My Insights on Education, Literature, Politics, Philosophy, Religion, and Life
1) Physically being together is the best way to solidify our family relationships.
In family relationships love is really spelled t-i-m-e, time. Taking time for each other is the key for harmony at home.
2) Less is more! That we should simplify our lives to enjoy more, gain more!
There is a beauty and clarity that comes from simplicity that we sometimes do not appreciate in our thirst for intricate solutions.
From “Of Things That Matter Most“
by Dieter F. Uchtdorf:
Introduction
Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich
Nietzsche and fascism? Is it not almost a contradiction in terms? What can Nietzsche have in common with this murderous ideology? The central ideal of Nietzsche’s philosophy was the individual and his freedom to shape his own character and destiny. The German philosopher was frequently described as the “radical aristocrat” of the spirit because he abhorred mass culture and strove to cultivate a special kind of human being, the Übermensch, endowed with exceptional spiritual and mental qualities. What can such a thinker have in common with National Socialism’s manipulation of the masses for chauvinistic goals that swallowed up the personalities, concerns, and life of the individual?
In 1934, Adolf Hitler paid a much publicized visit to the Nietzsche archives at Weimar. He had gone at the insistent request of its director, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche (sister of the long-deceased German philosopher), and he was accompanied by his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. The main purpose of the visit, it seems, was to enable Hoffmann to take a picture of Hitler contemplating the bust of Nietzsche, which stood in the reception room. Perhaps appropriately, only half of the philosopher’s head was shown in the picture, which duly appeared in the German press with a caption that read, “The Führer before the bust of the German philosopher whose ideas have fertilized two great popular movements: the National Socialism of Germany and the Fascist movement of Italy.”
Although Benito Mussolini was certainly familiar with Nietzsche’s writings and was a long-time admirer of the philosopher, Hitler’s own connection with Nietzsche remains uncertain. As a soldier during the First World War, he had carried the works of Schopenhauer and not those of Nietzsche in his backpack. There is no reference to Nietzsche in Mein Kampf (though there is to Schopenhauer), and in Hitler‘s Table Talk, he refers only indirectly to Nietzsche, saying: “In our part of the world, the Jews would have immediately eliminated Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Kant. If the Bolsheviks had dominion over us for two hundred years, what works of our past would be handed on to posterity? Our great men would fall into oblivion, or else they’d be presented to future generations as criminals and bandits.”1
Thus the picture of Hitler gazing at Nietzsche’s bust had more to do with a carefully orchestrated cult, one aspect of which was to connect National Socialism with the philosopher’s legacy, at least by association. On October 1944, celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Nietzsche, Alfred Rosenberg, the leading Nazi party ideologist, delivered an official speech in Weimar, seeking to reinforce this impression: “In a truly historical sense, the National Socialist movement eclipses the rest of the world, much as Nietzsche, the individual, eclipsed the powers of his times.”2 Of course, Nietzsche was not the only German philosopher invoked as a spiritual guide and forerunner of the Nazi revolution, but his “Nazification” in the course of the Third Reich is a historical fact that cannot be denied, though it is more open to interpretation than is sometimes assumed.
The intriguing question that lies at the heart of this original collection of essays is how Nietzsche came to acquire the deadly “honor” of being considered the philosopher of the Third Reich and whether such claims have any justification. What was it in Nietzsche that attracted such a Nazi appropriation in the first place? To what extent is it legitimate to view Nietzsche as a protofascist thinker? Does it make any sense to hold him in some way responsible for the horrors of Auschwitz? These issues are not as clear-cut as they may seem, and though they have attracted much polemical heat, they have not received any truly systematic treatment. In this volume, we have attempted to fill that gap in as concise and comprehensive a way as possible by turning to a variety of distinguished historians, Nietzsche scholars, philosophers, and historians of ideas. It was clear from the outset that we could not expect, nor indeed did we strive for, unanimous conclusions on the thorny, complex, and emotionally charged question of Nietzsche and fascism. A whole range of views is presented here that attempts to do justice in different ways to the ambiguity and richness of Nietzsche’s thought. Nietzsche encouraged his readers to shift their intellectual viewpoints and be willing to experience even radically incompatible perspectives. Thus by dealing with the subject matter of this collection from two different perspectives–that of philosophers and of historians–we hope that a Nietzschean spirit of intellectual tolerance will be reflected in this volume.
Nietzsche’s life and thought will never be reducible to a single constituency or political ideology, as this volume makes plain. The ambiguities and contradictions in his work as well as his elusive, aphoristic style lend themselves to a wide range of meanings and a multiplicity of interpretations. Nevertheless, while acknowledging this diversity, the editors cannot in good conscience be exempted from the challenge of offering some guidelines regarding the central issues raised by a book about Nietzsche and fascism, even if the title (as seems appropriate in this case) ends with a question mark.
Nietzsche was clearly an elitist who believed in the right to rule of a “good and healthy aristocracy,” one that would, if necessary, be ready to sacrifice untold numbers of human beings. He sometimes wrote as if nations primarily existed for the sake of producing a few “great men,” who could not be expected to show consideration for “normal humanity.” Not suprisingly, in the light of the cruel century that has just ended, one is bound to regard such statements with grave misgivings. From Mussolini and Hitler to Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Saddam Hussein, the last eighty years have been riddled with so-called political geniuses imagining that they were “beyond good and evil” and free of any moral constraints. One has to ask if there is not something in Nietzsche’s philosophy with its uninhibited cultivation of a heroic individualism and the will to power, which may have tended to favor the fascist ethos. Musssolini, for example, raised the Nietzschean formulation “live dangerously” (vivi pericolosamente) to the status of a fascist slogan. His reading of Nietzsche was one factor in converting him from Marxism to a philosophy of sacrifice and warlike deeds in defense of the fatherland. In this mutation, Mussolini was preceded by Gabriele d’Annunzio, whose passage from aestheticism to the political activism of a new, more virile and warlike age, was (as Mario Sznajder points out in his essay) greatly influenced by Nietzsche. Equally, there were other representatives of the First World War generation, like the radical German nationalist writer, Ernst Jünger, who would find in Nietzsche’s writings a legitimization of the warrior ethos (as David Ohana makes clear).
There have also been Marxist critics like George Lukács, who saw in Nietzsche’s philosophy nothing more than an ideological apologia for the rapacious plunder of German capitalist imperialism and a particularly destructive form of irrationalism. Lukács insisted both on the reactionary coherence of Nietzsche’s “system” and on the “barren chaos” of his arbitrary language, singling him out as one of the most dangerous “intellectual class-enemies” of socialism. Lukács’s own miserable record as an apologist (for the crimes of Stalinism), gave his one-sided reading of Nietzsche (which equated hostility to egalitarian socialism with fascist imperialism) transparently propagandist coloring, yet it is an interpretation that had considerable influence in its day.
Many commentators have raised the question as to whether the vulgar exploitation of Nietzsche by fascists, militarists, and Nazis could indeed be altogether arbitrary. While almost any philosophy can be propagandistically abused (as Hans Sluga has shown, Kant was a particular favorite among academic philosophers of the Third Reich!), Nietzsche’s pathos, his imaginative excesses as well as his image as a prophetseer and creator of myths, seems especially conducive to such abuse by fascists. The radical manner in which Nietzsche thrust himself against the boundaries of conventional (Judeo-Christian) morality and dramatically proclaimed that God (meaning the bourgeois Christian faith of the nineteenth century) was dead, undoubtedly appealed to something in Nazism that wished to transgress and transcend all existing taboos. The totalitarianism of the twentieth century (of both the Right and Left) presupposed a breakdown of all authority and moral norms, of which Nietzsche was indeed a clear-sighted prophet, precisely because he had diagnosed nihilism as the central problem of his society–that of fin de si`ecle Europe. For him there was no way back to the old moral certainties about “good” and “evil,” no way to regain firm ground under one’s feet. Humanity, long before 1914, had (spiritually speaking) already burned its bridges. Nietzsche was convinced that there was no escape from the “nihilism” of the age, except to go forward into a more “perfect nihilism,” to use the term of Wolfgang Müller-Lauter in this volume. Nietzsche believed that only by honestly facing the stark truth that there is no truth, no goal, no value or meaning in itself, could one pave the way for a real intellectual liberation and a revaluation of all values. Nietzsche was more a herald and prophet of the crisis of values out of which Nazism emerged, rather than a godfather of the century’s fascist movements per se.
Much of the confusion identifying Nietzsche with National Socialism can be traced back to the disastrous role of his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche (married to a prominent German anti-Semite) who took control of his manuscripts in the 1890s, when he was mentally and physically incapacitated. Already in the 1920s she promoted her brother as the philosopher of fascism, sending her warmest good wishes to Benito Mussolini as “the inspired reawakener of aristocratic values in Nietzsche’s sense”; similarly, she invited Hitler several times to the archive in Weimar, even giving him the symbolic gift of Nietzsche’s walking stick in 1934. Nazi propaganda encouraged such (mis)appropriation, for example, by publishing popular and inexpensive anthologies and short collections of Nietzsche’s sayings, which were then misused in their truncated form to promote militarism, toughness, and Germanic values. Alfred Bäumler, a professor of philosophy in Berlin after 1933, on seeing German youth march under the swastika banner could even write, “[A]nd when we call ‘Heil Hitler!’ to this youth then we are greeting at the same time Friedrich Nietzsche with that call.” Needless to say, Bäumler played a key role in the increasingly shameless appropriation of Nietzsche as a philosopher of the so-called Nordic race, a kind of intellectual Siegfried–anti-Roman, anti-Christian (which was true), and thoroughly in tune with the spirit of 1914. Aware that Nietzsche had no theory of volk or race, Bäumler nonetheless concocted a spurious link between the philosopher’s individual struggle for integrity and Nazi collectivism. With the same sleight of hand, he could explain away Nietzsche’s break with Wagner merely as a product of envy and dismiss his tirades against the Germans as expressing no more than his disapproval of certain non-Germanic elements in their character.
No less convoluted were the efforts of the Nazi commentator Heinrich Härtle in his 1937 book Nietzsche und der Nationalsozialismus, where he presented the philosopher “as a great ally in the present spiritual warfare.” Härtle realized that Nietzsche’s advocacy of European unity, his elitism and individualism, his critique of the state, his approval of race-mixing, and his anti-anti-Semitism were incompatible with Nazi ideology. By relativizing these shortcomings as minor issues (in the case of the Jews, he simply quoted those instances–comparatively few in number–where Nietzsche seemed to be attacking them) and as reflections of a different political environment in the nineteenth century, Härtle could present Nietzsche as a precursor of Hitler.
Sadly, such crude distortions were echoed in Allied war propaganda and in newspaper headlines in Britain and the United States, which (continuing the traditions of the First World War) sometimes depicted the “insane philosopher” as the source of a ruthless German barbarism and as Hitler’s favorite author. Phrases torn out of their context such as the “superman,” (or “Overman”), the “blond beast,” “master morality,” or the “will to power” were all too easily turned into slogans (even by distinguished philosophers like Sir Karl Popper3) to demonstrate Nietzsche’s imagined identification with German militarism and imperialism, though nothing had been further from his mind.
