- Lived:
- 1806–1856 · Bayreuth and Berlin, Germany
- Tradition:
- Young Hegelian turned radical egoist; the wild outer edge of German philosophy
- The Big Idea:
- Every abstraction placed above you — God, the State, Humanity, Morality — is a ghost haunting your head, and a free life begins when you stop serving ghosts and own yourself.
- In their words:
- "I have set my cause on nothing."
- If you remember one thing:
- A quiet Berlin schoolteacher wrote the most extreme book of the nineteenth century — so threatening that Marx and Engels spent more pages attacking it than the book itself contained.