Max Stirner - His Life and His Work

John Henry Mackay

Language: English

Description:

Max Stirner (1806-1856) was the philosopher of conscious egoism. His Book Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (1844; published in English as The Ego and His Own, 1907) is the fundamental work of that philosophy and the philosophical basis of individualist anarchism. The German poet and anarchist writer John Henry Mackay carefully researched Stirner's life and published his biography in 1897, with a third, definitive edition in 1914. This is the first translation into English.

John Henry Mackay (1865-1933) grew up in Germany with his German mother after the early death of his Scottish father. His long literary career included writings in a variety of forms, though he was best known as a lyric poet and anarchist. His boy-love writings were published under the pseudonym Sagitta. The rediscovery of Max Stirner was due to Mackay.

Hubert Kennedy (b. 1931), the translator of Mackay’s biography of Stirner, is a former mathematics professor. He has also published in the history of mathematics and the early history of the gay movement in Germany and Switzerland.