Before 1939 not everyone shared this increasingly broad consensus, which saw Nietzsche as the spiritual godfather of fascism and Nazism. Opponents of Nazism like the German philosophers Karl Jaspers and Karl Löwith sought to invalidate the official Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche in the 1930s. Together with a number of French intellectuals, they contributed to a special issue of Acéphale published in January 1937 and entitled “Réparation à Nietzsche.” The most prominent of the French antifascist Nietzscheans was the left-wing existentialist thinker Georges Bataille, who sought to rescue Nietzsche by demonstrating the German philosopher’s abhorrence of pan-Germanism, racism and the rabid anti-Semitism of Hitler’s followers. In the United States, the most eminent postwar advocate of a “liberal” Nietzsche was Walter Kaufmann, an American scholar in Princeton who provided many of the most authoritative translations into English of Nietzsche’s writings. His Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950) became a standard work in the critical rehabilitation of Nietzsche in the postwar English-speaking world, seeking to dissociate him from any connection with Social Darwinism and the intellectual origins of National Socialism.
One of Kaufmann’s virtues was to document the scale of Nietzsche’s contempt for the racist anti-Semites of his generation, such as the schoolteacher Bernhard Förster (his sister’s husband), Theodor Fritsch, Paul de Lagarde, and Eugen Dühring. If Nazism conceived of Jewry as an inferior race of “subhumans” marked for annihilation, then Nietzsche’s own writings show, as both Yirmiyahu Yovel and Robert Wistrich have argued, that the Jews represented for him a kind of spiritual crystallization of what he understood by the Übermensch (Overman) of the future.
At first sight, this sharp rejection of anti-Semitism might seem a good enough reason to answer negatively and decisively the question concerning Nietzsche’s responsibility for Nazism. Certainly, a thinker who held a high opinion of Jewish qualities, looked to them as a spearhead for his own free-thinking Dionysian “revaluation of all values,” and sought their full integration into European society could hardly be blamed for the Nazi Holocaust. On the other hand, in his sweeping rejection of Judeo-Christian values (as they were mirrored in German Protestantism) Nietzsche constantly referred to their origin in the sublime “vengefulness” of Israel and its alleged exploitation of so-called movements of “decadence” (like early Christianity, liberalism, and socialism) to ensure its own self-preservation and survival (Menahem Brinker). Even though Nietzsche’s prime target was clearly Christianity–which he also blamed for the suffering of the Jews–the source of the infection ultimately lay in that fateful transvaluation of values initiated by priestly Judaism two millennia ago. It was a selective reading of this Nietzschean indictment of Judeo-Christianity that led the late Jacob Talmon, an Israeli historian, some forty years ago to see in Nietzsche a major intellectual signpost on the road to Auschwitz. Moreover, even when describing the “Judaization” of the world in terms that mixed admiration with disapprobation, Nietzsche seemed inadvertently to be feeding the myth of Jewish power, so beloved of Christian and racist anti-Semites. Though his intentions were profoundly hostile to anti-Semitism, this provocative technique was undoubtedly a dangerous game to play. While it would be senseless to hold Nietzsche responsible for such distortions, one can find troubling echoes of a vulgarized and debased Nietzscheanism in the later diatribes of Hitler, Himmler, Bormann, and Rosenberg against Judeo-Christianity.
The case of Nietzsche is a good illustration of the pitfalls in an overly schematic approach to intellectual history that takes particular strands in a thinker’s oeuvre and seeks to fit them into more general constructs like fascism or National Socialism. On the basis of Nietzsche’s declared hostility to Christianity, liberal democracy, and socialism, it is possible to see him as a precursor of the fascist synthesis. Some aspects of his admiration for ancient Greek culture and for “Romanitas” were used by both fascists and Nazis, who thoroughly distorted his philosophical intent. Though he took the ancient Greeks as cultural models, he did not subscribe to their self-conception as a “breed of masters,” which prompted them to brand non-Greeks as “barbarians,” fit only to be slaves. Indeed, all forms of xenophobia were profoundly alien to Nietzsche’s outlook, none more so than the hot-headed nationalistic rivalries so typical of the European nation-state system into which he was born. This explains his revulsion from the German nationalism that had come into vogue in the 1880s following the unification of Germany and the success of Bismarckian power politics. In fact, Nietzsche was in many respects the least patriotic and least German of his philosophical contemporaries in the Second Reich.
This was one of the major reasons for his abandonment of Wagner and the Bayreuth Festival, which had degenerated into a chauvinist celebration of “German Art,” “German virtues,” and a so-called “Germanic essence,” deeply contaminated by “the humbug of races” and antiSemitism. The fact that the Wagnerites gave a romantic Christian veneer to their cult of “Germanism” further provoked his antagonism. Nietzsche reserved a special animus for the ways in which the Christian churches in Germany had allowed themselves to be swept along by the national intoxication after 1870. Above all he denounced the corruption of the German “spirit” by the new practitioners of power politics. Hence it was one of the worst Nazi distortions of Nietzsche’s philosophy to claim that his notion of “the will to power” was consonant with what was being advocated in the Third Reich.
Far from relating to nationalist obsessions, Nietzsche had asserted a life-affirming outlook that sought to empower the individual to overcome his or her limitations by questioning all our assumptions concerning truth, logic, beliefs, culture, values, and history. As Jacob Golomb has shown, what Nietzsche prized above all was spiritual power (Macht) not the brute political force (Kraft) that he denounced with all the sarcasm at his command. This spiritual power of the sovereign, emancipated individual who is “master of a free will” involved a long and difficult process of sublimation, which would eventually culminate in self-mastery. It was a vision fundamentally antithetical to the totalitarian collectivism of both the Right and the Left.
Nietzsche’s indictment of the Christian and nationalist Right as well as of the official Machtpolitik and its consequences for German culture, was unequivocal. The break with Wagner is especially illuminating because the Wagnerian ideology and the cult that developed in Bayreuth was a much more real precursor of völkisch and Hitlerian ideas. Once Nietzsche had thrown off the romantic nationalism of his early days, his devastating critique of Wagner–prophetic in many ways of what was to come–revealed his remarkably penetrating insight into its dangerous illusions. National Socialism could plausibly derive inspiration from Wagner but it could only use Nietzsche by fundamentally twisting his philosophy.
Nietzsche was undeniably mobilized by the Nazis as several historical essays in the present collection demonstrate. So what exactly was the role of Nietzsche and his writings in this process? Is Martin Jay right to claim in his Fin-de-Siécle Socialism (1988) that “while it may be questionable to saddle Marx with responsibility for the Gulag archipelago or blame Nietzsche for Auschwitz, it is nevertheless true that their writings could be misread as justifications for these horrors in a way that . . . John Stuart Mill or Alexis de Toqueville could not” (33). Even Jacques Derrida, despite insisting that “Nietzsche’s utterances are not the same as those of the Nazi ideologists and not only because the latter grossly caricature the former to the point of apishness,” cannot refrain from wondering, in reference to Nietzsche’s case, “how and why what is so naively called a falsification was possible (one can’t falsify anything).”4
Some of the essays in the present collection try to answer this intriguing question. The enigma becomes even more perplexing in an argument in which a distinguished scholar absolves Nietzsche from any responsibility for the atrocities performed by the Nazis, yet holds him accountable for their misinterpretations. His claim is that Nietzsche had anticipated being misinterpreted as a fascist without doing enough to prevent these misinterpretations. Such a view is presented in Berel Lang’s essay. Yet, in his 1990 book, Lang asserts that “to reconstruct in the imagination the events leading up to the Nazi genocide against the Jews without the name or presence of Nietzsche is to be compelled to change almost nothing else in that pattern.”5 So who is right? Lang ten years ago or the essay we have included? Can we, indeed ever reach a definite and sound judgment concerning Nietzsche’s accountability, responsibility, or even culpability for Nazi misappropriations of his writings?
The essays below strive to provide us with some answers. But other, even more crucial questions hover over this issue. Was Nietzsche not trying to convince an entire culture and society to cultivate a new kind of man and mode of life (as the Nazis were also trying to do)? Has not the fact that he had no normative ethics, nor normative politics, facilitated his criminal misappropriation? Should we not consider his attempt to overthrow the values of the Enlightenment and eradicate the foundations of Christian morality an extremely dangerous maneuver, especially when he could clearly hear the loud strains of Wagnerian music and the nationalism of Bayreuth, which for many philosophers and historians already seems like a prefiguration of Nazism (see Yovel’s essay in this volume)? Brinker and others in this book think that Nietzsche did have some responsibility for Nazi crimes–an argument that has also been made by Steven Aschheim in his study of the Nietzschean legacy in Germany. Many others, including both editors of this volume, think differently.
To tackle this question as soberly and objectively as possible requires going beyond a common defense of Nietzsche in the postwar scholarship. Walter Kaufmann and others were trying to sever Nietzsche altogether from Nazi ideology by stressing the fact that he was fundamentally an apolitical thinker who rejected pan-Germanism and antiSemitism. But it does not necessarily follow that since Nietzsche detested German and other nationalistic attitudes, his teaching was essentially a nonpolitical one. Tempting as it may be to cleanse his thought from the taint of any political ideology, especially that of fascism, it is in fact a misguided strategy. For it is precisely by emphasizing the political import and content of Nietzsche’s philosophy that one can put into a sharper relief his “antifascist” orientation.
The argument that presented Nietzsche as a staunch opponent of the nation-state was especially prevalent among his advocates during the first twenty years after the second World War. They wished to rehabilitate his reputation by denying any trace of resemblance between his writings and those who did almost everything to make them sound compatible with Mein Kampf. As a result, these apologists performed a sweeping depoliticization of Nietzsche’s thought.6 One of the most influential of these commentators was the previously mentioned Walter Kaufmann. Against the generalizing accusations of Crane Brinton (1940, 1941) and others, that Nietzsche was the godfather of Nazism, Kaufmann presented the leitmotif of Nietzsche’s life and thought as that of “the antipolitical individual who seeks self-perfection far from the modern world.”7
It is noteworthy that much contemporary research–which has been less vulnerable to the atmosphere of suspicion that loomed over Nietzsche by the end of the Second World War–tended instead to emphasize the significance of politics in his philosophy. Such scholars sensibly conceded that even if one cannot find in Nietzsche’s antisystematic writings any definite political thought, his radical discussions of morality and concept of the “modern man” had a far reaching political significance. It was within a definite cultural and political context that Nietzsche sought to attain his ideal of a unique and authentic individual cultivating Dionysian values.8
Nietzsche did, however, reject the view that one can justify or rationally derive a political order from certain universalistic principles. It is also true that during his life Nietzsche did not publish anything comparable to Spinoza’s Tractatus Politicus, which was specifically dedicated to political issues. Of course, there were always political implications in writings like his Genealogy of Morals, which critically examined the moral values prevalent in modern society. Moreover, there was an early unpublished composition by Nietzsche (from 1872) that analyses the “Greek state,” and we also have many long passages from his published works that squarely deal with politics.9 We should not forget also that the last sentence Nietzsche had a chance to write before his final collapse did have a pronounced political connotation: “Wilhelm, Bismarck und alle Antisemiten abgeschafft“ (“Wilhelm, Bismarck and all antiSemites abolished”).
