April 7, 2012
“The time is coming.”
Nietzsche and the crisis of contemporary politics
Hans Sluga
1.
“The time for petty politics is over,” Nietzsche proclaimed in Beyond Good and Evil, his “prelude to a philosophy of the future”[1] The year was 1886. At roughly the same moment his notebook records: “The time is coming when one will have to relearn about politics” – and this because of an incipient “compulsion to great politics.”[2]
I ask myself: what motivated such stark predictions? Surely not one of the political disturbances of the mid-1880’s. Not, for instance, the occasional saber-rattling on both sides of the Franco-German border. The 1880’s were, in fact, a period of consolidation in Europe. The revolutionary impulses of earlier decades had run their course. The national aspirations of Germany and Italy had been fulfilled. All in all, peace was in sight for the next thirty years. No, – Nietzsche was thinking in longer stretches and larger terms. In Beyond Good and Evil his eye was on the next century and its inevitable “struggle for mastery over the whole earth.”[3] And in his notebook he was speaking of future “more comprehensive forms of dominion,” future “masters of the earth,” of future racial unions “artist-tyrants” who would employ Europe to “get hold of the destinies of the earth, so as to work as artists upon ‘man’ himself.” Such visions were surely not provoked by the political tremors of the 1880’s; they were the product, rather, of Nietzsche’s breathless certainty of living in a transitory, transitional age.
2.
Nietzsche believed in the urgency of a new great politics because he saw the tide of nihilism rising before him – slowly but inexorably – over the course of “the next two centuries.” (WP, preface) The deluge would wash away our order of values and force us to rethink all our existing values, the political ones included.
We need to ask at this point what this nihilism meant to Nietzsche since the term is laden with too many associations. A common view has it that Nietzsche equated nihilism with anomie – a condition in which men have no values at all anymore and hence are unable to make deliberate choices. But Nietzsche defines nihilism in a different way. Nihilism, he writes, means that “our highest values devalue themselves.” (WP, 2, my emphasis) It is “the conviction of an absolute untenability of existence when it comes to the highest values. (WP, 2, my emphasis) As a result “the aim is lacking: ‘why?’ finds no answer.” (WP, 1) Nihilism destroys, thus, the hierarchy and order of values and with this their justification. It does not, however, consists in the disappearance of all values. Nihilism is not anomie.
Consider the famous madman passage from Nietzsche’s Gay Science. A madman lights his lantern in daylight and runs into the market square shouting: “Where is God? Where is God?” The men in the square laugh at him because they know well that God is dead and that their lives continue without him. Nietzsche tells his story in words that recall Diogenes the Cynic and his encounter with the citizens of democratic Athens. The men in the market square are thus meant to be, in the first place, Greeks of the fourth century: civilized, enlightened, democratically minded, certainly secularists and probably traders and merchants. They, surely, do not suffer from anomie since they value their own cultured, urban, tolerant way of life; they obviously value easy-going banter and quick wit; and they value presumably also the pleasures of buying and selling. We may think of Protagoras as their spokesman when he says mockingly: “As to the gods, I do not know whether they exist or don’t; the matter is too difficult and human life is too short.”
Nietzsche’s story of the madman has a second target, namely his own contemporaries. This is evident from the madman’s allusion to the death of Jesus when he shouts that we have murdered God. Nietzsche’s madman may be arguing with his Athenian contemporaries, but Nietzsche himself is arguing also with the men of his own time. Does he think that they are anomic because they no longer believe in God? Surely not. The Kantians – and there were many of those – would surely have told him that morality is based in reason alone and, hence, does not require a belief in God. Nietzsche would, probably, have responded that reason is just another shadow of God and will also eventually dwindle away. But what would he have said to the utilitarians – of which there were likewise many among his contemporaries? They value pleasure or happiness and appeal to neither God nor reason. It doesn’t follow, then, that all values are lost when our “highest” values are devalued and even less that all our values are lost when the belief in God is undermined.
