From the French Revolution to Nietzsche

Abstract

In its appeal to reason and to the rights of freedom and equality for the individual conceived as bourgeois citizen, the French Revolution has often been seen as the inauguration of political modernity. At the same time, however, in its theorization as a radical break with the past (in the form of the ancien régime), that same revolution may also be seen as the inauguration of political modernism — in short, as what Andrew Gibson describes as the ‘first great historical experience of the void underlying established structures, and therefore of the possibility of the tabula rasa and radical transformation’ (Gibson 2006: 257). In what is no doubt more than a mere philological coincidence, it is in this co-foundation of political modernity and political modernism that the first deployment of the term ‘nihilism’ within political discourse takes place.