It is worthwhile in this context to examine more closely Nietzsche’s so-called confession that he was the “last antipolitical German”. The German equivalent to this term is antipolitisch which is different from unpolitisch–referring to somebody who is utterly indifferent to politics. Indeed Nietzsche, in his Twilight of the Idols, in a section entitled “What the Germans Lack,” distinguished between both of these attitudes to politics by contrasting the Bismarckian modern Reich that embodies a strong political power (Grossmacht) to a society that is essentially antipolitisch. The latter is a social framework that objects to using political force (Kraft) to promote its culture (and Nietzsche in this context gives as an example France, which he calls the “Culturmacht“). None of this made Nietzsche into an antipolitical person, let alone an anarchist. On the contrary, as a great advocate of human creativity, he could see the need for statehood and a civil society in whose framework creativity might take place and flourish. Nietzsche distinguished sharply between the more sublime spiritual and mental powers of individuals (or entire peoples) who generate and produce sublime cultures, and the physical or political force that found expression in overpowering Kraft or Gewalt. Possibly because Hegel, whom Nietzsche criticized in his writings, regarded the Prussian state of the nineteenth century as the highest rational manifestation of the Universal Geist, Nietzsche felt particularly driven to attack this idea of statehood that had attracted his contemporaries. In any case, it is noteworthy that Nietzsche wished his publisher to remove the passage from his Ecce Homo where he supposedly declared himself to be a nonpolitical thinker.
In this passage, Nietzsche actually tries to distance himself not from politics as such (a move that would indeed have made him a nonpolitical thinker) but from the nationalist German politics which at that time raised its ugly head to the ominous tunes of “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles.” With this militaristic slogan, Nietzsche observes, came “the end of German philosophy.” Thus his statement that he was the “last antipolitical German” could itself be seen as a political statement that strove to overcome nationalism and racism–the “anticultural sickness par excellence.” At any rate, in that passage which, as mentioned above, was not intended for publication, Nietzsche states that due to him being “the last antipolitical German” he is “perhaps more German than present-day Germans, mere citizens of the German Reich, could possibly be.” Nietzsche thereby admits to belonging to the German nation but clearly distances himself (at least in his main compositions during the middle period of his career) from the German Reich of Bismarck. One could almost say that Nietzsche was an antipolitical thinker for political reasons and a political thinker for philosophical reasons, among them his attempt to foster the existential ideal of personal authenticity. In other words, Nietzsche had adopted an antipolitical attitude for reasons that had to do with the future of human culture, an issue which he called “grosse Politik.” For Nietzsche, politics becomes “grand” when it sustains and assists in cultivating human greatness and cultural grandeur. This “great politics” is fundamentally a politics of culture. And if we broadly define politics as an organized and orchestrated mobilization of human resources for the sake of a group or nation, Nietzsche, was indeed deeply engrossed with a politics that would embark on the cultural engineering of the entire society. We ought also to recall that Nietzsche saw in the genuine philosopher the creator of values for future society. Like Plato, Nietzsche envisaged the philosopher as a legislator. Hence Nietzsche is no less political than he is “immoral”–in a very moral and political sense.
Nietzsche abhorred the state only insofar as it became a goal in itself and ceased to function as a means for the advancement and education of autonomous and creative human beings. His preferred and most admired models to achieve the latter ideal were the Greek polis, the virtu of ancient Rome, and the worldly individualism of the Italian Renaissance–cultural patterns that had never made national supremacy the cornerstone of their ideal or regarded the ethnic attributes of their citizens as a mark of creativity or superiority. But there was nothing in his writings to suggest that Nietzsche objected in principle to “the political organization” of statehood as long as it did not become a Leviathan repressing genuine culture and persons.
Nietzsche did not reject the state where it was conducive to authentic life aspirations–a vital element in his philosophy. But once this legitimate (and “natural”) creation changed its nature and became a manifestation of extreme nationalism that hindered free and spontaneous creativity, Nietzsche vehemently opposed it and wished to curb its destructive effects. Perhaps under the influence of Hobbes, Nietzsche would call this kind of state “the coldest of all cold monsters.”10 However, where it encouraged individuals to shape and form their cultural identity in an authentic way, Nietzsche regarded the state as a “blessed means.”
An illuminating case in point is Nietzsche’s attitude toward the aspirations of the Jewish people to establish an independent state for themselves.
For Nietzsche, the history of the Jewish people was a great enigma. He was mesmerized by the example of the Jews in the Diaspora and their ability to establish an effective spiritual-cultural kingdom in Europe without any state or territorial basis. Despite their lack of such support and other adverse and taxing conditions, they had manifested a “plentitude of power without equal to which only the nobility had access” (GS, 136). Nietzsche’s reference to the Jews as the most “powerful race,” in spite of their obvious political and physical weakness, clearly showed that there was nothing physical in the sense of brute force (Kraft) in the Nietzschean concept of power (Macht). One might even assert that Nietzsche’s vision of a “new Europe” devoid of national boundaries and united not by a common economic interest and financial policy but by the wish to foster a Dionysian, genuinely creative culture was partially inspired by the example of European Jewry. Moreover, Nietzsche stressed the fact that even in the most adverse circumstances, the Jewish people “have never ceased to believe in their calling to the highest things” (D, 205). This abundance of spiritual power could best function creatively without national institutions. Hence Nietzsche bestowed on them a vital role in the extraterritorial and supranational Europe of the future when their plentiful power will flow “into great spiritual men and works . . . into an eternal blessing for Europe” (ibid.).
Echoing the Old Testament prophecy about Israel’s magnificent future and its spectacular salvation, Nietzsche claimed that the Jews would once again become the “founders and creators of values.” The creation of values is the most significant task in Nietzsche’s philosophy, which always returns to the “transfiguration of values” and the nature of Western culture, in which the Jews are destined to play the major role as well as to serve as catalysts. Nietzsche’s hope of mobilizing European Jewry to assist him in this transfiguration of values is the background for his emotional exclamation: “What a blessing a Jew is among Germans!” Nietzsche speculated in this context about the possible intermarriage of Jews with Germans or with the best “European nobility” for the sake of enriching a renewed European culture. Nietzsche, in this regard, obviously underestimated the strong and persistent reluctance of many Jews to fully assimilate into their Gentile environment. His views on intermarriage may seem especially perplexing in light of his admiration for Jewish “purity of race,” uniqueness, and pride.
Nietzsche’s cosmopolitan notion of “Jewish calling” might also seem to contradict the national aspirations of the emerging Zionist political movement. But a closer look suggests otherwise. There exists a record of Nietzsche’s conversations in the winter of 1883-34 in Nice with Joseph Paneth–an Austrian Jewish intellectual who was also a good friend of Freud. We know that Nietzsche and Paneth discussed the possibility of the revival of Jewish people in Palestine and their “regeneration” there.11 Nietzsche was apparently not at all happy about the prospect that the Jews might estrange themselves from their Jewish tradition and history to become completely assimilated within the European nations, since such “free spirits (freie Geister) detached from anything are dangerous and destructive” (Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, 486). He added that one should not ignore the “impact of nationality” and, according to Paneth, he was “quite disappointed that I did not wish to hear anything about the restoration of a Palestinian state” (ibid.). It is certainly possible to imagine Nietzsche supporting the idea of a return of the Jews to the land of Israel and statehood, which, especially in the times of the ancient Hebrews–as he had strongly argued–provided the earthly sources for their spiritual power and legacy. This hypothesis is in a sense implied by Nietzsche’s statement that “in the hands of the Jewish priests the great age in the history of Israel became an age of decay; the Exile” (A, 26). Logically, one way out of this state of “decadence” would be the reestablishment of a Jewish state that revived the secular kingdom of the ancient Hebrews in Zion.
Such a development could also serve Nietzsche’s project of European cultural rejuvenation since it would be quite possible to enlist the “new Israel” and its revival for the sake of “new Europe.” Hence Nietzsche did not see any tension or contradiction between his plan for enlisting Jews for the sake of his new Europe and the Zionist program. He had heard about and was quite aware of the Zionist sentiments awakening among the European Jewry in the last years of his lucidity, and had never given any sign of disapproval or indignation as he did so loudly and eloquently against many other nationalist trends and movements of his time, including the cult of Wagner in Bayreuth. On the contrary, he enthusiastically embraced the future prospects (without excluding the national option) of the Jewish people.12
But what of Nietzsche’s famous immoralism and rejection of traditional Judeo-Christian values? What of his Lebensphilosophie and thoughts about regeneration that at times seemed to envisage the “breeding” of a new elite that would eliminate all the decadent elements within European culture? Did the Nazis not draw some inspiration from his shattering of all moral taboos, his radical, experimental style of thinking, and his apocalyptic visions of the future? Certainly, there were National Socialists who tried to integrate Nietzsche into the strait-jacket of their ideology and exploited his dangerous notion of degeneration. But without its biological racism and anti-Semitism, the Nazi worldview had no real cohesion and Nietzsche was as fierce a critic of these aberrations as one can imagine. Moreover, his so-called immoralism, with its questioning of all dogmas and established values, was hardly the basis on which fascist, Nazi, or other totalitarian regimes consolidated their support. On the contrary, such regimes, however radical their intentions, were careful to appeal to conventional morality and nationalist feelings in order to broaden their following, just as they often paid lip service to democratic values in order better to destroy them. Nietzsche’s skeptical outlook, with its love of ambivalence, ambiguity, and paradox, was far removed from such manipulations, which he could only have despised and abhorred. Certainly, Nietzsche was a disturbing thinker whose ideas will always remain open to a diversity of interpretations. He was no admirer of modernity or of the liberal vision of progress, nor was he a “humanist” in the conventional sense of that term. His work lacked a concrete social anchor and his solution to the problem of nihilism led to a cul-de-sac. But to hold Nietzsche responsible, even indirectly, for Auschwitz, is surely to turn things on their head.13 No other thinker of his time saw as deeply into the pathologies of fin de si`ecle German and European culture, or grasped so acutely from within, the sickness at the heart of anti-Semitism in the Christian West. It would be more just to see in Nietzsche a tragic prophet of the spiritual vacuum that gave birth to the totalitarian abysses of the twentieth century. As such he remains profoundly relevant to our own time.
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Princeton University Press
My Response to Hugo’s Superconsumerism: http://web.media.mit.edu/~hugo/publications/drafts/Nada8-Liu-Superconsumer.pdf
I want to share this with you because, after reading Hugo’s paper, I realized that I have personally went through the process of cultural perspectivism, in that I was first, to borrow Hugo’s words, the “naïve [cultural] consumer, frustrated and anxious.” But because “[my] spirit[could] not tolerate anxiety and meaninglessness for long,” I have reshaped the American culture that was once my “oppressor into tool” which I now wield it integratively with my other cultures for moment-to-moment, situational purposes. I can do this because I am in tandem the consumer and the owner of multiple cultures and have a diverse range of self-expressive sociolinguistic mediums; I can never be mainstreamed into only one culture; I thus believe that I have found what Hugo calls one’s “niche culture” composed of rich cultural languages and authority.
I think this is what Hugo means by a “superconsumer” a postmodernist of auto-culture, a person of credible (authoritative) culture amidst an “in-credible culture,” a concept and a reality that emerges in stages as one travels this journey of cultural transformations from being naïve to superconsumer (which I do not totally agree; I think some will get stuck in this journey, forever xenophobic if not, in Hugo’s term, an incorrigibly “passive consumer”).
If I may reiterate Hugo to make sure that I am understanding his continuum of cultural evolvement: 1) Strauss & Derrida’s (1966) two primal models: a “bricoleur,” a cultural hero, opportunist, and critic who uses one culture to undermine another and his/her antithetical counterpart, an “engineer,” a cultural fool who is one-dimensional and submissive to authority; then 2) Jameson’s (1991) “intertextualist,” a culturally unsettled, faint vestige of globalism who is unduly influenced by and thus desensitized to milliard cultural propagandas; and 3) Bhabha’s (1994) biculturalist who, rather than being desensitized, by negotiating and contesting the bipolar cultures of one’s motherland and the host country has carved out a transcendent space of beyond in a conjoining sense; and ultimately, which brings us back to 4) Hugo’s (2006) superconsumer, an emblem of self-constructed culture which one is not born into ethnically/geographically but willfully and optimistically self-fashioned by utilizing/reconfiguring contaminated (or dumbed down) original cultures in the age of hyperglobalisation.
