Politics After Morality: Toward a Nietzschean Left 9783031122279, 9783031122286, 9783031122309

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
Abbreviations of Nietzsche’s Works
Chapter 1: Introduction
1 Overview of the Project and Summary of the Previous Volume
2 Introduction to the Second and Final Volume of the Project
References
Part I: Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche: Against Aristocracy
Chapter 2: Nietzsche’s Immoralist Theory of State Legitimacy
1 The New Problem of Normative Authority: Legitimacy Without Persuasion
2 Nietzsche’s Solution to the Authority Problem: Amor Fati as a Posteriori Legitimacy
References
Chapter 3: Nietzsche’s All Too Moralist Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism
1 The Law of Manu: The Foundations of Political Philosophy in Holy Lies
2 Meaningful Suffering: Nietzsche’s Failed Solution to the Legitimacy Problem
3 Aristocratic Radicalism as Nihilistic Idealism: Meaning without Material Foundation
References
Part II: Justice Beyond Exchange
Chapter 4: Nietzsche’s Failed Theory of Aristocratic Justice
1 Criteria for Reconstructing Nietzsche’s Incompatibilist, Immoralist Politics
2 Nietzsche’s Early Contractarian Theory of Justice: Self-Interested Exchange
3 Nietzsche’s Late Theory of Justice: Symbolic Exchange Between Classes
References
Chapter 5: An Immoralist Theory of Right: Doing Justice to the Drives
1 Types, Not Classes, as the Aim of Justice
2 Breeding, Not Improvement, as Means to Justice: How to Make Unequals Equal
3 Drives, Not Individuals, as the Object of Justice: Difference to the Different
4 Non-liberal Rights: Never Make the Different the Same
References
Part III: Democracy After Liberty
Chapter 6: An Immoralist Theory of Peoples: Nobility as Collective Agency
1 A Herd Animal Without Instincts: Nietzsche’s Misleading Animal Rhetoric
2 Herds Versus Peoples: The Possibility of Noble Collective Agency and Self-Rule
3 Peoples and Institutions: The Place of Strong, Manifold Souls in the Social Order
References
Chapter 7: An Immoralist Theory of Democracy as the Production of a People
1 Pluralism Versus Democracy: Why Popular Power Harms Individual Feelings of Freedom
2 The Aristocratism of Procedural Democracy: Majoritarianism, Elitism, and Ideology
3 Principles of Immoralist Democracy: A Non-liberalism of Consequences
4 The Danger of Non-liberalism: The Gay Science as Experimental, Democratic Verification
References
Part IV: Egalitarianism After Morality
Chapter 8: An Immoralist Theory of Egalitarianism: Toward a Nietzschean Theory of Socialism
1 The Breeding Conditions of Higher Types: Nietzsche’s Hothouse Politics
2 Nietzsche’s Failed Case Against Equality: Pathos from Distance Versus Pathos for Difference
Against Qualitative Equality: Ähnlichkeit or Vielheit, Similarity or Multiplicity?
Against Quantitative Equality: Pathos of Distance as Superiority or Difference?
3 Objections and Replies to Noble Egalitarianism: Why Equality Is Enhancement
Against Liberal Egalitarianism: Aristocracy as Qualitative or Quantitative Power?
Against Equality as Complacency: Will to Domination or Will to Resistance?
Against Equality as Inefficient Enhancement: The Critic’s Distribution Argument
For Equality in Moderation: The Critic’s Argument for Progressive Elitism
The Case for Efficient Egalitarian Enhancement
References
Chapter 9: Conclusion: Toward a Nietzschean Socialist Politics
1 Why Should a Nietzschean Egalitarianism Be Socialist?
2 How Would Nietzschean Socialism Be Different from Agonism, Marxism, or Anarchism?
3 How Would Nietzschean Political Practice Be Different from the Contemporary Left’s?
Nietzschean Socialism as a Tragic Realist Politics
Nietzschean Socialism as an Immoralist Politics
Nietzschean Socialism as an Anti-utopian Politics
4 Anti-utopian Socialism: A Populist Coalition of the Non-identical and Faithless
Anti-utopian Socialism as a Class-Expansionist Politics of Non-identity
Anti-utopian Socialism as a Socialism for the Faithless
References
References
Index

Citation preview

Politics After Morality Toward a Nietzschean Left Donovan Miyasaki

Politics After Morality “Our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, forebodings, expectation— Finally the horizon seems clear again, even if not bright; finally our ships may set out again, set out to face any danger; every daring of the lover of knowledge is allowed again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; maybe there has never been such an “open sea.”” —The Gay Science 343 “We take such and such option by chance or by choice; no matter: no one escapes fatality. On the other hand, fate has no grip on the infinite, for the infinite knows no alternatives and has room for everything.” —Louis-Auguste Blanqui, Eternity in the Stars: An Astronomical Hypothesis

Donovan Miyasaki

Politics After Morality Toward a Nietzschean Left

Donovan Miyasaki Wright State University Dayton, OH, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-12227-9    ISBN 978-3-031-12228-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12228-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Jason Knott / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

References to Nietzsche’s unpublished writings are to Kritische Studienausgabe, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967–. I have used the following translations, with occasional modifications for clarity and accuracy: The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, translated by Judith Norman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, edited by Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman, translated by Judith Norman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, edited by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, translated by Ronald Speirs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, edited by Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; On the Genealogy of Morality, edited by Keith-Ansell Pearson, translated by Carol Diethe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, edited by Bernard Williams, translated by Josefine Nauckhoff, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; “Homer’s Contest,” translated by Christa Davis Acampora, Nietzscheana 5, Fall 1996; Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, translated by R.  J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, translated and edited by Christopher Middleton, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1996; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, edited by Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin, translated by Adrian Del Caro, 2006; Untimely Meditations, edited by Daniel Breazeale, translated by R.  J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983; The Will to Power, edited by Walter Kaufmann, translated by Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Vintage Books, 1968; Writings from the Late Notebooks, edited by Rüdiger Bittner, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

For my grandparents, Fumi and Tateshi

Acknowledgments

This book completes a longer project, and I am once again indebted to the many people who made the previous volume possible, offering support, critical feedback, and invaluable advice and providing opportunities to present and develop my ideas: Ava Chamberlain, William B. Irvine, Valerie Stoker, the late Erik C. Banks, Larry Hatab, the late Tracy Strong, Barry Stocker, Manuel Knoll, Vanessa Lemm, Babette Babich, and an anonymous reviewer. I am especially grateful to Dan Conway for his encouragement and suggestions and to David Owen and Rex Welshon for their generous time and assistance during the completion of the second volume. I would also like to thank Amy Mullin for reminding me that Nietzsche often thinks more clearly than his readers do, the late André Gombay for reminding me of what Freud knew, that the unconscious is more rational than Nietzsche realized, and Rebecca Comay for helping me see past, as well as with and through, Marx’s romanticism. Additional thanks are due to Phil Getz, Robin James, Tikoji Rao Mega Rao, and Dhanalakshmi Muralidharan at Palgrave Macmillan and to Shane Moon for research assistance. Thanks, always, to Barb. The research for this book was completed with the help of a Research, Scholarship, and Creativity Grant from the College of Liberal Arts at Wright State University. Chapter 8 draws on material from “The Equivocal Use of Power in Nietzsche’s Failed Anti-Egalitarianism,” originally published in Journal of Moral Philosophy 12, no. 1 (2015): 1–32, reproduced with permission from Brill Press.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 1 Overview of the Project and Summary of the Previous Volume  1 2 Introduction to the Second and Final Volume of the Project  7 References 11 Part I Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche: Against Aristocracy  13 2 Nietzsche’s  Immoralist Theory of State Legitimacy 15 1 The New Problem of Normative Authority: Legitimacy Without Persuasion 15 2 Nietzsche’s Solution to the Authority Problem: Amor Fati as a Posteriori Legitimacy 29 References 39 3 Nietzsche’s  All Too Moralist Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism 43 1 The Law of Manu: The Foundations of Political Philosophy in Holy Lies 43 2 Meaningful Suffering: Nietzsche’s Failed Solution to the Legitimacy Problem 53 3 Aristocratic Radicalism as Nihilistic Idealism: Meaning without Material Foundation 63 References 72 xi

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Part II Justice Beyond Exchange  75 4 Nietzsche’s  Failed Theory of Aristocratic Justice 77 1 Criteria for Reconstructing Nietzsche’s Incompatibilist, Immoralist Politics 77 2 Nietzsche’s Early Contractarian Theory of Justice: Self-­Interested Exchange 88 3 Nietzsche’s Late Theory of Justice: Symbolic Exchange Between Classes 91 References 98 5 An  Immoralist Theory of Right: Doing Justice to the Drives101 1 Types, Not Classes, as the Aim of Justice101 2 Breeding, Not Improvement, as Means to Justice: How to Make Unequals Equal105 3 Drives, Not Individuals, as the Object of Justice: Difference to the Different111 4 Non-liberal Rights: Never Make the Different the Same119 References128 Part III Democracy After Liberty 131 6 An  Immoralist Theory of Peoples: Nobility as Collective Agency133 1 A Herd Animal Without Instincts: Nietzsche’s Misleading Animal Rhetoric133 2 Herds Versus Peoples: The Possibility of Noble Collective Agency and Self-Rule143 3 Peoples and Institutions: The Place of Strong, Manifold Souls in the Social Order150 References156 7 An  Immoralist Theory of Democracy as the Production of a People159 1 Pluralism Versus Democracy: Why Popular Power Harms Individual Feelings of Freedom159

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2 The Aristocratism of Procedural Democracy: Majoritarianism, Elitism, and Ideology172 3 Principles of Immoralist Democracy: A Non-­liberalism of Consequences182 4 The Danger of Non-liberalism: The Gay Science as Experimental, Democratic Verification189 References203 Part IV Egalitarianism After Morality 205 8 An  Immoralist Theory of Egalitarianism: Toward a Nietzschean Theory of Socialism207 1 The Breeding Conditions of Higher Types: Nietzsche’s Hothouse Politics207 2 Nietzsche’s Failed Case Against Equality: Pathos from Distance Versus Pathos for Difference222 3 Objections and Replies to Noble Egalitarianism: Why Equality Is Enhancement231 References245 9 Conclusion:  Toward a Nietzschean Socialist Politics249 1 Why Should a Nietzschean Egalitarianism Be Socialist?249 2 How Would Nietzschean Socialism Be Different from Agonism, Marxism, or Anarchism?257 3 How Would Nietzschean Political Practice Be Different from the Contemporary Left’s?266 4 Anti-utopian Socialism: A Populist Coalition of the Non-­identical and Faithless288 References305 References307 Index321

Abbreviations of Nietzsche’s Works

A BGE BT CW D EH GM GS HC HH KSA NCW SL TI UM WP WLN Z

The Anti-Christian Beyond Good and Evil The Birth of Tragedy The Case of Wagner Daybreak Ecce Homo On the Genealogy of Morality The Gay Science “Homer’s Contest” Human, All Too Human Kritische Studienausgabe Nietzsche contra Wagner Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche Twilight of the Idols Untimely Meditations The Will to Power Writings from the Late Notebooks Thus Spoke Zarathustra

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

1   Overview of the Project and Summary of the Previous Volume This book is the second in a two-volume project devoted to critically reconstructing a non-liberal, democratic, and socialist Nietzschean political philosophy. In the first volume, Nietzsche’s Immoralism: Politics as First Philosophy (2022),1 I argued that Nietzsche’s final writings commit him to a form of fatalism that is incompatible with moral forms of human enhancement, forcing him to attempt a belated transformation of his late moral philosophy and moral psychology into a political philosophy, resulting in a historical materialist metapolitical theory of politics as a form of breeding: the social-political transformation of the material conditions of the feeling of the will to power in order to produce new, more fate-affirming human types. I concluded that this metapolitics is not only logically independent of but fundamentally incompatible with his anti-egalitarianism and his political program of radical aristocratism. Far from being the logical expression of his metapolitics, Nietzsche’s political theory and program are an attempt to coopt the foundations of modern secular politics—to accept that the traditional foundations of aristocratic authority have been lost and any 1  Hereafter abbreviated as NI.  Accompanying numbers refer to chapters and sections rather than pages.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Miyasaki, Politics After Morality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12228-6_1

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future aristocratic politics must be erected on precisely the opposite grounds, the very grounds from which the democratic, egalitarian, and revolutionary movements he abhors have emerged: the rejection of the authority of objective moral truths, a natural moral order, and moral authority—in other words, from immoralism. A Nietzschean metapolitics is, consequently, a more consistently developed version of the ground of left politics. Having argued in the first volume that Nietzsche has a political philosophy grounded in a determinist, immoralist, and historical materialist metapolitics, and that this metapolitics is a compatible, even superior, ground for left politics, the task of the second and final volume is twofold: first, to explain why Nietzsche’s political program of aristocratic radicalism fails to meet its own criteria of enhancing humans toward the ideal of amor fati and preventing slave psychology and, second, to move beyond interpretation and critical reconstruction to develop from his immoralist metapolitics an independent political theory of non-liberal, democratic, and egalitarian socialism. The goal of this book is to suggest not only that there can be a Nietzschean left, but that a Nietzschean foundation can help us reconceive and improve the core concepts of the left political tradition: justice, rights, democracy, egalitarianism, and socialism. I will conclude that Nietzsche’s unique contribution to historical materialist political philosophy may serve as the groundwork for a more persuasive, more achievable socialism grounded in a tragic variety of realism, a rigorous immoralism, and a resolute anti-utopianism. Since the key arguments of this book draw on interpretative conclusions from the previous one, I will begin with an overview of the key arguments and claims in Nietzsche’s Immoralism. It consists of two parts, an interpretation, in which I attempt to faithfully clarify and develop Nietzsche’s explicit philosophical commitments in the final period of his work, and a critical reconstruction, in which I argue that making the details of Nietzsche’s political philosophy coherent requires rejecting substantial aspects of his view, but this can be accomplished in a way that preserves the core philosophical commitments of his final works. This book is devoted to the third and final part of the larger project, which I call, in contrast to the interpretation and reconstruction of parts one and two, an extrapolation: an attempt to build a broader political theory from Nietzsche’s metapolitical foundation that is independent of his own intended political program. For that reason, this book devotes less time to detailed critical engagement with the secondary literature about

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what Nietzsche really said, should have said, or even could have said. Where my interpretation of Nietzsche is controversial, I will refer the reader to the relevant chapters in the previous book. If that book was about Nietzsche, what he really was and might have been, this book is not about Nietzsche, but Nietzschean. It is something closer to an assisted self-overcoming of Nietzsche, an attempt to help him become otherwise rather than directly oppose or replace him. I begin by rejecting his entire political program for failing to consistently adhere to his foundational metapolitical commitments, and then ask where else we might take the inspiration of that metapolitics. But that is still a rejection of a substantial portion of his thought. A Nietzschean-left is not a left-­ Nietzscheanism; it rejects Nietzscheanism in any form. Ultimately, I hope the reader’s primary interest in the book will be in its attempt to reconceive rights, democracy, and equality in productive new ways, more than in the question of how deeply it is rooted in the “real” Nietzsche. It is not ultimately about Nietzsche but about our present political predicament. I will begin with a review of the key conclusions of the previous book, Nietzsche’s Immoralism, followed by a brief overview of the chapters of this book. Part one is the only part of the project that is strictly exegetical, with a focus on getting to the heart what Nietzsche really said and meant. I argue that Nietzsche’s final works are committed to an ideal of amor fati that is inseparable from his commitment to a hard incompatibilist determinism (NI 2). Most interpretations arguing that Nietzsche has a political philosophy begin by grounding their case primarily in early and middle works like Birth of Tragedy, “The Greek State,” Untimely Meditations, and Daybreak. However, in the five books he completed in 1888, a distinct fourth and final period of his thought, Nietzsche demonstrates his commitment to a deterministic form of fatalism, the view that “at any time only one future is possible” (McKenna and Pereboom 2016, 16). When we read Nietzsche backward, holding him to his final philosophical commitments rather than forcing them into a synthesis with incompatible earlier ones, we realize that Nietzsche is not only a determinist but a hard incompatibilist: we do not have freedom in any deep sense, not even the freedom to shape our character or attitude. Against the dominant compatibilist reading,2 which downplays the love of fate and treats Nietzsche’s ideal as a voluntarily achieved state of higher freedom and 2  See, for example, Sebastian Gardner (2009), Ken Gemes (2009), Christopher Janaway (2009), and Lanier Anderson (2012). Leiter (2002) is the rare exception.

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strength, he thinks we cannot, by dint of will, choose to be or effectively work to become higher types; we only superficially “give style” to our characters, we only superficially “create” values that might, as the early Nietzsche misguidedly thought, provide “an aesthetic justification of existence.” Nietzsche’s incompatibilism leads to his rejection of every project of—as well as the need for—justifying existence. The ideal of amor fati is precisely an attempt to imagine a human type that does not need to justify its existence. The love of fate is not the product of freedom, agency, or the creation of values but an accident of the physiologically and culturally determined organization of our drives, an order that can, in lucky cases, create the illusion of agency: a feeling of power experienced in action against equal resistances, in turn enabling the affirmation of necessity, of the self as a piece of fate existing only in the whole, freeing higher types from the illusion of any deeper kind of freedom. Nietzsche’s hard incompatibilism leads to the core foundation of his metapolitics, immoralism: the rejection of the exhortative means that characterize the “morality of improvement” (Besserungsmoral) (NI 3). Nietzsche’s primary objection to morality is not to its universal form or the content of particular moralities but an objection to every morality when used as a means to human enhancement, an objection to morality’s superficiality and inefficacy: we cannot persuade individuals to substantially change themselves on strictly moral or rational grounds. Nor can we achieve amor fati by stoically changing our attitude, as Nietzsche ironically demonstrates with Ecce Homo’s depiction of how haphazardly and inevitably he “became who he is.” Because we are not free and no morality can make us so, the ideal of amor fati is not a choice or practice but a condition, a form of agency that one has or does not. Because amor fati cannot be freely willed independently of the inevitable suffering of the human condition, it requires the possibility of a non-­ instrumental affirmation of suffering. But this requires that we reexamine and clarify Nietzsche’s psychology of the will to power. Against the dominant teleological interpretations, I argue that the will to power cannot be consistently interpreted as a drive toward both domination and resistance.3 Domination, overcoming, and conquest are accidents of the primary activity of resistance, undergoing, and contest—like self-preservation, only its “indirect and most frequent consequences” (BGE 13). The will to power 3   See, for example, Peter Poellner (1995), John Richardson (1996), and Bernard Reginster (2006).

