Max Stirner

Max Stirner worked as a teacher, journalist, and translator.

Tall and fit: He was a large-framed man of above-average height.
Most striking feature—the forehead: His most memorable characteristic was an unusually high, prominent forehead. The pseudonym "Stirner" was derived from the German word Stirn ("forehead") and was given to him by schoolmates.
Hair and eye color: He had dark hair and dark eyes.
Style and details: He was always neatly and tidily dressed, creating the impression of an extremely conscientious man. He often wore small steel-rimmed spectacles. He sported short sideburns and had aristocratic hands.
Gaze and demeanor: He had a calm gaze. In social settings, he would often sit silently in a corner, smoking a cigar and watching heated arguments with a wry smile.

Loved:
His own "Self"—the sole center of the world and the supreme value for which everything else exists.
Sincere emotions—love and hatred—as expressions of his own nature, rather than as an imposed duty.
Personal happiness and relationships, so long as they yielded personal benefit.

Hated:
Moral duty—any attempt to turn love or hatred into an obligation to society.
Abstractions such as God, the state, society, humanity, morality, and sin, which enslave the individual.
Altruism and self-sacrifice—submission to the interests of others at the expense of one’s own self.

Can one affirm the unique without turning "uniqueness" into a new essence? Can one live as a conscious egoist while recognizing that even this consciousness is itself a choice? These are not questions Stirner answered; he merely posed them, threw his bombs, and walked away laughing.
His thought anticipates existentialist themes of radical freedom and the absence of predetermined meaning. It prefigures Nietzsche's attack on morality and his celebration of self-creation. It echoes in Foucault's critique of power and in postmodernism's suspicion of grand narratives . But Stirner is more extreme than any of these successors: he refuses even to offer a positive program. He is the ultimate dismantler, the philosopher who has no philosophy.
"All things are nothing to me," Stirner concludes . This is not nihilism's despair but egoism's liberation: the confidence of one who has founded their affair on nothing, and found that nothing to be enough.
Stirner's philosophy is, in the end, a philosophy of reclamation. It reclaims the individual from the clutches of ideas that claim authority over them. It reclaims one's own desires, pleasures, and purposes from the demands of conscience, duty, and social expectation. It reclaims the power to say "no" to any demand that does not serve one's own flourishing.
But it is also a philosophy of responsibility. If there are no fixed ideas to guide you, then you cannot blame God, society, morality, or the state for your choices. You are alone with your own judgment. This is not the easy path of selfish indulgence; it is the hard path of radical self-ownership, where every action is chosen, every allegiance is voluntary, and every excuse is stripped away.
Stirner's final message is both terrifying and liberating: You are on your own. There is nothing to save you. And that is precisely why you are free.

The conscious egoist can be a communist, a liberal, a conservative, or anything else—provided they remember that their political commitment is a choice, not a duty, and that they can abandon it when it no longer serves them. This makes his philosophy supremely flexible and supremely dangerous to all dogmatists, regardless of their ideology.
To understand Stirner, one must see him in the context of the Young Hegelian movement. The 1840s in Germany were a time of immense intellectual ferment. Hegel's philosophy had dominated, but after his death in 1831, his followers split. The Right Hegelians defended religion and the state; the Left Hegelians (the Young Hegelians) sought to use Hegel's dialectical method to criticize religion and advocate human emancipation.
Stirner was the anti-Hegelian Hegelian. He did not reject dialectics—he used them against the dialecticians themselves. He was the child of the movement who turned on his parents. "Do you philosophers actually have an inkling that you have been beaten with your own weapons?" he asks . He mocked the Young Hegelians' earnest search for the "essence of man" as a new religion. He was what happens when radical critique is pushed to its logical conclusion: the rejection of critique itself as just another fixed idea.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels recognized the danger. In The German Ideology (written 1845-46, but not published until 1932), they devoted a full 400-page section to attacking Stirner. They argued that he abstracted the individual from material and social conditions, reducing everything to a spiritual struggle when real change required transforming the economic base of society . Marx called him a "petty bourgeois individualist intellectual"—which, for Stirner, was probably a compliment.
Stirner's philosophy poses a challenge that is as unsettling today as it was in 1844. The challenge is one of consistency. Can one embrace egoism without making it into another fixed idea?