Now, what I don’t understand is Hugo’s paradoxical concept of simultaneously submitting one’s self to a controller and yet controlling the controller. Help me with this, please. At the same time, I find Hugo’s “poetics of three critical experiences” simply exquisite! I agree 1000% and appreciate his graphic representations of his dense, potentially confusing theory.
It’s me again. Can you help me understand Kant?I’m stuck with his notion of “purposiveness without a purpose.” What significance does it hold for Kant’s claims about the human value of aesthetic judgment? I read this many times, but the more I read it, it confuses me more.
As far as I know, that’s Kant’s definition of the aesthetic. The aesthetic, to Kant, should be non-utilitarian (spelling). A knife is utilitarian-you use it to cut something with, but a poem is not utilitarian-you don’t use it to “do” something practical.
To put it differently, a work of art is not something that has a (utilitarian) function or “purpose.” But, that does not mean that the work of art does not have a purpose within its non-utilitarian realm.It has a purpose within the purpose-less (non-utilitarian) context. Take a beautiful tie for example. Its beauty lies, first, in the fact that it does not have a utilitarian purpose (I don’t have to wear a tie). But in the sense that the tie is carefully designed and produced, it has its purpose: it is meant to be beautiful, aesthetic.
Another example. Many students, English majors or non majors, ask me: What can literature do for me? They are thinking: how can literature help me get into a more profitable career? I tell them-if that’s what you are thinking, literature is useless. Can people live without the experience of music, painting or literature? The answer is: There are some people who live their lives without that experience.
The ancient Chinese philosopher Chuang Tze (or, Zhuang Tze) once said: “The great Tao appears useless” (da dao wu yong). That’s similar to what Kant tries to say.Art-or philosophy-appears useless if we look at it in the utilitarian sense.
Sophus A. Reinert, Cornell University & Erik S. Reinert, The Other Canon Foundation
Forthcoming in Backhaus, Jürgen and Wolfgang Drechsler (editors): Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-2000: Economy and Society, Series The European Heritage in Economics and the Social Sciences, Boston, Kluwer.
1. Preface: Nietzsche and the late 19th Century Economic Agenda. 3
2. The Kathedersozialist Program… 5
3. Nietzsche and Renaissance Individualism. 6
4. Nietzsche and the German Economic Tradition. 8
5. Nietzsche: Social Justice and Welfare. 10
6. Nietzsche: Entrepreneurship, Gradualism and Uniqueness. 12
7. Nietzsche in the Middle: Kathedersozialismus and the True Third Way. 14
8. Conclusion and Notes on Further Research. 16
Bibliography. 18
1. Preface: Nietzsche and the late 19th Century Economic Agenda.
From the viewpoint of modern mainstream economics, Nietzsche would hardly be considered as having made any contributions, directly or indirectly, to the economics profession. However, seen in the light of the German, and indeed Continental, tradition in economics – what we have labelled The Other Canon, [1] core parts of Nietzsche’s writing have immediate relevance to economics. Today’s standard theory is in effect a continuation of what some 19th Century economists suggested calling catallectics, ‘the science of exchanges’, rather than of production. In contrast to this mainstream body of barter-focused economic theory, the German tradition since the Renaissance has emphasized production, and particularly the role of what Nietzsche fittingly calls Geist- und Willens-Kapital (Nietzsche 2000:4722) – Man’s wit and will – as a factor of production. Within a theory where man’s wit and will – new knowledge, innovations and entrepreneurship – are considered a factor of production, Nietzsche has important things to say about economics. Indeed, as is argued in another paper in this volume (‘Creative Destruction in Economics: Nietzsche, Sombart, Schumpeter’), Joseph Schumpeter and the growing paradigm of evolutionary economics may be said to have their immediate roots in Nietzsche’s thoughts and in the Zeitgeist so much influenced by his work.
One important dividing line in 19th Century economics was the origin of the division of labour. This was in effect the tip of the iceberg of a profound philosophical debate as to the very nature of human beings (Reinert & Daastøl 1997). Adam Smith emphasised barter as the origin of wealth, highlighting Man’s ability to barter as a main difference between Men and dogs (Smith 1976: Book 1 p. 17). This emphasis on barter rather than production as being the core of the economic activities of Mankind was the object of constant rebuttal from German and US economists all through the 19th Century. In the German-American tradition, the division of labor was the necessary consequence of the scale and diversity of human innovations and inventiveness, not the other way around. In the United States, the work of John Rae (1834) may serve as an early example, whereas in the German language Carl Menger, the father of the Austrian School of Economics, in fact uses a whole section of his Grundsätze to refute Adam Smith on this point (Menger 1871/1923 : 26-29). [2] This is the ‘anti-English/anti-barter’ stance that is typical of Other Canon economics, to which we shall claim that Nietzsche has a strong affiliation. In this production-based tradition, economics is strongly tied to the science of statecraft, of the management of the state in order to maximise the welfare of a nation. We shall also point to some of Nietzsche’s many references to the importance of economic institutions, and to similarities between the approaches of Friedrich Nietzsche and Thorstein Veblen, the founder of the American Institutional School of Economics.
While scholars previously have made judgments as to Nietzsche’s political position on the right-left axis (e.g. Kashyap 1970), we will abandon this established political mould in favour of a lost, but historically significant, alternative tradition, The Other Canon. At the time of Nietzsche’s writings this tradition was represented by a group of economists of the German Historical School of economics who came to be called Kathedersozialisten, Socialists of the Professorial Chair, a term coined by H. B. Oppenheim (Ingram 1967:206). The economists who were interested in social reform, Schumpeter says, were ‘with singular infelicity dubbed socialists of the chair’ (Schumpeter 1954:758). For the sake of simplicity we shall still use the term Kathedersozialisten to represent a diverse group of social reformers and statecrafters unified in the Verein für Socialpolitik. There personalities involved in these three institutions – Verein für Socialpolitik, Kathedersozialisten and the German Historical School – overlap to a large degree, in all cases the non-monolithic nature of these groupings facilitates a loose use of the terms.
In this paper, we shall look at Nietzsche’s work, in particular Human, All too Human, written in Sorrento in 1876-77, as it relates to the economics of the great question of the time: The Social Question (Die Soziale Frage). The foundation of the Verein für Socialpolitik (literally ‘The Association for Social Policy’) in October 1872 had established the so-called Kathedersozialist program as a genuine Third Way between economic liberalism, where the market is seen as producing automatic harmony, and communism. We shall argue that in this ideological fight, which was to be prolonged until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Nietzsche comes out as a supporter of the Third Way of the Verein für Socialpolitik, of Other Canon economics.
The debate on the Social Question was a key issue not only in Germany, but all over Europe. On the Continent, the issue was central to the economics profession, whereas in England, the ‘social reformers’ were and are not considered economists in the strict sense.[3] Since what is presently taught as the history of economic thought basically covers the family tree of neo-classical economics plus Marx, this very important debate tends to get a marginal coverage.
1848 marks the political repercussions of the Social Questions, with revolutions in all major European countries except England and Russia, and the same year marks the birth of the German Historical School with the work of Bruno Hildebrand. In 1872, with the foundation of the Verein für Sozialpolitik under the leadership of Gustav Schmoller, the systematic work starts in order to create a solution to the Social Question. Barely a year earlier, Bismarck had forged the German state, and it was the joint efforts of Bismarck and the Kathedersozialisten – the political arm of the German Historical School of Economics – that built the welfare state as a viable alternative to liberalism and communism. By 1873 this debate and the agenda of the Kathedersozialisten had reached Italy, where an intense debate continued until 1876[4], the same year Nietzsche began working on Menschliches, Allzumenschliches in Sorrento. The fight to solve la Questione Sociale was intense in Italy up until World War I (Loria 1915 & 1920).
As Nietzsche wrote in Sorrento, it was against a backdrop, in Italy and internationally, of intense academic and political debate on liberalism, communism, and the Third Way attempted by the Kathedersozialisten, or i socialisti della cattedra as they were called in Italy. We therefore feel that it is appropriate to evaluate Menschliches, Allzumenschliches in the light of this debate. It is not at all clear that Nietzsche followed the academic debate in Italy on the pros and cons of the ‘new’ German theory which took place while he wrote Menschliches, Allzumenschliches in Sorrento. Nietzsche was not a linguist, but reports in his letters already in 1861 that he is studying Italian and reading Dante in the original language.[5]
Any inquiry into the possible political connotations of Nietzsche’s philosophy must be accompanied by a certain restraint. His writings are notoriously confusing, and the sheer complexity of his vision leaves, as Conway has pointed out, his readers with an incredible freedom in reinterpretation:
Nietzsche’s strategy of indirection has backfired egregiously and often. Rather than discourage unworthy readers from attempting to divine his Promethean wisdom, his rhetorical gyrations have in fact issued a blanket invitation to cranks and scholars alike. Encountering no insurmountable textual obstacles to their own interpretations of his elusive teachings, Nietzsche’s readers regularly conscript him as the philosophical progenitor of their respective political schemes (Conway 1997:119-120).
Indeed we find that anarchists, socialists, feminists, Nazis, and anti-clericalists of all sorts separately have found chimerical kinship in some aspect of Nietzsche’s writings (Magnus 1996:125-138). It is thus in full awareness of the multiple pitfalls left us by his literary vicissitude that we make our case. Our focus will be on Nietzsche’s view of the state, as it is expressed in the chapter “A Glance at the State”, in his 1878 Human all too Human. Most readers with even a passing familiarity with Nietzsche’s work will automatically recall the oft-quoted aphorism from Thus Spake Zarathustra, where Nietzsche calls the State “the coldest of the cold monsters”, but his quote is far too often taken out of context. What should be seen as an attempt to liberate his contemporaries from the shackles of civic submission, to shock them from their decadent lifestyles, has become a general attack on inappropriate social constructs regardless of nature.
2. The Kathedersozialist Program
In order to better illuminate our arguments on Nietzsche’s sociopolitical views, it is necessary briefly to outline the Kathederzosialist program. Their economic tradition was a progression of mercantilist doctrines as they were defined by Gustav Schmoller: ‘[Mercantilism] in its innermost kernel… is nothing but state making – not state making in a narrow sense, but state making and national-economy making at the same time, state making in the modern sense, which creates out of the political community an economic community, and so gives it a heightened meaning” (Schmoller 1884/1967:50-51). Spearheaded by economists like Adolph Wagner, Gustav Schmoller and Lujo Brentano (Wittrock 1939) the movement reacted to reigning social conditions created by Ricardian doctrines and policies. Acknowledging Engels’ terrible verdict of working class welfare under laissez-faire liberalism (Engels 1892) but unwilling to accept the Marxist alternative of a dictatorship of the proletariat, these economists sought to find a viable third alternative. State intervention in economic life was, on a general level, to follow the more active model of Friedrich List and what was later to become the American Institutional School, rather than the limited vision of Smith and the Ricardians. The Verein für Socialpolitik was established as a consequence of the growing profession’s need for direction (Schumpeter 1954:756). Involving a definite pledge and a practical agenda stretching beyond the limits of quantification, the Verein functioned on a basis of large-scale coordination of research activities that in the end resulted in the 188 volumes of the Verein’s Schriften published between 1872 and 1932.