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is an anti-teleological drive toward the activity of resistance alone and for its own sake, aiming at the qualitative feeling rather than reality of freedom and power, a feeling in turn maximized in relations of non-dominating, proportional equality. Nietzsche’s final commitment to amor fati depends entirely on this overlooked aspect of the will to power: a higher, fate-loving type is only possible because we can feel power, freedom, and happiness in undergoing without overcoming, in the non-instrumental affirmation of suffering experienced in active engagement of equal resistances for its own sake (NI 4). Moreover, because power is measured relatively as qualitative feeling, not superior power or ability, it cannot serve as a universal standard of moral excellence. Consequently, we must reject virtue-ethical readings such as Thomas Hurka’s (2007) perfectionism and Paul Katsafanas’s (2013) constitutivism, whose demand for an endless increase of excellence, a comparative, quantitatively measured view of will to power, leads not to love of fate but endless frustration and longing. This, in turn, gives us reason to reject the dominant interpretation of Nietzsche as a moral naturalist who grounds moral value and principles in natural facts, as well as the competing view that Nietzsche’s values are subjectively preferred fictions (NI 5).4 While animal wellbeing can be measured according to vitality, strength, and domination over environment, human health has a unique, internal criterion: the manifold soul, a tense unity of diverse but non-contradictory drives that enhances our will to power, feeling of freedom, and amor fati. Although this is an ideal of moral agency, it remains immoralist because, first, it is not obligating— only those who have a fundamentally well-ordered soul can further develop one—and, second, it is an ideal of the soul’s structure rather than content: it does not prescribe particular values to our form of selfhood. Nonetheless, it provides a solution to the central worry of moral philosophy: if the desire for domination is rooted in weak forms of agency, in individuals’ failure to internally satisfy their will to power, then not only does the promotion of effective forms of agency minimize our motive for conflict, the promotion of any positive content will do so—the problem of morality is not one of the “right” values but of any set of values’ successful integration. In Nietzsche’s language, the “bad” is reducible to “everything stemming from weakness” (A 2), a notorious claim that does not celebrate strength as domination but identifies envy and resentment as the source of 4

 On fictionalism, see Nadeem J. Z. Hussain (2007).

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the desire for domination, for negative, comparatively measured power against others as compensation for a lack of the direct feeling of power. The second and final part of Nietzsche’s Immoralism moves from exegesis to a critical reconstruction of Nietzsche’s political philosophy. I begin by contrasting my approach to two recent accounts: Tamsin Shaw’s (2007) reading of Nietzsche as a political skeptic and Hugo Drochon’s (2016) historically situated reading of Nietzsche’s late aristocratic project as continuous with his early political thought. Next, against the common view that Nietzsche’s higher type is a variation or synthesis of either the strength of the historical master or the autonomy of the sovereign individual, I argue that both the master and the sovereign individual remain tyrannical forms of the soul, the suppression of the majority of the “undersouls” that compose the social structure of agency to a few strongest drives (NI 6). The possibility of amor fati depends on the deep difference between both noble and sovereign types and the distinctly human ideal of health exemplified in the complexity of the manifold soul. While both noble and sovereign are defined by the strength and rigid hierarchy of their drive structure, by unity and one-dimensionality, the manifold soul is defined by the tension and equilibrium of its individual drives, by plurality and multi-dimensionality. Finally, I argue for the surprising view that in his late works, Nietzsche no longer has a moral philosophy, strictly speaking. He has transformed his early attempt at moral philosophy into a political philosophy (NI 7). He rejects morality altogether for a physics of the soul, a materialistic psychology that identifies the social conditions of the manifold soul, a type that achieves amor fati by internally maximizing the feeling of power. Abandoning his early aspiration to enhance humanity through culture, his genealogy of morality disguises what is in fact a historical materialist politics. Humanity is transformed not by changing the present generation of individuals but by replacing them through a politics of “breeding”: the transformation of the material conditions conducive to different kinds of political organizations, which create different types of morality, in turn grounded in different conditions of power and happiness, which finally produce different types of value agents through the materially motivated internationalization of those moral systems in individuals. What distinguishes political breeding from other forms of human transformation is its focus on change to the material conditions that produce moral agents rather than on changes to those agents. Breeding does not seek to persuade, coerce, or transform existing individuals but replace

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them with future generations of individuals who exhibit fundamentally different forms of deep character. Somewhat analogous to the notion of the “culture industry” found in the work of Frankfurt School critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944), the politics of breeding asserts that all politics is fundamentally a political industry or an industrialized politics: the mass manufacture of moral and political agent types. The political organization of society is the primary agent, the factory or the machine that produces moral and political agents, while effective political action is exercised only on that machine, a change in the manufacturing process rather than its products. The primary task of politics is not, then, to manage political subjects—to respond to, control, or negotiate their interests—but to produce future subjects. I conclude that by grounding human enhancement in a politics of breeding rather than a morality of persuasion, Nietzsche fundamentally reconceives politics as first philosophy. Political orders are justified not by advance principles but by real political outcomes, legitimized to the degree they bring into existence a populace that more fully affirms its fate, including affirming the political order that created it. Moreover, Nietzsche’s immoralist politics of breeding provides a superior foundation for the renewal of left politics, more consistent with the left’s spirit of “neither gods nor masters” than the often utopian, moralistic tendencies of the historical and contemporary left (NI 8). For his immoralism directly attacks traditional right politics at its very root: the belief in a natural moral order, in moral truth, authority, and responsibility.

2  Introduction to the Second and Final Volume of the Project I begin the final volume by arguing, in Chap. 2, that Nietzsche’s metapolitics poses a unique practical problem. As a moral anti-realist, he cannot hope for a political legitimacy based in a priori ethical principles. However, as a hard incompatibilist, he believes we can persuade only those already predisposed to our values, so he must find a way to draw people to his political ideal without means of persuasion that purport to deeply change their character or values. Nietzsche’s solution is similar to his solution to nihilism: rather than justify existence, we must breed fate-affirming types who do not require justification. Likewise, the state is legitimate to the degree it does not require legitimization. Legitimacy is achieved a posteriori, in practice, by producing material conditions of happiness that

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create a deep unity between society and individual, breeding healthier, fate-loving, manifold souls whose drive organization or forms of value agency directly reflect and affirm the social order that produced them. This theory suits his distinctively radical rather than conservative aristocratism, which seeks to create a self-justifying social hierarchy of politically bred classes and types rather than justify social hierarchy by appeal to a preexisting, supposedly natural aristocratic order. In Chap. 3, I examine Nietzsche’s interpretation of the Hindu law of Manu as a flawed model of political breeding founded in the noble lie necessary to every conservative aristocracy: the claim that a political order is justified by a natural one. The existence of a “non-bred” Chandala class, produced by domestication rather than breeding and maintained through violence rather than morality, proves Manu’s failure as a politics of breeding and ensures the eventual regeneration of the slave psychology and revolt that a successful aristocratic order is supposed to prevent. However, Nietzsche draws from this the wrong lesson, concluding that a successful aristocracy can breed happy slaves by investing their suffering with meaning provided by the excellence of its elite. Consequently, he regresses to the idealistic, nihilistic, and anti-naturalistic views that existence must be justified and that the will to power of the underclass can be ideologically suppressed. His resulting aristocratic political program is a complete and utter failure, endorsing a social order that would promote only the mediocre strength of the simple-minded noble rather than the higher health and complexity of the manifold soul, in turn, inevitably reproducing slave psychology and the slave revolt in morality. Chapter 4 argues that because Nietzsche’s political program fails on his own metapolitics’ criteria of incompatibilism and immoralism, we should rebuild upon it rather than abandon it, preserving its novel anti-realist theory of legitimacy through breeding and its replacement of the compatibilist politics of liberty with a politics of the feeling of freedom as power. Although we can still draw on his early theory of justice as relations of self-interested exchange in conditions of equilibrium, we should reject its focus on individuals, who are products, not creators, of social relationships. And although we can also draw on his late theory of justice as a class relation, we should reject its moralistic, idealist attempt to preserve class inequality through illusory, symbolic legal equality, a theory of justice doomed to regenerate slave psychology and morality. In Chap. 5, I begin to reconceive the core concepts of justice on the foundation of Nietzsche’s metapolitics, in order to avoid the mistakes of

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his aristocratism. An immoralist justice serves the interest not of individuals or classes but society as a whole, viewed as a means for breeding higher, more fate-loving types. This right of future against present types allows us to reconceptualize justice as the production of material conditions that breed a population that legitimizes the state. Because the potential reality of future types is the drive organization of present individuals, justice’s object is our drives’ right to power. Carefully interpreted, Nietzsche’s seemingly anti-egalitarian slogan “never make unequals equal”—better translated as “never make the different the same”—requires that we protect our weaker drives, in their difference from one another, from the tyranny of our strongest drives, creating the tension equilibrium that defines the manifold soul. Against the liberal prioritization of abstract individual rights that ultimately protect the internalized injustice of past societies, true justice prioritizes equality, providing conditions for concretely realizing freedom. This novel conception of justice is, in turn, reason to think that justice is inseparable from democracy in some form. Chapter 6 addresses Nietzsche’s objections to democracy. Nietzsche conflates democracy with herd rule, ignoring his own historical-materialist view that a true people and collective agency originates in the noble affirmation of shared conditions of power through a shared tablet of values. A noble democracy is not only possible but necessary. For if democracy destroys the will to institutions, then either his aristocratic elite will be too weak to lead or his imagined underclass will lack the discipline to effectively obey—even an aristocracy requires laborers who are sovereign individuals rather than slaves. The only alternative to Nietzsche’s failed aristocratic solution is a social order that balances order with pluralism, promoting an equilibrium of social power: a manifold, democratic society that mirrors the healthy combination of strength and complexity found in the manifold soul. In Chap. 7, I raise a possible objection to democracy that Nietzsche has not considered. On his incompatibilist view, democracy is not true popular rule but a mere feeling of effective popular will—a feeling often best heightened by conformity with consensus and alliances with more powerful groups. This regressive tendency in the feeling of democratic power is aggravated by procedural democracies, which produce only a superficial, ideological popular will, in turn dividing the people, leaving the economic and cultural spheres unprotected, and inevitably devolving into aristocracies of a majority (the herd), a dominant faction (the state), or symbiotic dual factions (the elite). In contrast, an immoralist democracy is defined

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not by procedures but consequences: the successful production of a true people. It prioritizes concrete equality over abstract rights and subjective interest, creating an experimental political science that discovers and verifies objective public interest in policies that increase social happiness, while refuting and rejecting policies that decrease social happiness. Having established the possibility of an alternative, noble form of democracy, in Chap. 8, I turn to the question of how democracy might— against Nietzsche’s conviction to the contrary—serve his aim of promoting higher types. In Nietzsche’s account, decadent, slavish types and higher, manifold types share the same ideal conditions for breeding: the hothouse conditions of hybrid identity created by the modern mixing of cultures that Marx attributes to the global expansion of capitalism. Consequently, it is precisely the conditions promoted by egalitarian democracy that are conducive to higher types. Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarian arguments to the contrary contradict his own emphasis on the qualitative rather than quantitative character of the will to power. Equality does not assimilate but protects plurality; it does not reduce the pathos of distance but increases our feeling for difference; it does not remove enhancing constraints but heightens tension; and it does not produce complacency but motivates the exercise and more efficient long-term development of our abilities. I conclude, in Chap. 9, that Nietzsche’s goal of promoting fate-loving, manifold types can only be achieved through a democratic egalitarianism of both recognition and distribution, a radical power equilibrium that includes resources, opportunities, and outcomes. Because power continually reintroduces contradiction, that is possible only through a permanent socialist, revolutionary state rather than through welfare capitalism, agonistic democracy, or Marxist and anarchist fantasies of final revolution. Nietzschean socialism is distinctively pessimistic, if only in a modest sense. Its tragic realism, immoralism, and anti-utopianism reject the contemporary politics of police, priest, and prince—along with its practices of policing, prescribing, and proscribing—for a politics of affirmation, absolution, and liberation. It demands a populist practice that gathers temporary coalitions on particular policies across fragmented identities and circumstances, to produce a material equality deep enough to produce an authentic people and democracy.

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References Anderson, Lanier. 2012. What is a Nietzschean Self? In Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity, ed. Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson, 202–235. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Drochon, Hugo. 2016. Nietzsche’s Great Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gardner, Sebastian. 2009. Nietzsche, the Self, and the Disunity of Philosophical Reason. In Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, ed. Ken Gemes and Simon May, 1–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gemes, Ken. 2009. Nietzsche on Free Will, Autonomy, and the Sovereign Individual. In Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, ed. Ken Gemes and Simon May, 33–49. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. [1944] 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hurka, Thomas. 2007. Nietzsche: Perfectionist. In Nietzsche and Morality, ed. Brian Leiter and Neil Sinhababu, 9–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hussain, Nadeem J.Z. 2007. Honest Illusion: Valuing for Nietzsche’s Free Spirits. In Nietzsche and Morality, ed. Brian Leiter and Neil Sinhababu, 157–191. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Janaway, Christopher. 2009. Autonomy, Affect, and the Self in Nietzsche’s Project of Genealogy. In Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, ed. Ken Gemes and Simon May, 51–68. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Katsafanas, Paul. 2013. Agency and the Foundations of Ethics: Nietzschean Constitutivism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leiter, Brian. 2002. Nietzsche on Morality. London: Routledge. McKenna, Michael, and Derk Pereboom. 2016. Free Will: A Contemporary Introduction. New York: Routledge. Miyasaki, Donovan. 2022. (NI) Nietzsche’s Immoralism: Politics as First Philosophy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Poellner, Peter. 1995. Nietzsche and Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reginster, Bernard. 2006. The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Richardson, John. 1996. Nietzsche’s System. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shaw, Tamsin. 2007. Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

PART I

Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche: Against Aristocracy

Anyone who wants slaves is not a master. —Hedwig Dohm, “Nietzsche and Women” Error of philosophers.—The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the building: posterity discovers it in the bricks with which he built and which are then often used again for better building: in the fact, that is to say, that that building can be destroyed and nonetheless possess value as material. —Assorted Opinions and Maxims 201

CHAPTER 2

Nietzsche’s Immoralist Theory of State Legitimacy

1   The New Problem of Normative Authority: Legitimacy Without Persuasion The best way to persuade is not to persuade. —Comte de Lautréamont, Poésies Poets who plan Utopias and prove that nothing is necessary for their realization but that Man should will them, perceive at last, like Richard Wagner, that the fact to be faced is that Man does not effectively will them. And he never will until he becomes Superman. —George Bernard Shaw, “The Revolutionist’s Handbook,” Man and Superman.

In the previous volume of this project, Nietzsche’s Immoralism: Politics as First Philosophy, I argued that Nietzsche’s analysis of the material social-­ political origins of moralities and agency types leads to the replacement of moral philosophy with something better described as a political philosophy (NI 7). Human enhancement is a goal without moral authority, to be achieved by the agency of society rather than individuals, through political rather than moral means. Moreover, the theory of this normative aim rests not on moral claims about rational reasons for action but on a political theory about the material conditions of social classes and the relations of

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power between them.1 Most important, my analysis of the Genealogy demonstrated not only that the creation, defense, and promotion of values is not the primary goal of Nietzsche’s value philosophy, but that morality as such is the principal obstacle to human enhancement. Nietzsche’s value philosophy is not only a political philosophy rather than a moral one; it is a political philosophy founded in the rejection of moral philosophy as a fundamental philosophical error based in a misunderstanding of the causes of human character, possibility, and change. Slave morality, for example, is not the wrong kind of morality, but wrong qua morality—wrong in its faith in the efficacity of morality and its erroneous claims about obligation and responsibility, about what we are free to do or not do, be or not be. Noble morality is preferable, not as a higher kind of morality, but as an immoralist predecessor to morality, as a politics that produces new types rather than trying to transform given ones, accepting and affirming a fatalism of choice and action according to social-politically conditioned agent- or character-types. We have seen that the textual marker of this decisive break from moral to political philosophy is his designation of future philosophers as commanders and legislators rather than persuaders, educators, or artists. This break may initially appear to reinforce a subjectivist reading of Nietzsche’s value anti-realism. Recall the original dilemma of the subjectivist reading (NI 6.1). On the one hand, because Nietzsche rejects moral truths, he can consistently promote any ideal of human enhancement. He can even consistently promote its imposition by force, since he does not accept any moral norms of freedom according to which force would be morally illegitimate. The problem, however, is that there is no incentive for Nietzsche to impose his values, since his deterministic fatalism about health entails that those who currently exemplify his ideal do so to the highest degree they are capable, while those who fall short of his ideal cannot achieve it at all. So, because he denies a substantial concept of moral freedom, imposing his values on those who do not already pursue them has no practical value.