I assume that Nietzsche understood all this. He writes in his notebook that the end of Christianity at the hand of its own morality has generated “a repugnance against the falseness and mendacity of every Christian interpretation of the world of history. Rebound from ‘God is the Truth” into the fanatical belief ‘Everything is false.’”[4] But the latter, we should see, is an overreaction against the preceding Christian fanaticism – psychologically understandable but not inevitable. He continues that “the end of the moral interpretation of the world” leads to nihilism and adds: “The untenability of one interpretation of the world, upon which a tremendous amount of energy has been lavished, awakens the suspicion that all interpretations of the world are false.” This does not mean that the suspicion is well-founded. Admittedly, Nietzsche seems to equate nihilism in this passage with the idea that “everything lacks meaning” so that it might be thought to collapse, after all, into anomie. But Nietzsche’s considered view still only involves the denial of a hierarchy and order of values, not that of values altogether. I find support for that conclusion in his distinction between active and passive nihilism. The passive nihilist may, indeed, be someone who has no values and, hence, may be unable to act. The active nihilist, on the other hand, has still something that motivates him – even if that is only the value of destruction. Nietzsche recognizes this kind of nihilism in himself and speaks of it as pervasively human and, indeed, as more powerful than the passive, anomic sort of nihilism. On the Genealogy of Morals reminds us repeatedly that “man would rather will nothingness than not will.”[5] I conclude that for Nietzsche anomic nihilism is a (minor) variety of nihilism properly understood; that the essence of nihilism is not to be found in the denial of all values but in the denial of a hierarchy and order of values.
If so, why does he consider nihilism to be such a threat? We understand that the presence or absence of certain values can affect our lives? But what difference does the existence or non-existence of a hierarchy and order of values make? Can’t life go on without belief in such a hierarchy as seems evident both from the men in the Athenian market square and from Nietzsche’s contemporaries? Nietzsche’s answer, I think, is twofold. Firstly, without such a hierarchy, values prove anchorless, unstable, and shifting. It is not that all values disappear under nihilistic conditions; we may, on the contrary, witness a proliferation of competing values. Second, only when there is a hierarchy of values can there be human greatness. Without it, we will not be capable of the achievements that require deep, long-term, unwavering commitment. We can see what Nietzsche has in mind from our own contemporary culture where the most trite and trivial counts as much as the greatest and most profound. Triviality itself has, indeed, become a value for us and all values have become trivial. We find ourselves, thus, in a world of constantly changing values. What is acclaimed today is discarded tomorrow. Our values have been reduced to fashions and as such to something of no great consequence.
3
We will understand nihilism better when we look at politics – where it manifests itself, in Nietzsche’s view, in the form of the democratic state. His conception of that state draws on Plato’s picture of the democratic polis. This polis is a place “full of freedom and freedom of speech.” Everyone can do what he wants and arrange his life in whatever manner pleases him. In consequence, there will be “all sorts of characters, fine and multicolored” and the polis will look like “a coat embroidered with every kind of ornament.”[6] Plato’s polis recognizes no order of rank between men and women, masters and slaves, or any other distinction of rank. Because it is built on the ideals of self-realization and subjective freedom, the democratic polis will also be a place of continuous turmoil and prone to disintegration. Plato’s democracy has, indeed, come about through the decay of other, better forms of government and is bound to give way, in turn, to a still worse political system. A reversal will come about only when a philosopher-king can establish himself and reform the city in the light of his knowledge of the genuine order of values.
Modern democracy – so Nietzsche – exemplifies the same tendencies as Plato’s polis. It, too, is a place of moral and political pluralism. It, too, lacks distinctions of rank and instead advances liberalism and socialism, feminism and egalitarianism. It, too, is unstable and bound to decay. This is what political nihilism looks like for Nietzsche – a condition from which no petty politics can relieve us. If we are to overcome political nihilism, we must establish a new hierarchy and order of values and that means new highest values. The great politics Nietzsche envisions will therefore call for new kinds of “masters” and “mastery,” and “forms of dominion.” Only in one respect does Nietzsche’s conception of such a great politics diverge from Plato’s. Where the latter takes the determination of a hierarchy of values to be a question of discovery by the philosopher, Nietzsche considers it to be a matter of creative invention by an “artist-tyrant.”.
4.
It was in Human All Too Human where Nietzsche had first said that the time was coming for a transformation of politics. The medieval Church, he had written in a section of the book entitled “A Glance at the State,” had aimed at being a universal institution, serving the highest interests of the whole of mankind. The states and nations of recent history present, by contrast “an oppressive impression” of being “petty (kleinlich), mean, materialistic, and narrow in space.” But they serve at least real needs, whereas the church had been built on illusions, and “the time is coming when institutions arise to serve the shared real needs of all people.” (476)[7]
Aphorism 472 in this section of Human All Too Human maps out what Nietzsche perceives to be problematic in modern politics – though not yet in the apocalyptic terms he will employ a decade later.[8] The passage deserves our attention.