The social question of the day, the Soziale Frage, was pressing. While the theory fuelling laissez faire liberalism already existed in praxis as public policy, the Marxist alternative did not. The Herculean task facing what was to become the Social Democrats was therefore to translate Marx’ analysis of the ills of capitalism increasingly into a viable political system compatible with democracy. As Haselbach argues, the task facing liberal revisionism was even more daunting, namely explaining why liberal theory had not functioned in praxis, and why liberalism had failed to deliver on its political promises. “The question for liberal revisionism was thus, why liberalism, as a practical policy, had not succeeded in harmonising and ordering the economic and social world through the invisible hand of the market forces, but had, instead, brought about new social divisions and political turmoil, the Social Question”(Haselbach 2000:65). In other words, why was the gap between rich and poor growing every day, and why was Europe in this period threatened by the lingering possibility of anti-capitalist revolution, rather than lulled into perpetual sociopolitical harmony by the Mandevillian private vices – public benefits doctrine? This was the focal point of Germany’s political debate from the mid-19th Century, and the uncertain foundation of the Kathedersozialist movement.
The Verein für Socialpolitik – created six years before Nietzsche wrote Human, all too Human – attempted to take the best of both worlds, allowing for individual creativity and Geist within a framework of social welfare. There was no use to, like the Jacobins, demand an overnight revolution to solve all of humanity’s problems, so instead a “fundamental reconstruction of society was to come about in time, as a by-product rather than as the result of efforts directly aimed at it” (Schumpeter 1954:803). While attacked by their opponents due to their lack of scientific objectivity and empirical proofs, these highly normative economists
adopted a stance somewhere between the German free-trade party and the democratic socialists… whilst rejecting the socialist program, they called for the intervention of the state… for the purpose of mitigating the pressure of the modern industrial system on its weaker members (Ingram 1967:205).
John Rae, writing in his 1901 book on Contemporary Socialism, judged their method to be as natural and legitimate a descendent from Adam Smith as the laissez faire-intensive German Manchester Party, and perhaps even more so, “for in science the true succession lies with those who carry the principles of the master to a more fruitful development, and not with those who embalm them as sacred but sterile simulacra” (Rae 1901:198-199).
The Verein was, however, not a proper ‘School’ per se, as its individual members disagreed on what course should be taken to achieve the intended reforms. A classic example can be found in the disagreements between Lujo Brentano and Gustav Schmoller on the role of the state in insuring the welfare of workers. Where Schmoller argued for direct state intervention in matters of the market, Brentano had faith in labour unions and the intrinsic mechanics of the commercial system (Kaku 2000:72-86). They all shared the final goal, but not the means of getting there. The diversity of its legacy greatly facilitates our task, as Nietzsche’s idiosyncrasies fail to alienate him from their larger goal. The theoretical nature of the Verein in the end found its perfect match in Bismarck’s pragmatism, and its work created the foundations for the European welfare states.
3. Nietzsche and Renaissance Individualism.
So how do Nietzsche’s principles of statecraft fit into this? Before we attempt to answer, we must first establish the Zeitgeist that bore them. In sharp contrast to the quantitative stasis of Newtonian Mechanics, Nietzsche’s Protagorean world is one of constant, qualitative flux: “Our social order will slowly melt away, just as all earlier orders have done, as soon as the suns of new opinions shone with new heat over humanity” (Nietzsche 1995:239).[6] Perspectives on reality are relative, and so are morals. To Nietzsche, and indeed to the whole German economic tradition, the true engine of socio-economic growth is Man‘s wit and will, in Nietzsche’s terms “The Will to Power”. While the academic community fails to agree on the exact meaning of this elusive ideal (Magnus 1996 : 41), we argue along the lines of Richardson and others that it reflects a basic need to master reality (Richardson 1996:148-157); an urge to fulfil our personal potential and reach for the divine within us (See also Reinert H & E, in this volume).
This better part of human nature was, long before Nietzsche, defined by Benjamin Constant as: “that noble disquiet which pursues and torments us, that desires to broaden our knowledge and develop our faculties… it is to this self-development that our destiny calls us” (Constant 1816). Industry, innovation, and production are all key-words in this tradition. While the commercialist Smith saw Man as a dog bartering bones (Smith 1976: Book 1 p. 17) (Man the Trader), the German tradition saw Man as a dog learning to can dog food instead of chewing bones (Man the Innovator and Producer).
The close relationship between Nietzsche and his older University of Basel colleague Jacob Burckhardt, the famous Renaissance scholar, is well documented in Edgar Salin’s Jacob Burckhardt und Nietzsche (Salin 1948), and more recently in Lionel Gossman’s Basel in the Age of Burckhardt (Gossman 2000). Burckhardt was the eminent historian of the same time periods that fascinated Nietzsche: Ancient Greece (Burckhardt 1998) and the Renaissance (Burckhardt 1958). Werner Sombart gives Jacob Burckhardt the credit when he refers to the Renaissance as “an embryonic age for the interest in the individual: in portraits, in biographies, and in psychology”[7] (Sombart 1930:88). This was clearly also Nietzsche’s view. The word Renaissance appears 76 times in Nietzsche’s complete works, of which 14 times in Human, all too Human.
To Nietzsche the Renaissance with its birth of individualism was the main event of the second millennium:
To me the Renaissance will always mark the high point of this millennium; and what happened subsequently is the great reaction of all kinds of herd instincts against the individualism of that period.[8]
Nietzsche’s economics is today not easily recognised as such, because in many ways it belongs to the ‘duty-based economics’ of the Renaissance, what Werner Sombart calls richtende Nationalökonomie. In the new interpretation of the Bible that created the Renaissance, the duty to invent and to create emanated from Man being created in the image of God. As the most typical characteristic of the Lord was his creativity, innovations and creation were Man’s pleasurable duties (Reinert & Daastøl 1997). Nietzsche’s teachings retain the pleasurable and playful duty to create that characterises the Renaissance, but now as a duty towards an inner self: ‘Yes to the game of creation, my brothers, requires a holy saying of yes’ he says in Zarathustra.[9]
In the Renaissance tradition Nietzsche identifies a fundamental role played by the individual in society – an aspect which much later came to be associated with the economics of Joseph Schumpeter – namely the vital role of the individual entrepreneur in renewing society through ‘creative destruction’. As an economist, Nietzsche upholds the Renaissance legacy of humanist creativity from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Christian Wolff, the founders of German economics. “The industry of men”, as the term appears in the works of Molinaeus (Molinaeus 1546/1930:73), was born when Neo-Platonic influences during the Renaissance made creation itself self-conscious (Reinert & Daastøl 1997). Fuelled by what Nietzsche refers to as Geist- und Willens-Kapital (Nietzsche 1995:258), in this tradition Man’s wit and will became the true engine of socio-economic growth. This is what Nietzsche complains was being lost in the economics of his age: Our age, which speaks so much of economics is wasteful, it wastes the most precious of all, the Geist.[10] This is an echo from the complaints of German economists at the time against die Entgeistung of economic theory: that Man’s Geist, his wit and will, was disappearing from economic theory as the barter-based English tradition of automatic economic harmony increasingly dominated the scene.
4. Nietzsche and the German Economic Tradition.
Nietzsche accepts the standard goal of statecraft as “making life tolerable for the greatest number [of people]” (Nietzsche 1995:236).[11] This places Nietzsche in the anthropocentric German tradition of social sciences emanating from Leibniz and Wolff.[12] This tradition emphasizes the need to construct a theory around a core of ‘Man and his needs’. This tradition is holistic, stressing the organic coherence of the social sciences, the Strukturzusammenhänge. This problem-oriented science finds no room for arbitrary distinctions between academic disciplines. The metaphysical instruments of philosophy, economics, and politics are all applied according to their relevance to the task at hand, in sharp contrast to the limited toolbox of neoclassical economics. Whereas modern economists tend to be tool-focused, in that they seek to apply a few axiomatic instruments to all problems they face, the statecrafters were problem-focused, finding or inventing the right tool for the right job. It is therefore impossible, and in fact anachronistic, to divorce the sphere of economics from the whole in Nietzsche’s work; his arguments are synergical, the totality reflecting the State in its all-encompassing form of human coexistence.
In its origins, with Christian Wolff, German economics was based on duty. As already mentioned, Werner Sombart calls this type of economics a richtende Nationalökonomie (Sombart 1930). Symptomatically, in the collected works of Nietsche the word Pflicht – duty – gets 167 hits. The word ‘market’ gets only 8.
Physiocracy marks the point where today’s standard economics diverges from German economics and Other Canon economics. Physiocray, or ‘the rule of Nature’, stands in sharp contrast to the Renaissance tradition where the creative human being is the driving force. Most German economists at the time were ardent anti-physiocrats, and interestingly Friedrich Nietzsche comes out with an unusually strong praise of the greatest anti-physiocratic economist of all, the Neapolitan Abbé Galliani: ‘the profoundest acutest…. man of his century, he was far profounder than Voltaire’. (Nietzsche 2000: 6909).
Corresponding to the German tradition, citizenship, according to Nietzsche, is a reward for dutiful sacrifices on the altar of common good; “We must ourselves, along with other people, have risked what is dearest to us, only this binds us firmly to the state, we must have the happiness of posterity in mind, in order to take the proper, natural interest in institutions and in their alteration” (Nietzsche 1995:245).[13]
This phrase in Nietzsche raises the issue of the many similarities between the Nietzsche and Thorstein Veblen, the founder of the US Institutional School of Economics. Two connecting points come to mind from the last phrase in the former paragraph: first of all, the active attitude towards institution building, and secondly the need to have ‘the happiness of posterity in mind’. In a similar vein Veblen’s term ‘parental bent’ signified Man’s ties to and obligations towards posterity. In Veblen’s system the ‘good’ production-capitalists had this trait as opposed to the ‘bad’ financial capitalists who were, at best, a necessary evil. The creative and constructive people, in Veblen’s case the engineers, are the carriers of salvation for both Nietzsche and Veblen.
In a parallel fashion, Veblen’s contempt for people making their living based on ‘vendibility’ clearly mirrors the perspectives of Nietzsche, and later of Sombart (Sombart 1915). In the Renaissance sprit, Veblen’s basic driving force in the economy is Man’s ‘idle curiosity’ which produces inventions that become innovations when they meet ‘workmanship’ and capital, and the duties and ‘drives’ he establishes for mankind are very similar to those of Benjamin Constant in the quote above. The connections between Nietzsche and Veblen seem to have caused even less academic interest than the connections between Nietzsche and Schumpeter. Of a selection of twelve biographies and works on Veblen, just four (Diggins 1978/1999, Tilman 1992, Eby 1998 and Jorgensen & Jorgensen 1999) seem to make references to Nietzsche, and all of them only peripherally and in passing, not connecting or comparing the analysis of the two authors. Veblen was interested in philosophical matters, his first publication was ‘Kant’s Critique of Judgement’ (Veblen1884/1934)
Going back to Nietzsche’s emphasis on the need to have risked something in order to properly qualify for citizenship, he clearly betrays his Classicist heritage in the sentence quoted above. Arguing here along the lines supported today by Raaflaub (1997), Ober (1996), Rahe (1994), and others, Nietzsche seemingly alludes to the birth of democracy with the ascension of Athenian rowers following the battle of Salamis. Politically alienated due to their material inability to participate in traditional hoplite battle – the martial progenitor of Western warfare characterized by high barriers to entry due to the high cost of bronze armaments (Hanson 2000) – the lower classes utilized their participation in the new naval activities as leverage in political disputes. The essential argument followed Nietzsche’s earlier statement in the empowerment of people actively making sacrifices for the good of the state. Accentuating the need for a higher morality to seriously pursue long-term socio-political goals, Nietzsche clearly belongs to the movement revolting against the hedonistic nature of post-Mandeville economics (see Mandeville 1714/1924).[14] Nietzsche sees the need to sacrifice ‘what is dearest to us’ for the State, and he is conscious of the need to change and shape societies institutions. If we ask ourselves what Nietzsche means by ‘risking what is dearest to us’, risking one’s life comes to mind, but, specifically in Nietzsche’s case, it may be argued that what was dearest to him was ‘individuality’.
