periodicals "were undoubtedly influenced by Liberty's presentation of egoism". They included I, published by Clarence Lee Swartz and edited by William Walstein Gordak and J. William Lloyd (all associates of Liberty); and The Ego and The Egoist, both of which were edited by Edward H. Fulton. Among the egoist papers that Tucker followed, there were the German Der Eigene, edited by Adolf Brand; and The Eagle and The Serpent, issued from London. The latter, the most prominent English-language egoist journal, was published from 1898 to 1900 with the subtitle A Journal of Egoistic Philosophy and Sociology.[65] Other American egoist anarchists around the early 20th century include James L. Walker, George Schumm, John Beverley Robinson, Steven T. Byington.[65]

In the United Kingdom, Herbert Read was influenced by Stirner and noted the closeness of Stirner's egoism to existentialism (see existentialist anarchism). Later in the 1960s, Daniel Guérin says in Anarchism: From Theory to Practice that Stirner "rehabilitated the individual at a time when the philosophical field was dominated by Hegelian anti-individualism and most reformers in the social field had been led by the misdeeds of bourgeois egotism to stress its opposite" and pointed to "the boldness and scope of his thought".[66] In the 1970s, an American Situationist collective called For Ourselves published a book called The Right To Be Greedy: Theses On The Practical Necessity Of Demanding Everything in which they advocate a "communist egoism" basing themselves on Stirner.[67]

Later in the United States, it emerged the tendency of post-left anarchy which was influenced profoundly by Stirner in aspects such as the critique of ideology. Jason McQuinn says that "when I (and other anti-ideological anarchists) criticize ideology, it is always from a specifically critical, anarchist perspective rooted in both the skeptical, individualist-anarchist philosophy of Max Stirner".[68] Bob Black and Feral Faun/Wolfi Landstreicher strongly adhere to Stirnerist egoism. In the hybrid of post-structuralism and anarchism called post-anarchism, Saul Newman has written on Stirner and his similarities to post-structuralism. Insurrectionary anarchism also has an important relationship with Stirner as can be seen in the work of Wolfi Landstreicher and Alfredo Bonanno who has also written on him in works such as Max Stirner and Max Stirner and Anarchism.[69]

German Stirnerist Adolf Brand produced the homosexual periodical Der Eigene in 1896. This was the first ongoing homosexual publication in the world[70] and ran until 1931. The name was taken from the writings of Stirner (who had greatly influenced the young Brand) and refers to Stirner's concept of "self-ownership" of the individual. Another early homosexual activist influenced by Stirner was John Henry Mackay. Mackay also used the works of Stirner to justify "man-boy love" and the abolition of the age of consent.[71] Feminists influenced by Stirner include anarchist Emma Goldman, as well as Dora Marsden who founded the journals The Freewoman, The New Freewoman, and The Egoist. Stirner also influenced free love and polyamory propagandist Émile Armand in the context of French individualist anarchism of the early 20th century which is known for "[t]he call of nudist naturism, the strong defense of birth control methods, the idea of "unions of egoists" with the sole justification of sexual practices".[72]

In his book Specters of Marx, influential French poststructuralist thinker Jacques Derrida dealt with Stirner and his relationship with Marx while also analysing Stirner's concept of "specters" or "spooks".[73] Gilles Deleuze, another key thinker associated with post-structuralism, mentions Stirner briefly in his book The Logic of Sense.[74] Saul Newman calls Stirner a proto-poststructuralist who on the one hand had essentially anticipated modern post-structuralists such as Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze and Derrida, but on the other had already transcended them, thus providing what they were unable to—i.e. a ground for a non-essentialist critique of present liberal capitalist society. This is particularly evident in Stirner's identification of the self with a "creative nothing", a thing that cannot be bound by ideology, inaccessible to representation in language.

Caricature by Engels of the meetings of Die Freien

Friedrich Engels commented on Stirner in poetry at the time of Die Freien:

Look at Stirner, look at him, the peaceful enemy of all constraint.
For the moment, he is still drinking beer,
Soon he will be drinking blood as though it were water.
When others cry savagely "down with the kings"
Stirner immediately supplements "down with the laws also."
Stirner full of dignity proclaims;
You bend your willpower and you dare to call yourselves free.
You become accustomed to slavery
Down with dogmatism, down with law.[75]

Engels once even recalled at how they were "great friends" (Duzbrüder).[15] In November 1844, Engels wrote a letter to Karl Marx in which he first reported a visit to Moses Hess in Cologne and then went on to note that during this visit Hess had given him a press copy of a new book by Stirner, The Ego and Its Own. In his letter to Marx, Engels promised to send a copy of the book to him, for it certainly deserved their attention as Stirner "had obviously, among the 'Free Ones', the most talent, independence and diligence."[15] To begin with, Engels was enthusiastic about the book and expressed his opinions freely in letters to Marx:

But what is true in his principle, we, too, must accept. And what is true is that before we can be active in any cause we must make it our own, egoistic cause—and that in this sense, quite aside from any material expectations, we are communists in virtue of our egoism, that out of egoism we want to be human beings and not merely individuals.[76]

Later, Marx and Engels wrote a major criticism of Stirner's work. The number of pages Marx and Engels devote to attacking Stirner in the unexpurgated text of The German Ideology exceeds the total of Stirner's written works.[77] In the book Stirner is derided as Sankt Max (Saint Max) and as Sancho (a reference to Cervantes' Sancho Panza). As Isaiah Berlin has described it, Stirner "is pursued through five hundred pages of heavy-handed mockery and insult."[78] The book was written in 1845–1846, but it was not published until 1932. Marx's lengthy ferocious polemic against Stirner has since been considered an important turning point in Marx's intellectual development from idealism to materialism. It has been argued that historical materialism was Marx's method of reconciling communism with a Stirnerite rejection of morality.[46][47][48]

The ideas of Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche have often been compared and many authors have discussed apparent similarities in their writings, sometimes raising the question of influence.[79] During the early years of Nietzsche's emergence as a well-known figure in Germany, the only thinker discussed in connection with his ideas more often than Stirner was Arthur Schopenhauer.[80] It is certain that Nietzsche read about The Ego and Its Own, which was mentioned in Friedrich Albert Lange's History of Materialism and Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious, both of which Nietzsche knew well.[81] However, there is no indication that he actually read it as no mention of Stirner is known to exist anywhere in Nietzsche's publications, papers or correspondence.[82] In 2002, a biographical discovery revealed it is probable that Nietzsche had encountered Stirner's ideas before he read Hartmann and Lange in October 1865, when he met with Eduard Mushacke, an old friend of Stirner's during the 1840s.[83]

As soon as Nietzsche's work began to reach a wider audience, the question of whether he owed a debt of influence to Stirner was raised. As early as 1891 when Nietzsche was still alive, though incapacitated by mental illness, Hartmann went so far as to suggest that he had plagiarized Stirner.[84] By the turn of the century, the belief that Nietzsche had been influenced by Stirner was so widespread that it became something of a commonplace at least in Germany, prompting one observer to note in 1907 that "Stirner's influence in modern Germany has assumed astonishing proportions, and moves in general parallel with that of Nietzsche. The two thinkers are regarded as exponents of essentially the same philosophy."[85]

From the beginning of what was characterized as "great debate"[86] regarding Stirner's possible positive influence on Nietzsche, serious problems with the idea were nonetheless noted.[87] By the middle of the 20th century, if Stirner was mentioned at all in works on Nietzsche, the idea of influence was often dismissed outright or abandoned as unanswerable.[88] However, the idea that Nietzsche was influenced in some way by Stirner continues to attract a significant minority, perhaps because it seems necessary to explain the oft-noted (though arguably superficial) similarities in their writings.[89] In any case, the most significant problems with the theory of possible Stirner influence on Nietzsche are not limited to the difficulty in establishing whether the one man knew of or read the other. They also consist in determining if Stirner in particular might have been a meaningful influence on a man as widely read as Nietzsche.[90]

The individualist anarchist orientation of Rudolf Steiner's early philosophy—before he turned to theosophy around 1900—has strong parallels to and was admittedly influenced by Stirner's conception of the ego, for which Steiner claimed to have provided a philosophical foundation.[91]

• Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). "Max Stirner". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy., an extensive introduction
• Svein Olav Nybergs website on Max Stirner, with extensive links to texts and references
• Max Stirner within the LSR project (English section)
• Max Stirner Project by H. Ibrahim Türkdogan
• Library of Egoism, an extensive depisitory of free books, essays and journals concerning egoism

• "Max Stirner, a durable dissident – in a nutshell – 'How Marx and Nietzsche suppressed their colleague Max Stirner and why he has intellectually survived them'
• Stirner Delighted in His Construction – "loves miracles, but can only perform a logical miracle", by Karl Marx
• Nietzsche's initial crisis due to an encounter with Stirner's "The Ego", by Bernd A. Laska (2002)
• "At the End of the Path of Doubt: Max Stirner", By Lawrence S. Stepelevich (Owl of Minerva 41:1–2 (2009–2010) pp. 85–106)

• Works by Max Stirner at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Max Stirner at Internet Archive
• Works by Max Stirner at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Online book Der Einzige und sein Eigentum
• The complete original text in German of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum
• The complete English edition of "The Ego and his Own", in the translation of Steven T. Byington.
• Some of Stirner's illuminating "Shorter Essays", translated into English
• Recensenten Stirners / Stirner's Critics bilingual: full text in German / abridged text in English (trans. Frederick M. Gordon)
• Stirner's Critics by Max Stirner translated by Wolfi Landstreicher, with an introduction by Jason McQuinn (2013 revision of the only full-text English translation of both "Stirner's Critics" and "The Philosophical Reactionaries" by Wolfi Landstreicher published by CAL Press)
• Archive of texts on Stirner at RevoltLib