The first thing to note in it is that, in speaking of the history and future of the state, Nietzsche uses of the word “state” to refer first of all to the classical European state of the 17th and 18th centuries with its “absolute tutelary government,” the state that sees itself “as guardian for the benefit of the masses not yet of age.” This classical state has given way in more recent times to the more precarious institution of “the democratic state.” In Nietzsche’s terminology “the state” and “the democratic state” refer, thus, to historically specific institutions. His crucial thesis is that the modern democratic state is not a self-standing political order but represents “the historical form of the decay of the state,” that is, of the classical state that preceded it.
Nietzsche explains the transition from tutelary to democratic government in terms of the loss of belief in God as final authority and highest value and the resulting disestablishment of religion. He maintains accordingly that “the interests of tutelary government and the interests of religion go hand in hand together, so that when the latter begins to die out the foundations of the state too are undermined.” In so far as the death of God signals for Nietzsche the devaluation of our highest values and, according to his later formulation, the coming of nihilism, the decline of tutelary government, the rise of democracy, and the eventual decline and death of the state will turn out to be all aspects of the history of nihilism. This thought is, however, not yet expressed in Human All Too Human.
The belief that the authority of government has (and must have) divine origins reflects, indeed, the dominant self-image of the modern absolute state. Hegel still holds that “religion is intimately associated with the principle of the state.”[9] For Nietzsche it is not that political authority requires a religious grounding as such, it is, rather, that it may require the belief in such a grounding. Religion is needed to reconcile the masses to “inevitable evils” the state cannot or will not prevent and to reconcile them to “shortcomings of the state government or the perilous consequences of dynastic interests.” This may be true only for the European tradition with its intimate bond to the Christian religion. Elsewhere, as in China, the tutelary state may have had quite different roots in the idea of patriarchal authority. Moreover, while the classical European state tended to appeal to divine authority, its religious justification is not the only possible one as Hobbes has demonstrated.
In the Western tradition, to which Nietzsche restricts himself, the modern absolute state is eventually challenged by the democratic state in which a “quite different conception of government” prevails. Modern democracy understands itself as “the instrument of the popular will … as a function of the sole sovereign power, the people.” It is a form of government where the opinion of the people “must find its echo in their representatives.” The democratic state, so conceived, is finally also said to be dedicated to “the unshackling of the private person.”[10] In short, it incorporates the distinctively modern ideas of popular sovereignty and political equality, the representative system of government and the value of liberal individualism.
This kind of state Nietzsche takes to be inherently unstable. He identifies three successive stages of disregard, decline, and ultimate death of the state as “the consequence of the democratic conception of the state,” and he adds to this the sharp judgment that it is in this that the mission of democratic state lies. The privatization of religion marks the first stage in this process. This development is prepared by the diversification of religious opinions during the Reformation. Next comes that moment in the Enlightenment when the people governing the absolute state begin to feel superior to religion. Once that attitude spreads “an employment and exploitation of the religious drives and consolations for political ends will no longer be so easy” and the privatization of religion will get on its way.
While we tend to regard this process as a decisive advance in individual freedom and thus in the rights of the individual, Nietzsche is far less sanguine about it. Its first consequence is for him “an apparent strengthening of religious feelings.” Freed from political constraints, religious feelings can now seek new outlets. This leads to religious “excesses and extremes” so that the established forms of religion will eventually be overrun with sects. It then becomes evident that “at the moment religion was made a private affair an abundance of dragon’s teeth were sown.” Confirmation of Nietzsche’s conjecture may be found in the waves of religious re-awakening that have spread through Europe and America since the Victorian age and the proliferation of new denominations in this same period from Mormonism through the Old Catholics to the panoply of Evangelical churches and mini-churches.
Nietzsche predicts further, what is also confirmed by our experience, that this intensification of religious feelings will, in turn, bring about a backlash in which “every better and better gifted man will make irreligion his private affair.” And these sentiments may generate “an almost fanatical enthusiasm for the state,” filling the emotional space formerly occupied by religion “with a kind of substitute in the form of devotion to the state.” He also considers it certain that, with the spread of such sentiments, governments will give their measures increasingly “a character hostile to religion.” And that will, in turn, provoke a backlash from the religious who now become “decidedly hostile to the state.” This dialectic is, indeed, thoroughly familiar to us from recent history where fundamentalist sectarianism, a-religiousness, the state’s hostility to religion, and religion’s hostility to the state, as well as the extreme worship of the state (in the form of fascist ideology) are all found jostling together.