In this one crucial phrase, quoted above, Nietzsche thus distances himself from right-wing liberalists on two important points, both of which place him squarely in the German economic tradition against unmitigated economic liberalism. First of all institutions matter and need ‘proper, natural interest’, careful attention and conscious design: the economy does not create a ‘spontaneous order’. Secondly, people like Ayn Rand, who combine characters superficially similar to Nietzsche’s Übermensch with a hatred for the state and for collectivity, have completely missed Nietzsche’s point about the need both for heroic individualism and a solid state structure. As with the Athenian rowers, heroism could almost be seen as a precondition for the honor to participate in the affairs of the state.
In terms of economic policy, this follows in the footsteps of Friedrich List. While not being part of any ‘school’ of economics, List is still a luminary in the German tradition and the history of economic analysis. A precursor to the Historical School and the Verein für Socialpolitik, List’s writings were undoubtedly influential, laying the foundations for the late 19th Century policies which spread industrialization to continental Europe. List’s emphasis was on organizing forces of production over accumulation of wealth, arguing that the power to produce wealth was infinitely more important than wealth itself (List 1909:109). His anthropocentric system was also quintessentially continental, in that it elevated the mind of Man to a position of primacy: “…all discoveries, inventions, improvements, perfections and exertions of all generations which have lived before us… form the mental capital of the present human race”(List 1909:113 discussed in Bell 1953:310). As we have already seen, this last term is also found in Nietzsche, a point to which we will get back.
5. Nietzsche: Social Justice and Welfare.
So what does Nietzsche’s socioeconomic construct actually look like? Most first-time readers of his works will approach the subject with a severely distorted ‘vision’ of a right-wing anti-Semitic Übermensch with Nazi sympathies, but even a preliminary study will uncover the fallacy of such a predisposition. It is on the Jews that he bestows the ‘capital of spirit and will’, and he argues:
it was the Jewish freethinkers, scholars, and physicians who held fast to the banner of enlightenment and of spiritual independence while under the harshest personal pressure and defended Europe against Asia, it is not least thanks to their efforts that… the ring of culture that now unites us with the enlightenment of Greek and Roman antiquity remained unbroken (Nietzsche 1995:158).[15]
The Jews should, in Nietzsche’s eyes, thus be respected as superior intellects, not defiled as racial inferiors. The further one reads, the further this castle of propaganda, started by Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth, crumbles under the weight of the evidence. Nietzsche harbours a deep-seated respect for the individual, and while most scholars would trace this back to his Homeric legacy of individual greatness, Human, All too Human takes a different stance; “Like every organizing political power, the Greek polis resisted and mistrusted the growth of culture… it did not want to allow any space in culture and education for history or ‘becoming’ (Werden)” (Nietzsche 1995:256).[16]
The Greek polis did thus not supply enough cultural flux to allow for individual genius, a social condition that, as we mentioned earlier, only emerged in the Renaissance. The humanist veneration of the individual simultaneously explains Nietzsche’s violent reactions both against the social conditions surrounding him, and against the collectivist solutions presented by the communists. Individuality is a pivotal characteristic of Nietzsche’s state.
Nietzsche claims the greatest cost of government lies in the redirection of individual energy from personal creativity to macroscopic problem solving, but acknowledges a sacrifice has to be made to ensure public good. The 19th Century Soziale Frage – worries that created the Verein für Socialpolitik in 1872 and the Kathedersozialismus – clearly weigh heavily on Nietzsche; “Every day, new questions and concerns about the public welfare devour a daily tribute from mental and emotional capital of every citizen” (Nietzsche 1995:263).[17] There are several other instances where he seems incensed by issues of social justice, and he acknowledges the old truism that slaves were treated better than workers, as slaves had an inherent cost and a value to the owner:
Whereas everyone must concede that slaves live more securely and happily in every respect than the modern worker and that the work of slaves involves very little work compared with that of the ‘worker’ (Nietzsche 1995:246).[18]
While giving room for entrepreneurial activities, the liberal Laissez-Faire doctrines that emerged from Ricardian economics created a system of institutionalised abuse of the lower classes, a social imbalance totally unacceptable to Nietzsche. Following the above discussed decline of the state,[19] we find that Nietzsche goes as far as distinguishing between a person and an individual: “The disregard for, decline, and death of the state, the liberation of the private person (I take care not to say: of the individual) is the consequence of the democratic concept of the state; herein lies its mission” (Nietzsche 1995:254).[20] An individual is unique, whereas a private person can be an undifferentiated part of the masses.
Nietzsche is fundamentally critical of the theoretical bases of liberal economics, of utilitarianism and of Spencer’s social Darwinism. He particularly engages himself against the ‘respectable but mediocre Englishmen: Darwin, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer.’ [21] The passive adaptation – Anpassung – of Darwinism is fundamentally opposed to Nietzsche’s creative Will to Power as the driving force of history. To him it makes no sense to establish a secondary reactive adaptation at the core of the theory of human development, rather than the original force to which others then have to adapt.[22] As with Adam Smith’s characterisation of human beings as dogs having learned to barter, English social theory again with Mill and Spencer leaves out Man’s creative spirit in the foundations for the social sciences. In this criticism Nietzsche is truly in the mainstream of 19th Century German social science.
6. Nietzsche: Entrepreneurship, Gradualism and Uniqueness.
So was Nietzsche then in the end a ‘socialist’? Far from it. According to Nietzsche,
Socialism is the visionary younger brother of an almost decrepit despotism whose heir it wants to be, its aspirations are therefore in the deepest sense reactionary. For it desires an abundance of governmental power such as only despotism has ever had and indeed outdoes the entire past by striving for the outright annihilation of the individual (Nietzsche 1995:255).[23]
Again we find Nietzsche absorbed by the historical significance of the present, mirroring the German Historical School. Like the Kathedersozialisten, Nietzsche did, however, acknowledge the value of socialist ideals and the need for social justice, but he distrusted their motivation: “By contrast, the demand for equality of rights made by socialists of the subjected caste never flows from a sense of justice, but instead from greed” (Nietzsche 1995:243).[24] He thus argues that extreme anti-bourgeoisie sentiments are derived from a deep-seated jealousy of the more ‘successful’ castes, rather than any sense of social welfare.
Again, the principal reason for Nietzsche’s scepticism of extreme Socialism seems to be his opposite stance on the value of the individual. Nietzsche indeed claims Socialism strives for “the outright annihilation of the individual” (Nietzsche 1995:255), a goal quite contrary to his will to power. This remarkable distrust of the masses has clear Classical roots. Nietzsche’s Homeric legacy saw no ‘justice’ in Socialism, and from Thucydides to Livy, ‘mob’ was consistently presented as a derogatory term, as a screaming, angry, easily agitated and directed mass of drones. And this is exactly what Nietzsche argues people under Socialism would necessarily become. Socialism “pounds the word ‘justice’ like a nail into the heads of the half-educated masses in order to rob them completely of their understanding” (Nietzsche 1995:256),[25] and furthermore unduly influences its subjects: “Someone who has money and influence can make the public share any opinion”(Nietzsche 1995:241)[26] summons visions of George W. Bush and Silvio Berlusconi. Socialist masses may be free of their materialistic fetters, but sadly their spiritual capital is lost along with their monetary one. 20th Century social democracy therefore saw mass education as a key task.
The bloody revolution proclaimed by the more ardent socialists also failed to convince Nietzsche, as his economic theory had no room for sudden revolts. Perhaps influenced by the ‘Reign of Terror’ following the French Revolution, as well as the general failure of the 1848 uprisings, he deeply distrusted limited truth in ‘spontaneous order’, both from the left and from the right:
There are political and social visionaries who ardently and eloquently demand the overthrow of all social order in the belief that the most splendid temple of beautified humanity would immediately be raised, as by itself…. Unfortunately, we know from historical experience that every such revolution brings with it a new resurrection of the most savage energies in the form of long-buried horrors and excesses of the most distant ages: that a revolution can therefore certainly be a source of energy when humanity has grown feeble, but never an organizer, architect, artist, perfecter of human nature (Nietzsche 1995:248-249).[27]
Nietzsche’s goal and the need for a gradual approach to get there is not only stated clearly, but also presented as a mirror image of the Verein’s ideology:
What is necessary is not a forcible redistribution of property, but instead the gradual transformation of sensibility, the sense of justice must become greater in everyone, the instinct for violence weaker (Nietzsche 1995:244).[28]
While Nietzsche here agrees with the need for greater justice in the distribution of wealth, in his opinion, the socialist formulas were too simple-minded:
When the socialists demonstrate that the division of property among present-day humanity is the consequence of countless acts of injustice and violence… they are seeing only one isolated thing (Nietzsche 1995:243).[29]
As contemporaries Marx and Nietzsche share a perception of a Zeitwende, of the end of an era and the start of a new one. However, while Marx sees history moving as a result of material factors, Nietzsche’s world is moved by the spirit and will of man. It may be argued, of course, that these are but two aspects of the same historical movement, at two different levels of abstraction: the material world being the result of Man’s inventiveness.
Nietzsche reports having read Marx in a letter from Bonn dated May 1865[30]. This is two years before the first volume of Das Kapital is published, so the reference is likely to be to Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (1858). The Communist manifesto is unlikely to have qualified as a Werk, which is the term used by Marx. Other than in this letter, Nietzsche never refers to Marx by name. Nietzsche thoroughly dislikes the picturesque fanatics of history, those devoted to one single issue. To him these fanatics who appeal to the masses, he calls them ‘Epileptiker des Begriffes (‘concept-epileptics’)[31], form the antithesis to the strong and free spirit. Although Nietzsche so clearly sees the basic point of the need for social justice, it is likely that he may have considered Marx as having fallen into this category.
An interesting parallel between the two is the analysis of institutional inertia that makes sudden change difficult. Nietzsche presents a poetic version of Marx’ idea of ‘institutional mismatch’: “The overthrow of institutions does not follow immediately upon the overthrow of opinions, instead, the new opinions live for a long time in the desolate and strangely unfamiliar house of their predecessors and even preserve it themselves, since they need some sort of shelter” (Nietzsche 1995:249-250).[32] In this case Nietzsche’s ideas are far from utopian, as long as one can see through the masques of poetry that hide his realism.
