The Political Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche

Einzige · Jul 18, 2012

Part one of a series of posts I'd like to make about different political philosophers and their impact on modern thought. The crown jewel in this series is to be a book-length analysis of Karl Marx, beginning with his earliest works; but I want to test the waters first, to make sure that there's an actual audience for that sort of thing. Friedrich Nietzsche didn't discuss politics a great deal in his writings, and so it's easier for me to get a feel for the taste of the board by starting off with a one-post thread.

The most noted aspect of his "political philosophy" , loosely called, is his objection to 'socialism'. His overriding objection to socialism is stated most clearly in Human, All-Too-Human 473, and it is not at all unlike those raised constantly by modern minarchists to the idea:

Socialism in respect to its means. Socialism is the visionary younger brother of an almost decrepit despotism, whose heir it wants to be. Thus its efforts are reactionary in the deepest sense. For it desires a wealth of executive power, as only despotism had it; indeed, it outdoes everything in the past by striving for the downright destruction of the individual, which it sees as an unjustified luxury of nature, and which it intends to improve into an expedient organ of the community. Socialism crops up in the vicinity of all excessive displays of power because of its relation to it, like the typical old socialist Plato, at the court of the Sicilian tyrant; it desires (and in certain circumstances furthers) the Caesarean power state of this century, because, as we said, it would like to be its heir. But even this inheritance would not suffice for its purposes; it needs the most submissive subjugation of all citizens to the absolute state, the like of which has never existed. And since it cannot even count any longer on the old religious piety towards the state, having rather always to work to eliminate piety (because it works on the elimination of all existing states), it can only hope to exist here and there for short periods of time by means of the most extreme terrorism. Therefore, it secretly prepares for reigns of terror, and drives the word "justice" like a nail into the heads of the semieducated masses, to rob them completely of their reason (after this reason has already suffered a great deal from its semieducation), and to give them a good conscience for the evil game that they are supposed to play. Socialism can serve as a rather brutal and forceful way to teach the danger of all accumulation of state power, and to that extent instill one with distrust of the state itself. When its rough voice chimes in with the battle cry "As much state as possible," it will at first make the cry noisier than ever; but soon the opposite cry will be heard with strength the greater: "As little state as possible."

From this, one would be tempted to ascribe to Nietzsche the label as a protogenic forerunner of Grover Norquist's "Starve The Beast" philosophy. And, indeed, though quite a few are loathe to admit it, many anti-socialists, including Ayn Rand and Richard Nixon, borrowed liberally from Nietzsche's writings on socialism.

But to label Nietzsche as a mere anti-socialist is to miss the point of what few political expressions can be found in his works. When Nietzsche says that socialism "wants to be" the heir of an 'ancient despoty', he was speaking from the context of his experience as a German national. For the welfare State in Germany, far from being the product of socialist agitators, was imposed by none other than the greatest of all great reactionaries, the Iron Chancellor himself, Otto von Bismarck. This article goes into further detail on this most unholy of alliances:

The modern welfare state had its birthplace in late nineteenth-century Imperial Germany under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. In the 1870s the Social Democratic Party gained increasing support from the voters in elections to the parliament, the Reichstag. Fearful that the socialists might win a majority, Kaiser Wilhelm and the conservative parties resolved to thwart this dangerous challenge to their power and the existing order.

In the early 1880s the Kaiser agreed to support the first welfare-state legislation sponsored by Bismarck. A decade later, Bismarck explained to an American sympathizer the strategy behind these laws that guaranteed every German national health insurance, a pension, a minimum wage and workplace regulation, vacation, and unemployment insurance. “My idea was to bribe the working classes, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare,” he said.

Nietzsche, himself a self-professedly 'apolitical' man, absolutely despised Bismarck and the Kaiserreich, famously declaring himself a descendant of Polish nobility to escape the association that came with being the son of a pastor of the Imperial court. At almost the exact same time as Nietzsche was writing Human, All-Too-Human, the 'left-winged' SPD was busy forging an alliance with the Kaiser and Bismarck to advance legislation it then perceived to be in the best interests of the working-class - and of the State.

Einzige · Jul 18, 2012

But if Nietzsche's hostility to socialism was largely predicated upon his antipathy towards the newly reunified Germany, what does he say on the subject of the working-class itself? He is far more amenable to that class itself than he is to its political organ in the SPD, as the following quotations, pulled from various of his works, demonstrate:

The workers should learn to feel like soldiers: a fee, a salary but no payment. They should one day live like the bourgeoisie at present; but above them, distinguishing itself by its lack of needs, the higher caste, poorer and simpler, but in possession of the power.

The impossible class. - Poor, happy and independent! - these things can go together; poor, happy and a slave! - these things can also go together - and I can think of no better news I could give to our factory slaves: provided, that is, they do not feel it to be in general a disgrace to be thus used, and used up, as a part of a machine and as it were a stopgap to fill a hole in human inventiveness! To the devil with the belief that higher payment could lift from them the essence of their miserable condition - I mean their impersonal enslavement! To the devil with the idea of being persuaded that an enhancement of this impersonality within the mechanical operation of a new society could transform the disgrace of slavery into a virtue!

