The work is full of quotations, partly from Auguste Comte, partly from Edmund Burke. None of these works represent anything typically original or of real significance in the history of human thought.
His real contribution to the world's literature remains his work Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, the title of which is rendered in English The Ego and His Own, and this, strange to say, enthrones the individual man, the ego, every personality, as a sovereign power that should not be subject to morality, rules, obligations, or duties of any kind. The appeal is made so directly that it will convince all those unscientific and half-educated minds who after having surrendered their traditional faith find themselves without any authority in either religion or politics. God is to them a fable and the state an abstraction. Ideas and ideals, such as truth, goodness, beauty, are mere phrases. What then remains but the concrete bodily personality of every man of which every one is the ultimate standard of right and wrong?
[1] See also R. Schellwien, Max Stirner und Friedrich Nietzsche; V. Basch, L'individualisme anarchiste, Max Stirner, 1904.
[2] Max Stirner, sein Leben und sein Werk. Berlin, 1898.
[3] The name of the gentleman she mentions is replaced by a dash at his express wish in the facsimile of her letter reproduced in Mr. Mackay's book (p. 255).
[EGO-SOVEREIGNTY]
Strange that neither of these philosophers of individuality, Nietzsche or Stirner, ever took the trouble to investigate what an individual is! Stirner halts before this most momentous question of his world-conception, and so he overlooks that his ego, his own individuality, this supreme sovereign standing beyond right and wrong, the ultimate authority of everything, is a hazy, fluctuating, uncertain thing which differs from day to day and Anally disappears.