ABSTRACT
Max Stirner, the egoist par excellence, comes in a line of philosophers following and feeding upon Hegel's method. In Stirner, the individual is broken free from the totality of the Hegelian Absolute and made the centre and end of all attention. Ownness is the manifestation of this self in the world. It is the alternative object, given by Stirner, to his ego, for its striving. Stirner's position is obviously overladen with theoretical considerations, of the very worst kind. He begins and ends the analysis with self-consciousness, decrying the efforts of every post-Cartesian to proceed beyond the cogito. The ontological character of what Stirner says is important because the most common reason for rejecting Stirner's philosophy is its manifestation as the ethics of "dog eat dog". It is a terrible prospect that all the constraints on the behaviour of others are imaginary, liable to be torn aside as soon as they impede the will of the individual ego.
