Editing Max Stirner (section)

== Critical reception ==
Stirner's work did not go unnoticed among his contemporaries. Stirner's attacks on ideology—in particular Feuerbach's humanism—forced Feuerbach into print. Moses Hess (at that time close to Marx) and Szeliga (pseudonym of Franz Zychlin von Zychlinski, an adherent of Bruno Bauer) also replied to Stirner, who answered the criticism in a German periodical in the September 1845 article ''Stirner's Critics'' (''Recensenten Stirners''), which clarifies several points of interest to readers of the book—especially in relation to Feuerbach.

While Marx's ''Saint Max'' (''Sankt Max''), a large part of ''[[The German Ideology]]'' (''Die Deutsche Ideologie''), was not published until 1932 and thus assured ''The Unique and Its Property'' a place of curious interest among [[Marxist]] readers, Marx's ridicule of Stirner has played a significant role in the preservation of Stirner's work in popular and academic discourse despite lacking mainstream popularity.<ref name="Paul 1975"/><ref name="Lobkowicz 1970"/><ref name="Stedman-Jones 2002"/><ref name="Alexander"/>

=== Comments by contemporaries ===
Twenty years after the appearance of Stirner's book, the author [[Friedrich Albert Lange]] wrote the following:
{{blockquote|Stirner went so far in his notorious work, 'Der Einzige und Sein Eigenthum' (1845), as to reject all moral ideas. Everything that in any way, whether it be external force, belief, or mere idea, places itself above the individual and his caprice, Stirner rejects as a hateful limitation of himself. What a pity that to this book—the extremest that we know anywhere—a second positive part was not added. It would have been easier than in the case of [[Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling|Schelling]]'s philosophy; for out of the unlimited Ego I can again beget every kind of [[Idealism]] as ''my'' [[Will (philosophy)|will]] and ''my'' [[idea]]. Stirner lays so much stress upon the will, in fact, that it appears as the root force of human nature. It may remind us of [[Schopenhauer]].<ref>''[[History of Materialism]]'', ii. 256 (1865).</ref>}}

Some people believe that in a sense a "second positive part" was soon to be added, though not by Stirner, but by [[Friedrich Nietzsche]]. The [[Relationship between Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner|relationship between Nietzsche and Stirner]] seems to be much more complicated.<ref>See [http://www.lsr-projekt.de/poly/ennietzsche.html Bernd A. Laska: Nietzsche's initial crisis] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171020022410/http://www.lsr-projekt.de/poly/ennietzsche.html |date=20 October 2017 }}. In: Germanic Notes and Reviews, vol. 33, n. 2, Fall/Herbst 2002, pp. 109–133.</ref> According to George J. Stack's ''Lange and Nietzsche'', Nietzsche read Lange's ''History of Materialism'' "again and again" and was therefore very familiar with the passage regarding Stirner.<ref>George J. Stack, ''Lange and Nietzsche'', Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, New York, 1983, p. 12, {{ISBN|978-3-11-008866-3}}.</ref>