1  Contrast Paul Katsafanas’s claim that “whereas Marx focuses solely on the economic factors driving social change, Nietzsche focuses solely on the philosophical and religious ones” (2016, 208). But Nietzsche is more of a materialist than Marx: even economic relations are superstructural, reflecting the demand of the drives, a non-intentional, unconscious response to environmental opportunities to maximize the mere feeling of power.

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Nietzsche’s shift to political philosophy, to an analysis that stresses the causal primacy of material social-political conditions in the origin of moralities and agent types, does suggest an initial solution to the problem of normative authority. Recall that for the later Nietzsche, the primary question of value philosophy is no longer the ethical question, “what ought I, as a moral agent, choose to do or to become?” but the political questions, “what agent-types ought societies to produce?” and “what types of societies can consistently produce and preserve such agents?” Nietzsche’s distinctly political version of anti-realism about values is, consequently, compatible with both character-based fatalism and moral subjectivism in a way that ordinary moral anti-realism is not. Character determinists have no incentive to impose their values because the attempt to do so will necessarily fail. In contrast, character determinists who are also, like Nietzsche, political anti-realists, want to impose their values not on individuals but the on social systems that manufacture them. Political character fatalism seeks to leave the deep characters of existing individuals largely unchanged, but change their behavior to produce a new generation of higher individuals to replace them. So, although character fatalism does take away moral subjectivists’ incentive to force their values on existing individuals, it preserves their incentive to promote material social-­ political conditions favorable to the development of new agents who share their values. Of course, Nietzsche cannot directly persuade readers—in the sense of changing their deep character—to help him produce those conditions since, as we saw in the previous volume, he believes the educator is no freer to be rationally or morally persuaded than the educated are. However, he can potentially persuade those who already share his values to direct their efforts away from moral means and toward more effective political means of achieving the value goals they already share with him.2 That is the real task of Nietzsche’s political philosophy: to persuade those who already share his ideal of human enhancement to participate in and promote the transformation of the material foundations of our social, cultural, educational, and political institutions rather than expend their moral energies on the impossible exhortative moral and epistemic transformation of individuals, to get them to change the material circumstances 2  Note that Nietzsche’s rejection of moral persuasion includes what Brian Leiter calls “the Therapeutic Nietzsche,” who “wants to get select readers to throw off the shackles of morality” (2019, 6).

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that will produce future minds and values, rather than present minds and values. Nietzsche’s insight is that replacing moral anti-realism with political anti-realism resolves the practical difficulty of value subjectivism— namely, the dilemma that precisely to the degree that a norm needs to be imposed, it is certain to be resisted. Once we recognize that the only way to enhance humanity is not by changing individuals but by producing them differently, this practical problem is solved: a political philosophy of human enhancement aims to create new agents upon whom its normative ideal does not need to be imposed. This does not mean values no longer need to be enforced—no more, than, for example, the moral norm of property rights does not need to be enforced upon subjects who believe there is a right to property. Rather, it is not an imposed ideal because it enforces a value that is recognized as legitimate by its subjects, even though they occasionally disobey it. The practical problem is resolved because the foundation of the law is no longer in force alone; it is reinforced by the deep characters of the individuals it governs, by the hierarchy of values and incentives that organizes their souls as a social structure of stronger and weaker drives. The practical problem is, in other words, resolved by Nietzsche’s theory of sovereign individuals, whose internalized order of drives produces actions in conformity with their values, which, in turn, may or may not harmonize with the rank of values that govern their society.3 This not only solves the practical problem of value subjectivism—of how to successfully impose lasting norms that cannot be legitimized through persuasion. It solves the problem of legitimacy in principle, too, since it gives us an objective criterion for preferring some subjectivist values over another. Although there are no non-subjective reasons governing the moral question of which values we truly ought to hold, making subjective preference the only criterion for existing individuals’ preferences in values, there are still non-subjective reasons governing the political question of which kind of preferring subjects societies ought to produce. 3  Contrast Keith Ansell-Pearson: “nowhere in his writings does Nietzsche develop a notion of legitimacy to support his theory of politics” (1994, 40). Because Ansell-Pearson underemphasizes the contrast between political breeding and cultural transformation, he draws two incompatible conclusions: that Nietzsche’s politics “justifies itself in terms of an untenable naturalism” and “simply justifies itself in terms of the willed creation of a new human type” (41).

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The problem in principle is that value subjectivism makes the victory of one set of values over another a matter of arbitrary force, providing us with no criterion for supporting one value system over another apart from subjective preference. Nietzsche’s political version of anti-realism does solve the practical problem, but only in cases where an agent is already well-constituted according to a particular set of values, as in the case of the sovereign individual. However, if I am deeply uncertain or divided about my values—as Nietzsche suggests is characteristic of decadent modern individuals—my will and choices are determined by contradictory drives that prevent their strong hierarchical organization. Consequently, as a decadent agent, I cannot effectively choose among competing value systems. Nietzsche may be able to persuade like-minded, healthy individuals to assist in his political project, but for the majority of us, it must remain unpersuasive. And that, in turn, is a serious practical problem for Nietzsche’s new philosophers, since they will have the seemingly impossible task of organizing the kind of society that produces healthy agents out of an existing society controlled and populated by decadent ones. However, it turns out Nietzsche’s political form of value subjectivism may also solve the problem in practice, not just in principle. We need not wait to see which group’s values will overpower the rest, eventually producing agents in tune with those values and making the problem of legitimacy irrelevant. Nor do Nietzsche’s healthy types need to rely on force to make their values victorious over those of us who lack such health. For he has already implicitly provided us a criterion of political authority and, consequently, of value legitimacy. That criterion is simply that any political system holds legitimate authority to the degree that its social organization and values reflect its subjects’ own deepest values and mirrors the internal organization of their moral agency and drives. This, in turn, also allows us to make non-subjective judgments about political legitimacy. A state’s authority is justified to a greater or lesser degree, the more or less deeply its subjects, in their very nature, speech, and actions, affirm the values according to which it is organized. In other words, because there is no properly moral criterion of value authority, a state’s authority is indirectly justified to the degree that it does not need moral justification in order to be affirmed by its subjects—that is, to the degree it successfully produces subjects for whom the problem of

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legitimacy will not arise, subjects sufficiently happy not to demand a justification of their political circumstances. In the language of moral subjectivism, a state is politically legitimate to the degree that it is makes impossible or unlikely moral illegitimacy in two senses: (1) its authority does not rest on the purported veracity of any particular moral content, and (2) its authority is nonetheless accepted by its subjects. Both conditions are possible only if subjects accept its authority for non-moral reasons—namely, because the state’s political organization and laws reflect values that happen to coincide with their own deepest values.4 To be clear: this is not a simple dismissal of the problem of authority. It does not amount to saying: there is no criterion of the authority of moral values; therefore, there are no truly legitimate political states; however, if the citizenry does not mind, it is not a practical problem. On the contrary, the point is that while legitimate authority does not exist in advance—there are no metaethical moral principles to ground political authority—political legitimacy can come into existence in practice. Like moral agents themselves and like the moralities that shape them (NI 7.3), political legitimacy is a product not a cause of politics. The legitimate state is an outcome, rather than a foundation. The authority of values is not the moral starting point from which a just state is derived. Rather, certain kinds of states, by producing legitimacy, bestow authority on certain values. Political philosophy is, once again, first philosophy. But in what sense is this achieved outcome—the harmony of a state’s organization and values with the values and drive organization of its subjects—a real basis of authority? Perhaps the best way to answer this question is to approach it from the opposite direction, from the meaning of “illegitimacy” rather than “legitimacy.” The language of normative authority, both moral or political, is based in a legal metaphor: just as an 4  Consequently, politics can be grounded neither in the creative legislation of “higher” individuals nor in standard rights and liberties. Daniel Conway notes that “while most rulers formulate and justify their legislations by appealing to the prosperity of a particular people or polity over a specific, short-term duration, the lawgiver appeals exclusively to the permanent enhancement of humankind as a whole” (1996, 11). However, since neither ruler, legislator, nor citizen can assert a true standard of enhancement, a concept of enhancement cannot be legitimized independent of its relation to the wellbeing of the people. The question of enhancement is one of amor fati (NI 4), the citizens’ love of their social-political fate, in turn a question of their relationship to each other and the state.

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action is legally legitimate if it is in accordance with the law, so a political state or a moral action is legitimate if it is in accordance with a moral principle or rule. “Illegitimacy,” then, implies action against law; a particular state, law, or value is illegitimate if violates some foundational moral principle. The problem of illegitimacy can only arise, then, where there is already a conflict among values systems, disagreement about which moral principles are the ones to which a legitimate state ought to conform. Wherever such conflict arises, questions about or challenges to legitimacy are themselves “morally legitimate”—not in a sense that implies moral realism, but in the sense of rationally justified. Likewise, ignoring or suppressing such questions is, in the same sense, “morally illegitimate.” For there do not need to be moral truths for disagreements or doubts about morality’s role in justifying a particular political authority to be reasonable. Everyone has a rational self-interest in knowing whether their own state’s values are correct, even if the “correct” answer turns out to be that values are not truth-apt at all. But in such cases of conflict and epistemic uncertainty, we cannot say in advance what the answers to these moral questions and challenges will turn out to be. Wherever there is widespread uncertainty or disagreement about values—as is the case, according to Nietzsche, in any decadent society—it becomes meaningful and reasonable to ask whether a particular political system’s authority is justified. So, although there is not in a simple sense such a thing as “real legitimacy,” a very real illegitimacy arises with the very raising of the question: a state’s authority is truly unjustified to the degree that its subjects see it as in need of justification and such justification is not provided. The anti-realist’s position that there are no moral truths entails that there is never, after all, any justification of any state’s authority, but it is only when authority is questioned or rejected that this original and natural lack of justification becomes a rational obligation to provide justification. Once a state begins, in answer to challenges to its authority, to claim that its authority is justified, it then obligates itself to demonstrate such claims. Previously, it was non-legitimate in a morally neutral sense, neither legitimate nor illegitimate in its authority. Now it becomes truly illegitimate in a moral sense: it makes false moral claims that no one has any moral obligation to obey. Let’s call this position normative political

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realism. In keeping with most forms of realism in political theory, it does not treat politics as an applied ethics; it does not presume an a priori ethical principle or criterion according to which the legitimacy of political orders can be measured. However, against most forms of realism, it does not focus only on descriptive claims, reducing all norms to pragmatic questions of social stability and order.5 For it provides us with non-moral reasons for determining why some stable societies might have illegitimate governments: the negative criterion of whether a people actively question authority rather than the positive criterion of whether they actively believe in an authority. Here, Nietzsche’s view of legitimacy mirrors the development of his views of nihilism. For the early Nietzsche, still under the spell of Schopenhauer’s (1818) idealism and Wagner’s romanticism, the problem of nihilism is that existence needs meaning, a problem solved by finding the right way—aesthetic, moral, or scientific—to provide that meaning. However, as I argued in the previous volume, in his final work, Nietzsche recognizes that diagnosis as a symptom of nihilism. Nihilism is not a metaphysical problem of value realism but a psychological problem about the need for value realism: the need to instrumentally affirm suffering rather than produce a fate-loving form of existence (NI 2, 4). Just as the need for meaning in the form of positive beliefs about moral truth is a symptom of a badly ordered soul, so the need for positive beliefs about true political legitimacy is a symptom of a badly ordered world. And just as a justified existence is one that is not in dire need of justification, a legitimate state is one that is not in dire need of legitimization. The job of political philosophy is not to convince us some political orders

5  See, for example, Raymond Geuss’s characterization of realism as focusing on “ways in which people can structure and organise their action so as to limit and control forms of disorder that they might find excessive or intolerable for other reasons” (2008, 22). On Nietzsche and political realism, see Christian J. Emden (2014). Nietzschean realism is closer to John J. Mearsheimer’s notion of “offensive realism” (2014, 22), in which political systems are motivated by maximizing power, than “human nature” realism’s intrinsic lust for power (Hans Morgenthau 1948) or “defensive” realism’s tendency toward a balance of power (Kenneth Waltz 1979). But offensive realism’s psychology is too teleological; maximizing power is not the will to power’s aim but “only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences” (BGE 13).

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are truly tolerable but to help us figure out how to bring about political orders we no longer merely tolerate.6 So, illegitimacy becomes a problem in principle only when authority is challenged—only when a state’s subjects begin to seriously consider the possibility that its authority is unfounded. True, for the anti-realist, the question of legitimacy is at bottom a philosophical pseudo-problem, but it is one that produces a very real practical problem. If there were a true ground of legitimacy, then the questioned authority would have to demonstrate it. But even if there is no deep ground for state legitimacy, there is, for the time being, a real illegitimacy of a state’s authority until its subjects either regain their faith or accept the anti-realist position that there are no such grounds at all. For in circumstances where there is conflict over legitimacy, subjects do not yet know whether the anti-realist, a realist who opposes the state, or the state itself is in the right. Once the mere possibility of illegitimacy has been raised, authority is de facto exerted against that possibility without justification, making it de facto illegitimate. So, from the real illegitimacy of authority in question we can work backward, recognizing that prior to the crisis of legitimacy, any political authority that had been generally accepted by its subjects was in fact truly legitimate, in the sense that it had not violated any true moral principle or imposed any false or unsubstantiated one. If the problem of legitimacy is false in principle, then illegitimacy exists only in practice. But wherever illegitimacy does not exist in practice, a state is truly legitimate both in practice and in principle. Consequently, a political authority is justified to the degree that its subjects do not recognize a need for its justification even in principle, that is, do not recognize the possibility of either legitimacy or illegitimacy. This is somewhat similar to Bernard Williams’s “critical theory principle,” the view that “the acceptance of a justification does not count if the acceptance itself is produced by the coercive power which is 6  The dominant approach of synthesizing Nietzsche’s mature political theory with his early and middle works misses this crucial point: that the late Nietzsche recognizes his early moralist demand for justification, including aesthetic justification of the state, as a symptom of nihilism. Compare, for example, Hugo Drochon’s view that “‘The Greek State’ and the Genealogy therefore present the same account of the birth and justification of the state as a conquering horde who...suddenly appear to establish a hierarchical state which is their work of art, only justifiable as a whole” (2017, 333).

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supposedly being justified” (2005, 6). However, the crucial distinction— what makes this a distinctively immoralist form of legitimacy—is that a state is truly legitimate to the degree its subjects do not recognize any need for justification, rather than on the basis of how acceptance of a justification is produced. In Nietzschean language: a state is legitimate to the degree that it is truly “beyond good and evil,” disbelieving in and indifferent to the moral myth of value authority, not recognizing any need for justification of authority beyond personal preference in principle and popular acceptance in practice.7 Here, we should emphasize two important qualifications to this view. First, to say that a state’s authority is justified is not yet to make any strong claim about the value of such states. For one thing, states are justified by their evaluative harmony with their citizenry, so their justification varies by degree. More important, a state may be legitimate and still be an awful one for reasons other than the justifiability of its authority. For Nietzsche, remember, the key question is not whether a state is legitimate, but whether it is healthy rather than decadent: whether it promotes amor fati by promoting the higher type defined by a manifold soul (NI 5.2, 6.2). Likewise, an illegitimate state might be valuable for a variety of reasons other than legitimacy. For example, consider, from the standpoint of democratic theories of legitimacy, the real possibility of benevolent monarchies. The question of legitimacy does not completely answer the question of the overall value of a political system. Second, the Nietzschean theory of political legitimacy that I am reconstructing does not, in any way, entail the conclusion that a blindly obedient citizenry morally justifies any state’s authority. The claim is not that a state’s legitimacy always corresponds directly with its practical acceptance; rather, it corresponds with a very deep alignment of the values of the state with the constitution of the character of its subjects—an alignment of one’s deep character and values with that of the state in a way that leads, in practice, to rejection in principle of its possible illegitimacy. A state whose citizens believe that its authority could in principle be unjustified, but who also believe that it happens to be justified in fact, is not a legitimate one. 7  Conway rightly says, “Nietzsche treats the founding question of politics as a philosophical question of ultimate justification or legitimization. He thus asks: in what incarnation, if any, might humankind justify its continued existence and warrant its unsecured future?” (1996, 6). However, Nietzsche is no more a political perfectionist than a moral one. He does not wish to breed a humanity that conforms to a standard of perfection or justification, but one too well-suited to life to need the consolation of normative justification.

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The question is whether the issue of legitimacy is a live one. The problem with an imaginary society of blindly devoted subjects is that such a state would rely on the populace’s moral convictions, on their conscious adherence to a realist value system to which they believe the state also adheres. But it is precisely that conviction, their conscious justification of state authority by appeal to objective moral criteria, that will in practice continually raise and renew the problem of legitimacy. For wherever there is a blindly devoted populace, you will find not an absence of the question of illegitimacy, but an endless, dogmatic reassertion of legitimacy. In reality, proponents of blind faith never tire of arguing for blindness. They can be its proponents only because their faith is not in fact blind. The defining feature of an illegitimate, dogmatic state is a widespread moral realism, a moralistic conviction that there are real grounds of authority and that the state does indeed conform to them. In contrast, the defining feature of a Nietzschean legitimate state is an immoralist indifference to moral realism’s questions and claims (not entirely unlike the classic skeptic’s suspension of judgment), an affirmation of the state that is beyond good and evil, based in the lack of any deep incentive for demanding justification of the state’s authority.8 What, then, would qualify as a truly legitimate form of state authority, if not one governing a blindly obedient populace? In Nietzsche’s depiction of the origins of the state, legitimacy initially exists by default thanks not to obedience but to ignorance—to the lack of the distinctively human form of agency and moral conscience produced by the internalization of the instincts. The question of legitimacy does not arise because the members of the nobility are barely self-aware “beasts.” The question of a legitimate right to authority can only arise, first, with conflict, with an opposing claim to authority and, second, with the intellectual ability to recognize the possible truth of opposing claims. In other words, it arises only after the priests infect the nobility with the concept of moral guilt, creating the internal conflict of values that allows them to recognize the possibility that their social order may be unjustified. It is only when the nobles’ values and drives come into conflict that the problem of state legitimacy can become a live one.

