Nietzsche’s agonistic philosophy, Connolly believes, keeps the identity of the communal self open, by preserving the tensions and ambiguities of political life. (WP 890). So, I would maintain that, in spite of some of the troubling statements he makes, it would be rash to exclude the possibility that Nietzsche allowed for the open ended-ness of, not only of higher type subjectivity, but also of a lower type one. The various Marxist criticisms of liberal democracy are analysed and assessed. His “higher type” does not denote a political category: it refers to those who possess the aristocratic instincts as a countervailing force against the instinctive hatred of any form of distinction on the part of the “democratic herd”. They favor strong authoritarianism … Affirming liberal democracy (438). (Bruce Detwiler argues for this position in: Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism [D], 1990.) And, as I will show later, Nietzsche’s most vitriolic attacks were against forms of populism, and his general criticism of “the democratic idea” was motivated mostly by his mistrust of the “new idols”, political imposters seeking to take the place left vacant by the death of God. Unfortunately, in spite of his disavowals, his language is full of political imagery. And what game is Russia playing? Liberal democracy is in contradiction with itself. All political parties are demagogic in their crude appeal to the … III. December 2002 ; Journal of Political Philosophy 5(2):183 - 193; DOI: 10.1111/1467-9760.00030. Detwiler is the only commentator I am aware of who takes Nietzsche’s positive comments about democracy in his middle period seriously. In the course of this paper, I will have to clarify in what sense Nietzsche was a liberal but not a democrat. In addition, I do not share his implicit criticism of what he, too, takes to be deficient in Nietzsche’s political position. What a solution to this contradiction might look like receives no answer in Foucault’s lectures. These higher types need to understand, but keep their distance from, the herd and its values. Access options Buy single article. Also, they could help in the drawing and re-drawing of socio-political horizons providing a limited, fragile place within which a true political militancy could evolve. His critique of democracy is a big area in the study of his works. I am most sympathetic to Connolly’s Foucault inspired reading of Nietzsche. 30 Frederick Appel shows that Nietzsche views liberal democracy as conditioning the higher human beings and potential tyrants that would subvert its principles (Nietzsche Contra Democracy [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999], 130). Also, a conversation with Danish novelist Olga Ravn Ravn about dominant attitudes to motherhood. He holds, in my opinion, the following paradoxical complex of views: Liberal democratic institutions are here to stay. In order to follow this lecture carefully it is particularly useful … True power is an attribute of the creative, strong, individual who seeks not to dominate others, but to overcome himself. Fareed Zakaria, in a paper entitled “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy” (Foreign Affairs, 1997) had alerted us to the fact that outside the Western world “Democracy is flourishing, constitutional liberalism is not.” C.B. He also accepts the Kantian idea that moral valuation is intimately tied up with legislation. Aristocrats have feared that the Warren, whose point of view might be considered neo-Kantian, maintains that Will to Power is an “ontology of social practice”. Warren’s interpretation is ingenious, but highly speculative. But that does not mean that they can ignore it. Also, he goes farther than Kaufmann, Warren or Connolly in analyzing the political implications of Nietzsche’s doctrine of Will to Power. Hobbes, Hegel, Nietzsche and Liberal Democracy « on: September 15, 2011, 10:04:16 am » From The End of History and the Last Man (Fukuyama, 1992): Quote. I feel fairly confident about all but the last sentence of the previous paragraph, and I am also fairly confident that Detwiler too would agree with most of it. For my reading of it, this is the most important passage in Detwiler’s text. The first movement is unconditional – levelling of the species, great ant-buildings etc. His denunciations of modern democracy and liberal equality are legion. Liberal Democracy – democracy always being the front for Communism – was the Cause and Nazism the Effect. While Nietzsche did not care for politics, parliamentary debates and the associated culture of newspaper reading, he did have views on politics and those were very clearly in favour of the more liberal … There are plenty of passages from the late period indicating that Nietzsche thinks of the higher types as spiritual, not political, leaders who can thrive in democratic societies: “In a certain sense the latter [higher type] can maintain and develop itself most easily in a democratic society” (WP 887). Also, I will have to show that Nietzsche’s theory of Will to Power does not imply political domination of the majority of people by what he calls the “higher types”. Putting this mystical, romanticized jingoistic nonsense behind us is the triumph of liberal democracy. 481-489. If there is no divine creator, no absolute standards, how are values to be created and justified? (WS 289), The democratization of Europe is irresistible: for whoever tries to halt it has to employ in that endeavour precisely the means that the democratic idea first placed in everyone’s hand makes these means more wily and more effective. Nietzsche condemned Bismarkian nationalism along with anti-Semitism and socialism. The only way to avoid this Kantian objection is to insist that the drives constituting a self are not discrete, homogeneous, multiplicities like atoms, but continuous, heterogeneous, multiplicities like the organs of a living body. Progressive politics, which affirms the liberal or humanist vision, seems to be collapsing. Nietzsche's aristocratic liberalism can be sketched out as four affirmations and four negations: affirming constitutional democracy, liberal pluralism, religious liberty, and cosmopolitan globalization, while denying socialist statism, "great politics," anti-Semitism, and atheistic religiosity. Patton: Nietzsche would be highly critical of the manner in which liberal democracy has evolved into a form of government of the many by the few on the basis of fear, moral panic and crude forms of economic self-interest. We are using cookies to help us give you a better experience. Even if we admit that they need to keep their distance, and admit, also, that they cannot enter into communication with the herd on its terms; if the herd learns nothing from them, even indirectly, what is their social use? And he goes on to say that: Once the struggle among the drives has forged a unity in diversity that we call the self into a cohesive centre of power unto itself, the interaction among selves within society might well resemble the interaction of the drives within the body. In the same way, how living unities continually arise and die and how the “subject” is not eternal; in the same way, that the struggle expresses itself in obeying and commanding, and that the fluctuating assessments of the limits of power is part of life. There is enough evidence in Nietzsche’s later writings to support the view that he not only abandoned but also condemned the Romanticism, the Schopenhauerianism, the Wagnerism, and the Statism of the early period. w/ Prof. Fred E. Baumann of Kenyon College. 16, No. Hardback, e-book. Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review. He puts forth an argument regarding "the old lie, [to] the slogan of resentment about the privileged rights of the majority, in opposition to that will for a low condition, abasement, equality, … Nietzsche’s “philosophy of the future”, as he named it, would amount to utilizing difference not as a method of comparison with the covert aim of blaming and shaming, but to affirming difference as difference – in other words a “metaphysics” of difference itself. It is the point of encounter between two opposing forms of knowledge—one of which, historicism, is itself self-contradictory, attacking and appealing to the philosophical discourse of rights and objectivity. Bloom lays special emphasis on the obstacles modern students have in accepting or appreciating Nietzsche's attack on liberal nihilism. (HAH 472, p. 172), Democratic institutions are quarantine arrangements to combat that ancient pestilence, lust for tyranny: as such they are very useful and very boring. 143 Accesses. What Marx and Nietzsche both share is a conviction that this moment of the modern crisis of liberal bourgeois freedom requires us to face who we are, to fully be who we are, socialist or barbarian, one or the other, without the half measure of liberal democracy, which satisfies nobody except the bourgeoisie—and it doesn’t even really satisfy them.