The Ego and His Own
1869
This is the book that made Nietzsche look like a gentleman. Written in 1844 by the obscure German schoolteacher Johann Kaspar Schmidt (writing as Max Stirner), it is a demolition job on every sacred cow that ever demanded your obedience: God, humanity, morality, the state, the socialist collective, even love. Stirner's argument is simple in its ruthless logic and vertiginous in its implications: nothing is worth sacrificing your unique self for. Every ideology, every religion, every moral system is ultimately a trick, a "spook" that feeds on your self-abnegation. The only thing you truly own is your own existence, your own will, your own desires. The book is notoriously difficult, dense, full of digressions and savage personal attacks on fellow Hegelians. It has been called prescient, dangerous, and insane. It influenced Nietzsche, every shade of anarchist, existentialists, and postmodernists. It remains one of the most radical statements of individual autonomy ever written, and one of the most uncomfortable. For anyone who has ever resented being told what to want.
Editions
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“Where the world comes in my way”
— Max Stirner
“All things are Nothing to Me””
— Max Stirner
“I love men too”
— Max Stirner
“Political liberty,” what are we to understand by that? Perhaps the individual’s independence of the State and its laws? No; on the contrary, the individual’s subjection in the State and to the State’s laws... Political liberty means that the polis, the State, is free; freedom of religion that religion is free, as freedom of conscience signifies that conscience is free; not, therefore, that I am free from the State, from religion, from conscience, or that I am rid of them. It does not mean my liberty, but the liberty of a power that rules and subjugates me; it means that one of my despots, like State, religion, conscience, is free. State, religion, conscience, these despots, make me a slave, and their liberty is my slavery.””
— Max Stirner
“Is not all the stupid chatter of most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed idea of morality, legality, christianity and so forth, and only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space?””
— Max Stirner
“My power is property. My power me property. My power I myself, and through it am I my property.””
— Max Stirner
“There are intellectual vagabonds, to whom the hereditary dwelling-place of their fathers seems too cramped and oppressive for them to be willing to satisfy themselves with the limited space any more: instead of keeping within the limits of a temperate style of thinking, and taking as inviolable truth what furnishes comfort and tranquility to thousands, they overlap all bounds of the traditional and run wild with their imprudent criticism and untamed mania for doubt, these extravagating vagabonds.””
— Max Stirner
“If i cherish you because I hold you dear, because in you my heart finds nourishment, my need satisfaction, then it is not done for the sake of a higher essence whose hallowed body you are, not on account of my beholding in you a ghost, an appearing spirit, but from egoistic pleasure; you yourself with *your* essence are valuable to me.””
— Max Stirner
“The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.””
— Max Stirner
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Stirner, Max. The Ego and His Own. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-ego-and-his-own-39f9c7bb-c891-4d44-8557-b3d7394fdbd4.Stirner, M. (1869). The Ego and His Own. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-ego-and-his-own-39f9c7bb-c891-4d44-8557-b3d7394fdbd4Stirner, Max. The Ego and His Own. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-ego-and-his-own-39f9c7bb-c891-4d44-8557-b3d7394fdbd4.