 So, we can agree with Shaw’s (2007) characterization of Nietzsche as a political skeptic without accepting her conclusion that he has no political philosophy. 8

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Of course, this suggests that the most obvious way to create a legitimate state would be through return to Nietzsche’s imagined, pre-moral age of early noble societies. But such a state would be possible only given the absence of the complex form of human agency and consciousness that coincides with real social existence. As Nietzsche stresses, his aim, although a “return (Rückkehr) to nature,” is “not really a going-back (züruckgehen) but a going-up (hinaufkommen)” (TI IX.48). A return to the pre-moral and pre-human world is both impossible and undesirable. State legitimacy is accomplished not through a people’s ignorance but something closer to their indifference; it is found not prior to good and evil but beyond it. Political authority is legitimate not simply to the degree that its subjects accept it, but to the degree that they recognize in its laws and organizing values the structure of their own character, the hierarchy of their own drives, and so to the degree they accurately identify with it so deeply that they no longer care whether it is legitimate. But that degree of happy indifference to the question of legitimacy, in turn, indicates that there must be no substantial reason for the citizenry to challenge state authority. Our reconstructed Nietzschean theory of legitimacy is certainly not, then, one in which power or violence can justify a state’s authority. For state violence provokes rather than silences the question of legitimacy. And it is certainly not one in which ignorance or blind obedience can justify state authority. For blind obedience is achieved only through the continual suppression of real opposing values, views, and interests—again, through the constant suppression rather than absence of the live question of legitimacy, the erroneous denial of, rather than a true lack of, any incentive to question the state’s legitimacy. Instead, political legitimacy is achieved only through the successful production of a social-political order whose laws and values are mirrored in the very psychic structure of its citizens’ character, affirmed by a citizenry of agents who are essentially constituted by those very same values, as an embodiment of its authority. In its most perfect form, a legitimate state would be one that truly, consistently, and continually makes all of its subjects happy not superficially or coincidentally, but in a way that is consistent with their deepest values and psychological needs—a way that reinforces the harmony of their character with the laws and values that govern their society. This deep harmony of societal and individual psychological hierarchies of value makes the justification of authority a matter of indifference, as unnecessary and meaningless as demanding justification of one’s authority over oneself.

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In this way, Nietzsche has, like Marx (1867), preserved Hegel while standing him on his head. In Nietzsche’s case, the image of a distinctly human form of health anticipated in the sovereign individual and fully developed in the concept of the manifold soul leads us to a version of Hegelian recognition: in the authentic recognition of a state’s authority, subjects merely recognize the identity of societal law with the laws that govern their own true nature, the evaluative organization of their deepest character and drives.9 Like Marx, however, Nietzsche inverts rather than sublates Hegel’s idealism, insisting that this true nature is socially fabricated rather than naturally given, reducible to the organization of our unconscious drives rather than equivalent to self-conscious reason or Geist. In Hegel’s version, because our essential nature is given in advance, the task of politics is simply to replicate our implicit rationality in the explicit forms of both individual activity and the structure and laws of society. In Nietzsche’s version, in contrast, there is no preexisting natural and rational order to which human nature, morality, or politics can be made to correspond. The content of politics, like that of morality, is indifferent. What matters is the harmony of our laws and social order with the organization of our drives, the harmony of the social order with the order of the soul. Whatever particular values might ground a given society, legitimacy requires only that they be deeply mirrored in the fabricated agency of the subjects expected to obey them, so that, in obeying the state, they ultimately obey themselves, making the justification of authority unnecessary.10

9  Because Nietzsche preserves the importance of recognition in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1820) but rejects its idealism, he belongs in the tradition of critical theorists like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1944) and Herbert Marcuse (1955, 1969). Although recent critical theorists Jürgen Habermas (1981) and Axel Honneth (1995) have regressed to Hegel’s idealism, others like Nancy Fraser (Fraser 1997 and Fraser and Honneth 2003) have resisted the trend. On Nietzsche’s relation to critical theory, see Christine A. Payne and Michael J.  Roberts (2020). On Nietzsche’s agonistic approach to recognition and self-­ respect, see Alan D. Schrift (1999) and David Owen (2002). 10  Nietzsche’s theory of political legitimacy is a subversive return to Plato’s Republic (1997). Plato’s aristocratism is conservative since it depends on the assumption of a natural harmony between the order of society and the order of the soul. Nietzsche preserves the form, the alignment of the orders of society and soul, but rejects its conservative content, natural harmony, for a radical aristocratism: the breeding of non-natural classes. Contrast Manuel Knoll’s (2014) suggestion that Nietzsche is more conservative than Plato, because of supposed indifference to the welfare of the social whole.

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That is also why, in his final works, Nietzsche repeatedly emphasizes that every new morality must be founded in immoral acts. This is not primarily a jab at moral hypocrisy, nor is it a cynical claim that moralities are really just disguised forms of violence. Rather, it is meant to underline that a legitimate political system achieves its authority and right to exist only after the fact and in practice, by producing subjects who can affirm and establish that authority. Legitimacy cannot be guaranteed in advance, only procured and maintained over time through the social-political production of a harmony between the cultural and legal values that organize a society and the internal hierarchy of values that psychologically organizes its subjects. Legitimacy cannot, then, be decided in the abstract, as traditional political philosophy tries to do by grounding primary political principles, such as justice and rights, in foundational metaethical arguments. We cannot, for example, simply ask whether a particular form of the state, such as democracy or aristocracy, is a priori legitimate. We must first ask, “Legitimate for whom?” The key variable in this question is one of time: is it legitimate for past, present, or future subjects of the state? But if legitimacy is not a priori but accomplished over time, it cannot be accurately measured in relation to past and present subjects, but rather in relation to future ones. We must ask: is the present social-political order likely to produce future subjects for whom its legitimacy will not be an issue, subjects who will continue to affirm the values and order of the society that produced their own values and character? That, then, is the real reason why Nietzsche says every new morality must begin in immoral action. If a state’s authority is the outcome of a long process of producing the values and character type of its own subjects, then every human society necessarily begins illegitimately. Note that the claim here is not that immoral means of legitimizing a state ought to be used, but that they are always already used. If that is objectionable, it is nonetheless necessary and unavoidable—in the same way, for example, that it might be thought objectionable that children must of necessity be subjected to illegitimate family and social authority until they have gained the degree of moral independence necessary to bestow, through the internalization of social values, a new legitimacy to authorities that previously governed them illegitimately. Far from serving as an excuse for authoritarian or paternalistic political systems, Nietzsche’s theory of legitimacy simply acknowledges the degree to which every political system is

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“beyond good and evil,” whether it admits it or not. This acknowledgment of a necessary minimum degree of illegitimate authoritarianism in the origins of politics enables us—much like parents’ acknowledgment of an inevitable element of authoritarianism in childrearing does—to compare real political systems not according to abstract criteria of legitimacy that are never met in reality, but instead according to the real material and psychological consequences of political systems, their actual correspondence with the values, interests, and needs of their citizens. It is a realism that allows us to acknowledge and control authoritarianism, not a recommendation of it. Rather than asking how we can entirely avoid illegitimate authority—which we cannot do and will only serve to whitewash the illegitimacy of our preferred political systems—Nietzsche asks: which kinds of states or political orders will best overcome their initial illegitimacy? For Nietzsche, political legitimacy is, like morality and moral agency, a natural and historical phenomenon, something that, because it must be socially produced over time, can only be evaluated according to the casual mechanisms that produce it. The Genealogy is not, then, just a history of morality but also a history of political legitimacy. It is the story of the successful production of a legitimate state, of a noble social-political order that produced a people, a politics, and a morality so in harmony with the values, interests, and drives of its original subjects that the question of legitimacy did not arise. The task of Nietzsche’s political philosophy is to reapply the causal mechanisms of that history to our present and future, to recreate in a new form the historical accident of political legitimacy.

2   Nietzsche’s Solution to the Authority Problem: Amor Fati as a Posteriori Legitimacy But two different ways can be thought of, in which Man in time can be made to coincide with Man in idea, and consequently as many in which the State can affirm itself in individuals: either by the pure man suppressing the empirical—the State abrogating the individual—or by the individual becoming State—temporal Man being raised to the dignity of ideal Man. —Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Fourth Letter

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In Nietzsche’s Immoralism, I argued that Nietzsche’s project of enhancing humanity through a so-called “morality of breeding” is a political project grounded in what can only be consistently described as a political philosophy. It seeks the material social-political conditions of a transitional society and state engineered to produce higher types: strong value agents who exemplify a standard of health in which their deepest values and drives harmonize with the values and laws that organize the state. The higher type, as amor fati, is self-justifying, in turn legitimizing a state that successfully produces and maintains it. So, the goal of human enhancement is political not only in its means and ends but also in its justification: the ideal of health is justified not theoretically by appeal to foundational moral truths but politically through the production of individuals who accept its legitimacy in virtue of their own constitution, in obedience to the values that organize and determine their own character. Notice that this self- and state-justifying form of individual agency coincides in its structure with the conventional form of moral agency that originally internalizes social mores (Sittlichkeit). Nietzsche’s future higher type moves beyond both the conventional moral agent (dominated by social norms) and the sovereign individual (dominated by personal norms), restoring the original harmony of moral agency and social agency—but through the transformation of the social order rather than of the individual. Society is to be subordinated into harmony with the health of the soul in the interests of individual growth and power rather than individuals subordinated into harmony with society in the interest of its growth and power. In his final years of lucidity, Nietzsche enthusiastically accepted the characterization that Danish scholar Georg Brandes gave to this political project: “aristocratic radicalism” (SL 283). Although Brandes’s reasons for the name were superficial—as was Nietzsche’s own enthusiasm for it— it turns out to be an apt description, one that anticipates why Nietzsche’s political philosophy—although it had only reached its beginning stages by the end of his writing life—was doomed from the start. As an aristocratic theory, Nietzsche’s political philosophy takes as its first premise the rejection of egalitarianism and democracy. Almost every aspect of his political project depends on this first premise which, as we will see in part four, is fatally flawed. However, Nietzsche’s politics is a distinctively radical, in contrast to traditional or conservative, aristocratism. In his day, aristocratism was conservative in two senses. First, it was contingently conservative in relation

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to what happened to be the established order; it rejected the rise of new democratic and egalitarian movements that demanded dramatic structural changes to the current political order in the form of the emancipation of slaves, universal suffrage, establishment of rights, and parliamentary forms of government. Nietzsche’s aristocratism remains partially conservative in this sense: his philosophy shares this reactionary tendency against the rise of liberal-democratic politics. However, against conservatism, Nietzsche abandons the reactionary aim of preserving the status quo. As we shall see, he believes that liberal-democratic politics will inevitably triumph and hopes not to prevent this but chart a path through and beyond it toward a new aristocratic order.11 More important, however, aristocratic politics has traditionally been conservative in the deeper sense that it endorses political systems in conformity with a conservative view of the natural order, according to which class distinctions mirror and have their justification in naturally existing essential differences among individuals, genders, races, classes, and peoples. Nietzsche’s aristocratism, in contrast, is radical, in the sense that it does not ground its promotion of class distinction and inequality in naturally given, essential differences among human individuals and groups.12 Political hierarchies do not simply mirror or sort naturally differentiated and occurring types. Instead, for Nietzsche, political organization produces unequal types as means to the end of human enhancement.13 11  Compare Ishay Landa, who calls Nietzsche “a static thinker facing a reality in motion”: “in order to stay put, Nietzsche was forced to become, to apply a later term, a conservative revolutionary” (2020, 155). It is true that he tries to ground aristocratism on a new and shifting foundation, but to call him “static” or a “conservative revolutionary” is misleading. Conservatism is a moral realist metapolitics that derives political order from a natural order (NI 8.1). 12  Roger Berkowitz acknowledges this in a misleading way: “What Nietzsche stresses is not the specifics of any particular division of nature, but rather that nature—and with it life— demands distinctions among men” (2003, 1141). But Nietzsche views life as a non-­ teleological drive toward resistance for its own sake rather than as domination (NI 5.2). Nature does not demand distinction, however much the distinguished would like us to believe so—as Berkowitz should know from his political service to the American knightly-­ aristocratic class. 13  This is his fundamental difference from Plato. The system of education in The Republic meritocratically sorts naturally occurring types into naturally determined social functions. Its superficially progressivism—equal opportunity regardless of class or gender—is, as in all “meritocracies,” a disguised conservatism. To find nature’s true gold, we must put everyone into the pan. Nietzsche, in contrast, would manufacture gold rather than dig for it.

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His aristocratism is radical, first, because he rejects the belief that historical aristocratic orders in the past have in fact successfully produced higher types. Most have produced social hierarchies organized according to mistaken criteria of human enhancement, such as heredity, wealth, power, and, in the case of capitalism, industry. Second, his aristocratism is radical because he rejects the belief that aristocracies promote human excellence by mirroring a natural order. On the contrary, for Nietzsche, human excellence is achieved independently of and against the natural order, where true greatness is a rare, “lucky hit” because natural processes tend to preserve the weak over the strong.14 Nietzsche’s aristocratism is radical, then, because it is anti-conservative: it seeks to fundamentally alter the political organization of society against both the newly emerging liberal democratic, egalitarian movements and the conservative preservation of class rank and privilege that do not correlate with Nietzsche’s preferred criterion of rank: health understood as a form of value agency that maximizes the feelings of freedom and power, promoting amor fati. 14  This is his key point of incompatibility with fascism. Ansell-Pearson argues that “labeling Nietzsche as a Fascist…ignores the fact that Nietzsche’s radical aristocratism seeks to revive an older conception of politics…the Greek agon” (1994, 33–34). However, Nietzsche’s aristocratism is radical precisely because he rejects the traditional aristocratic belief—shared with fascism—that political orders should mirror and perfect a preexisting natural order. The myth of Nietzsche’s conservatism has the same root as the myth of his anti-modernism: the pretense that the present has been sufficiently liberated from the past to demarcate an authentically new era, when for Nietzsche a true modernity is yet to come. The latter myth is particularly striking, when his work was first embraced by “moderns” in the truest sense— modern artists. Of course, opponents of left readings of Nietzsche only take historical reception as evidence when it goes their way, ignoring that he was initially, as Gary Yeritsian notes, “primarily received as a forward-looking, radical thinker than as a conservative or reactionary, his work compared by conservatives to Marxism in terms of its potential threat to the existing social order” (2020, 210). If the conservative reading is correct about anything, it’s that Nietzsche’s aesthetic sensibility tends toward the reactionary, suited to abuse because it delivers anti-fascist content in semi-fascist wrapping. Kristin Lawler’s characterization is apt: “Nietzsche is punk rock” (2020, 204)—with all of the moral ambiguity that entails. On Nietzsche’s anti-conservative reception, including by Soviet Marxists, see Richard Hinton Thomas (1983), Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (1986), Seth Taylor (1990), and Steven E.  Aschheim (1992); on his reception by the Soviet avant-garde, see Glatzer Rosenthal (1994); by Latin American Marxists in the 1920s, see Ofelia Schutte (1988), by socialist feminists, see Carol Diethe (1996), and by American anarchists and labor radicals, see Lawler (2020).

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Nietzsche’s radicalism lies primarily, then, in his suggestion that his preferred criterion of rank, health as qualitatively heightened will to power, is not an a priori natural justification of authority by appeal to the given, essential superiority of a class or type, but a project that will retroactively justify authority by bringing about superior types that do not yet exist. And because Nietzsche’s aristocratism does not, as conservative aristocratism does, depend on the assumption of a natural moral order, it is not, as conservative naturalism is, vulnerable to naturalist fallacies (as I argue in NI 5). Conservative aristocratism collapses when we recognize the falsehood of its belief in natural superiority and the moral obligation to promote it. In contrast, aristocratic radicalism seeks to achieve, rather than presupposes, legitimacy by producing a society whose members are, in their very production and constitution, predisposed to affirm the society that produced them, making any appeal to moral-naturalistic justification unnecessary.15 We can now clarify why Nietzsche’s ideal of enhancement is not just one subjectivist ideal among others and why we cannot argue that we have no reason to prefer Nietzsche’s ideal of health to any other, even if any value ideal can, in principle, be made legitimate through the harmony of the social order with the structure of its subjects’ value agency. Nietzsche’s approach to political legitimacy gives us reasons for preferring certain ideals, a way of rationally choosing which ones to make legitimate through

15  This is the principal flaw in the belief in an intrinsic affinity between Nietzsche and right politics. See, for example, Conway: “his political philosophy bears a closer resemblance to the conservative republicanism of his predecessors than to the progressive liberalism of his contemporaries” (1996, 2). However, because Nietzsche tries to resurrect aristocratism on modern grounds (NI 8), he divides the radical and the conservative across the grain of contemporary notions of left and right, allowing for right radicalism and left conservatism. This complication has been overlooked even by those who recognize his emancipatory potential, such as Schutte in her work on Nietzsche, feminism, and anticolonialism (1984, 172). We should, then, doubt Linda Martín Alcoff’s suggestion: “wasn’t his misogyny, elitism, and European chauvinism just all too typical, of his day and ours?” (2004, 151). No less dangerous, but far from typical.