To the devil with setting a price on oneself in exchange for which one ceases to be a person and becomes a part of a machine! Are you accomplices in the current folly of the nations - the folly of wanting above all to produce as much as possible and to become as rich as possible? What you ought to do, rather, is to hold up to them the counter-reckoning: how great a sum of inner value is thrown away in pursuit of this external goal! But where is your inner value if you no longer know what it is to breathe freely? if you no longer posess the slightest power over yourselves? if you all too often grow weary of yourselves like a drink that has been left too long standing? if you pay heed to the newspapers and look askance at your wealthy neighbor, made covetous by the rapid rise and fall of power, money and opinions? if you no longer believe in philosophy that wears rags, in the free-heartedness of him without needs? if voluntary poverty and freedom from profession and marriage, such as would very suit the more spiritual among you, have become to you things to laugh at? If, on the other hand, you have always in your ears the flutings of the Socialist pied-pipers whose design is to enflame you with wild hopes? which bid you to be prepared and nothing further, prepared day upon day, so that you wait for something to happen from outside and in all other respects go on living as you have always lived - until this waiting turns to hunger and thirst and fever and madness, and at last the day of the bestia triumphans dawns in all its glory?

- In contrast to all this, everyone ought to say to himself: 'better to go abroad, to seek to become master in new and savage regions of the world and above all master over myself; to keep moving from place to place for just as long as any sign of slavery seems to threaten me; to shun neither adventure nor war and, if the worst should come to worst, to be prepared for death: all this rather than further to endure this indecent servitude, rather than to go on becoming soured and malicious and conspiratorial!' This would be the right attitude of mind: the workers of Europe ought henceforth to declare themselves as a class a human impossibility and not, as usually happens, only a somewhat harsh and inappropriate social arrangement; they ought to inaugurate within the European beehive an age of a great swarming-out such as has never been seen before, and through this act of free emigration in the grand manner to protest against the machine, against capital, and against the choice now threatening them of being compelled to become either the slave of the state or the slave of a party of disruption.

Let Europe be relieved of a fourth part of its inhabitants! They and it will be all the better for it! Only in distant lands and in the undertakings of swarming trains of colonists will it really become clear how much reason and fairness, how much healthy mistrust, mother Europe has embodied in her sons - sons who could no longer endure it with the dull old woman and were in danger of becoming as querulous, as irritable and pleasure-seeking as she herself was.

Only those individuals can emerge from this horrifying struggle for existence who are then immediately preoccupied with the fine illusions of artistic culture, so that they do not arrivate at that practical pessimism which nature abhors as truly unnatural. In the modern world which, compared with the Greek, usually creates nothing but freaks and centaurs, and in which the individual man is flamboyantly pieced together like the fantastic creature at the beginning of Horace's Ars Poetica, the craving of the struggle for existence and of the need for art often manifests itself in one and the same person: an unnatural combination which gave rise to the need to excuse and consecrate the first craving before the dictates of art. For that reason, people believe in the 'dignity of man' and the 'dignity of work'.

The Greeks have no need for conceptual hallucinations like this, they voice their opinion that work is a disgrace with shocking openness - and a more concealed, less frquently expressed wisdom, which was nevertheless alive everywhere, added that the human being was also a disgraceful and pathetic non-entity and 'shadow of a dream'.... Nowadays it is not the man in need of art, but the slave who determines general views: in which capacity he naturally has to label all his circumstances with deceptive names in order to be able to live. Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of work, are the feeble products of a slavery that hides from itself.

Nietzsche is not an anarchist, but is quite close to such a position - again, he is not, at all, a political thinker. His aesthetic mode of existence, the Dionysian state, contains within itself a communal form of living centered around gift-giving and free associations of power; it is very much a sort of potlach. Nietzsche takes no issue with a communalistic economy; he does have a very serious grievance against communalism which uses the apparatus of state power to secure such a state.

Nietzsche detested capitalism as a means by which man is demeaned, in several meanings of the term. He loathed socialism as a means to the establishment of the dictatorship. And although he called anarchists "dogs", he shares more affinities with them than with any other political movement, although, again, to call him an anarchist is to posthumously subscribe to him a political view he never held.

His one real political statement, in fact, is almost pacifistic:

And perhaps the great day will come when a people, distinguished by wars and victories and by the highest development of a military order and intelligence, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifice for these things, will exclaim of its own free will, ‘we break the sword,’ and will smash its military establishment down to its lowest foundations. Rendering oneself unarmed when one has been the best armed, out of a height of feeling — that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on a peace of mind; whereas the so-called armed peace, as it now exists in all countries, is the absence of peace of mind. One trusts neither oneself nor one’s neighbor and, half from hatred, half from fear, does not lay down arms. Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared — this must someday become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth.

However, it must be said that Nietzsche's method is a philosophy unto itself, and is quite correctly the apotheosis of radical thought - radicalism for radicalism's sake. Nietzsche addresses the man who is pulled towards the extremity of any sort; his political philosophy is subjectivist, and addressed to the subject itself.

The Political Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche

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Elitist as Hell.

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Elitist as Hell.