In the expanded second edition of Politics and Vision (2004) Sheldon S. Wolin devotes an entire chapter to Friedrich Nietzsche, a figure omitted from the original 1960 edition. Wolin’s Nietzsche is a deeply political thinker who would do away with liberal democracy on the grounds that it fosters a “herd mentality”: an attraction to security and docility that disguises itself as an altruistic concern for humanity.
At the heart of Nietzsche’s philosophy, Wolin argues, is the concept of power. Nietzsche held that life itself is the “will to power,” understood as the drive to increase one’s strength and impose one’s will. In Nietzsche’s view as Wolin understands it, all human institutions are expressions of power relations, not of justice or morality. By making power the central value, Nietzsche denied the liberal democratic hope that politics could accommodate reasonable deliberation and the recognition of equal rights, instead conceiving of it as an arena of conflict, struggle, and domination.
Culture, not parliaments and certainly not bureaucracies, is according to Nietzsche the real shaper of humanity. Governance for Nietzsche could not be about law or procedure but must focus instead on whatever is required to cultivate a certain type of personality, one who is self-confident, assertive, domineering, and comfortable with his superiority to the majority. Instead of focusing on policies and principles, then, Nietzsche was concerned with the “revaluation of values.” Accordingly, he offered no vision of an adequate or ideal political association – a fatal flaw for Wolin – and instead undertook a kind of cultural revolution against modern liberalism.
Nietzsche’s celebration of strength naturally lends itself to an aristocratic politics for which “the political way of life … has never been … for the many but only for ‘the best.’” Wolin sees Nietzsche as longing for a “new elite” to reshape culture. This is part of what Wolin calls Nietzsche’s “cult of the exceptional,” the idea that human greatness is achieved only by rare individuals who are not inhibited by the “herd” and its norms. In contrast to the “last men” of modernity, who are complacent, petty, and devoid of creativity, the Übermenschrepresents a future type who will overcome the nihilism of the modern age by creating a new myth that celebrates domination through creative achievement.
Wolin thus portrays Nietzsche as an unrelenting critic of liberal democratic institutions. Nietzsche rejected egalitarian ideals, endorsed a politics of raw power, prioritized creative individuals over the democratic herd, and denied rational and moral constraints in favor of myth and struggle. While acknowledging the value Nietzsche’s analysis of nihilism and conformity, Wolin places far more weight on Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarian and anti-rationalist stance and finds in it a dangerous repudiation of “the political” as an explicitly shared or common form of life.
If Wolin’s picture of Nietzsche as a political thinker sounds familiar, that may partly be because it resembles Alfred Bäumler’s explicitly pro-Nazi interpretation in Nietzsche: The Philosopher and Politician (1931), which is typically dismissed (by Wolin’s colleague Walter Kaufman, for example) as hopelessly superficial. Indeed, Wolin’s Nietzsche is, as he puts it, “pretotalitarian”: although not a totalitarian himself, Nietzsche is a precursor in style and substance. Drawing attention to Nietzsche’s call for a “great politics” with life-or-death stakes on a global scale, and his longing for a neo-aristocratic society led by an elite who will save mankind from nihilism, Wolin, like Bäumler, argues that Nietzsche’s work provides intellectual resources for totalitarian movements by undermining the principle of moral equality and by glamorizing power and leadership. The main difference between Wolin’s and Bäumler’s interpretations are that whereas Bäumler endorses the views he attributes to Nietzsche, and Wolin condemns them.
What should we make of Wolin’s interpretation? First, “the will to power” does not primarily or essentially refer to a desire to dominate others. Nietzsche was certainly interested in domination and the desire to dominate, but it’s a mistake to infer that he endorsed or approved of domination for its own sake. For Nietzsche, the will to power was above all a psychological concept that was meant to explain the attraction of different kinds of ideals and values to different types of personalities. As he defined it in The Antichrist and Twilight of the Idols, the will to power is the disposition to experience growth in ability.
What is good? – All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.
What is bad? – All that proceeds from weakness.