Stirner does not say that unions are bad; he says that compulsory unions (states, churches, moral systems) are bad because they claim authority over the individual.
One of Stirner's most controversial positions is his rejection of morality as a fixed idea. He does not advocate immorality—he does not say people ought to be immoral. Instead, he denies that morality has any legitimate claim on the individual. "The hard fist of morality treats the noble nature of egoism altogether without compassion," he complains . Morality demands obedience to principles that are not grounded in any individual's desire but are presented as universal and binding.
The conscious egoist can choose to act in ways that appear moral—helping others, telling the truth, respecting rights—provided they do so as a self-conscious choice rather than as obedience to an abstract command. They can even consistently embrace the value of universal human rights, as long as they recognize that this value is their value, chosen by them, not a truth that binds them from outside. "The egoist is not a fanatic," one commentator notes; "he acts on judgment, not on a principle".
Stirner's political stance is notoriously difficult to pin down. He has been claimed by individualist anarchists, post-left anarchists, existentialists, nihilists, and even some on the libertarian right . His thought is fundamentally anti-political in the sense that it rejects all systems, programs, and ideologies that claim to know what is best for humanity.
He was skeptical of revolution, seeing it as merely replacing one set of masters with another. "The revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection, at a new state of affairs," he wrote. Revolution overthrows institutions but preserves the idea of institutional authority; insurrection is the individual's uprising against all authority as such.
Stirner's only political commitment is the rejection of all sacred abstractions.

"I am my own only when I am master of myself, instead of being mastered either by sensuality, or by anything else (God, Man, authority, law, State, Church)" . Ownness is not a fixed idea like "freedom," which can become just another spook demanding worship; it is simply the condition of the owner—the one who owns themselves and their capacities.
This distinction has profound political implications. Liberation movements typically aim for freedom from oppression, but they often replace one master with another. The revolutionary who fights for "humanity" may end up serving the abstract concept of humanity as faithfully as the Christian served God. Stirner is not against liberation; he insists that liberation must be for the sake of ownness, not for the sake of some new sacred cause.
Stirner is often misread as an advocate of atomistic isolation, a "war of all against all" where might makes right. This misreading ignores his concept of the Union of Egoists (Verein von Egoisten). Stirner did not reject association or cooperation; he rejected compulsory association and the sacralization of institutions.
The Union of Egoists is a voluntary, fluid, non-systematic association of individuals who come together because it serves their interests—and who remain together only as long as it continues to do so . It is not an authority above individual wills but a relation "continually renewed by all parties' support through an act of will" . If one party finds themselves suffering but maintains appearances, "the union has degenerated into something else".
This vision has been compared to a game, a voluntary club, or an improvised partnership. It acknowledges that human beings are social creatures who benefit from cooperation, but it insists that such cooperation be genuine and free—not coerced by appeals to duty, loyalty, or some "higher" good.

Crucially, it is not a fixed essence or a definable nature. Stirner refuses to say what the ego is, only what it is not. The ego is "a creative nothing"—an ungrounded, self-determining source that generates its own meaning and resists all categorization.
"I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself create everything," he writes . This formulation deliberately echoes the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing), but with a subversive twist: the individual, not God, is the creator. The ego has no predetermined purpose, no essence to fulfill, no nature to realize. "Your nature is, once and for all, a human one; you are human natures, human beings. But, just because you already are so, you do not still need to become so" . One does not strive to be human; one already is, and that is sufficient.
This makes Stirner's egoism fundamentally descriptive rather than prescriptive. He does not command people to be selfish; he observes that everyone already acts from self-interest, whether they admit it or not. The difference lies in consciousness. The "unconscious egoist" serves fixed ideas—God, duty, nation—believing they are acting for something higher, not realizing they are actually pursuing their own desires for security, meaning, or social approval . The "conscious egoist" recognizes all ideals as human constructs and chooses freely whether to follow them, while never forgetting that the choice is their own.
Stirner draws a crucial distinction between freedom and ownness (Eigenheit). Freedom is negative: it means being free from something—from oppression, from constraints, from external authority. But freedom alone is impoverished because it defines the individual by what they lack rather than by what they possess.
Ownness, by contrast, is positive: it is the assertion of one's power, the taking of possession of oneself and one's world.