For Nietzsche the history of the modern and democratic state involves thus a struggle between the religious and the anti-religious parties whose outcome he considers by no means predictable. He offers us, thus, an alternative to Max Weber’s thesis that modern society is engaged in an inevitable process of secularization. In Nietzsche’s picture, the disestablishment of religion will have as one of its side-products a new intensification of religious feeling among some people and in the resulting struggle between the religious and the antireligious the latter may even win out, re-establishing a religious despotism – “perhaps less enlightened and more troubled by fear than formerly.” Another possible outcome is that the anti-religious parties succeed once and for in undermining “the propagation of their opponents.” These possibilities are again familiar to us from contemporary politics with some societies turning back towards a clerical regime (Iran), others maintaining a consciously secularist and anti-religious stance (China) and yet others, like the United States, experiencing a continuous battle between the religious and the anti-religious parties.
5.
While Nietzsche declares himself uncertain about the ultimate outcome of this struggle, he is sure that in the course of this development the underlying principle of the democratic state will be more and more exposed. It will become clear then that this state is based on a single-minded commitment to the freedom of the individual. When this becomes finally apparent, the individual will respect only that side of the state which “promises to be useful or threatens to be harmful for him, and will bend all his efforts to acquiring influence upon it.” Like Plato in the Republic, Nietzsche assumes that the desire for political self-determination will eventually give way to unconstrained selfishness and that the result will be sharply increased competition. He writes:
But this competition will soon become too great, men and parties alternate
too quickly, hurl one another too fiercely down the hill after barely having
attained the top. None of the measures effected by a government will be
guaranteed continuity; everyone will draw back from undertakings that
require quiet tending for decades or centuries if their fruits are to mature.
No one will feel toward a law any greater obligation than that of bowing
for the moment to the force which backs up the law: one will then at once
set to work to subvert it with a new force, the creation of a new majority.
Once again, it is easy to identify aspects of our own political reality that fit these characterizations. Nietzsche goes on to argue that at this stage “distrust of all government” will initiate “the resolve to do away with the concept of the state,” and dissolve, in particular, the distinction between the private and the public. When the state is ruled entirely by private interests, its functions will be taken over more and more by those who seek to make private profit. He writes: “Private companies will step by step absorb the business of the state: even the most resistant remainder of what was formerly the work of government (for example its activities to protect the private person from the private person) will in the long run be taken care of by private contractors.” Once more, we are reminded of our own political reality with its private security firms, private armies, private prisons, and the whole-scale privatization of services formerly performed by the state.
6.
Nietzsche is convinced that the process will reach its logical end in the disintegration of the entire political order and at that point “a new page will be turned in the story book of humanity.” But he is not at all keen to see this day come too soon. He puts his trust modestly, instead, “in the prudence and self-interest of men to preserve the existing state for some time yet and to repulse the destructive experiments of the precipitate and the over-zealous.”
At the same time he reflects on what is likely to happen after the disappearance of the state. And here he is sure that “the last that will ensue is chaos.” Instead we will see the appearance of new forms of political order. “An invention more suited … than the state was will gain victory over the state.” For the state as we know it is only a specific historical creation and as such contingent. Nietzsche reminds us at this point of the existence of other, earlier forms of political order, “for example that of the racial clan, which was for millennia far mightier than that of the family, and indeed ruled and regulated long before the family existed.” Subsequently, the ideal of familial rights and powers came to rule “as far as the Roman world extended,” but it has since grown “ever paler and more impotent.” Nietzsche is sure that later generations “will see the state too shrink to insignificance in various parts of the earth – a notion many people of the present can hardly contemplate without fear and revulsion.”
7.
He is clear, however, on two things. The first is that one has to work actively for the abolition of nations. European nationalism is anathema to him and the cause of many of Europe’s troubles and he is not afraid to proclaim himself therefore “a good European,” rather than a German and he becomes, thus, the first European philosopher to do so. European integration seems to him, indeed, inevitable given “trade and industry, the post and the book trade, the possession in common of all higher culture, rapid changing of home and scene” etc. (475) He believes, furthermore, that this integration has to be accompanied by a mixing of the European nations, the achievement of a European racial union, and that this, too, is already on the way.