What is happiness? – The feeling that power increases – that a resistance is overcome.[1]
By “power” Nietzsche means agency, i.e. the ability to bring about states of affairs. The will to power is something like the desire for agency, except that “desire” is probably too weak to capture what Nietzsche means by “will.” The latter, being insatiable, is more like a drive or at least a disposition. This suggests that the will to power is the disposition to identify, create, and exploit opportunities to enhance one’s agency. The feeling or experience of increasing power, however, is most prominent when one is overcoming a resistance. A full definition of the will to power, then, is the disposition to overcome a resistance by exercising an ability (and therefore to identify, create, and exploit opportunities to do so). What Nietzsche has in mind, I think, are what we might call “growth experiences.”
[The will’s] intent … is to incorporate new “experiences,” to file new things in old files – growth, in a word, or more precisely the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased power.[2]
Nietzsche’s twist on agency is that he regards personal identity itself as a “resistance” to be overcome. Agency has commonly been understood as the ability to bring about states of affairs that accord with the preferences, interests, and commitments that define us as persons. But Nietzsche regards such commitments as standing in the way of abilities we could and would acquire, and therefore “growth experiences” we might enjoy, if we could free ourselves from them. He offers a picture of personal growth in which we periodically abandon our idea of who we are and, in changing our defining commitments, become someone new and different.
If the will to power correctly understood is politically relevant, surely it’s because of its implications for how we should conceive the political dimensions of individual and collective agency. And an important stream of political thought has understood Nietzsche in just this way, by those who find in him resources for an “agonistic” yet pluralistic and democratic concept of politics that foregrounds debate and dissent rather than consensus.
Nietzsche himself, in any case, was interested in individual agency, especially the kind of agency involved in creative action, not the power of the state or the party. The will to power is an attempt to explain what we findgood (what strengthens our agency) and bad (what weakens our agency), but it plainly doesn’t follow that a more powerful state is better than a less powerful one. Indeed, Nietzsche was deeply skeptical of the great power with which he was most familiar. One of the key events that formed his political attitudes was the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), during which he served as a medical orderly in the Prussian army and wrote his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872). Nietzsche came to believe that victory in war led the Germans to draw the erroneous conclusion that they were superior not only in military strength but also in culture. This was, Nietzsche thought, profoundly wrong:
Coming to power is a costly business: power makes stupid [Verdummung]. […] Nowadays the Germans are bored with intellect, the Germans mistrust intellect, politics devours all seriousness for really intellectual things….[3] After all, no one can spend more than he has – this is true of individuals, it is also true of nations. If one spends oneself on power, grand politics, economic affairs, world commerce, parliamentary institutions, military interests … then there will be a shortage in the other direction. Culture and the state … are antagonists…[4]
The will to power, then, is not a political concept in the way Wolin imagines it is. Moreover, to criticize democratic culture is not necessarily to call for an undemocratic state. Indeed, it is possible to argue that a healthy liberal democratic society is the most appropriate kind of state for nurturing the individual agency Nietzsche values. It certainly doesn’t follow from the view that not all individuals are of equal moral worth that one must reject political democracy. Nietzsche opposed the belief in innate equal worth because he saw it as a fiction that suppressed recognition of human excellence and distinction. But this is not incompatible with the view that human flourishing in Nietzsche’s sense goes best under democratic conditions. One could argue, for example, that free inquiry and social mobility might better allow exceptional individuals to develop and challenge conformity than a rigidly stratified aristocratic order.[5]
This helps to explain Nietzsche’s otherwise puzzling praise of democracy in Beyond Good and Evil.