Max Stirner's philosophy, presented in his sole major work Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and Its Own, 1844), is deceptively simple in its core claim and explosively radical in its implications. At its heart lies a single, devastating proposition: all transcendent ideals—God, humanity, morality, the state, truth itself—are "spooks" (Spuk) or "fixed ideas" that enslave the individual by demanding allegiance to something outside oneself. The only reality is the unique ego (der Einzige), and the only legitimate foundation for action is one's own self-interest, consciously recognized and freely chosen.
Stirner begins his philosophical assault by diagnosing the human condition as one of possession. People are not free because they are possessed by ideas that claim authority over them. These fixed ideas are not natural or necessary; they are human creations that have been reified into sacred objects. "What is not supposed to be my affair!" he exclaims sarcastically. "First and foremost, the Good Cause, then God's cause, the cause of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of humanity, of justice; further, the cause of my people, my prince, my fatherland; finally, even the cause of Mind and a thousand other causes". All these demand sacrifice, devotion, and the subordination of one's own desires.
Stirner's brilliance lies in exposing how even supposedly "radical" critiques remain trapped in this religious mode. Feuerbach had argued that Christianity falsely projects human qualities onto God; humanity should recognize that it worships its own essence. Stirner counters: "Feuerbach thinks that if he makes God into the essence of man, he has found the truth. But if God has troubled me, then his human essence troubles me just as much". Replacing God with "Man" or "Humanity" simply substitutes one tyrant for another. "This became just another religion for Stirner, a 'change of masters' over the individual".
What, then, is the ego that Stirner champions?

These are not questions Stirner answered; he merely posed them, threw his bombs, and walked away laughing.
The "character" of Max Stirner is ultimately a refusal of character—a determination to remain unclassifiable, unsystematic, and unpossessed by anything beyond oneself. "All things are nothing to me," he concludes. This is not nihilism's despair but egoism's liberation: the confidence of one who has founded their affair on nothing, and found that nothing to be enough.

The fallacy of egotism begins with the inference that, therefore, a person can know only his ideas and can live only for his own benefit". A person's generosity is still genuine even if it is their generosity. Stirner's conclusion that because sacred ideals are false, "we must worship nothing and merely enjoy in a piggish way what we may call our own" misreads human nature, which lives by imagination and impersonal objects of devotion.
Marx and Engels, who initially found Stirner's egoism appealing as a point of departure for communism, ultimately subjected him to a ferocious critique in The German Ideology, calling him a "petty bourgeois individualist intellectual" and "Sankt Max" (Saint Max). They did not deny that individuals act from self-interest; they argued that Stirner abstracted the individual from social and material conditions. "The changing of oneself coincides with the changing of circumstances," they wrote. The trouble with Stirner was not his obsession with individuation but his one-sided abstraction of the individual from physical and social life.
What emerges from all this is a character of startling originality and troubling implications. Max Stirner was neither a philosopher offering a system nor a prophet announcing a new gospel. He was a destroyer—a philosophical terrorist who detonated charges under the foundations of morality, religion, state, and even "humanity" itself. He was also a humorist who laughed at his own creation, knowing that even his own words were just more spooks, more "fixed ideas," if taken too seriously.
Stirner's ultimate challenge is to the consistency of his readers. Can one embrace egoism without making it into yet another sacred abstraction? Can one affirm the unique without turning "uniqueness" into a new essence? Can one live as a conscious egoist while recognizing that even this consciousness is itself a choice?

Stirner simply insisted that such connection be genuine and free, not coerced by appeals to duty, loyalty, or some "higher" good.
The tragedy of Stirner's personal life adds poignancy to this vision. His first wife died in childbirth; his second, Marie Dähnhardt, left him around the time of publication. His attempt with fellow Young Hegelians to run a milk shop on co-operative principles failed spectacularly—the dairy farmers were suspicious of well-dressed intellectuals, and customers found the shop too ostentatiously decorated. He died in poverty in 1856 from an infected insect bite, with Bruno Bauer the only Young Hegelian at his funeral. The philosopher who preached that only the individual ultimately matters lived a life that displayed the limits of pure individualism.
Stirner has been a remarkably generative figure for subsequent thought. His influence can be traced through existentialism's emphasis on radical freedom, nihilism's rejection of objective values, and postmodernism's suspicion of grand narratives. His critique of fixed ideas anticipates Wittgenstein's later work on language games and the illusion of objective meaning.
Yet this influence has been largely subterranean. Stirner has been claimed more often by individualist anarchists like Benjamin Tucker, who adopted his egoism while rejecting natural rights, and by post-left anarchists like Bob Black and Hakim Bey. But one contemporary scholar notes that Stirner has been "subject to some rather revisionist translation to suit various political movements". Part of his enduring fascination is precisely that he resists appropriation.
Critics have argued that Stirner's position is intellectually unsustainable. George Santayana, in a withering critique, observed that "the fact that volition and knowledge must have their seat in some person prejudges nothing about the scope of their objects.