He Hopes that this process will at once solve the notorious problem of anti-Semitism since “the entire problem of the Jews exists only within nation states.” The Jews with their exceptional talents would, indeed, be important for “the production of the strongest possible European mixed race.” Nietzsche offers us at this point his most enthusiastic assessment of the Jews who have had “the most grief-laden history of any people” for which, he adds, all of us are not without blame. We have to thank the Jews, he writes, for the noblest human being in Christ, the purest sage in Spinoza, and “the mightiest book and the most efficacious moral code in the world.” Jewish scholars helped moreover, in the darkest period of the Middle Ages, “to uphold the banner of enlightenment and intellectual independence,” they restored our link to the ancient world, and it is thanks to them “that a more natural, rational, and in any event unmythical elucidation of the world could at last obtain victory.” (475)
His hopes, we can see now, were, of course, overly optimistic. Europe is still struggling to unite itself; nationalism (European and otherwise) has yet to be overcome; a mingling of the European races is still hard to conceive. What we have as a European Union is so far only a business arrangement; there is no philosophical vision of Europe; Nietzsche has found few successors in his effort to be a good European. The problem of anti-Semitism still persists; the more rabid persecution of the Jews since Nietzsche’s time – sometimes conducted even, absurdly enough, in the name of Nietzsche – has, moreover, weakened the capacity of the Jews, envisaged by Nietzsche, to serve as a bond across races and nationalities and has given impetus, instead, to a new Jewish nationalism with all its attendant problems and perplexities; in addition, the Europeans have invented new forms of discrimination directed against new minorities. Nietzsche’s great vision, in other words, still awaits realization and may, indeed, turn out be marred and impossible to pursue.
8.
A broader look at the section of Human All Too Human entitled “A Glance at the State” confirms what I have said and throws at the same time a new and diffracted light on it. Such a broader view illuminates, in particular, the distance that separates Nietzsche’s thinking about politics in 1878 from what he says about it eight years later.
He begins the section with a critique of the democratic state. “Everything is lost,” he quotes Voltaire, “when the populace joins into the reasoning.” And that has happened in the democratic state which aims “to make life endurable for as many as possible” The people in this state “want for once to forge for themselves their own fortunes and misfortunes.” That is not objectionable, Nietzsche argues, as long as “this narrow-mindedness does not go so far as to demand that everything should become politics in this sense, that everyone should live and work according to such a standard.” At least a few must be allowed to refrain from this sort of politics and “to step a little aside.” These few will “fail to take the happiness of the many so seriously, whether by the many one understands nations or social classes.” For they know that a higher culture can come about only where there are different castes and thus a distinction of rank.
Nietzsche is convinced that a distinction of rank underlies every stable political order. In the classical form of the state men treat their princes as if they were gods or, at least, as representatives of the god. (440) And “wherever there is a striving to exalt individual men into something superhuman, there also appears the tendency to imagine whole classes of the people as being coarser and lower than they really are.” (461) Princely rule and class division thus go hand in hand. This distinction of rank generates willingness to subordinate “which is so highly rated in the military and bureaucratic state;” In the democratic state, on the other hand, subordination is no longer valued and must therefore become unbelievable. “It is bound to disappear because its foundations are disappearing: belief in unconditional authority, in definite truth.” (441) In freer, i.e., more egalitarian and more democratic circumstances, “people subordinate themselves only conditionally, as the result of a mutual contract, and thus without prejudice to their self-interest.” But we must recognize that “a host of the most astonishing operations” will no longer be possible when subordination ceases to be acceptable. Nietzsche is certain that our political order will therefore eventually disintegrate just as “all previous orders have done so, as soon as the suns of novel opinions shine out over mankind with a new heat.” (443) But, once again, he is cautious about this possibility and adds that one can wish for the dissolution of the existing political order only if one harbors hope – and this hope is usually just “a piece of presumption and overvaluation.”
9.
It is, however, not only the state that is undermined when the sense of subordination is lost – great culture also ceases to be possible. With the introduction of this theme Nietzsche opens up a new line of thought whose implications become most evident in the next to last aphorism of the entire section on the stat in Human All Too Human. It is in this aphorism that Nietzsche makes use for the first time of the notion of a great politics – but, as it turns out, with very different connotations from the ones that the term will have for him a decade later.
