Article: Nietzsche's Anti-democratic Liberalism

Béla Egyed's article "Nietzsche's Anti-democratic Liberalism" was published in Slovakia's "Kritika & Kontext: Journal of Critical Thinking" (35, 2007 [2]: pp. 100-13).

The full text of the article can be read free of charge here:

www.kritika.sk/pdf/2_2007/7.pdf

Excerpts: "The title of this paper reflects my view that, 'liberalism' and 'democracy' denote related but separable concepts. [...] Nietzsche was a sworn enemy of populism and egalitarianism, [...] a liberal but not a democrat. [...] In what sense is his liberalism 'anti-democratic'? My short answer to this question is that Nietzsche was, indeed, an 'aristocratic radical' [...], 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. [...] What he is opposed to is the democratic ideology which he attacks relentlessly for its promoting mediocrity and the basest of human instincts. [...]

"It is a mistake to construe Nietzsche's elitism of the spirit as an advocacy of a rigid political hierarchy. 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'. [...] These higher types need to understand, but keep their distance from, the herd and its values. [...] Nietzsche has, in fact, two politics: the one is a perfunctory endorsement of existing institutions he considers essential, inevitable and contemptible, the other is a proto-politics of para-personal drives and intensities, practiced by genealogists and critics of existing values and institutions. [...] Let me give the last word to Nietzsche: 'Liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: subsequently there is nothing more harmful to freedom than liberal institutions [...]'."

Hungarian-born Béla Egyed is Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Carleton University and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Concordia University, Canada.

Book: Nietzsche Contra Democracy

A book showcasing Friedrich Nietzsche's anti-democratic thought: "Nietzsche Contra Democracy" by Fredrick Appel (Cornell University Press, 1999).

Publisher's description: "Apolitical, amoral, an aesthete whose writings point toward some form of liberation: this is the figure who emerges from most recent scholarship on Friedrich Nietzsche. The Nietzsche whom Fredrick Appel portrays is of an altogether different character, one whose philosophical position is inseparable from a deep commitment to a hierarchical politics. Nietzsche contra Democracy gives us a thinker who, disdainful of the 'petty politics' of his time, attempts to lay the normative foundations for a modern political alternative to democracy. Appel shows how Nietzsche's writings evoke the prospect of a culturally revitalized Europe in which the herdlike majority and its values are put in their proper place: under the control of a new, self-aware, and thoroughly modern aristocratic caste whose sole concern is its own flourishing.

"In chapters devoted to Nietzsche's little discussed views on solitude, friendship, sociability, families, and breeding, this book brings Nietzsche into conversation with Aristotelian and Stoic strains of thought. More than a healthy jolt to Nietzsche scholarship, Nietzsche contra Democracy also challenges political theory to articulate and defend the moral consensus undergirding democracy."

www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=3083

Reviews: "From the opening words of this new book on Nietzsche's political philosophy, we know we are in the hands of a capable scholar: 'Friedrich Nietzsche's great concern is for the flourishing of those few whom he considers exemplary of the human species.' Appel's book demonstrates, from start to finish, the economy and lucidity found in this pithy statement. [...] He laces together textual evidence and strong arguments to make his case, to my mind incontrovertibly, that Nietzsche's opposition to liberal and egalitarian political ideas ... was unvarying." (Philip R. Munger, "The Boston Book Review")

"Fredrick Appel offers a thorough and devastating critique of what he calls the 'new orthodoxy' about Nietzsche which dominates contemporary scholarship. Appel [...] demonstrates how much scholars have to distort Nietzsche's writings to turn him into an enemy of social hierarchy and domination". (Bernard Yack, University of Wisconsin, Madison)

"[A] brilliant piece of scholarship, both clearly written and well argued, or if you prefer, both lucid and logical." (David A. Gugin, "Perspectives on Political Science")

The book is fully searchable on Google Book Search (including table of contents):

http://books.google.com/books?id=My2-0mPc9cAC&printsec=frontcover

Fredrick Appel is Senior Editor at Princeton University Press. He appears not to have published since – neither books nor articles.

Articles: Nietzsche's Critique of Democracy

Friedrich Nietzsche's antipathy toward democracy is well known, and it is advisable to read primarily his own books, such as "Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None", "Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future", and "On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic".

However, scholars continue to publish about him and last year "The Journal of Nietzsche Studies" carried an article by Herman W. Siemens on "Nietzsche's Critique of Democracy" (issue 38, autumn 2009: pp. 20-37).

Abstract: "This article reconstructs Nietzsche's shifting views on democracy in the period 1870–86 with reference to his enduring preoccupation with tyrannical concentrations of power and the conviction that radical pluralism offers the only effective form of resistance. As long as he identifies democracy with pluralism (Human, All Too Human), he sympathizes with it as a site of resistance and emancipation. From around 1880 on, however, Nietzsche increasingly links it with tyranny, in the form of popular sovereignty, and with the promotion of uniformity, to the exclusion of genuine pluralism. Democracy's emancipatory claims are reinterpreted as 'misarchism,' or hatred of authority, and Nietzsche looks to the 'exceptional beings' excluded by democracy for sources of resistance to the 'autonomous herd' and 'mob rule.'

"Against elitist readings of this move, it is argued that Nietzsche opposes the domination of the herd type under democracy from a standpoint in human diversity and a generic concern with the future of humankind. Exceptional individuals are conceived in pluralistic, agonal terms, as a community of legislators engaged in a process of transvaluation that serves the interests not of one or a few but of all of us: 'the self-overcoming of the human.'"

Unfortunately, I have no further access to this journal and can't even find a link where to buy it.

Herman W. Siemens is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Philosophy of Leiden University, The Netherlands.

Slightly older is an article by Paul van Tongeren, "Nietzsche, Democracy, and Transcendence", published in the "South African Journal of Philosophy" (26 [1], 2007: pp. 5-16):

http://ajol.info/index.php/sajpem/article/view/31458

Excerpts: "[Nietzsche] calls 'the democratic movement [...] not only a form of the decay of political organization but a form of the decay, namely the diminution, of man, making him mediocre and lowering his value' [...] and in Twilight of the Idols, he writes: 'The man who has become free – and how much more the mind that has become free – spurns the contemptible sort of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats.' [...]

"It therefore not only sounds, but is dangerous to read Nietzsche on democracy. And yet, or by that very token, it might be important to confront ourselves with Nietzsche's critique of democracy, not only for historic reasons, but also in order to test our own democratic convictions, as well as to acknowledge and to understand better our possible unease with some features of contemporary democracy. [...]

"Equality is in the interest of the weak. Therefore a weak being, a weak society, a weak era, will become democratic, will preach equality and will make efforts to expell [sic] any struggle, any tension, any difference [... .]

"Democracy for Nietzsche is one of those figures in which the human being, after the death of God canonizes itself, eternalizes its present form and makes it impossible for other forms to emerge. [...] After having been liberated from the subservience to a transcendent God [...], we have become (or at least run the risk of becoming) the prisoners of ourselves, locked into the immanence of our present interests. [...]

"If this is true, we do not have to become anti-democrats in every sense of the word, when we recognize some of our own unease with democracy in Nietzsche's critique. [...] We will have to look critically at the ways in which actual democratic structures tend to eliminate conflict in favour of consensus. Instead we will have to be creative in finding ways of cultivating dissensus."

Paul van Tongeren is Professor of Moral Philosophy and Director of the Center for Ethics at Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands.