Abstract
The extent to which Nietzsche’s philosophy flowed from his deeply reactionary political impulses is a matter of scholarly dispute. The fact that he had such impulses is not. He was horrified by the Paris Commune. He tended to equate the aspiration for a more egalitarian social order with a desire for humanity to be reduced to a crowd of blinking Last Men anaesthetized by their collective contentment.
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Notes
- 1.
Brian Leiter, for example, seems to endorse the “Anti-Politics View” according to which Nietzsche “occasionally expresses views about political matters but, read in context, they do not add up to a theoretical account of any of the questions of political philosophy.” Nietzsche, he suggests, has “views about human flourishing” that he seeks to communicate “at least to a select few” but doesn’t believe that a particular form of social or political organization can be designed to enable more people to flourish (Leiter 2021).
- 2.
Granted, even at the height of my Nietzsche reading, I seriously doubt I would have broken up with a girlfriend for speaking disrespectfully about Nietzsche’s books—the reason Goldman gives in her memoir for dumping her boyfriend Ed.
References
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Cohen, G. (2000b). Karl Marx’s Theory of History (2nd Edition). Princeton University Press.
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Goldman, E. (1970). Living My Life, Vol. 1. Dover Publications Inc.
Leiter, B. (2020). “Nietzsche’s Moral and Political Philosophy,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche-moral-political/.
Marx, K. (1875). Critique of the Gotha Program. Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/index.htm.
Nietzsche, F. (1967). On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Hoo (Kaufman, W. trans). Vintage Books.
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Burgis, B. (2023). The Genealogy of Socialist Morality: Some Preliminary Thoughts on Nietzsche, G.A. Cohen and the Argumentative Value of Moral Disgust. In: McManus, M. (eds) Nietzsche and the Politics of Reaction. Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13635-1_5
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