The term “great politics” was by no means Nietzsche’s invention. He had borrowed it, rather from the public rhetoric of his time. Somewhat after Nietzsche, Theodor Schiemann, a political commentator, uses the term, for instance, in a survey of political conditions in Germany. “Great politics” is for Schiemann a politics addressing “the great problems of world politics;” it is a politics of “the great powers” and their “interests,” of “the development of their power” and their “power relations.” In Schiemann’s usage great politics is, above all, foreign politics in contrast to the small-scale of internal political struggles.[11] It is in this sense also that Nietzsche uses the term in Human All Too Human. The great politics of which he speaks there is that of individual states dedicated, as he puts it, to the “coarse and gaudy flower of the nation.” (481) In pursuit of their national honor these states seek to ensure for themselves “a decisive voice among the most powerful states” and to this end they do not hesitate to sacrifice their most talented people on “the altar of the fatherland.” That kind of great politics, Nietzsche says, is characteristic not only of the classical modern state but even more so of the democratic state which squanders away “men of the highest civilization” in its conscription armies. (442)
The Nietzsche of Human All Too Human expresses a profound distaste for this sort of politics. Evidently still under the impact of the 1870/71 war against France in which he had served, he writes in aphorism 444: “Against war it can be said: it makes the victor stupid, the defeated malicious” – alluding, evidently, here to the Prussians and Germans, on the one hand, and the French, on the other. War, he adds, makes people more barbaric and, in that state they find themselves in “the winter or hibernation time of culture.” There is a higher mission to be found in culture than in “fatherland and honor” and a “crude Roman patriotism is either something dishonest or a sign of retardation.” (442)
These thoughts are brought to a point in aphorism 481 where Nietzsche argues that “every efficient, industrious, intelligent, energetic man” who belongs to a people lusting after a great politics will be consumed by that lust because he no longer can belong to his own domain. The greatest cost of great politics is, indeed, that it removes “an extraordinary number of its efficient and industrious men from their proper professions and occupations.” (481) The result will be almost necessarily “a spiritual impoverishment and enfeeblement and a diminution of the capacity for undertakings demanding great concentration and application…” There manifests itself here, so Nietzsche, a profound antagonism between politics and the demands of culture. Even the Greek polis, he writes, was “mistrustful of the growth of culture and sought almost exclusively to paralyze and inhibit it.” (474) There is no reason to subscribe to the “grand, optimistic illusion” of a Pericles concerning the natural link between the democratic polis and Athenian culture. In reality, “this culture evolved in spite of the polis.” Far from celebrating a great new politics, we should thus realize that it is usually on the political sickbed where a nation “rejuvenates itself … and rediscovers its spirit, which it gradually lost in its seeking for and assertion of power. Culture owes the most to the ages of political weakness.” (465)
With this in mind I can turn back to the Nietzsche of 1886 and his very different assessment of the value of a great politics. Where the Nietzsche of Human All Too Human had seen an irreconcilable conflict between politics and culture, the Nietzsche of Beyond Good and Evil and other later texts conceives of a politics reconciled with culture. By 1885 Nietzsche was, indeed, ready to hail the coming of this new kind of politics. “Great politics, rule over the earth, are at hand,” he declared triumphantly.[12] This new form of great politics was to be the work of new, exceptional men producing entirely new values, new hierarchies and orders of value – not that of ordinary politicians; it was to be a great European cultural politics, not the power politics of the old European nation states; a politics of a newly united Europe and of great artists dedicated to carrying out at once the work of culture and politics, not a politics of senseless crude, barbaric and nationalistic warfare.
10.
Nietzsche’s reflections on politics and the history and future of the state might be read as rejoinders to Hegel and Marx – were it not that he took so little note of these two others. As a self-declared disciple of Schopenhauer he could muster only a few perfunctory references to Hegel and while socialism obsessed him, he seems not to have worried about its different factions. The name of Marx makes, in any case, no appearance in his writings. This does not mean that he was ignorant of what Hegel and Marx had said. Given the milieu of the late nineteenth century, he must surely have had some awareness of their views.
