3 - Nietzscheanism and politics

Summary

It is only beginning with me that the earth knows great politics.

(EH “Destiny” 1)

From the earliest receptions of Nietzsche in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he was embraced enthusiastically by representatives of both the extreme right and extreme left of the political spectrum, in the belief that his philosophy had significance for their own politics. Moreover, this interest in the purported political dimension of Nietzsche's thought was signalled by Nietzsche's first significant popularizer, Georg Brandes. During his lectures on Nietzsche in 1888, he focused on the political dimension of Nietzsche's critique of culture, and ascribed to Nietzsche a political philosophy he described as “aristocratic radicalism” (a term Nietzsche himself approved) (Leiter 2010). Throughout the first part of the twentieth century, Nietzsche's work was often embraced in relation to the politics of cultural renewal. This culminated with the darkest chapter in the history of Nietzscheanism, with which any consideration of Nietzscheanism and politics must come to terms: his appropriation by the Nazi Party, and the sullying of his name with the marks of nationalism and racism of the very worst extremes. After the end of the Second World War, Nietzsche interpreters typically sought to redeem him from the Nazi association by painting him as in reality an unpolitical thinker.