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the process of political breeding, a way of eliminating competing answers to the question, “which agency-types ought society to produce?”16 If evaluative ideals are made legitimate only by producing moral agents constituted by those values in a way that makes authority coincide with autonomy, obviating the need for justification, then one value ideal can be rationally preferable to another on purely practical grounds: namely, the more likely a value is to successfully produce future legitimacy, the better it is. And the more likely a value is to produce subjects whose characters and values will continue indefinitely to harmonize with their social order, thereby preventing the reintroduction of illegitimacy, the more likely it is to successfully produce future legitimacy. For Nietzsche, the ideal of amor fati, grounded in the criterion of health as will to power, is the most likely to successfully produce continued, lasting political legitimacy. In other words, his ideal of health is not accidentally a justifiable ideal, nor is it only one among many; it is instead an ideal formed from the very criterion of value-justifiability. We have seen that his concept of health designates only a form of moral agency, not a particular value content, making it compatible in principle with different 16  So, Nietzsche is not, as György Lukács (1954) pretends to believe, an “irrationalist” (NI 3.1). While all philosophical reading is motivated, the particularly hyper-motivated form of some left critiques should prompt greater suspicion. As Babette Babich notes, among Nietzscheans, “Marx is faulted for missing what such readers favour, and Marxists for their own part and quite expectedly do the same, if the same is that much worse inasmuch good Marxists…know who is right and who is wrong” (2020, 257). It is striking that Commissar Lukács would imply Nietzsche’s thought is essentially fascistic, when there was a lively group of Nietzschean-Marxists in Russia at the time of the revolution—until they were murdered by Stalin (Mark D. Steinberg 2002; George Kline 1969). But to blame Lukács for Stalinism would be as ridiculous as blaming Nietzsche for fascism—even if Nietzsche, at least, never worked directly in the employ of the bad company that would later keep him, nor recanted his criticism of them, much less produced a body count in their service (Arpad Kadarkay 1991, 223). Recently, Domenico Losurdo (2021) has tried to rehaunt us with the specter of Lukács’s straw-Nietzsche in a 1000-page book that manages to completely ignore the last 70 years of Nietzsche scholarship. Losurdo, too, has an ambivalent relation to Stalin, whose often historically inaccurate, hypercritical demonization he rightly critically examines rather than, as he does with Nietzsche, dogmatically reinforces (2008). It is fitting irony that the anti-Nietzschean wing of less-than-critical Marxists uses the collective accomplishments of the Soviet Union to defend the beyond-good-and-evil status of individual übermenschen like Stalin—particularly in his “creators are hard” approach to the Russian peasantry, which he, like a bad reading of Nietzsche, treated as a herd animal standing in the way of higher humanity. On Nietzsche’s covert influence on the Soviet Five-Year Plan and the Cultural Revolution, see Glatzer Rosenthal (2002).

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value systems. On the political level, for example, we can imagine many different kinds of states that might produce citizens who exemplify a strong, healthy kind of agency, but those agents’ drives might be organized according to dramatically different values. However, health as a form of value agency still allows us, in practice, to rank value contents. For, as we have seen, Nietzsche defines health in relation to the optimal psychological conditions of individual wellbeing—the maximization of the feeling of power. Now, recall that the criterion of state legitimacy is a harmony of the values that organize the state with those that constitute its subjects’ agency type. If, in obeying the state, I simultaneously obey myself, obedience complements autonomy, obviating any need for justification and making the problem of illegitimacy moot. Notice, however, that the harmony of social and psychological orders of value is perfectly compatible with political orders that include serious privations to individual wellbeing. A deeply ascetic culture, for example, could produce subjects who are so successfully constituted by its values that they would never truly question its authority. Yet their values, in virtue of their severe ascetic content, might nonetheless do harm to their physiological and psychological wellbeing. This worry has to do, as we saw in our discussion of the paradox of the ascetic, with the overlap of “health” in the broader organic and animal sense of a well-organized hierarchy of the drives with “health” in the narrower, distinctly human sense of a complexity of the drives that maximizes the feeling of power (NI 5). The organic and animalistic forms of health as strength of agency, will, and action are compatible with many different kinds of human unhappiness. And that, in turn, means that health in the broader sense can produce conditions that disrupt a legitimate political state’s harmony of social and psychological orders of value. That is, in fact, exactly what happens in Nietzsche’s account of slave morality. The slaves are not entirely unhealthy in the broader sense, since their psychological structure consists of a strong hierarchy of drives that subordinates every incentive to their dominant motives of resentment and hatred. The slave revolt may be one of weak against strong but it is not, in Nietzsche’s narrower sense, one of the decadent against the healthy. It is, rather, a revolt that has decadent values as its outcome, values that the priestly element of the aristocratic class uses to infect the knightly aristocratic class with moral guilt, undermining the hierarchy of their drives and introducing into the order of their drives a state of debilitating anarchy rather than fruitful diversity and tension.

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That is the secret of how slave morality can, despite its political impotence, become victorious: even healthy societies and relatively healthy agents can produce decadent values. But it also explains why some value contents are better than others in practice, even though any value system can be made legitimate in principle through political breeding. Namely, any society whose subjects’ external political conditions and internal psychological organization combine to preserve lasting wellbeing, continually maximized feelings of freedom and power, will not accidentally produce decadent values. Nietzsche’s uniquely human criterion of health as the ground of amor fati is not just one justifiable instance of a general form of ideal agency; it is a criterion for distinguishing which particular value contents will more effectively promote and preserve that ideal form of agency. This crucial distinction is best understood in light of our earlier contrast between the animalistic health of the early nobles and Nietzsche’s later, more refined conception of human health as the manifold soul, a complex unity grounded in a modest hierarchy of diverse drives in tension with one another. The early nobles’ simple hierarchy of drives produces strong agency in relation to their own impulses, a united, overriding will that will not suffer indecision or internal conflict; however, it does not guarantee strong agency relative to the external world, above all, relative to their social environment. That is, after all, the crucial difference between nobles and slaves: their strength as classes relative to each other, not their strength relative to their own drives. So, the kind of strength grounded in a strong hierarchy of drives is a necessary but not sufficient condition of health in Nietzsche’s narrower, distinctly human sense.17 It is only once civilization begins to dramatically suppress individuals’ power, forcing the internalization of their drives, turning some drives against others, that health in the narrower and highest human sense becomes possible. As I have argued, this form of health involves the maximization not of power as such, but of the feeling of power felt in resisting activity against proportionate obstacles (NI 4). And we have seen this maximization of the feeling of power is achieved in two forms: (1) through activity in relation to external resistances of proportionate power, a form that depends on the individual’s social-political condition, and (2) through the cultivation of a rich diversity of drives in non-contradictory tension 17  Contrast Wolfgang Müller-Lauter’s view that each type “precludes the other in principle” (1999, 77).

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that increases one’s feeling of power over oneself—a form that is, in contrast, to some degree independent of the individual’s social-political condition. That is why Nietzsche’s ideal of amor fati is not just one legitimate political ideal among others and why a politics of breeding of agents that instantiate this ideal is—despite Nietzsche’s value anti-realism—an objectively preferable ideal. Amor fati is realized in a form of health that is not entirely dependent, as animal health is, upon a form of power that is contingent, variable, and relative to our material, social-political condition. It is, consequently, a form of health that is not as easily undermined by changes to those conditions. Nietzsche’s distinctly human ideal of health as the feeling of power, in contrast to the animal ideal of health as strength, includes internal conditions that guarantee agents’ capacity to experience the feelings of freedom and power in their self-relation as well as in their external relations, conditions that ensure a continual ability to affirm fate despite their variable strength relative to the external world and others. In addition, because Nietzsche’s ideal of human health, in contrast to animal strength, is defined by both internal and external conditions—by proportionate resistance among the drives as well as between agent and external world—its production requires the organization of social-political relationships not merely as a means to the breeding of higher types but also as an end: subjects’ social-political relationships must be permanently organized to sustain healthy agency in both its internal and external conditions, not just to produce it.18 Amor fati is not just, then, Nietzsche’s preferred political ideal, it is also his criterion of degrees of political legitimacy, since truly healthy human individuals are of a type that can assure the continued production and preservation of subjects who possess the forms of both internal drive structure and external power relations necessary to continually affirm the legitimacy of the state that produced them. This distinction of strength (animal health) and manifoldness or complexity (human health) as the necessary and sufficient conditions of amor fati and political legitimacy is one that Nietzsche begins to develop in his final work but fails to consistently uphold. However, it will help clarify the fundamental reason for the failure of his fledgling political program. For 18  See Christa Davis Acampora: “the agon is better conceived as a field of relations—or, perhaps better still, as a domain of activity—than as a dyadic relation” (2019, 135).

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his politics to succeed, Nietzsche must identify social-political conditions that both produce and preserve the two key aspects of his ideal form of agency: (1) relative power in relation to the external world and other agents, the condition for the feeling of social and political power, and (2) a diversity internal to the organization of the drives, the condition for the feelings of autonomy and self-mastery. So, he must clarify two distinct aspects of political philosophy: politics as a theory of the production of political agency (how to bring about his ideal subjects) and politics as a theory of their preservation (how to continue to bring about and sustain the health of such subjects).19 At each stage of Nietzsche’s value philosophy, we find a paradigmatic image of human enhancement, of the social process for manufacturing his ideal agency type. In his middle period, when Nietzsche begins to question his early determinism and begins to speak of “free spirits,” the paradigm of enhancement is education as Bildung, because it is through culture, morality, philosophy, and ideas that he hopes to produce and sustain his ideal. In his later work, especially the Genealogy and Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche’s turn to fatalism leads him to doubt whether culture is an effective means of human transformation. The new image is animal husbandry: the training and breeding of new kinds of animals through the thoughtless, involuntary incorporation of moral norms, impressed into passive recipients, sealed by the incentives of reward and punishment. In Nietzsche’s final period, once he recognizes that the material conditions that produced the animalistic vitality of the noble are not identical to those of human health as the maximization of the feeling of power, he presents us with a new paradigmatic image of the process of human enhancement. That new model of enhancement is found not education or husbandry but in the distinctly political register of law: the ancient Hindu lawbook of Manu. 19  It is this coincidence of the manifold soul with the conditions of amor fati and political legitimacy that agonistic liberal-democratic readings and their critics both fail to appreciate. Dombowsky is right that “Nietzsche is philosophically interested in the ordering and organization of this chaotic perspective-multiplicity” (2004, 78). But democratic readings need not take the “postmodern” view of will to power as “resistance to totalization” and the subject as “evasion of fixed identity” (73, 77). The manifold soul as a type defies the dichotomy of strength and decadence. But the “agonism” debate is a misunderstanding: a radical democracy cannot be liberal, at least not if uncoupled from egalitarianism and socialism—as the founders of this approach, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau (1985), well knew.

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References Acampora, Christa Davis. 2019. Agonistic Communities: Love, War and Spheres of Activity. In Conflict and Contest in Nietzsche’s Philosophy, ed. Herman Siemens and James Pearson, 122–144. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2004. Schutte’s Nietzschean Postcolonial Politics. Hypatia 19 (3): 144–156. Ansell-Pearson, Keith. 1994. An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker: The Perfect Nihilist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Aschheim, Steven E. 1992. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany: 1890–1990. Berkeley: University of California Press. Babich, Babette. 2020. Between Nietzsche and Marx: ‘Great Politics and What They Cost’. In Nietzsche and Critical Social Theory: Affirmation, Animosity, and Ambiguity, ed. Christine A.  Payne and Michael J.  Roberts, 226–276. Chicago: Haymarket. Berkowitz, Roger. 2003. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Code of Manu, and the Art of Legislation. Cardozo Law Review 24 (3): 1131–1150. Conway, Daniel. 1996. Nietzsche and the Political. Abington, Oxon: Routledge. Diethe, Carol. 1996. Nietzsche’s Women: Beyond the Whip. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Dombowsky, Don. 2004. Nietzsche’s Machiavellian Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Drochon, Hugo. 2017. Nietzsche Theorist of the State? History of Political Thought 38 (2): 323–344. Emden, Christian J. 2014. Political Realism Naturalized: Nietzsche on the State, Morality, and Human Nature. In Nietzsche as Political Philosopher, ed. Barry Stocker and Manuel Knoll, 311–344. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Fraser, Nancy. 1997. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition. New York: Routledge. Fraser, Nancy, and Axel Honneth. 2003. Redistribution or Recognition: A Political-­ Philosophical Exchange. New York: Verso Books. Geuss, Raymond. 2008. Philosophy and Real Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Glatzer Rosenthal, Bernice. 1986. Nietzsche in Russia. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1994. Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: Ally and Adversary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2002. New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1981. The Theory of Communicative Action. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press.

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Hegel, G.W.F. [1820] 1991. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Edited by Allen W.  Wood and translated by H.B.  Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Honneth, Axel. 1995. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Translated by Joel Anderson. Cambridge: MIT Press. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. [1944] 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kadarkay, Arpad. 1991. Georg Lukács. Life, Thought, and Politics. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Katsafanas, Paul. 2016. The Nietzschean Self: Moral Psychology, Agency, and the Unconscious. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kline, George. 1969. ‘Nietzschean Marxism’ in Russia. In Demythologizing Marxism: A Series of Studies on Marxism, Volume II. Chestnut Hill: Boston College. Knoll, Manuel. 2014. The ‘Übermensch’ as a Social and Political Task: A Study in the Continuity of Nietzsche’s Political Thought. In Nietzsche as Political Philosopher, ed. Barry Stocker and Manuel Knoll, 239–266. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Landa, Ishay. 2020. Marx, Nietzsche, and the Contradictions of Capitalism. In Nietzsche and Critical Social Theory: Affirmation, Animosity, and Ambiguity, ed. Christine A.  Payne and Michael J.  Roberts, 147–172. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Lawler, Kristin. 2020. Labor’s Will to Power: Nietzsche, American Syndicalism, and the Politics of Liberation. In Nietzsche and Critical Social Theory: Affirmation, Animosity, and Ambiguity, ed. Christine A.  Payne and Michael J. Roberts, 173–207. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Leiter, Brian. 2019. Moral Psychology with Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Losurdo, Domenico. 2008. Stalin: Storia e critica di una leggenda nera. Rome: Carocci. ———. 2021. Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel. Translated by Gregor Benton. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Lukács, György. [1954] 2021. The Destruction of Reason. Translated by Peter Palmer. London: Verso Books. Marcuse, Herbert. [1955] 1966. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1969. An Essay on Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press. Marx, Karl. [1867] 1975–2005. Capital, Volume I. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 35. New York; Moscow; London: International Publishers; Progress Publishers; Lawrence and Wishart. Mearsheimer, John J. 2014. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. New  York: W. W. Norton & Company.

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Miyasaki, Donovan. 2022. (NI) Nietzsche’s Immoralism: Politics as First Philosophy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Morgenthau, Hans J. [1948] 2006. Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Peace and Power. Edited by Kenneth W. Thompson and W. David Clinton. Boston: McGraw-Hill Education. Mouffe, Chantal, and Ernesto Laclau. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Müller-Lauter, Wolfgang. 1999. Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of his Philosophy. Translated by David J.  Parent. Urbana: University of Illinois. Owen, David. 2002. Equality, Democracy, and Self-Respect: Reflections on Nietzsche’s Agonal Perfectionism. Journal of Nietzsche Studies 24: 113–131. Payne, Christine A., and Michael J.  Roberts, eds. 2020. Nietzsche and Critical Social Theory: Affirmation, Animosity, and Ambiguity. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Plato. 1997. Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Schopenhauer, Arthur. [1818] 2020. The World as Will and Representation, Volume I. Translated by and edited by Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schrift, Alan D. 1999. Respect for the Agon and Agonistic Respect. New Nietzsche Studies 3 (1/2): 129–144. Schutte, Ofelia. 1984. Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche without Masks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1988. Nietzsche, Mariátegui, and Socialism: A Case of ‘Nietzschean Marxism’ in Peru? Social Theory and Practice 14 (1): 71–85. Shaw, Tamsin. 2007. Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Steinberg, Mark D. 2002. Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Taylor, Seth. 1990. Left-Wing Nietzscheans: The Politics of German Expressionism: 1910–1920. New York: Walter de Gruyter. Thomas, Richard Hinton. 1983. Nietzsche in German Politics and Society: 1890–1918. Dover, NH: Manchester University Press. Waltz, Kenneth N. [1979] 2010. Theory of International Politics. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Williams, Bernard. 2005. In the Beginning was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument. Edited by Geoffrey Hawthorn. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Yeritsian, Gary. 2020. Marxism, Anarchism, and the Nietzschean Critique of Capitalism. In Nietzsche and Critical Social Theory: Affirmation, Animosity, and Ambiguity, ed. Christine A.  Payne and Michael J.  Roberts, 208–225. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

CHAPTER 3

Nietzsche’s All Too Moralist Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism

1   The Law of Manu: The Foundations of Political Philosophy in Holy Lies The image of politics as human enhancement in the book of Manu mirrors, in many ways, Nietzsche’s earlier models of education, domestication, and breeding. However, insufficient attention has been paid to their differences and to the way those differences reflect a change in Nietzsche’s political aim and ideal. His political philosophy is moving beyond the identification of the material causal conditions of merely stronger types in the animalistic sense and toward a politics of specifically healthy types in the distinctly human sense of a manifold soul of diverse, complex drives. Many commentators have remarked upon the ambivalence of Nietzsche’s comments about the law of Manu, but few have noted the way this mirrors his increasing ambivalence toward his own earlier depiction of higher types and their production, an increasing doubt in the efficacy of either education or noble forms of morality for producing higher types that are healthy rather than merely strong, whose happiness rests on stable, sustainable internal conditions of wellbeing rather than upon the noble’s contingent, relative, and ultimately fragile conditions of class superiority.