He did not claim that people ought to be selfish, only that morality itself is a spook—a concept that commands obedience without basis. "The hard fist of morality treats the noble nature of egoism altogether without compassion," he complained. The conscious egoist can choose altruism or selfishness, cooperation or conflict, based on what serves them, not because any abstract principle demands it.
This is where Stirner's character defies easy categorization. He has been claimed by anarchists, existentialists, nihilists, and even some on the political right. His thought does not lead to any necessary political position. "Egoism has both everything and nothing to do with anarchism," one scholar observes. The conscious egoist can consistently hold any values they desire—including the value of universal human rights—provided they do so as a self-conscious choice rather than as obedience to a sacred abstraction.
Stirner is sometimes caricatured as an advocate of isolated, atomistic selfishness—a "dog eat dog" world where the strongest devour the weak. This misreads him. He did not reject association or cooperation; he rejected compulsory association and the sacralization of institutions.
His alternative was the "Union of Egoists"—a voluntary, non-systematic association of individuals who come together because it serves their interests, and who remain together only as long as it continues to do so. This union is not an authority above individual wills but a relation "continually renewed by all parties' support through an act of will." If one party finds themselves suffering but maintains appearances, "the union has degenerated into something else".
This vision has been compared to a game or a voluntary club, where participants join for their own enjoyment and may leave when it ceases to be enjoyable. It is a thoroughly anti-authoritarian vision, but not one that denies the possibility of human connection or cooperation.

The "conscious egoist" recognizes that all such sacred truths are artificial constructs, and chooses freely whether or not to follow them.
Stirner's character here reveals a deep suspicion of anything that claims authority over the individual. He saw "spooks" everywhere: religion, nationalism, morality, liberalism, socialism, even humanism itself. Feuerbach had argued that Christianity mistakenly projected human qualities onto a transcendent God; Stirner countered that Feuerbach simply replaced God with "Man" as a new sacred abstraction. "This became just another religion for Stirner, a 'change of masters' over the individual". The left Hegelians, for all their supposed radicalism, remained trapped in the same religious mode of thinking they claimed to reject.
Stirner's rejection of authority was total. He denied that social classes, the state, or humanity itself had any objective reality independent of individuals. "The individuals are its reality," he said of society . What matters is the unique, the Einzige—a term he insisted was "only a name," adding that "names don't name it" . One critic has compared this to the Tao or Buddhist emptiness, an ineffable non-concept that escapes definition.
Stirner distinguished sharply between freedom and what he called "ownness" (Eigenheit). Freedom was a negative concept—freedom from something—and he saw it as limited in value. Ownness, by contrast, was positive: the assertion of one's power, the taking of possession of oneself and one's world.
"I am my own only when I am master of myself, instead of being mastered either by sensuality, or by anything else (God, Man, authority, law, State, Church)," he wrote. This ownness is not a "fixed idea" like freedom, morality, or humanity—it is simply a description of the owner. It cannot be prescribed or demanded; it can only be realized.
Stirner's rejection of "fixed ideas" extended to ethics. He advocated a form of amoralism, but importantly, not immoralism.

