Max Stirner was the nom de plume of the German individualist philosopher Johann Kaspar Schmidt. Born in Bayreuth, Bavaria, Schmidt had a poor childhood. His academic career was long and fragmented. From 1826 to 1828 he studied philosophy at the University of Berlin, where he fell under the influence of G. W. F. Hegel. After brief periods at the universities of Erlangen and Königsberg, he returned to Berlin in 1832 and with some difficulty gained a certificate to teach in Prussian Gymnasiums. Several years of poverty and unemployment followed, until Schmidt found a position as teacher in a Berlin academy for young ladies run by a Madame Gropius. After this he lived something of a double life: The respectable teacher of young ladies had for another self the aspiring philosophical writer who assumed the name of Stirner.

The immediate stimulus that provoked Stirner to write his...