The historical sense … has come to us in the wake of that enchanting and mad semi-barbarism into which Europe had been plunged by the democratic mingling of classes and races: only the nineteenth century knows this sense, as its sixth sense. The past of every form and way of life … flows into us ‘modern souls’, thanks to this mixture; our instincts now run back everywhere; we ourselves are a kind of chaos. […] Through our semi-barbarism in body and desires we have secret access in all directions, as no noble age ever did…. ‘[H]istorical sense’ almost means the sense and instinct for everything, the taste and tongue for everything. […] Perhaps our great virtue of the historical sense is necessarily opposed to good taste, at least to the very best taste…. Measure is alien to us; let us own it; our thrill is the thrill of the infinite, the unmeasured. [W]e … reach our bliss only where we are most – in danger.[6]
Let anyone look at the nineteenth century with an eye for these quick preferences and changes of the style masquerade…. [A]gain and again a new piece of prehistory or a foreign country is tried on, put on, taken off, packed away, above all studied: we are the first age that has truly studied “costumes” – I mean those of moralities, articles of faith, and religions – prepared like no previous age for a carnival in the grand style…. Perhaps this is where we shall still discover the realm of our invention, that realm in which we, too, can still be original, say, as parodists of world history and God’s buffoons.[7]
Here Nietzsche explicitly recognizes the superiority of modern liberal regimes to ancient aristocratic ones: the latter reject whatever is unfamiliar or doesn’t meet their standards, whereas the modern lack of standards can be exhilarating just because it’s dangerous and challenging.
On Wolin’s interpretation, Nietzsche is not only an antagonist of the liberal tradition but also a progenitor of new currents in political philosophy. Wolin pairs Nietzsche with Karl Marx as the two great theoreticians of modern power, representing divergent paths. Marx had located the engine of history in economics and class struggle, leading inevitably to a future egalitarian society. Nietzsche, by contrast, located the crisis of modernity in the realm of culture and values – the loss of noble ideals, the death of God, the triumph of the last men – and thus oriented his thought towards psychological and moral transformation. This shift “from economy to culture” marks, in Wolin’s account, the birth of what later became the “postmodern” concern with language, morals, and identity in politics. Wolin does find this praiseworthy to some extent, saying that Nietzsche’s influence led to a heightened awareness of the cultural dimension of politics, challenging the dominance of rationalist and institutional analyses –though here again I’m afraid I must disagree: the result was a lamentable politicization of the study the study of culture without much of a corresponding cultural enrichment of the study of politics. Wolin’s larger point, however, is that Nietzsche’s (much-misunderstood) pronouncement “there are no facts, only interpretations” underlies the relativism often associated with postmodernism, noting that Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida took up Nietzsche’s idea that truth and knowledge are merely instruments of power.
It’s undeniable that Nietzsche was a patron saint of postmodern theory, but the postmodern Nietzsche had already been thoroughly refuted by the time the second edition of Politics and Vision was published in 2004. By then it was generally understood that Nietzsche, far from being a relativist or subjectivist, was in fact a naturalist and empiricist. Nietzsche was committed to empirical truth claims about human psychology (the will to power as a drive), and he evaluated cultures, practices, and beliefs according to how successfully they promoted individual agency, above all creative ability or “greatness.”[8] It was also well-understood by 2004 that Nietzsche was very far from denying the existence of truth; his focus was on its value. Nietzsche opposed certain theories and conceptions of truth (such as those associated with metaphysical rationalism), but his own arguments about moral motivation depended crucially on the affirmation of ordinary empirical truth claims that he adamantly defended as such, and his “perspectivism” was not a denial of the possibility of truth but rather a theory of our interest in truth.[9]
Finally, Wolin’s picture of Nietzsche as a proto-totalitarian and postmodernist downplays what is surely the most significant aspect of Nietzsche’s thought, namely his concept of “genealogy,” which led to a form of inquiry that Hans Sluga calls “diagnostic political philosophy.”[10] From this point of view, Nietzsche’s true political relevance lies in his development of a method to diagnose and treat the conceptual underpinnings of modern life rather than in any direct effort to create a shared political vision – in effect, the creation of a new genre of political theory.
The ”diagnostic” tradition in political thought, on Sluga’s account, begins with Marx and Nietzsche and extends through thinkers such as Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault. What unites these otherwise disparate thinkers is a common focus: rather than proposing normative principles or imaginative visions of shared institutions, they engage in the interpretation of the political and moral conditions of their time. They aim to discern how our beliefs, values, and practices have somehow created conditions that arouse distress, discomfort, and other forms of dysfunction. This is done not as a detached scholarly exercise but rather in the spirit of a “therapeutic” practice to free us from conditions that inhibit rather than foster agency.