As a deeply historical thinker, Nietzsche certainly shared something with the two others, something that separated him from Schopenhauer’s profoundly ahistorical form of philosophizing. But where Hegel and Marx conceived of history as linear in its course and as a progressive unfolding of reason, Nietzsche saw a cyclical movement of forces “flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back,” (WP, 1067) a world of constant growth and destruction. Hegel and Marx also knew the destructive side of history but both held onto the idea of an ultimate and inevitable progress for as Hegel put it, the spirit rises from every destruction “not only rejuvenated but also enhanced and transfigured.” And, thus, “when it abandons the shell of its former existence, it does not merely migrate into a new shell; it emerges as a purified spirit from the ashes of its earlier form.”[13] Nietzsche failed to share such a comforting optimism. While he allowed that there is “reason in history,” he added in a pointed reference to Hegel that “there is also an admixture of unreason, without which nothing human can exist.” (450)[14] Much of human history is, indeed, “nonsensical,” as Nietzsche never stops reminding us. We cannot, indeed, speak of the meaning of the world as a whole or of history as a whole. The world has no meaning, only moments and episodes in it do – if and when we succeed in giving them meaning.
These differences in historical outlook bring about divergent views about the history and future of the state. Hegel looks at world history as the necessary and rational process of the appearance and perfection of the state. “The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea,” we read in The Philosophy of Right, and since “the state is the absolutely rational” the supreme duty of the individual is to be a member of the state.[15] Individuals animated by their selfish and mundane interests and desires are merely “the unconscious tools and organs of the world spirit at work in them,” and heir actions are such guided by the inner necessity of reason.[16] By contrast, Nietzsche sees the historical process as blindly generating in its course ever new variations, including new forms of social and political organization. Human beings are not made to attain an end state in which they can once and for all be happy. “The destiny of man is designed for happy moments” he reminds us, “but not for happy ages.” (471) Far from postulating the apotheosis of the state, Nietzsche sees the state as one of the many possible (and inevitably imperfect) incarnations of human order. Politics, on the other hand, transcends for him the destiny of the state. He can contemplate, thus, the possibility of a great politics outside and beyond the state and therefore also the possibility of (and need for) a complete rethinking of the nature and meaning of politics.
If Nietzsche distinguishes himself in this manner from Hegel, he keeps equally distance to Marx and a long line of nineteenth century anarchists, socialists, radical republicans, and libertarians. He shares the doubts about the state that had been hatched in France in the aftermath of the July revolution of 1831 but not the accompanying disdain for politics. By the 1840’s, those two attitudes – doubt about the state and disdain for politics – had spread to Germany. The German radicals, Marx included, learned of these things from Lorenz von Stein’s book on The Social Movements in France in which he described the efforts of the French radicals to change society rather than the state.[17] The state might prove a help or a hindrance in this; it might prove irrelevant to the needed social reforms; it might even dwindle away and be replaced with a new form of social organization; politics itself might disappear together with the state. The radicals of the mid-nineteenth century were divided on these points. Some saw a society without politics ahead, some a stateless society, yet others the coming of a reformed, social state. But they all thought that the destiny of the state and that of politics were inseparably linked. Thus, the anarchists spoke of a world without gods and masters, without state and government, of a world in which social engagement would take the place of political action. Fighting on the barricades of the 1848 revolution, Michael Bakunin could proclaim his lack of interest in any new constitution, calling instead for inspiration, life, and a new, free, and lawless world. Not all agreed with such views. When Bakunin rushed to Lyon in 1870 to assist the local Commune, Marx accused him of having helped to pass “the most foolish decrees on the abolition de l’etat and similar nonsense.”[18] No revolutionary fiat could abolish the state. Instead, Marx foresaw a need to overcome the existing separation of state and civil society and the abolition of the state as a separate organ divorced from economic reality. The final outcome of all this might be that in some ways both politics and the state would disappear together. In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels wrote: “When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of associated individuals, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another.”[19] Despite such apparently clear-cut declarations, Marx’s view on the future of politics and the state remained guarded but by the middle of the nineteenth century many others were certain that the fate of both the state and of politics was sealed and they held that belief because they identified the destiny of the one with that of the other.
Against all this Nietzsche insisted on the need to distinguish between politics and the state; but he also understood that this required a radical rethinking of politics. Since the Greeks, the concepts of authority and identity have circumscribed our understanding of the polis and state. The state is for us the legitimate user of violence, the source and enforcer of law, a patriarchal authority and dispenser of welfare. This state has, moreover, a determinate identity, fixed institutions, sharp boundaries, and precisely defined limits to its actions. Since the Greeks we think of politics, moreover, in terms of this kind of institution. Politics is for us the rule of the polis or government of the state. Our conception of politics is, thus, tied to the notions of authority and identity and to the reality of the institutional order of the polis or the state. Nietzsche saw, however, that our notions of authority, of legitimacy, and rank, and of political order are no longer securely anchored and that the same holds for the idea of the identity of the state, of its power, function, and reach. This is, indeed, the dilemma that still haunts us today and the ultimate source of our entire contemporary political crisis. Nietzsche convinced himself in the end that this crisis could be overcome only by means of a great new politics – a politics that would create a new hierarchy and order of values and that could thus legitimize a distinction of rank and authority, a politics on a European and global scale, a politics capable of overcoming the old division between society, culture and politics. But his recipes for such a new politics (we must admit) have proved unpersuasive, unpalatable, and unrealistic and so we find ourselves today still in the midst of that crisis which Nietzsche has so acutely diagnosed.