Stirner constructed his book to parallel Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity, using their own dialectical methods to undermine their conclusions. "Do you philosophers actually have an inkling that you have been beaten with your own weapons?" he asks. "You have shown me with what 'eloquence' one can make all into nothing and nothing into all, black into white and white into black. What do you have against it, when I turn your neat trick back on you?" This was not a sign of philosophical commitment but a tactical choice—dialectic was merely an intellectual tool, and one that could be turned to any purpose.
Stirner's character emerges here as iconoclastic, playful, and profoundly uninterested in system-building. He refused to offer a positive philosophy or a program for human salvation. He simply tore down the idols others worshipped and laughed while doing it.
At the heart of Stirner's thought is the concept of the "creative nothing"—the ego as an ungrounded, self-determining source that resists all categorization. The individual is not defined by any essence, nature, or purpose. "Your nature is, once and for all, a human one; you are human natures, human beings. But, just because you already are so, you do not still need to become so". In other words, one does not need to strive to fulfill some predetermined human essence; one already is what one is, and that is enough.
This makes Stirner's conception of egoism descriptive rather than prescriptive. He was not telling people what they ought to do but describing what everyone already does: act out of self-interest. The difference lies in consciousness. The "unconscious egoist" is possessed by fixed ideas—concepts like God, duty, morality, humanity, or the state—and believes they serve something higher than themselves, not realizing they are actually fulfilling their own desires for security, meaning, or validation.

Max Stirner—born Johann Kaspar Schmidt in 1806—remains one of philosophy's most provocative and misunderstood figures. His sole major work, The Ego and Its Own (1844), has been dismissed as mere intellectual provocation, embraced as anarchist scripture, and subjected to hundreds of pages of critique by Karl Marx himself. Yet beneath the shocking declarations and philosophical mockery lies a character whose intellectual temperament is far richer and stranger than the caricature of a selfish hedonist suggests. Stirner was not simply an apologist for selfishness; he was a philosophical assassin targeting the sacred cows of his age, a humorist who weaponized dialectics against dialecticians, and a thinker whose "creative nothing" prefigured existentialist and postmodern concerns by a century.
To understand Stirner's character, one must first grasp his relationship to philosophy itself. Stirner was not, in any conventional sense, a philosopher. As one commentator notes, "to call the mocker of philosophy a philosopher is as absurd as calling the impious atheist a theologian". Stirner saw philosophy as a joke that its practitioners took far too seriously. The philosopher pursues wisdom as something objective, external, and greater than any individual—and is therefore still possessed by a "spook," an abstraction that commands his allegiance.
Stirner's entire project was to demonstrate that there is no ultimate, universal wisdom to find. "I have based my affair on nothing," he declares at the opening and close of his book, quoting Goethe's drinking song—a deliberate signal that none of this should be taken with the solemn gravity philosophers typically demand. He was a "wise guy" rather than a wise man, mocking the pretensions of those who believed they could discover eternal truths.
This mockery was strategic.

After the collapse of his marriage and business, Stirner turned to translation work. He produced the first German translation of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1847) and Jean-Baptiste Say's Traité d'économie politique. In 1852, he published History of Reaction, a compilation of texts. None of this brought financial security.
The 1850s were brutal. In 1853, Stirner spent two months in debtors' prison. Accounts of his final years vary: some sources describe him dying in poverty, pursued by creditors; others suggest he managed his mother's inheritance wisely enough to live modestly and pay his debts. He was a regular guest at the salon of Baroness von der Golz, continuing to espouse his radical rejection of conventional values.
On June 26, 1856, Stirner died in Berlin from an infected insect bite, aged forty-nine. Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Buhl were the only Young Hegelians present at his funeral. He was buried at Friedhof II der Sophiengemeinde Berlin.
Stirner's life was, in many ways, a small and troubled one—marked by poverty, professional frustration, and personal loss. Yet out of these humble circumstances emerged one of the nineteenth century's most explosive and enduring critiques of authority, ideology, and the very concept of the "human" as a sacred abstraction.