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Most readers follow Nietzsche’s lead, focusing on the differences he draws in The Anti-Christian1 between Christian morality and the law of Manu, but the more enlightening contrast is that of Manu with noble morality. The most striking difference: while noble morality begins with the equation of nobility with truthfulness, Manu begins with a holy lie, justified, Nietzsche tells us, because unlike in Christianity, these dishonest means serve an admirable end: The fact that “holy” purposes are lacking in Christianity is my objection to its means. Only bad purposes: poison, slander, negation of life, hatred of the body, the degradation and self-violation of humans through the concept of sin,—consequently its means are bad as well.—I get the opposite feeling when I read the law book of Manu. (A 56)

Contrast this to Nietzsche’s initial characterization of noble morality, in which the good identify themselves, first, in their “superiority of power,” as “the rich,” “the possessors” and, second, as “‘the truthful’…in contrast to the deceitful common man” (GM I.5). The birth of noble morality is a natural accident of environment, resources, and conquest. Because the happy and powerful necessarily define goodness, there is a fortunate coincidence of the values of the political order with the order of the soul that initially makes legitimacy unnecessary; for only the politically impotent slave class has an incentive to object to their authority. However, in the law of Manu, legitimacy is not, like noble morality, a happy accident. It is the conscious founding of a political order. And in a willed political order, legitimacy must be produced over time. It does not, as it did for the nobles, exist from the start. It can only be imposed by force or with the assistance of the noble lie. Consequently, the practice of political philosophy as Nietzsche now understands it, the commanding and legislating of new values that will structure a future social-political order, must begin with an act of injustice: the imposition of as yet illegitimate values. That is, at the end of the day, all that Nietzsche means when he tells us new philosophers must be commanders and legislators: they must found a political order, and to do so is 1  I translate Der Antichrist throughout as The Anti-Christian to underscore its critical focus on the Pauline tradition, in contrast to Christ whose practice is harmless, “not a believing but a doing, above all a not-doing-much, a different being” (A 39), even beneficial and this-worldly, since the “kingdom of heaven” is achieved as “a state of the heart—not something lying ‘above the earth’ or coming ‘after death’” (A 34).

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to impose values that have not yet, through their consequences, been justified. We should keep in mind, of course, that every already existing political order was also founded in similar noble lies and acts of illegitimate power, so the question is not whether we should risk the injustice of imposing an illegitimate political order, for that is already the case, but whether we should risk continued greater injustice by not preferring, over preserving the current order, to impose a new political system that is more likely in the future to become and remain legitimate. The “holy purpose” in the case of Manu is to produce a lasting moral and political order of rank among social castes: The central point, the fundamental difference between it and every type of Bible: it lets the noble classes, the philosophers and the warriors, stand above the crowd; noble values everywhere, a feeling of perfection, saying yes to life, a triumphant sense of well-being both for its own sake and for the sake of life,—the sun shines over the entire book. (A 56)

The laws of Manu are, then, put in place to create a social and political hierarchy. But that hierarchy, in turn, has as its ultimate goal the promotion of deeply affirmative human types. Like Nietzsche, the laws of Manu pursue the holy purpose of consciously, systematically manufacturing individuals who are capable of amor fati.2 This is in marked contrast to the development of noble morality, in which the good fortune of a barbaric conquering people leads them to accidental and ultimately precarious power, wealth, and happiness—a happiness that in turn produces its political order as an aftereffect, in turn producing the noble type and morality as further aftereffects. Nietzsche is here admiring the law of Manu’s use of politics to reverse engineer the noble type from its accidental natural origins. In other words, it is a model of exactly the task Nietzsche has, in his late work, assigned to philosophers: creating, commanding, and legislating. The law of Manu is, for Nietzsche, a paradigmatic work of political philosophy: a political philosophy beyond good and evil, designed to retroactively produce its own legitimacy in the higher types it generates, rather than, as formal political

2  Contrast Berkowitz’s interpretation of this passage as an aestheticizing of politics (2003, 1143–1144). Such aestheticist readings force his late politics to conform to his early nihilistic idealism (NI 2).

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philosophy does, establishing its legitimacy in advance by appeal to foundational moral principles. What, precisely, is the lie that founds Manu? Nietzsche’s description of the content of those laws suggests they are far from falsehoods. The lawbook is, in fact, a record of facts: “it summarizes the experience, shrewdness, and experiments in morality of many centuries, it draws a conclusion, it creates nothing new” (A 57). We should wonder at that last claim; if Manu is founded in a lie, then surely it produces something new. There is no specific lie in the content of the laws. The lie is, at bottom, that of morality as such—the presentation of the laws as obligations, the false implication that they are, and that there are, moral truths. Although their content is factual, a summary of experience, of “truth slowly and expensively acquired…the richest and completest harvest from the ages of experimentation and bad experience,” nevertheless their form is false. They are presented not as truths of socially useful practice but as obligating norms: The way that a slowly and expensively acquired truth becomes authoritative is fundamentally different from the way that this truth would be proven. A book of law never describes the uses, the reasons, and the casuistry in the prehistory of a law: this would make it lose its imperative tone, the “thou shalt,” the presupposition for being obeyed. (A 57)

The purpose of this lie, the reason for disguising useful social experience as obligating moral truth, is to produce precisely the kind of political legitimacy that Nietzsche hopes to produce with his own political philosophy. The purpose is to prevent the question of legitimacy from ever even being raised, by producing individuals who bear the values of their political order in their deepest psychology, in the very structure of their character and order of their drives: What now needs to be prevented at all cost is any further experimentation, the continuation of values in a fluid state, scrutiny, selection, and criticism of values in infinitum. A double wall is set up against this: first: revelation, the claim that the reasoning behind the law does not have a mortal provenance, has not been slowly and painstakingly looked for and discovered, but instead had a divine origin, arriving whole, complete, without history, a gift, a miracle, simply communicated…. And second: tradition, which is to say the claim that the law existed from time immemorial, that it is irreverent to cast

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doubt on it, a crime against the ancestors. The authority of the law is grounded in the theses: God gave it, the ancestors lived by it. (A 57)

What is crucial in this passage is not the particular religious and moral content of the laws, but their universal, moral realist form. They are presented not as facts of experience, products of long social experimentation, whose value rests on their utility to a particular population. No, they are “not of mortal provenance” and, consequently, have no history or genealogy. They have “existed from time immemorial,” and so must not be the products of particular civilizations but truths that can be imposed on any civilization. The laws are presented as political first principles that justify in advance the political order they produce, rather than treating justification as something to be achieved in the future, as the outcome and consequence of that order. It is the holy lie of all political philosophy as traditionally practiced—the pretense that political philosophy begins in principles, not in power, that morality precedes and founds politics. So, when we are told that the twin holy lies of Manu are “revelation” and “tradition,” we must avoid the easy assumption that such founding falsehoods are characteristic only of premodern political orders. On the contrary, Nietzsche is identifying the lies that must found any new, consciously created and imposed value system: the lies of morality, moral discourse, and moral philosophy. Revelation is the lie that there are moral truths at all, real features of the world, waiting to be discovered, that will legitimize authority. Tradition is the lie that a social order can ever be legitimized in advance—the pretense that the work of moral and political philosophy is a purely theoretical task that can be gotten out of the way before politics even begins, rather than requiring the successful political production of subjects who continually affirm the political order that produced them. But why are these lies necessary? For the simple reason that those who must accept a new social-political order are not themselves products of that order. If a state can only become legitimate by producing a harmony between its own values and that of its subjects, the original subjects of any new value-system are necessarily at odds with it, making either force or manipulation necessary. Even Nietzsche’s ideal of healthy agency which in principle coincides with happiness and should be in everyone’s rational interest is only abstractly so. Precisely to the degree that it is a health higher than most possess, it could only be concretely desirable to the future types it will generate. It is not, then, in the direct rational interest

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of those upon whom it must be imposed, since they will not directly benefit; their core character type and basic level of health has already been determined by their past social and political condition. But the law of Manu is grounded in lies in another sense. It lies not only in asserting the truth of moral realism to justify imposing an as-yet illegitimate political order. It also lies in pretending that it is a morality rather than a politics, presenting itself as conforming to an existing natural order rather than artificially producing a new one. It is only a “so-called morality, the breeding of a particular race and type” (TI VII.3). This is, again, why Manu rather than animal breeding becomes Nietzsche’s final model of human enhancement: it is a perfect historical example of the distinctly immoralist political philosophy he is trying to develop, one that, against the entire philosophical tradition, completely reduces moral practice to a means of politics and moral philosophy to a misguided political philosophy that mistakenly believes in the efficacy of moral persuasion. Given Nietzsche’s treatment of Manu, as well as his newfound preoccupation in The Anti-Christian with the Platonic “holy lie,” we might well wonder whether he has intentionally disguised his political philosophy as a moral one. Perhaps he wants to deceive his readers into thinking, against his core philosophical commitments, that immoralism is just a modest variant of moral naturalism and that his aristocratism is really of the conservative kind—not an experiment that must prove itself in practice, but a moral command derived from nature and the historical precedent of nobler ancient peoples, in other words, from revelation and tradition. This problem of authorial deception in Nietzsche is one we have already seen in the Genealogy. A similar worry plagues his discussion of the law of Manu. There are two strikingly different accounts. The account we have just examined is found in The Anti-Christian, where Nietzsche simultaneously enacts the deceptive methodology he describes. In contrast, an earlier account in the Twilight of the Idols serves as a corrective to the self-implicating aspects of that later one. Just as, in the Genealogy, Nietzsche misleadingly takes the viewpoint of the sovereign individual and the nobles (NI 2.3, 6.3), in The Anti-Christian he describes Manu from its creators’ point of view, without distinguishing a distinct viewpoint about those laws. Taken at face value, The Anti-Christian approvingly describes Manu as a traditional rather than radical aristocratism, asserting that aristocratic politics is justified by conformity to a natural order, that its class distinctions directly reflect of natural categories:

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Caste-order, the most supreme, domineering law, is just the sanction of a natural order, natural lawfulness par excellence—chance and “modern ideas” have no sway over it. In every healthy society, three mutually conditioning physiological types separate out and gravitate in different directions, each one having its own hygiene, its own area of work, its own feelings of perfection and field of mastery. Nature, not Manu, separates out predominantly spiritual people from people characterized by muscular and temperamental strength from a third group of people who are not distinguished in either way, the mediocre,—the latter being the great number, the first being the exceptions. (A 57)

Here we see a confusing conflation of Nietzsche’s own view with the self-­ presentation of Manu’s laws. True, Nietzsche believes that “caste-order” is in some sense a “natural” order—as he makes clear with his interjection about “modern ideas.” However, he agrees only in the general sense that nature is “the will to power,” a tendency toward resisting activity that has hierarchy not as a teleological aim but as an accidental consequence.3 It is not, however, Nietzsche’s view that nature conveniently organizes itself into three eternal, immutable human types. That is not even the view of Manu’s creators; that is part of the holy lie that disguises generations of experience about the social utility of such castes as “revelation” and “tradition,” the false pretense that this artificial political order is not an illegitimate imposition but a moral obligation derived from nature. In Nietzsche’s analysis of Manu, we find a surprising—and given the common moral naturalist misreading of his politics, enlightening—suggestion: that conservative aristocratism, in its claim that inequality is sanctioned by God or nature, is little more than a holy lie upon which radical aristocratic orders, which produce artificial social hierarchies, are always founded. That Manu’s caste system is not in fact a reflection of the natural order, but an aristocratic politics posing as morality and a radicalism posing as conservatism, should be clear from the context of the passage alone. Nietzsche opens the entire section, as we have seen, with the assertion that the law of Manu is a lie, but with a holy purpose: “If you measure the Christian goal against the goal of the law book of Manu—if you examine these starkly antithetical goals under a strong light—you will catch the unholiness of the means Christians use in flagrante” (A 57). He then 3  Contrast Drochon, who takes this presentation at face value: “as Nietzsche portrays it, caste society is something historically objective and natural, and not simply a subjective projection of his own desires” (2016, 91).

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underlines the dishonesty of its means: the way the laws erect a “two-fold wall” of revelation and tradition against any questions about their legitimacy. He then explains the purpose of this deception and why that purpose is “holy”: To identify some life as the proper one (which is to say one that has been proven through immense and highly filtered experiences) and to prevent people from becoming conscious of it: to achieve a perfect automatism of the instinct,—this is the presupposition of every type of mastery, of every type of perfection in the art of life. To prepare a book of law in the style of Manu means to give a people the right to become master one day, to become perfect,—to aspire to the highest art of life. To this end, it must be made unconscious: this is the goal of every holy lie. (A 57)

Ironically, Nietzsche’s declaration that its caste order is a natural one immediately follows this passage about why the law of Manu must be made unconscious and why its origins in “highly filtered experiences” and social utility must be forgotten. As in the Genealogy, he simultaneously warns us of the deception that he is participating in, playfully tempting the reader to conflate Manu’s projected worldview with his own. In stark contrast, his critical opinion of Manu in Twilight of the Idols could not be clearer. There it is, like Nietzsche’s own immoralist politics, only a “so-called morality” (TI VII.3). It is not a morality at all, not even a “natural lawfulness” that is the “sanction of the natural order,” as it purports to be. Instead, “this law sets the task of breeding no fewer than four races at once: a priestly race, a warrior race, a merchant and agricultural race, and finally a servant race, the Sudras.” These races are not natural categories to which the law conforms. For they cannot exist before the laws of Manu if they are bred into existence by those very laws. They are, on the contrary, not natural kinds but new psychological types manufactured by the political system created through those laws. Manu is not a morality but a politics, an aristocratic radicalism that, unlike conservative aristocratism, creates a new social order rather than protects an old one, and that seeks to legitimize its authority through the types it brings into existence, rather than by appeal to a foundational moral naturalism that justifies its caste-order in advance. Note that this leaves open the question of whether Manu successfully does so, whether the members of the castes it produces will continually

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affirm its values and its political authority. Manu is merely an attempt at aristocratical radicalism, at political legitimization through breeding. The same, of course, applies to Nietzsche’s own attempt: we can accept his reduction of moral philosophy to political philosophy, his view that the ends of “so-called morality” can only be achieved and legitimized through politics, and still deny that his own attempt succeeds, that his imagined aristocratic order would in fact produce agents who would continually affirm and legitimize its authority. The Anti-Christian’s account of Manu is written as if for an audience of its subjects: we are not allowed behind the curtain of its holy lies. In Twilight, in contrast, we go directly behind the scenes of this politics beyond “good and evil”—we see the political reasoning behind its instrumental use of morality, its moral claims about the natural foundation of the castes and the divine origins of the laws. For the same reason, we also see Nietzsche’s objections more clearly. If we insist on reading The Anti-­ Christian’s account without careful attention to Nietzsche’s ventriloquist-­ like presentation, we are forced to the improbable conclusion that he wholeheartedly approves. There is not, after all, a single word of criticism against its castes, laws, or their consequences. However, from Twilight’s account, we know that conclusion is false.4 On the contrary, from Manu “we learn that the concept of ‘pure blood’ is anything but harmless” (TI VII.4). Far from endorsing Manu’s treatment of the Chandala, Nietzsche describes its methods as “terrible”: “the only way it was able to render these people harmless, to make them weak, was to make them sick.” Its methods are, in other words, identical to the priestly cures of slavish Christian morality that he has just criticized in the preceding passage’s final line: “To put the matter physiologically: when struggling with beasts, making them sick might be the only way to make them weak. The church understood this: it has ruined people, it has weakened them,—but it claims to have ‘improved’ them” (TI VI.2). The entire section is, after all, titled “The ‘Improvers’ of Mankind.” Its entire purpose is to contrast the morality of so-called improvement, which harms rather than improves, from the so-called morality of breeding, which unlike morality can actually improve, but only by producing superior types 4  On Nietzsche’s ambivalence toward Manu, see Thomas Brobjer (1998) and Andreas Urs Sommer (1999). For an opposing view, see Dombowsky (2001).

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rather than changing existing ones. Nietzsche does endorse Manu as a politics of breeding rather than a morality of improvement, but that is an endorsement only of its general form and means, not its specific content and aims. And he is explicit in his rejection of Manu’s failure. Its goal is to breed stable, complimentary social types, but the Chandala is proof that its project has failed: “the non-bred human people, the hodgepodge human being, the Chandala” (TI VII.3). The Chandala is concrete proof that Manu failed to successfully incarnate its values in the agency of its subjects, proof that its order of rank is not, in fact, sanctioned by nature but resisted by it.5 “Nothing outrages our feelings more than these protective measures of Indian morality,” Nietzsche says, underlining that, like the priestly cures of slave morality, they are not “protective” at all; they do not exist to preserve the types bred through the caste system, but to destroy the evidence of its failure: the evidence that it is the imposition of politics rather than the expression of nature.6 The Laws of Manu are intended, then, to serve as a flawed model of Nietzsche’s politics of breeding, a failed experiment from which Nietzsche hopes to learn. Unlike the lucky accident of noble morality that devolved into the slave’s victory, Manu consciously attempts to reverse engineer the nobles from their material conditions: to reproduce rather than conserve a superior aristocracy. And against Nietzsche’s early optimism about cultural, educational, and moral means of enhancement, Manu’s methods are consistent with his later recognition that human character is formed through social-political production, not moral persuasion.

5  For the same reason, the non-class of the “lumpenproletariat,” the non-bred remainder of capitalism, is proof that its aristocratic project of breeding classes has failed. However, it is also reason to suspect that any solution to capitalism that ignores or downplays the importance of that remainder must also fail. Nietzsche’s master morality is defeated by the priestly segment of the aristocratic class rather than by the slave class precisely because failed aristocracies produce not revolutionary classes but broken and weakened fragments of peoples. A class-revolution must build a class, produce a people, not presuppose one. But then it must build it precisely from the broken. 6   Berkowitz overlooks that Manu fails on the Nietzschean ground he emphasizes: “Nietzsche’s preference for the Manu Code is its valuation of preservation over destruction” (2003, 1138). But that the Chandala is the “non-bred person” proves its destructiveness. Nietzsche’s distinction between “breeding” and “taming” contrasts essentially destructive and constructive forms of human transformation: empowering or weakening, selecting in or out, affirming and preserving or negating and eliminating types (Miyasaki 2014).