Nietzsche recognized the instabilities of the modern state, he understood perfectly how tenuous the legitimacy of government and the identity of the state have become. Beyond this point he leaves us, however, with a series of questions: Can there ever be a stable balance between our need for order and our modern desire for individual freedom? Can there be a political order without the acceptance of some sort of authority and hence of some distinction of rank and some level of inequality? For how long can the democratic state persist on the negative premise of “what other alternative is there?” Should we expect a new order of values, a new distinction of rank to emerge any time soon? Is a new local identity and specifically a new European identity even thinkable now or will all such identities be swept up in the surge of globalization? Can we define a new role for Europe beyond the business model when a European dominion over the earth is no longer in sight? What of the state and its power in the face of multiplying centers of power? What of government and rule in an increasingly unruly world?
One final remark before closing: I have not been concerned here with Nietzsche in order to endorse his diagnoses, his predictions, and his prescriptions. I certainly see him as a particularly acute though obviously fallible diagnostician of his time. But I have discussed him here, primarily, as a symptom of a new mode of thinking about politics, a mode of thought that emerged in the nineteenth century. I could have made the same case by focusing, instead, on Bakunin or Marx or the liberal and libertarian thinkers of the period. For each of them, government and the state were no longer to be treated as given, as unproblematic, as having an indubitable future. We will surely not understand the course of political thought in the twentieth century without recognizing that it has these concerns in its background.
Notes
[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, § 208.
[2] “Die Zeit kommt, wo man über Politik umlernen wird.” Nachgelassene Fragmente, Herbst 1885 bis Herbst 1886, Werke, edited by Giorgio Colli and Massimo Montinari, eighth division, vol. 1, Walter de Gruyter: Berlin 1974, p. 86. The sentence is reproduced in Nietzsche’s Der Wille zu Macht, 960. In their translation of this work Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale render the sentence overly free as “The time is coming when politics will have a different meaning.”
[3] Loc. cit.
[4] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, section 1. Translation modified.
[5] Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, translated by Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen, Hackett Publishing, Indianopolis 1998, p. 118 and elsewhere.
[6] Plato, Republic, 557-558, translated by G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve, in Plato, Complete Works, edited by John Cooper, Hacket Publishing, Indianapolis 1997.
[7] I have deviated here once more from the Hollingdale translation.
[8] Human All Too Human, vol. 1, 472, p. 173. The quotations in sections 4-6 are all taken from this aphorism.
[9] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Introduction: Reaon in History, transl. by H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1975, p. 109.
[10] Nietzsche writes of an “Entfesselung der Privatperson” which Hollingdale translates misleadingly as “liberation of the private person.” One might, instead, also speak of a “letting loose of the private person.”
[11] Theodor Schiemann, Deutschland und die große Politik anno 1901, Georg Reimer, Berlin 1902, p. iii. Later on, from 1922 onwards, a collection of diplomatic documents from the German Foreign Office is published under the title Die große Politik der Europäischen Kabinette. 1871-1914 (edited by Johannes Lepsius et al., Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft für Politik und Geschichte, Berlin, vol. 1, 1922) I have, however, been unable to trace the origin oft he term.
[12] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 978.
[13] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Introduction: Reason in History, translated by H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1975, pp. 32-33.
[14] I have modified Hollingdale’s translation in order to bring out Nietzsche’s use of Hegel’s terminology. In aphorism 472 Nietzsche repeats once more that “everything human bears much reason and unreason in its womb.”
[15] Loc. cit., sections 257 and 258.
[16] The Philosophy of Right, 344.
[17] Johann Plenge, Marx und Hegel,
[18] Karl Marx, letter to Beesly, quoted in Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1968, p. 208.
[19] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” in David McLellan, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1988, pp. 237-238. On Marx’s complex views on these matters see Avineri, loc.cit.