Whereas Wolin’s idea political theorist offers imaginative visions of the good or just society, diagnostic thinkers inspired by Nietzsche ground their inquiry in historical and cultural analysis of how our values and practices have evolved. In Sluga’s words, this approach “shuns grand principles; instead it offers a more on-the-ground approach to politics, one more historical in its outlook and more cautious in its practical conclusions.”[11] From this perspective, Nietzsche’s criticisms of democracy and morality should be understood as part of an assessment of the 19th-century European condition: what he called a “stock-taking” or an inventory of available cultural resources. Nietzsche saw his task as explaining why the formerly highest values were losing their force and interrogating the viability of modern egalitarian values rather than simply urging aristocratic domination for its own sake. Nietzsche’s political relevance lies in this capacity to discover and communicate uncomfortable truths about the moral foundations of political life.
The question should not be whether Nietzsche defends democracy but rather “What does Nietzsche reveal about modern liberal democracy and its discontents?” The answer is that Nietzsche reveals the fragility of our normative ideals by showing that concepts such as justice and equality have ambiguous and contested histories that continue to shape their meaning and efficacy in the present. By showing how modern egalitarian ideals emerged as reactive negations (the slave revolt in morals, born of resentment), Nietzschean genealogy illuminates the pathologies that can haunt democratic societies – for example, pervasive resentment, a thirst for revenge disguised as justice, or an attraction to nihilistic relativism when inherited values lose salience. Far from recommending authoritarian rule, Nietzsche warns that modern ideals have internal tensions that must be understood if we are to address contemporary predicaments by political means.
If Nietzsche is doing diagnostic work, then his excoriation of democracy is not necessarily a call to abolish democracy but rather an invitation to confront democracy’s potential self-undermining tendencies. Nietzsche’s laments about the mediocrity of the “last men” or the rise of mass conformity can be understood as diagnoses of cultural conditions that threaten political agency. In this optic, Nietzsche helps us ask what historical or cultural forces produce complacent or unfree citizens. These questions are certainly political, but they are diagnostic rather than visionary.
In sum, a focus on Nietzsche’s genealogical method offers an alternative to Wolin’s framing. Where Wolin emphasizes Nietzsche’s anti-democratic content, this focus emphasizes Nietzsche’s critical method and leads to a strikingly different appraisal. Wolin effectively writes Nietzsche off as an enemy of democracy, a precursor of totalitarian thought, and a progenitor of postmodern relativism and cynicism. But he is better understood if incorporated into a lineage of political thinkers who, by diagnosing the present, strengthen our capacity to think politically about how to formulate our aims given the conditions in which we find ourselves. This doesn’t entail eschewing a vision of the common good but rather pursuing it under changing circumstances.
Ultimately, the difference between the visionary and the diagnostic points to a recurring question: should we judge political thinkers by their normative commitments, or by the methodological and hermeneutical contribution they make to how we think about politics? Wolin takes the former route and finds Nietzsche severely wanting – even dangerous – for democratic life. Nietzsche’s better readers take the latter route, finding in Nietzsche’s genealogy a resource for analyzing and assessing the values that govern us. By overlooking Nietzsche’s diagnostic approach, Wolin misses how Nietzsche deepened our insight into the predicaments of modern politics. A fuller interpretation restores that dimension, presenting Nietzsche as a diagnostic philosopher whose questions about the relationship between agency, personhood, goodness, and greatness enrich rather than erode political thought.
[1] The Antichrist §2.
[2] Beyond Good and Evil §230.
[3] Twilight of the Idols, “What the Germans Lack” §1.
[4] Twilight of the Idols, “What the Germans Lack” §4.
[5] As does Maudemarie Clark in “Nietzsche’s Antidemocratic Rhetoric,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 24 (2002), pp. 1-25. See also her Nietzsche on Ethics and Politics (Oxford University Press, 2015).
[6] Beyond Good and Evil §224.
[7] Beyond Good and Evil §223.
[8] See Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge, 2002, 2014).
[9] See Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
[10] See Hans Sluga, Politics and the Search for the Common Good (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
[11] Sluga, Politics and the Search for the Common Good, p. 171.