Engels, however, remembered Stirner well. In 1889, he wrote: "I knew Stirner well, we were good friends. He was a good man, far from being as bad as he portrayed himself in his Unique One, though somewhat pedantic, which he had acquired from his teaching years". Despite his presence at these debates, Stirner was not a central participant; Engels described him as an attentive listener who "did not contribute much to the discussions". Stirner would silently smoke his cigar, occasionally offering a dry, sarcastic comment to whoever sat next to him.
At the "Free Ones" gatherings, Stirner met Marie Dähnhardt, an affluent and intellectually engaged young woman with an inheritance of several thousand thalers. They married on October 21, 1843, in an appropriately iconoclastic ceremony. The pastor arrived to find Stirner and his best man, Bruno Bauer, playing cards; the bride appeared in everyday clothes; no Bible was available; and no rings had been purchased—Bauer produced two copper rings from his pocket to substitute for wedding bands. The local press reported the event as evidence of the "Free Ones'" scandalous behavior.
Stirner dedicated his major work, The Ego and Its Own (published in October 1844, though dated 1845), "to my sweetheart Marie Dähnhardt". The book was a polemic against Feuerbach, Bauer, communist Wilhelm Weitling, and anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Stirner resigned his teaching position in anticipation of the controversy it would generate.
But his timing was unlucky. Marie left him in 1846, and Stirner's disastrous attempt at entrepreneurship sealed his financial ruin. Using Marie's inheritance, he opened a dairy shop to distribute milk from farmers into the city. The venture failed spectacularly: farmers mistrusted the well-dressed intellectuals with their talk of cooperative principles, and the ostentatiously decorated shop intimidated working-class customers who felt too poorly dressed to enter.

He transferred to the University of Erlangen in 1828, studying alongside Ludwig Feuerbach, who would later become a major target of his critique. The following year, he moved to the University of Königsberg, but family troubles intervened—his mother's mental health deteriorated, forcing him to abandon his studies to care for her.
He returned to Berlin in 1832 to complete his education, but his path to a teaching career was obstructed. His examination thesis, "On School Regulations" (1834), was deemed too abstract and Hegelian for the examiners. His oral examination in April 1835 was equally disappointing; the examiners noted he had "speculative ability" but lacked precise understanding of Scripture and basic logical command of history, philosophy, and philology. He was granted only a limited teaching certificate and, unable to secure a government position, worked for eighteen months as an unpaid trainee teacher at a Royal Realschule in Berlin.
In 1837, Stirner inherited a small sum from his stepfather's estate and married Agnes Burtz, the daughter of his landlady, on December 12. The marriage was short-lived. Agnes died in childbirth on August 29, 1838, and the child was stillborn.
His professional life finally stabilized in 1839 when, at age thirty-three, Stirner secured a teaching position at a Berlin girls' school owned by Madame Gropius. He taught literature and history, earning a modest but steady income and earning the respect of colleagues and students. This five-year period was his most settled and productive.
In 1841, Stirner began participating in discussions with a group of radical intellectuals calling themselves Die Freien (The Free Ones). Meeting at Hippel's wine bar on Friedrichstraße, this group included Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge, Friedrich Engels, and briefly Karl Marx . Marx had left Berlin in July 1841, so he and Stirner almost certainly never met.

Max Stirner, born Johann Kaspar Schmidt on October 25, 1806, in Bayreuth, Bavaria, remains one of philosophy's most enigmatic figures. The details of his life are surprisingly sparse for a thinker who so profoundly influenced anarchism, existentialism, and postmodern thought. What we know comes largely from the dedicated work of one biographer, John Henry Mackay, a Scottish-born German writer who spent nearly thirty years reconstructing Stirner's life from fragments, interviews with his surviving acquaintances, and archival research. Even Engels contributed to the visual record by drawing a cartoon portrait of Stirner from memory forty years after his death.
Stirner was the only child of Albert Christian Heinrich Schmidt, a flute-maker and portrait painter, and Sophia Elenora Reinlein, both devout Lutherans. Tragedy struck early: his father died of tuberculosis on April 19, 1807, when the infant was barely seven months old. In 1809, his mother remarried Heinrich Ballerstedt, a pharmacist, and the family moved to West Prussian Kulm (now Chełmno, Poland). Stirner gained his famous nickname during his school years—"Stirner" derived from Stirn, the German word for forehead, referencing his notably high brow.
At age twelve, Stirner returned to Bayreuth to live with his aunt and attend the Christian-Ernestine Gymnasium for seven years, where he was a solid student, graduating third in his class.
In 1826, at age twenty, Stirner entered the University of Berlin to study philosophy, philology, and theology. He attended lectures by the era's intellectual titans—Friedrich Schleiermacher, and most significantly, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Stirner absorbed Hegel's lectures on the history of philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and subjective spirit. This was the intellectual crucible that would shape his later work, though ultimately he would turn Hegel's dialectical method against the master's own conclusions.
Stirner's academic path was restless and uneven.