7. Nietzsche in the Middle: Kathedersozialismus and the True Third Way.
…the cleverness and self-interest of human beings are the best developed of all their characteristics; if the state no longer corresponds to the demands of these forces, chaos is the least likely thing to emerge; instead, an invention even more to the purpose than was the state will triumph over the state. How many organizing forces has humanity already seen die out… We ourselves are seeing the idea that attributes significant legal and political power to the family, which once held sway as far as the Roman way of life reached, becoming ever fainter and feebler. Thus, a later generation will likewise see the state become insignificant in certain areas of the world – an idea that many people today can scarcely conceive without fear and abhorrence. To work towards the diffusion and realization of this idea is admittedly something else: we would have to be quite arrogant about our rational capacity and hardly understand history halfway to put our hand to the plow right away – at a point when nobody can yet exhibit the seeds that later are to be strewn upon the rended earth. Let us therefore trust to “the cleverness and self-interest of human beings” that the state will still persist for a good while yet and that the destructive experiments of over-zealous and premature half-knowers will be repelled! (Nietzsche 1995:255)[33]
Hidden in the bowels of this voluminous passage, we see the embryonic form of a Kathedersozialist ideology. While “the cleverness and self-interest of human beings” appear to be the next in kin to a certain invisible hand, Nietzsche’s phrase seems to be of a different temperament. Where Classical economics saw the aggregate self-interest of Man usurping the idea of a state, as in an extreme laissez-faire system, Nietzsche’s self-interest was of a more political nature. Social experimentation is to be avoided, as one should instead rely on nature’s perpetual propensity to change, evolve, and mature. The role of the state in society is to be evaluated from a historical perspective, and not defined on the basis of a monolithic model.
One can thus see how Nietzsche is unwilling to sacrifice the creative genius of the individual to the avatar of communist collectivism. He demands social justice and improved conditions for the working classes, but also acknowledges that progress originates in individual innovations and individual initiative; “A higher culture can arise only where there are two different castes in society… the caste of those who are forced to work and the caste of those who are free to work” (Nietzsche 1995:237)[34] Mirroring the ideas Benjamin Constant proposed in his The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns (Constant 1816), he simultaneously requests the freedom from need, and the freedom to be creative. While liberalism tends to emphasize the freedoms to (freedom as ‘civil liberties’), communism tended to emphasize the freedoms from (hunger, illiteracy etc). The characteristics of the Third Way of the Verein für Socialpolitik and the successors have been a simultaneous attention to both of these freedoms.
Furthermore, it was important to Nietzsche that there was circulation between the two castes: “…it is even possible for some movement between the two castes to take place, so that the duller, less intelligent families and individuals from the upper caste can be demoted to the lower one and the freer people from the lower caste can in turn gain admission to the higher one…” (Nietzsche 1995:237-238).[35] Nietzsche’s idea of social mobility was followed up by Vilfredo Pareto’s ‘Circulation of Elites’ (Pareto 1916). Schumpeter’s later metaphor that the economy is like a hotel where the persons inhabiting the luxury rooms always change also shows clear kinship to the same idea; “In fact, the upper strata of society are like hotels which are indeed always full of people, but people who are forever changing” (Schumpeter 1959:156).
Writers like Kashyap have already pointed out that Nietzsche was “as opposed to the socialist State as to the democratic one” (Kashyap 1970:91), but fail to elaborate on the argument. Nietzsche was thus left hanging in mid-air as a utopian renegade whose social criticisms were as disturbing as they were impractical. The general impression left us by the considerable body of secondary literature on Nietzsche’s political philosophy is that of a diagnostic prophet, a social critic with a visionary analysis of his contemporary power structures. His writings are, however, seldom policy-centred, and hard to relate to the dichotomous political situation created by the Cold War. It can thus, in this day and age of bipolar socioeconomic systems, seem as if Nietzsche’s goal indeed was utopian, that he simultaneously demanded socialism and liberalism; that he wanted to ‘have his cake and still eat it’. This conclusion, however, is anachronistic in that it imposes modern Cold War values on history. Anthony Giddens writes “The ruling groups who set up the social insurance system in imperial Germany in the late nineteenth Century despised laissez-faire economics as they did socialism” (Giddens 1998) and it is indeed in this tradition, independent as it was from the right-left axis of the Cold War, that we find Nietzsche and the Kathedersozialisten.
Also, ‘As a political metaphor, the third path claims a larger field than just economics. Their path took the meaning to bridge the gap, or find an alternative approach beyond the dualism of modernity and tradition, of liberal democracy and authoritarian rule, of rationalism and Heimat’ (Haselbach 2000:67).
Nietzsche’s Zeitgeist was very different from the present one, resting on the intellectual ruins of the Cold War. As a consequence of the NATO-Soviet axis of hostilities, economics became divided in a system of binary opposites, but binary in the sense of a circle cut in two. Only recently did it dawn upon us that the Cold War was fought between two brands of Ricardian economics, while the Other Canon type theory of economics – represented by the Kathedersozialisten and the US institutionalist and pre-institutionalist counterparts – died out. The common Ricardian roots of both neo-classical economics and the planned economy of the communist counterparts have been emphasized by Geoffrey Hodgson (Hodgson 1999), Nicholas Kaldor (Kaldor 1955-1956), and Joseph Stiglitz (Stiglitz 1994). While confusing, shocking, and at times contradictory, Nietzsche’s Glance at the State is more than the quixotic bile of a confused mind, and can indeed be read as a concrete statement of public policy.
8. Conclusion and Notes on Further Research.
Marxist critique of Nietzsche often characterises him as an apologetic of liberalism and capitalism. We have attempted to show that this is a fundamentally wrong interpretation. Indeed, not only liberalism itself, but also its philosophical foundations are at cross-purposes with Nietzsche’s basic philosophy. Typically, the appreciation of Nietzsche as a true Third Way social scientist in the German economic tradition has been lost in the prolonged crossfire between liberalism and communism.
While we now have joined ranks with countless ‘cranks’ in securing Nietzsche for one cause or another, we believe this to be one of the few occasions on which his writings have been evaluated from the perspective of an economist (Ottmann 1987 is one of them). This paper is, however, not intended as a final verdict on the matter, but rather as a prelude for further analysis. There are immediate questions whose answers remain beyond the scope of this essay, which would be interesting topics for future studies. We only analysed a very small portion of his substantial literary legacy, and the obvious continuation would be the task of testing our preliminary conclusion against this vast body of writings. Given Nietzsche’s rhetorical gymnastics, this could be a monumental task. We have already noted Nietzsche’s classicist heritage on several occasions – and from Thucydides to Aristotle, from Xenophon to Pericles, the intellectual echoes of ancient Athenians are indeed prominent in his writings – and the next logical step would be to connect the plethora of existing studies on this subject to our theory of Nietzschean Kathedersozialismus. Upon browsing though the vast body of secondary literature on Nietzsche, one clearly sees the uneven distribution of their topics. Countless scholars have discussed his connection to the Ancient Greeks, but few indeed have evaluated his contributions to the fields of economics and political science.
While Nietzsche for years has been thought to be a philosophical pariah, we have sought to establish his connection to the German tradition of appreciative and verstehende economics. Nietzsche’s influence on his Zeitgeist was, as other papers in this volume have explored, considerable. While we have placed Nietzsche’s economic policies under an overall heading, his political writings are still a unique amalgamation of two millennia of Western political theory, and what ideas he took from where remains contested. In the end our contribution has been to place Nietzsche’s economic policies within the context of an existing school of political economy. His legacy remains that of an intrepid, if somewhat esoteric statecrafter.
As a final note it should be said that the Kathedersozialist agenda, and indeed the entire German tradition, has gained new relevance in the past years, as it becomes clear that our times also have a Soziale Frage. Haselbach’s statement about the Kathedersozialisten seems highly relevant also for Nietzsche:
[His] work tried to re-write liberal economic theory with a distinctively anti-capitalist stance, albeit by reinvigorating the liberal utopia, and by reinterpreting the notion of capitalism. This theoretical approach can be characterised as a theory of a third path between capitalism and communism (Haselbach 2000:64).
The gap between rich and poor has, however, this time increased in scale, as the task at hand is one of solving fundamental international discrepancies arising from globalisation, rather than re-evaluating domestic policy. The question to ask is therefore why most of the World’s countries are poorer today than ten years ago, and what can be done about it. In our post-Cold War era, the true Third Way can perhaps provide us with the best tools for the job.
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[1] See http://www.othercanon.org
[2] Section entitled ‚Über die Ursachen der fortschreitenden Wohlfahrt der Menschen’ .
[3] John Stuart Mill is an exception here.
[4] Cossa (1891/92:68-69) lists two pages of literature on the Italian debate on these issues. There we find titles like Francesco Ferrara’s ‘Il Germanismo economico in Italia’ (1874), Salvatore Majorana Calatabiano’s ‘La scuola germanica e la scuola Adamo Smith in economia politica’ (1875) and Constatino Baer’s ‘I socialisti della cattedra in Germania’ (1875). The ‘new’ germanofile economists held an important congress in Milan in 1875.
[5] In Nietzsche’s letters he reports studying Italian and reading Dante in the original language. ‘Augenblicklich studiere ich ja Italienisch….wo im Kränzchen Dante gelesen wird.’ (Nietzsche 2000:9668). In his letters Nietzsche also reports speaking Italian with a ballerina from Milan on the train, and to conversing with a Spaniard in Italian.
[6]“Unsere gesellschaftliche Ordnung wird langsam wegschmelzen, wie es alle früheren Ordnungen getan haben, sobald die Sonnen neuer Meinungen mit neuer Glut über die Menschen hinleuchten” (Nietzsche 2000:4689)
[7]Es erwacht, wie das vor allem Burckhardt nachgewiesen hat, im Zeitalter der Renaisance das Interesse am Individuellen: am Porträt, an der Biographic, an der Psychologie…
[8] Die Renaissance bleibt mir immer noch die Höhe dieses Jahrtausends; und was seither geschah, ist die große Reaktion aller Art von Herdentrieben gegen den »Individualismus« jener Epoche. Nietzsche’s letter to Franz Overbeck, October 1882 (Nietzsche 2000:10228)
[9] Ja, zum spiele des Schaffens, meine Brüder, bedarf es eines heiligen Ja-sagens: seinen Willen will nun der Geist, seine Welt gewinnt sich den Weltverlorene (Nietzsche 2000:6373).
[10] Unser Zeitalter, soviel es von Ökonomie redet, ist ein Verschwender: es verschwendet das Kostbarste, den Geist (Nietzsche 2000:5579 )
[11] Überdies: wenn es sich nun einmal bei aller Politik darum handelt, möglichst vielen das Leben erträglich zu machen, so mögen immerhin diese Möglichst-Vielen auch bestimmen, was sie unter einem erträglichen Leben verstehen… (Nietzsche 2000:4683)
[12] See Reinert & Daastøl 1997.