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However, Manu fails to the degree that it generates its noble order of rank only through the continual reproduction of the Chandala, an ignoble remainder that endangers the entire social order and can only be dealt with through the revival of slavish moral means that weaken and harm rather than improve.7 Manu willfully repeats the same mistake noble morality committed by accident: it creates material social-political conditions that guarantee the continued existence of slave morality and, ultimately, the defeat of noble morality.

2   Meaningful Suffering: Nietzsche’s Failed Solution to the Legitimacy Problem If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without ascending it, the work would have been permitted. —Franz Kafka, “Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and the True Way”

This, then, is the dilemma Manu poses for Nietzsche’s politics: how can he follow its model of aristocratic radicalism, the social-politically engineered reproduction of higher types, without reproducing its failed result: the reproduction of the slave? Nietzsche’s mistaken conclusion is that he cannot. Rather than try to produce nobles without slaves, he must integrate the slaves into his political order in way that does not, as in the Roman Empire’s suppression of Christianity and Manu’s treatment of the Chandala, lead to slave morality and revolt. The central question of Nietzschean politics consequently becomes: how create slaves who do not want to revolt? And, recalling that political legitimacy is only attained through the production of subjects whose values mirror those of their social order, this leads to a second question: how create a state in which slavery can become legitimate? It is a disturbing question, and it hinges upon a very dubious assumption: that aristocratic conditions are necessary for the production of higher types. It is an assumption Nietzsche has maintained since his earliest works and never rigorously defends. As we’ll see in Chap. 8, Sect. 2, it is also 7  Contrast Conway: “Nietzsche does not personally advocate the caste system developed by Manu, but he fully endorses the willed practice of political exclusion, which Manu’s system was designed to convey” (1996, 34). However, Nietzsche believes aristocracies must make the underclass’s suffering meaningful, while here he emphasizes Manu’s failure to make the excluded harmonious with the social whole.

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utterly mistaken. Nietzsche’s own final commitments, in particular his psychology of the will to power as resistance for its own sake, will undermine that assumption. But for now, our question is whether he successfully solves the problem as he has posed it. He does not do so, and for a very simple reason: because he fails to distinguish the social-political conditions of animal health from those of human health, he also fails to recognize that the former are completely incompatible with the latter. Nietzsche’s ideal of health is, as we have seen, a distinctively human kind based in the crucial difference between human and animal nature—the internalization of brute animal instincts into a manifold unity, a richly diverse hierarchy, of socially reconstituted drives. The nobles who found morality, in contrast, “return to the innocent conscience of the wild beast” (GM I.11). Although they create a political order that makes possible the development of civilization, the sovereign individual, and the human form of health, the nobles do not instantiate human health in its highest form. They share with that ideal a fundamental positivity; their values are an affirmation of self rather than the reactive negation of another, and their characters are formed by a well-ordered hierarchy of drives that successfully converts values into action. But that is only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition of human health. Human health includes nobility, strong, positively grounded agency, but it is not reducible to it. Recall that human health’s fundamental difference from animal health is that it maximizes the feeling, rather than quantity, of power (NI 5.2), and does so along two dimensions: one’s feeling of power in relation to external resistances and one’s feeling of power in the relation of the drives to one another. The former dimension, health as strength, shares with animal health the condition of a strong drive hierarchy, but departs from animal health in that it is measured not by domination of one’s environment but by the feeling of power achieved in the activity of resisting worthy, proportionately equal obstacles. The latter dimension—health as the manifold soul, a complexity of drives that are in tension but not contradictory—is completely unique to human health, the primary difference between Nietzsche’s higher types and the historical nobles, paragons of drive simplicity rather than complexity. Consequently, Nietzsche’s theory of aristocratic politics begins with a catastrophic error: he promotes the material social-political conditions for the production of noble types in the sense of animal strength. But the

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pre-­human noble type is not merely different from Nietzsche’s ideal of human health; it is the very source of the failure of noble morality, the ultimate material cause of slave morality’s victory over noble morality. His politics is doomed from the very start to simply regenerate the slavish type, its morality and, ultimately, its victory. Nietzsche’s politics of aristocratic radicalism, following the method of the laws of Manu, transforms accidental material conditions that historically produced noble moralities into legislated ones, a political order to be realized at every level of social institution and authority, including the political, legal, religious, and educational: The philosopher as we understand him, we free spirits—, as the man with the most comprehensive responsibility, whose conscience bears the weight of the overall development of humanity, this philosopher will make use of religion for his breeding and education work, just as he will make use of the prevailing political and economic situation. (BGE 61)

As in the case of his political model, the laws of Manu, we see that culture, religion, and morality are reduced to political means, and philosophers, even in their cultural role as writers and thinkers, have a principally political function: If individuals from such a noble lineage are inclined, by their high spirituality, towards a retiring and contemplative life, reserving for themselves only the finest sorts of rule (over exceptional young men or monks), then religion can even be used as a means of securing calm in the face of the turmoil and tribulations of the cruder forms of government, and purity in the face of the necessary dirt of politics. This is how the Brahmins, for instance, understood the matter. (BGE 61)

In other words, Nietzsche is not creating a morality through which to influence politics; he believes that his future philosophers, like the Brahmins, practice politics or “forms of government” in a higher or less “crude” sense, preferring “only the finest sorts of rule” which, it turns out, consist of “legislating,” that is, identifying the values according to which society should be politically and legally ordered, as well as “commanding,” since the very activity of philosophy is the true legislative branch of politics, and the obedient conversion of its commands into religious principles, laws, or social institutions merely the work of an inferior

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executive branch. Just as in the Genealogy, it is ultimately the priest who rules and truly practices politics, while the noble merely obeys and serves. Just as in Manu, it is the Brahmins, not the king, who are the true rulers, since they produce the values that the king obediently enforces in the form of law.8 Moreover, as we saw in the case of Manu, this makes them the true originators, not only of the laws but of the entire social order, since the laws are designed first and foremost to produce an order of rank, an organization of the populace in the service of producing an aristocratic class system. That class system creates, as in the case of the historical nobles (NI 7.1), the material conditions for the noble type: a constant pathos of distance, a constantly reinforced feeling of superiority over a lower order that establishes the noble’s fundamentally self-affirming character. However, class inequality is also the source of the problem of slave morality, for the very same social organization that conditions the self-­ affirming nature of the noble simultaneously conditions the resentful, hateful, and envious character of the slave. Consequently, any politics that recreates the original material conditions for breeding the noble type necessarily also recreates the material conditions of slavishness and the slave revolt. So, how can Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism avoid simply repeating noble morality’s historical failure? On close inspection, the failure of noble morality was always inevitable. The nobles are closer to animals than humans, their brute strength rests upon an unreflective, outwardly directed, simple hierarchy of homogenous instincts that leads to the conquest of their environment. Their happiness, their feeling of power, is based in their ability to dominate the external world: Let us not be deceived about how every higher culture on earth has begun! Men whose nature was still natural, barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, predatory people who still possessed an unbroken strength of will and lust for power threw themselves on weaker, more civilized, more peaceful 8  Maudemarie Clark denies this is Nietzsche’s view as “too silly for words” (2015, 168). The assumption that a major philosopher could never hold views too silly for words is, if convenient to her esoterism, a strikingly silly one. Nietzsche does not mean philosophers could have institutional political power. They would promote values that become culturally victorious, so that everyone, including politicians, inadvertently obey them. His model is the Roman Empire, where Christian and Stoic emperors indirectly served values “legislated” by early Christian and Hellenistic philosophers.

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races of tradesmen perhaps, or cattle breeders; or on old and mellow cultures in which the very last life-force was flaring up in brilliant fireworks of spirit and corruption. The noble caste always started out as the barbarian caste. Their supremacy was in psychic, not physical strength,—they were more complete people (which at any level amounts to saying “more complete beasts”). (BGE 257)

In contrast, the sovereign individual introduces a very different kind of strength, along with a very novel kind of happiness: the uniquely human strength of self-conquest and self-mastery, and a uniquely human happiness grounded in the internal tension produced by a rich diversity of drives. The nobles’ feeling of power precariously depends not only on their superiority to the slaves but on the endless quantitative expansion of their power.9 In contrast to the refined happiness of human health, which is grounded in resistance and contest rather than conquest, the noble type requires conquest—indeed, ever greater conquests—to preserve its happiness.10 Like Manu, Nietzsche’s politics mimics the political structure of the historical nobles. In doing so, it grounds their happiness, their pathos of distance, on their superiority to the slaves rather than on their superiority to themselves. It is a political order designed to produce healthy animals rather than healthy humans, individuals who find the feeling of power and 9  A necessarily finite potential. Nietzsche’s ignorance of Marx is one of the greatest missed opportunities in the history of philosophy. Here his analysis borders upon Marx and Engels’s (1848) insight that capitalism—an economic system that turns the quantitative misunderstanding of will to power into a politically-imposed moral norm—must, in its tendency toward expansion, contradict the finite limit of geography and natural resources. 10  I have previously described the will to power as contest rather than conquest, as play for its own sake in contrast to games that, like work, subordinate play to achievement (NI 3–4). I now think the word “contest” is best abandoned as too bound up with ordinary concepts of competition—particularly since many agonistic readings conflate contest with competition, leading them to endorse liberal, meritocratic, and perfectionist versions of Nietzschean democracy. Play is independent of the slavish, negatively-tuned evaluation of measuring and scorekeeping—of the meritocratic aestheticism that simply shifts the moralistic notion of work from the economic to the cultural sphere. The task is not to turn life into fair competition but create a field of play, of life for life’s sake, protected from the compensatory pleasures of all games, whether political, moral, or cultural. Rather than turn politics into an agon, we should lift agonistic play out of the political sphere, using politics to protect the conditions of play from the constraints of games. On the centrality to both Nietzsche and Marx of play in distinction from work, see Lawler (2020), Michael J.  Roberts (2020), and Dawn Herrera (2020).

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happiness in the domination of an inferior rather than in the domination of themselves. However, Nietzsche believes that this aristocratic ordering is unavoidable. It is necessary for human enhancement, since a belief in the validity of social hierarchy promotes the internal spiritual hierarchy that characterizes human health: Without the pathos of distance as it grows out of the ingrained differences between stations, out of the way the ruling caste maintains an overview and keeps looking down on subservient types and tools, and out of this caste’s equally continuous exercise in obeying and commanding, in keeping away and below—without this pathos, that other, more mysterious pathos could not have grown at all, that demand for new expansions of distance within the soul itself, the development of states that are increasingly high, rare, distant, tautly drawn and comprehensive, and in short, the enhancement of the type “man,” the constant “self-overcoming of man” (to use a moral formula in a supra-moral sense). (BGE 257)

However, he does not ask the crucial question: does inequality promote that “other” pathos of distance, the feeling of distance over myself, among the ruling caste or among the ruled? In his own history of morality, he tells us that the noble’s pathos of distance in relation to the slave led to the growth of the soul among the slaves, not the nobles: “the human soul became deep in the higher sense and turned evil for the first time” (GM I.6). Individuals whose sense of superiority depends on their established political and material supremacy, upon unquestioned, universally recognized class superiority will, on the contrary, feel absolutely no need for self-overcoming and enhancement. They will experience only satisfaction, complacency, and pride, not a “demand for new expansions of distance within the soul itself.”11 It is, consequently, noble morality’s good fortune that causes its downfall. The simple happiness found in class superiority necessitates the constant expansion of power. Unlike truly healthy types, whose happiness depends more on their self-relation than external relationships, the nobles have no capacity for independent happiness, the feeling of power in

11  Just as capitalism eliminates the competition that supposedly defines it, aristocracy eliminates the competition that produces the self-rule and independent form of self-respect that Nietzsche pretends define it. On this link between agonism, democracy, and self-respect, see Owen (2002).

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self-mastery.12 They can preserve their fragile happiness only through continual conquest. And this, in turn, means that the noble form of happiness found in crude animal strength and the pathos of distance has, as its necessary consequence, a constant increase in the exploitation and suffering of its slave class. But then the creation of the slave as a type is equally inevitable, for it follows from the very structure of noble strength and happiness that the slave’s psychology will be centered in envy, hatred, and resentment. Noble morality necessarily creates slave morality.13 Consequently, Nietzsche’s politics immediately encounters a profound obstacle. He has modeled his aristocratic radicalism on noble morality, calling for future reproduction of the social and political conditions of the genesis of the noble type. But doing so means enhancing humans not according to his own ideal of human health as the maximal feeling of the will to power as resistance, but according to the ideal of animal health as maximal power in conquest, which in turn guarantees the production of a new slave class and the regeneration of the material conditions that produce slave morality. If, as his own historical account demonstrates, the slave revolt in morality and the downfall of noble morality is ultimately produced by the material conditions of noble politics, how can Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism recreate the conditions of noble politics while avoiding its downfall? As Keith Ansell-Pearson asks, “To what extent is the cultivation of an aristocratic political discipline possible without at the same time giving rise to a politics of resentment?” (1994, 154). This is, recall, not just a practical question but one of political legitimacy. Since a legitimate state is produced after the fact through the production of subjects whose drive structure mirrors the order of values of the state, how can an aristocratic politics avoid producing anti-aristocratic 12  Nietzsche clearly draws on Hegel’s (1807) insight that the master is dependent because its measure of freedom—the slave’s obedience—lies outside itself. However, he inverts Hegel’s opposition of mind as essentially centered to matter as decentered (1837, 17). For the slaves’ self-affirmation through negation of an outside is also the essence of idealism, best illustrated in their invention of an ideal ego that chooses slave morality from freedom rather than material weakness. 13  As in Marx (1867), material social-political conditions aggravate class conflict—for Marx, capital’s demand for increased production, for Nietzsche, the nobles’ need for evergreater conquest. For both, individuals are the product of class position: capitalists are no more to blame for their exploitative behavior than nobles for their beastliness. Consequently, against Nietzsche’s hopes, in both, the sub-human happiness of the ruling class produces dehumanizing conditions for the rest, whose need for a truly human form of happiness makes revolt inevitable.

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subjects whose very existence, like the Chandala’s in relation to Manu, refutes its claim to legitimacy? In the end, what is aristocratic politics but a machine for the production of slave morality, and an engine for the eventual victory of slave morality? Nietzsche’s politics begins in materialist history, yet unlike Marx, he never directly addresses a basic fact that is utterly at odds with his entire project: the history of aristocratic politics is the history of the endless reproduction of slave morality, the endlessly repeated downfall of aristocracies. He insists on preserving the master–slave dichotomy, but as Ofelia Schutte insists, “To overcome nihilism, one must transcend all forms of dualism, not merely some of them” (1984, 190). Nietzsche’s mistaken solution to this dilemma is to insist that a political order can produce a legitimizing slave class, one that affirms the social hierarchy it serves. If that is possible, then the production of a slave class need not lead to the production of slave psychology. The slaves revolt, he assures us, not because they suffer too much, but because they suffer meaninglessly or without purpose. That is, after all, the secret of the success of slave morality; it does not end suffering but gives it sense: Except for the ascetic ideal: man, the animal man, had no meaning up to now. His existence on earth had no purpose; “What is man for, actually?”— was a question without an answer; there was no will for man and earth; behind every great human destiny sounded the even louder refrain “in vain!” This is what the ascetic ideal meant: something was missing, there was an immense lacuna around man,—he himself could think of no justification or explanation or affirmation, he suffered from the problem of what he meant. Other things made him suffer too, in the main he was a sickly animal: but suffering itself was not his problem, instead, the fact that there was no answer to the question he screamed, “Suffering for what?” Man, the bravest animal and most prone to suffer, does not deny suffering as such: he wills it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. (GM III.28)

Nietzsche’s solution to the self-undermining nature of aristocratic politics is to create a politics that, unlike aristocratic conservatism, bestows meaning on the slaves’ suffering. Made meaningful, the slaves’ suffering will no longer be a fundamental objection to the political order that produces it; they will no longer have an incentive to question the legitimacy of that order, and, ultimately, no longer have an incentive to revolt, whether through moral or political means. And that, in turn, allows an aristocratic political order to preserve its legitimacy, indefinitely maintaining a

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complementary relation between the values of the social order and the values that structure the agency of its subjects. Nietzsche’s political philosophy is not, then, just one subjective political ideal among others, but one that strives to be more legitimate in its actual consequences, one intended to produce and maintain legitimacy.14 Nietzsche first hits upon this solution as early as Untimely Meditations, where he suggests that individuals of genius are not only intrinsically valuable but also instrumentally as a source of meaning in the lives of their inferiors. He tells those of us who cannot become his higher types to find happiness vicariously through their accomplishments: “How can your life, the individual life, receive the highest value, the deepest significance? How can it be least squandered? Certainly only by your living for the good of the rarest and most valuable exemplars” (UM III.6). Many lesser individuals are, he says, “destined for the task of rendering this assistance and only in subjection to such a destiny do they come to feel they have a duty and that their lives possess significance and a goal” (UM III.6). Those of us excluded from the direct political conditions of happiness enjoyed by the aristocratic elite can still find satisfaction by identifying with that elite, living vicariously through their victories, taking satisfaction in our small contribution to their glory.15 When Nietzsche turns to this theme again in the Genealogy, the solution is unchanged—a warning sign, given how dramatically his core philosophical commitments have changed since that early idealist, aestheticist 14  As Conway points out, Nietzsche’s politics is not a naïve voluntarism, “fatuously entrusting the future of humankind to a titanic act of übermenschlich will” (Conway 1996, 116). 15  Nietzsche’s program shares this picture of meaning not only with Christianity, in which we find meaning vicariously through a future, other-worldly self, but also with Sartrean existentialism (1943), where present meaning depends vicariously on projects realized only in the future by a future self, a promissory note of significance infinitely delayed because never finally realizable, making Sartre’s notion of l’engagement essentially identical to, rather than an oxymoronic, secular variation of, Kierkegaardian faith. Every failed attempt at replacing religious faith with a secular one depends on this swindle of artificial eternity, making the ultimate value of present activity depend instrumentally on the future. Compare, more recently, Martin Hägglund: “Secular faith is committed to persons and projects that may be lost: to make them live on for the future” (2019, 6). For the definitive critique of this tradition, see Albert Camus: “To the extent to which I hope, to which I worry about a truth that might be individual to me, about a way of being or creating, to the extent to which I arrange my life and prove thereby that I accept its having a meaning, I create for myself barriers between which I confine my life. I do like so many bureaucrats of the mind and heart who only fill me with disgust and whose only vice, I now see clearly, is to take man’s freedom seriously” (1942, 57).

