Abstract
The French Revolution was an event of particular interest to political philosophers. For Hegel, it was the event that put an end to the age-old Platonic division between guardians and producers. The master–slave conflict culminated in the bourgeois epoch where everyone works and everyone fights. The equality of persons is consistent with a Hegelian rank ordering of activities, with art, religion and philosophy possessing an authority that supersedes that of nation-states.
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Notes
- 1.
Ronald Beiner, Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Italics are Beiner’s. Dangerous Minds condenses arguments in his longer scholarly treatise Civil Religion: A Dialogue in the History of Political Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
- 2.
Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel, trans. Gregor Benton, introduction by Harrison Fluss, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021.
- 3.
Fluss, introduction, pp. 7–8.
- 4.
A dress rehearsal in Roman garb with lower-class members of L’Ormée giving the populist cry in Latin “vox populi, vox dei” set a precedent for the Roman dress in the drama of the French Revolution. See Edward Andrew, Imperial Republics: Revolution, War, and Territorial Expansion from the English Civil War to the French Revolution (University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. 106–115.
- 5.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1969), 283.
- 6.
Beiner, Civil Religion, 390.
- 7.
Keith Ansell-Pearson, “Nietzsche on Enlightenment and Fanaticism: On the middle writings,” in Paul Katsafanas ed. (London: Routledge, 2018), 13.
- 8.
Losurdo (103–104) cites Smith’s Wealth of Nations asserting that human differences are the effect, not the cause, of the division of labor. Losurdo’s Marxism is basically an elaboration of this point, with particular emphasis on the division between mental and physical labor, or labor and management.
- 9.
Mark Hulliung, The Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994); Graeme Garrard, Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment: A Republican Critique of the Philosophes (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), Graeme Garrard, Counter-Enlightenments: From the eighteenth-century to the present (London: Routledge, 2006), Chapter 2.
- 10.
Ansell-Pearson, “Nietzsche on the Enlightenment and Fanaticism”, 13–16.
- 11.
See Dale Van Kley, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971; Dale Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); William Doyle, Jansenism: Catholic Resistance to Authority from the Reformation to the French Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).
- 12.
Beiner, Civil Religion, chap. 30–31.
- 13.
John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1990).
- 14.
The Seven Years War (1756–63) was known in America as the French and Indian War since the conflict defeated Catholic New France, and its aboriginal allies, in North America.
- 15.
Andrew, Imperial Republics, 140–141.
- 16.
To be sure, Wollstonecraft criticized Rousseau’s assertions about natural difference between the sexes but her statement, in Vindication of the Rights of Women—“Our own conscience is the most enlightened philosopher”—is pure Rousseau.
- 17.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), pp. 58–59.
- 18.
Like Losurdo, Garrard, Counter-Enlightements, 75 asserts that admiration for Voltaire was “a key aspect of his rejection of Wagnerian romanticism.”.
- 19.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and the Antichrist, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 58. Also Antichrist, # 43–44.
- 20.
See Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great, ed. Richard Aldington (London: Routledge, 1927); Voltaire and Catherine the Great: Selected Correspondence, trans. A. Lentin (Cambridge: Oriental Research Partners, 1974).
- 21.
Voltaire and Catherine the Great: Selected Correspondence, 52, 68.
- 22.
Beiner, Civil Religion, 104, 110, 120, 363, 411, 419.
- 23.
Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (2001) considers Spinoza the progenitor of the radical enlightenment. His questionable premise is that religious radicalism (atheism) breeds political radicalism, while religious moderation (deism) limits political radicalism. Israel’s Spinozan Henri de Boullainvilliers is grouped with Gobineau and Nietzsche as master race theorists and aristocratic reactionaries by Losurdo, Nietzsche, 411–415, 786–787.
- 24.
Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2011), 313.
- 25.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 289. Bloom doubts that the Savoyard vicar is presenting Rousseau’s own teaching but the most memorable passages in the vicar’s account are word for word identical with Rousseau’s love letters to Sophie d’Houdetot.
- 26.
Locke’s philosophic An Essay concerning Human Understanding was far more widely read than his Two Treatise of Government. In the former work, conscience is dismissed as fallible opinion and natural law is supplanted by the law of fashion but, in the latter work, natural law and conscience have a central role to play is his political theory.
- 27.
John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding (London: Thomas Basset, 1690), II.xxvii.7–12, pp. 158–159.
- 28.
Claude Adrien Helvétius, A Treatise on Man; His Intellectual Faculties and His Education, trans. W. Hooper (New York: Burt Franklin,1969), Vol. 1, p. 127.
- 29.
Claude Adrien Helvétius, De l’esprit (New York: Burt Franklin, 1810, reprinted 1970), p. 408.
- 30.
Catherine Glyn Davies, Conscience as Consciousness: The Idea of Self-Awareness in French Philosophic Writing from Descartes to Diderot (Oxford, The Voltaire Society, 1990), Chapter 2.
- 31.
Denis Diderot et Jean D’Alembert, L’Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (New York: Readex Microprint Corporation, 1969), t. 3, p. 902.
- 32.
Voltaire, “Equality” in Philosophical Dictionary, trans. Peter Gay (New York: Basic Books, 1962), p. 246.
- 33.
I write so-called democratic enlightenment because, if Rousseau was the most radical and democratic thinker of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as Nietzsche thought, and if Rousseau is more a romantic critic of enlightenment than a proponent of enlightenment, then Jonathan Israel’s democrats amongst the philosophes of the French Enlightenment were Baron d’Holbach and the Marquis de Condorcet. See Jonathan Israel, Democratic enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution and Human Rights 1750–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
- 34.
Andrew, Imperial Republics, 140–141.
- 35.
Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), Chapter 1–2. The Marquis de Condorcet was an exception to Darnton’s observation that the High Enlightenment did not participate in the French Revolution. Although Condorcet does not appear in Nietzsche: The Aristocratic Rebel, he plays a large role in Losurdo’s Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History, trans Gregory Elliot (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and his Liberalism: A Counter-History for his support for the slave revolution in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) in 1791. Condorcet may well have been in Losurdo’s mind in pairing the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, or perhaps Diderot since Losurdo misinterpreted Diderot and Raynal’s Histoire des Deux Indes as an anti-imperialist manifesto, whereas it advocates a French empire of trade to contest British dominance in the East and West Indies conquered from the French in the Seven Years War. See Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History, 135, 138, 168–169, 314–315 and Andrew, Imperial Republics, 136–139.
- 36.
Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie (Cambridge, Mass.: Belnap Press, 1979), 8.
- 37.
- 38.
Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government, ed. J.H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 10.
- 39.
Denis Diderot, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. R. Lewinter (Paris: Société encyclopédique française et le Club français du livre, 1972), t. 10, 249.
- 40.
“What is Enlightenment?” in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 58–59.
- 41.
Voltaire and Catherine the Great: Selected Correspondence, ed. A. Lentin, 14.
- 42.
Stuart Andrews, Enlightened Despotism (London: Longmans, 1967), 141.
- 43.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. John H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), 49, 183.
- 44.
Edmund Burke, Letter to a Member of the Legislative Assembly in Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. L.G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 271.
- 45.
Igor Shoikedbrod, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
- 46.
Losurdo, Class Struggle, 293, 336.
- 47.
Ping-Ti Ho, The Ladder of Success in Imperial China: Aspects of Social Mobility 1368–1911 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962).
- 48.
Simon Kow, China in Early Enlightenment Thought (New York: Routledge, 2017).
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Andrew, E. (2023). Nietzsche on the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. 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_7
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