Max Stirner Has Been Called the Father of Anarchism and the Only Writer to develop Fully the Implications of a Total Rejection of External Authority

James Huneker relates the following incident:

One hot August afternoon in the year 1896 at Bayreuth, I was standing in the Marktplatz when a member of the Wagner Theater pointed out to me a house opposite, at the corner of the Maximilian-strasse, and said: "Do you see that house with the double gables? A man was born there whose name will be green when Jean Paul and Richard Wagner are forgotten." It was too large a draught upon my credulity, so I asked the name. "Max Stirner," he replied. 

Thus far, Huneker's informant has proved to be a poor prophet. The philosophy of Max Stirner has been largely ignored since its creation over one hundred years ago. One commentator asserts that "scholars are mostly content to recollect him, if they recollect him at all, by his associations, the tacit assumption being that it is only through these associations that he has any historical significance or contemporary interest."

 Stirner has, indeed, important associations in abundance. He was a student of Hegel, the most extreme member of the school of Young Hegelians who turned their master's method against his conclusions. He then turned his dialectic against his fellow Young Hegelians and became embroiled in controversy with them; one of these was Karl Marx. His associations include membership in several other important intellectual traditions. He has been called "a key figure" in German nineteenth-century romantic individualism, "the one in a line including Goethe, Wagner, and Nietzsche who went the furthest in exploring a philosophy of the glorification of the ego in the context of political and socio-economic ideas." There is little evidence of a direct influence of Stirner upon Nietzsche, but many striking anticipations of Nietzschean ideas can be found in Stirner: "cleric" and "herd" morality, the "moralizing of ethically neutral words," the death of God, the will to power. There are also many anticipations of Freudian concepts in Stirner, among them projection and unconscious motivation, libidinal repression, and the egoistic character of all human acts. He has also been regarded as a precursor of existentialism.

When Stirner has been considered at all, however, it has usually been as an expounder of anarchism. He has been called "the father of anarchism" and "the only writer to develop fully the implications of a total rejection of external authority."

--Philip Breed Dematteis, Individuality and the Social Organism: The Controversy between Max Stirner and Karl Marx, Men and Movements in  the History and Philosophy of Anarchism (Brooklyn, NY: Revisionist Press, 1976), 1-2.