You have to look at Stirner’s position in Europe - basically the poor fecker was despised. But loads of people were refering to Stirner but never by name - the classical example was Marx and Engels “The German Ideology”- which is a pretty poor attempt to critique the ego and its own - but again not mentioning him.
I think Nietzsche’s views are far wider and have much greater depth then Stirner (plus he’s a million times easier to read)
BUT, none the less, I suspect Nietzsche must have got access to Stirner at some stage and that there was surely some influence:
lsr-projekt.de/poly/eninnuce.html
and
lsr-projekt.de/poly/ennietzsche.html
(I think this guys thesis of Nietzsche as a “stirner suppressor” (!) is over the top - but an interesting read)
Here’s an extremely badly written anarchist appreciation of/introduction to Stirner by myself (from a good few years ago!)
flag.blackened.net/revolt/rbr/rbr6/stirner.html
The wikipdedia link (I know, I know- trust them not) is quite interesting
[i]While The German Ideology so assured The Ego and Its Own a place of curious interest among Marxist readers, Marx’s ridicule of Stirner has played a significant role in the subsequent marginalization of Stirner’s work, in popular and academic discourse.
Over the course of the last hundred and fifty years, Stirner’s thinking has proved an intellectual challenge, reminiscent of the challenge Cartesian criticism brought to western philosophy. His philosophy has been characterized as disturbing, sometimes even considered a direct threat to civilization; something that ought not even be mentioned in polite company, and that should be, if encountered by some unfortunate happenstance, examined as briefly as possible and then best forgotten. Stirner’s relentlessness in the service of scuttling the most tenaciously held tenets of the Western mindset yields a terrain which bears testimony to the radical threat he posed; most writers who read and were influenced by Stirner failed to make any references to him or The Ego and Its Own at all in their writing. As the renowned art critic Herbert Read has observed, Stirner’s book has remained ‘stuck in the gizzard’ of Western culture since it first appeared.
It has been argued that Nietzsche did read Stirner’s book, yet even he did not mention Stirner anywhere in his work, his letters, or his papers [1]. Nietzsche’s thinking sometimes resembles Stirner’s to such a degree that Eduard von Hartmann called him a plagiarist. This seems too simple an explanation of what Nietzsche might have done with Stirner’s ideas. Stirner’s book had been in oblivion for half a century, and only after Nietzsche became well-known in the 1890s did Stirner become more well-known, although only as an awkward predecessor of Nietzsche. Thus Nietzsche - as with Marx’s concept of historical materialism in 1845/46 - did not really plagiarize Stirner but instead “superseded” him by creating a philosophy.
Several other authors, philosophers and artists have cited, quoted or otherwise referred to Max Stirner. They include Albert Camus (In The Rebel), Benjamin Tucker, Dora Marsden, Georg Brandes, Rudolf Steiner, Robert Anton Wilson, Italian individualist anarchist Frank Brand, the notorious antiartist Marcel Duchamp, several writers of the situationist movement, and Max Ernst, who titled a 1925 painting L’unique et sa propriété. The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini read and was inspired by Stirner, and made several references to him in his newspaper articles, prior to rising to power. His later writings would uphold a view opposed to Stirner, a trajectory mirrored by the composer Richard Wagner.
Since its appearance in 1844, The Ego and Its Own has seen periodic revivals of popular, political and academic interest, based around widely divergent translations and interpretations – some psychological, others political in their emphasis. Today, many ideas associated with post-left anarchy criticism of ideology and uncompromising individualism - are clearly related to Stirner’s. He has also been regarded as pioneering individualist feminism, since his objection to any absolute concept also clearly counts gender roles as ‘spooks’. His ideas were also adopted by post-anarchism, with Saul Newman largely in agreement with many of Stirner’s criticisms of classical anarchism, including his rejection of revolution and essentialism.
Stirner’s demolition of absolute concepts disturbs traditional concepts of attribution of meaning to language and human existence, and can be seen as pioneering a modern media theory which focuses on dynamic conceptions of language and reality, in contrast to reality as subject to any absolute definition. Jean Baudrillard’s critique of Marxism and development of a dynamic theory of media, simulation and ‘the real’ employs some of the same elements Stirner used in his Hegelian critique without, however, making recourse to very much that lies at the heart of the plumb-line libertarian core of Stirner’s philosophy. Though many in the poststructuralist camp have championed Stirner’s thought, the core tenets of these two entities are wholly incompatible; Stirner would never agree, for example, with that fundamental poststructuralist idea, that as a product of systems, the self is undermined. For Stirner, the self cannot be a mere product of systems. There remains, in the Stirnerian schema, as described in the above, a place deep within the self which language and social systems cannot destroy. This idea finds expression, perhaps, in a concept put forward by the contemporary philosopher Julia Kristeva; the ‘semiotic chora’, as she calls it, represents a state of mind which predates the inculcation of the social apparatus in the mind of the young child.
[/i]
the ego and its own is at
flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchi … eego0.html
Last but not least an excellent anarchist introduction to Stirner from the anarchist FAQ
geocities.com/CapitolHill/1931/secG6.html
krossie