 Max Stirner (1806–1856) is the author of Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (1844). This book is usually known as The Ego and Its Own in English, but a more literal translation would be The Unique Individual and their Property). Both the form and content of Stirner’s major work are disconcerting. He challenges expectations about how political and philosophical argument should be conducted, and shakes the reader’s confidence in the moral and political superiority of contemporary civilisation. Stirner provides a sweeping attack on the modern world as increasingly dominated by “religious” modes of thought and oppressive social institutions, together with a much briefer sketch of a radical “egoistic” alternative in which individual autonomy might flourish. The historical impact of The Ego and Its Own is sometimes difficult to assess, but Stirner’s work can confidently be said: to have had an immediate and destructive impact on the left-Hegelian movement; to have played an important contemporary role in the intellectual development of Karl Marx (1818–1883); and subsequently to have influenced significantly the political tradition of individualist anarchism.