[13] Man muß selber mit den anderen sein Liebstes daran gewagt haben: das erst bindet an den Staat fest; man muß das Glück seiner Nachkommen ins Auge fassen, also vor allem Nachkommen haben, um an allen Institutionen und deren Veränderung rechten, natürlichen Anteil zu nehmen (Nietzsche 2000:4700)
[14] For a discussion of Mandeville’s 1714 Fable of the Bee, see Schumpeter (1954:184 and 325)
[15]Überdies: in den dunkelsten Zeiten des Mittelalters, als sich die asiatische Wolkenschicht schwer über Europa gelagert hatte, waren es jüdische Freidenker, Gelehrte und Ärzte, welche das Banner der Aufklärung und der geistigen Unabhängigkeit unter dem härtesten persönlichen Zwange festhielten und Europa gegen Asien verteidigten; ihren Bemühungen ist es nicht am wenigsten zu danken, daß eine natürlichere, vernunftgemäßere und jedenfalls unmythische Erklärung der Welt endlich wieder zum Siege kommen konnte und daß der Ring der Kultur, welcher uns jetzt mit der Aufklärung des griechisch-römischen Altertums zusammenknüpft, unzerbrochen blieb (Nietzsche 2000:4723-24)
[16]Die griechische Polis war, wie jede organisierende politische Macht, ausschließend und mißtrauisch gegen das Wachstum der Bildung; ihr gewaltiger Grundtrieb zeigte sich fast nur lähmend und hemmend für dieselbe. Sie wollte keine Geschichte, kein Werden in der Bildung gelten lassen; (Nietzsche 2000:4720)
[17]die täglich neuen Fragen und Sorgen des öffentlichen Wohls verschlingen eine tägliche Abgabe von dem Kopf- und Herz-Kapitale jedes Bürgers (Nietzsche 2000:4731)
[18]während jeder sich sagen muß, daß die Sklaven in allen Beziehungen sicherer und glücklicher leben als der moderne Arbeiter, daß Sklavenarbeit sehr wenig Arbeit im Verhältnis zu der des »Arbeiters« ist (Nietzsche 2000:4701)
[19] See footnote 22
[20]Die Mißachtung, der Verfall und der Tod des Staates, die Entfesselung der Privatperson (ich hüte mich zu sagen: des Individuums) ist die Konsequenz des demokratischen Staatsbegriffs; hier liegt seine Mission (Nietzsche 2000:4716)
[21] achtbarer, aber mittelmäßiger Engländer – ich nenne Darwin, John Stuart Mill und Herbert Spencer
[Curt Paul Janz: Biographie: XI. Erste Ernte, S. 60. Digitale Bibliothek Band 31: Nietzsche, S. 2285 (vgl. Janz-Nietzsche Bd. 2, S. 470) (c) C. Hanser Verlag]
[22] Druck jener Idiosynkrasie die »Anpassung« in den Vordergrund, das heißt eine Aktivität zweiten Ranges, eine bloße Reaktivität, ja man hat das Leben selbst als eine immer zweckmäßigere innere Anpassung an äußere Umstände definiert (Herbert Spencer). Damit ist aber das Wesen des Lebens verkannt, sein Wille zur Macht; damit ist der prinzipielle Vorrang übersehn, den die spontanen, angreifenden, übergreifenden, neu-auslegenden, neu-richtenden und gestaltenden Kräfte haben, auf deren Wirkung erst die »Anpassung« folgt (Nietzsche 2000:7323)
[23] Der Sozialismus ist der phantastische jüngere Bruder des fast abgelebten Despotismus, den er beerben will; seine Bestrebungen sind also im tiefsten Verstande reaktionär. Denn er begehrt eine Fülle der Staatsgewalt, wie sie nur je der Despotismus gehabt hat, ja er überbietet alles Vergangene dadurch, daß er die förmliche Vernichtung des Individuums anstrebt (Nietzsche 2000:4718)
[24] Dagegen Gleichheit der Rechte fordern, wie es die Sozialisten der unterworfenen Kaste tun, ist nimmermehr der Ausfluß der Gerechtigkeit, sondern der Begehrlichkeit (Nietzsche 2000:4696)
[25] Deshalb bereitet er sich im stillen zu Schreckensherrschaften vor und treibt den halbgebildeten Massen das Wort »Gerechtigkeit« wie einen Nagel in den Kopf, um sie ihres Verstandes völlig zu berauben (nachdem dieser Verstand schon durch die Halbbildung sehr gelitten hat) und ihnen für das böse Spiel, das sie spielen sollen, ein gutes Gewissen zu schaffen (Nietzsche 2000:4719)
[26]Weil es beinahe sittlich gleichgültig erscheint, eine Zeile, noch dazu vielleicht ohne Namensunterschrift, mehr zu schreiben oder nicht zu schreiben, so kann einer, der Geld und Einfluß hat, jede Meinung zur öffentlichen machen (Nietzsche 2000:4692)
[27] Es gibt politische und soziale Phantasten, welche feurig und beredt zu einem Umsturz aller Ordnungen auffordern, in dem Glauben, daß dann sofort das stolzeste Tempelhaus schönen Menschentums gleichsam von selbst sich erheben werde… Leider weiß man aus historischen Erfahrungen, daß jeder solche Umsturz die wildesten Energien als die längst begrabenen Furchtbarkeiten und Maßlosigkeiten fernster Zeitalter von neuem zur Auferstehung bringt: daß also ein Umsturz wohl eine Kraftquelle in einer matt gewordenen Menschheit sein kann, nimmermehr aber ein Ordner, Baumeister, Künstler, Vollender der menschlichen Natur (Nietzsche 2000:4706)
[28] Nicht gewaltsame neue Verteilungen sondern allmähliche Umschaffungen des Sinnes tun, die Gerechtigkeit muß in allen größer werden, der gewalttätige Instinkt schwächer (Nietzsche 2000:4697)
[29] Wenn die Sozialisten nachweisen, daß die Eigentums-Verteilung in der gegenwärtigen Menschheit die Konsequenz zahlloser Ungerechtigkeiten und Gewaltsamkeiten ist, und in summa die Verpflichtung gegen etwas so unrecht Begründetes ablehnen: so sehen sie nur etwas einzelnes (Nietzsche 2000:4697)
[30] Als Nebensache treibe ich jetzt Beethovens Leben nach dem Werk von Marx (Nietzsche 2000:9712)
[31] Die pathologische Bedingtheit seiner Optik macht aus dem Überzeugten den Fanatiker – Savonarola, Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon -, den Gegensatz-Typus des starken, des freigewordnen Geistes. Aber die große Attitüde dieser kranken Geister, dieser Epileptiker des Begriffs, wirkt auf die große Masse – die Fanatiker sind pittoresk, die Menschheit sieht Gebärden lieber, als daß sie Gründe hört (Nietzsche 2000:8001)
[32] Neue Meinungen im alten Hause. – Dem Umsturz der Meinungen folgt der Umsturz der Institutionen nicht sofort nach, vielmehr wohnen die neuen Meinungen lange Zeit im verödeten und unheimlich gewordenen Hause ihrer Vorgängerinnen und konservieren es selbst, aus Wohnungsnot (Nietzsche 2000:4708)
[33] Die Aussicht, welche sich durch diesen sichern Verfall ergibt, ist aber nicht in jedem Betracht eine unglückselige: die Klugheit und der Eigennutz der Menschen sind von allen ihren Eigenschaften am besten ausgebildet; wenn den Anforderungen dieser Kräfte der Staat nicht mehr entspricht, so wird am wenigsten das Chaos eintreten, sondern eine noch zweckmäßigere Erfindung, als der Staat es war, zum Siege über den Staat kommen. Wie manche organisierende Gewalt hat die Menschheit schon absterben sehen: – zum Beispiel die der Geschlechtsgenossenschaft, als welche Jahrtausende lang viel mächtiger war als die Gewalt der Familie, ja längst, bevor diese bestand, schon waltete und ordnete. Wir selber sehen den bedeutenden Rechts- und Machtgedanken der Familie, welcher einmal, so weit wie römisches Wesen reichte, die Herrschaft besaß immer blasser und ohnmächtiger werden. So wird ein späteres Geschlecht auch den Staat in einzelnen Strecken der Erde bedeutungslos werden sehen – eine Vor-stellung, an welche viele Menschen der Gegenwart kaum ohne Angst und Abscheu denken können. An der Verbreitung und Verwirklichung dieser Vorstellung zu arbeiten, ist freilich ein ander Ding: man muß sehr anmaßend von seiner Vernunft denken und die Geschichte kaum halb verstehen, um schon jetzt die Hand an den Pflug zu legen, – während noch niemand die Samenkörner aufzeigen kann, welche auf das zerrissene Erdreich nachher gestreut werden sollen. Vertrauen wir also »der Klugheit und dem Eigennutz der Menschen«, daß jetzt noch der Staat eine gute Weile bestehen bleibt und zerstörerische Versuche übereifriger und voreiliger Halbwisser abgewiesen werden! (Nietzsche 2000:4717-18)
[34] Eine höhere Kultur kann allein dort entstehen, wo es zwei unterschiedene Kasten der Gesellschaft gibt: die der Arbeitenden und die der Müßigen, zu wahrer Muße Befähigten; oder mit stärkerem Ausdruck: die Kaste der Zwangs-Arbeit und die Kaste der Frei-Arbeit (Nietzsche 2000:4685)
[35] Findet nun gar ein Austausch der beiden Kasten statt, so, daß die stumpferen, ungeistigeren Familien und einzelnen aus deroberen Kaste in die niedere herabgesetzt werden und wiederum die freieren Menschen aus dieser den Zutritt zur höheren erlangen: so ist ein Zustand erreicht, über den hinaus man nur noch das offene Meer unbestimmter Wünsche sieht (Nietzsche 2000:4685-86)
HYBRIDITY: Deep down inside, nonetheless, I feel that even this new title, “Asian American,” is too restricting for me, especially in light of the fact that I am an Angelino who inter-socializes with peoples of all cultures. As Cohen (1997) hypothesizes, as a postmodern cultural diaspora, I ultimately and inevitably have dubious political allegiances. That is, though I maintain certain sociopolitical ties with 1) my legal country U.S., 2) my mother land Korea, and 3) the host countries of Taiwan and China, by not completely assimilating to any of these national/cultural norms, I live in what Cohen (1997) calls “no-group lands” (p.189). In this no-group land, then, my existence is a composite of liminality, syncretism and ambiguity, ultimately rendering my identity geopolitically fluid and culturally amorphous. In tiny increments, I have gradually come to embrace myself as what Bhabha (1998) calls a “postcolonial cultural freak”—an indistinguishable, marginalized, and multi-cultural member in our society (pp. 1331-1344). Now, I accept and even thrive on the fact that my identity cannot be fixed to one national/cultural locale. It is in constant flux; it can never be compartmentalized into this or that category. Rather, my subjectivity is forever in the making. It is an unoccupied whirling void without a shape. It has immeasurable depth that can soak up any culture, selectively or wholeheartedly. It is thus fluid and amorphous. I simultaneously feel that I am Korean, Chinese, and American, and lately, an Angelino. Who knows what I will be tomorrow? Perhaps, a denizen of the entire world.
SHE wonders:
HE reacts:
2000
Total Households 105,480,101 (100.00%)
According to this statistics (Census Scope http://www.%20censusscope.org/), we as a society are headed towards a predominantly elderly populace, since less and less women are willing to produce babies. In fact, such is the trend for other countries with 1st world status.
Do you have any concerns with this trend?
Question: Who are to be blamed for the modern women’s “anti-domestication” stance, as they overwhelmingly restrain their reproductive organs? Is it A, B, or C?
A) Men, who for centuries have underappreciated or exploited domestic wives’ human dignity in general, compelling women to seek psychological/intellectual validation outside her traditional enclave (home and her children).
B) Women, who innately having “Eve’s syndrome” to thwart “Adam’s God-ordained authority” over her, have ingeniously made some strategic political strides over the years, such as: the 20s suffrage act (1st wave feminism), the 60s civil rights’ movement (2nd wave feminism), and the 90s women-of-color consciousness and post-colonial transnationalism (3rd wave feminism).
C) Other: Your insights as to why.
All of sudden, men (factory owners & politicians) preferred women of the following sizes:
JC's Mental Portal 