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period (NI 2–3). Nietzsche still believes that aristocratic politics can not only produce enhanced human types but also imbue the population as a whole with purpose and meaning. In his later work, the solution differs only slightly, in that he now directly combines these two elements: the production of higher types just is the purpose that his politics gives to society as a whole.16 Once society is organized around the goal of creating an aristocratic class populated by ever healthier, happier, and more accomplished individuals, then every individual, including those not fortunate enough to belong to the elite, will find vicarious meaning in contributing to their production: But the essential feature of a good, healthy aristocracy is that it does not feel that it is a function (whether of the kingdom or of the community) but instead feels itself to be the meaning and highest justification (of the kingdom or community),—and, consequently, that it accepts in good conscience the sacrifice of countless people who have to be pushed down and shrunk into incomplete human beings, into slaves, into tools, all for the sake of the aristocracy. Its fundamental belief must always be that society cannot exist for the sake of society, but only as the substructure and framework for raising an exceptional type of being up to its higher duty and to a higher state of being. (BGE 258)

These notorious passages are often taken to be expressions of indifference to the wellbeing and fate of the overwhelming majority. But they are, on the contrary, his recognition that his politics cannot succeed without that majority’s support; they are his attempt to harmonize the interest of the rule with that of the exceptions, by making those exceptions into a source of social meaning.17 In other words, Nietzsche fully recognizes that the existence of the many, of “kingdom” and “community,” must be justified not only to the political elite. Their existences must also be justified to

16  As Acampora notes, “Exceptional individuals cannot independently establish their own values and terms of excellence by dint of will…. New standards of excellence both need and receive their meaning from the broader community in which they abide” (2019, 140). 17  Nietzsche is admitting that, as long as deep social inequality remains, religion will remain a political necessity. The Übermensch is a noble lie intended to preserve the pacifying function of religion while avoiding its dangers.

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themselves, for only then will the elite be protected from resentment and revolt.18

3  Aristocratic Radicalism as Nihilistic Idealism: Meaning without Material Foundation There is hardly an intellectual weapon of political romanticism that Nietzsche did not forge, or at least sharpen. And yet he does not really belong to this movement…. Over against the befoggery of romantic thought he set the hardest, clearest, knowledge, the most rational scientific method. —Paul Tillich, The Socialist Decision

Notice, however, that this solution overlooks another problem. Even if aristocratic radicalism’s goal of enhancement provides a justifying purpose for suffering, successfully preventing the rise of slave morality, it only produces higher types in the noble form of health as strong agency, not in the more refined form of the healthy manifold soul. For the conditions of that higher kind of human health, the internalization of instinct and the development of self-mastery, are created only through the development of slave morality, specifically, development of the appreciation of internal resistance that separates the sovereign individual from the noble. So, Nietzsche’s political philosophy, even if successful, will fail to promote true human health, instead promoting mere animalistic strength in the form of well-­ ordered drives. At best, his solution might produce a legitimate aristocracy that continually reproduces the noble type—a strong, well-ordered, affirmative soul—while failing to produce higher kinds of health—the maximization of the qualitative feeling of power in a manifold, spiritualized form of strength, the self-mastery of agents constituted by a tension of well-­ ordered but diverse drives. More problematic, the possibility of such partial success—a lasting, legitimate aristocracy of nobility that fails to maximize human health—is directly at odds with Nietzsche’s commitment in his late works to a naturalistic theory of moral psychology in which human health has its basis in the will to power. It is incompatible in two ways. First, it is incompatible with the causal naturalism of the will to power, according to which human 18  Ansell-Pearson notes that Nietzsche’s politics “must give rise to permanent class conflict” (1994, 41), but not that Nietzsche recognizes and explicitly tries to address that problem, and that his attempted solution must fail.

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psychology—including agency, character, belief, and meaning—are effects rather than causes of the feelings of power, freedom, and affirmation. Second, it is incompatible with the will to power as a direct rather than instrumental affirmation of suffering, according to which human happiness is based in the feeling of resistance for its own sake, rather than as a means to some further teleological end. If we hold Nietzsche to his aristocratic solution to the problem of state legitimacy, we can do so only by rejecting one of the principal commitments of his mature philosophy. Recall that the possibility of amor fati depended on the possibility of affirming existence in its entirety, not only in isolation but in its interdependency with the entire history of every individual and event. Such a holistic affirmation of fate requires that suffering be affirmed as such, rather than as a mere means to some greater good. Consequently, for amor fati to be possible, it must be psychologically possible to find intrinsic value in certain forms of suffering (NI 3.2). Nietzsche’s psychology of the will to power asserts precisely this possibility, for it suggests that power is not a teleological good, justifying the suffering required for its achievement as means to that end. Instead, the feeling of power is an end in itself, making the very activity of resistance in relation to an object—a form of suffering in the broadest sense—an intrinsic source of pleasure (NI 3.3). It is only this theory of power—according to which individuals can take pleasure directly in suffering in relation to an object of resistance, directly enjoying the frustration of their activity and power and delighting in worthy opponents—that makes concretely possible Nietzsche’s ideal of a truly affirmative human type. To affirm existence completely, to love rather than merely accept fate, individuals must find themselves for the most part faced with challenges that are proportionate to their abilities, obstacles to which they are equal, against which they are able to continue acting and resisting. The material ground of affirmative values and human types is continual proportional equality of power between individuals and their external world, providing them with a feeling of power and freedom that will produce in them a truly affirmative character and the capacity to affirm their world in its entirely—including the political order that created them. In other words, even the underclass must achieve amor fati, for Nietzsche can prevent a new slave morality only if members of the underclass accept as the meaning of their own existence the production of ever higher exemplars of the elite. The true causal basis of political legitimacy is, then, the existence of material conditions that maximize agents’ power, producing not

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meaningful suffering but intrinsically satisfying forms of suffering. On Nietzsche’s own theory of motivation, a politics cannot produce amor fati simply by providing an external meaning or purpose for their suffering. It can only do so by transforming suffering into a positively conditioned form of will to power, the real joy of successful, resisting activity rather than the mere addition of an instrumental, theoretical, and moral justification for the concrete feeling of powerlessness. When Nietzsche insists in The Anti-Christian that the good is the feeling that power has increased, he is not making a normative claim but a causal one: humans find their existence good only given conditions that produce real feelings of freedom and power.19 Nietzsche’s proposed aristocratic radicalism would produce precisely the opposite for its underclass: a reverse pathos of distance, a constantly reactivated feeling of the vast negative difference in power between themselves and their privileged superiors. The supposed meaning provided by their political order—the knowledge that they are assisting in creating ever more perfect and happy exemplars of health among the elite—is only an imaginary condition of power. They merely imagine the elite’s health, joy, and success as their own. That is, on any psychological theory of human happiness, an extraordinarily fragile basis.20 On Nietzsche’s psychological theory, it is no basis at all. The ability of the underclass to identify with and affirm the aristocracy depends directly upon actual social power, not on their imagined instrumental relationship to power. The belief that their suffering is meaningful depends for its 19  This may pose problems for Marx’s solution to alienation. Nietzsche requires joyful play rather than merely meaningful labor. Although this suits Marx’s view that “to economize on labour time means to increase the amount of free time, i.e. time for the complete development of the individual” (1939, 593), it seems at odds with his later claim that socialism “remains in the realm of necessity” rather than achieving “the development of human energy which is an end in itself” (1894, 807). For Nietzsche, just as the need for the justification of existence is a symptom of, not solution to, nihilism, so the need to find labor meaningful may be a symptom of, not solution to, alienation. On whether Marx changed his view on this issue, see Jan Kandiyali (2014). 20  Compare Strong: “Such an attachment is the very basis of ressentiment. The lack of a dominating will on the part of the weak leads them to tie themselves psychically to the strong. Psychologically, this compensation is at the source of the genealogy of slave morality” (1999, 197). See also Schutte: “In a society or culture where everyone has to account for one’s value to a ‘higher’ authority, the possibility of emptiness and fragmentation will always stay with human beings…. The origin of the depreciation of human life, then, is in the need to make human life fit the expectations of a ‘superior’ authority” (1984, 192).

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maintenance on the concrete feeling of power found in a real capacity to successfully engage obstacles of resistance in their social and political relationships.21 But the precondition of the nobles’ pathos of distance is precisely the lack of any such capacity, the lack of even the feeling of power among the underclass. Ideology cannot override the natural, concrete foundations of human happiness, and so Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism is doomed to failure by his own psychological naturalism. Breeding an underclass that believes it exists for the purpose of achieving higher aristocratic types will lead inevitably to the recreation of slave psychology and, eventually, to the end of state legitimacy, a revolt against the hierarchical social order upon which the continuation of that legitimacy rests. So, the first problem is that if Nietzsche insists upon an aristocratic solution to the problem of state legitimacy, he can do so only by rejecting two central philosophical commitments in his final works: his naturalistic psychology of character and values and his theory of the good as the will to power. The second problem is that because aristocratic radicalism is incompatible with his psychological theory of the intrinsic value of power, it is also incompatible with his critique of nihilism and can be preserved only at the cost of regressing to his early works’ idealist roots in Schopenhauerian pessimism. The heart of Nietzsche’s critique of Christian morality as nihilism is his claim that Christian metaphysics devalues the actual world through the projection of another world defined negatively as its contradiction. Christian morality is nihilistic in the very specific sense that it actively promotes the value of this counter-reality as higher than the value of reality itself. By valuing “the characteristics of non-being, of nothingness” (TI III.6), such as eternity, immateriality, and changelessness, more highly than those of being, Christianity creates the false appearance that the natural world has no value, since its very nature contradicts all the qualities according to which value has been defined: “you rob reality of its 21  Consequently, Hegel’s state must exist before the psychological recognition supposed to lead to it. The master gains self-certainty through domination of the servant, while the servant gains it through domination of nature. But recognition does not come from domination but a concretely achieved relationship of equal resistance. Recognition is not the basis of the slave’s revolt but its outcome. This is also a problem for a contemporary politics of recognition or identity that ignores distribution and class: to hope that symbolic recognition of equality will cause material equality of social power is to, as Nietzsche says, confuse cause and consequence.

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meaning, value, and truthfulness to the extent you make up an ideal world” (EH Preface 2). As a result, the natural world can gain value only secondarily through its relation to that supposedly higher world, for the sake of which it can be affirmed only instrumentally: So, when Christian values collapse, this creates the false impression that the natural world lacks any value at all. Since it has lost the relative value it once held, it now falsely appears to need justification. That is the idealist swindle hidden behind any demand for significance or meaning: “the world might be far more valuable than we used to believe; we must see through the naivete of our ideals, and while we thought that we accorded it the highest interpretation, we may not even have given our human existence a moderately fair value” (WP 32, summer-fall 1888). That is the real core of nihilism: the belief that existence was ever in need of justification in the first place. And it is this need, this nihilism, that Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism intentionally recreates, supposedly in order to cure it. For Nietzsche’s politics legislates a social order expressly designed to produce a class, consisting of the great majority of its subjects, who experience their existence as a source of suffering without intrinsic value and so in need of justification. And just as the need for the justification of existence is symptomatic of an essentially failed, unjustified form of existence, so the need for the justification of a political order is symptomatic of an essentially failed, unjustified political order. So, we have already seen that rather than preventing slave psychology Nietzsche’s aristocratism reproduces it, ensuring the return of slave morality. We now discover that rather than overcoming the nihilism produced by Christianity’s decline, Nietzsche’s aristocratism would recreate the conditions of nihilism, politically engineering a vast nihilistic slave class, placating them with a new anti-natural morality, a new value system that negates reality—the underclass’s psychologically insupportable suffering—with the fantasy of a promise of a higher future world: ever-higher instantiations of human excellence that will retroactively justify the past, a legitimate state that must be eternally deferred since, if it were ever achieved, their very source of meaning would be lost. The overman, far from an “anti-Christ,” is just another Christ—or worse, another Paul. For the overwhelming majority, Nietzsche’s political project would not produce humans who love their fates but merely tolerate them in anticipation of an ideal future world toward which they endlessly labor.

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In other words, Nietzsche’s applied political program—if not his metapolitics and political theory—is a profound regression to his earliest work, in direct contradiction to the core commitments of his final works. An aristocratic politics is necessary to give meaning, purpose, and justification only if we accept, as the Schopenhauer-poisoned early Nietzsche did, that existence needs justification, that life has no intrinsic psychological value, such as the feeling of the will to power, that might make possible a love of fate independent of our suffering’s instrumental value to purportedly higher goals. We saw in the case of normative authority that if the order of society’s values corresponds with that of the character of its subjects, then a state is legitimate by default, since the need for legitimacy does not arise. Where a state is affirmed in fact and in practice, there is no need to justify it theoretically. The same is true of existence: if individuals find value in practice in the most basic conditions of their existence, then there is no need to justify their existence morally or politically through a theoretically imposed purpose. It is not the lack of meaning that produces nihilism but the belief in its necessity. Because Nietzsche’s politics is designed to justify human existence through the goal of higher types, it amounts to an abandonment of his theory of the will to power, along with its naturalistic resolution of the problem of morality and normative authority and a regression to his early nihilistic view that “the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon” (BT 5). Nietzsche’s likely reply to this criticism is that he is merely acknowledging that nihilism is the inevitable lot of the great majority. If higher human types can only be achieved through the political mechanism of class inequality, then only the higher types can be protected from nihilism, for only they have the political good fortune to enjoy the intrinsic source of existence’s value: power. If there is no other way to breed higher types than through an aristocratic order, then a state can never be fully legitimate; we can only legitimize the state to a greater degree through its affirmation by some, rather than all, of its subjects. Although a state becomes more legitimate to the degree it breeds a greater number or qualitatively higher instantiation of enhanced types, it can never be perfectly legitimate, since the legitimizing character of its higher types is possible only through the servitude of the underclass. If that is Nietzsche’s view, then noble lies do not only found every new order but remain a permanent necessity among its underclass; they must be continually persuaded that their existence is aesthetically justified by the

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higher types they instrumentally bring about. But this cannot be a successful source of their own affirmation of fate. The best of all possible worlds achieves amor fati only among the elite; for the underclass, it can provide only opiates, compensatory nihilist values propped on noble lies.22 There are two critical problems with this defense. First, Nietzsche’s belief in the necessity of an aristocracy for the breeding of higher types is based in his early nihilistic aestheticism about the value of existence and his middle period’s idealism about the effectiveness of cultural education, so it is only by acknowledging and accepting a return to those early positions that he can consistently insist upon this line of defense. Second, returning to his early idealism would not resolve the practical problem of legitimacy. Even as a moderately legitimate order, an aristocratic politics that depends on a nihilistic class supported by compensatory moral idealism is doomed to fail; its second-rate legitimacy will not last. On the first point, Nietzsche’s earliest argument for aristocracy as the only means for human enhancement is perhaps his strongest. In Human, All Too Human, he argues that great cultural achievements are possible only to individuals of leisure, and an abundance of leisure for a lucky few requires the reduction of the majority to beasts of burden. Leaving aside the profound historical limitations of that argument—technology, particularly automation, has vastly expanded the possible size of the leisure class— this argument entirely begs the question at hand. Only on Nietzsche’s early, abandoned view that existence must be justified aesthetically does it make sense to believe that human enhancement consists in the promotion of artistic genius and extraordinary cultural achievements. If, on the contrary, we hold Nietzsche to his later view that enhancement consists in the intrinsically valuable happiness found in the feeling of power, a feeling that depends not on comparative achievement but proportionately equal relations of resistance against worthy opponents, there is no longer any reason to believe a leisure class is necessary for breeding higher types. Indeed, as we have seen, the principal failing of Nietzsche’s politics is his assumption that reproducing the conditions of the historical noble’s animalistic health is sufficient for producing human health, when he has 22  Nadeem Hussain thinks fictionalism solves a similar puzzle. Higher types “are supposed to believe that things are valuable in themselves even though such beliefs are false,” yet “higher men are distinguished by their ability to face up to reality” (2007, 165). But the ruling class’s feeling of power is indeed intrinsically valuable, while fictions are needed only among the underclass.

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devoted his late work to articulating the profound differences between the two. Because human health does not consist of quantitative power or comparative greatness—whether in crude measures like political privilege or economic superiority or refined measures like artistic genius or philosophical insight—there is no longer any reason to assume a leisure class is necessary at all to the enhancement of humanity. Nietzsche does, in his later work, develop new arguments on behalf of aristocratic social orders. However, we have already seen that the principal one—that aristocratic societies produce the pathos of distance necessary to spiritual self-overcoming—fails because it neglects to distinguish the positive and negative forms of that pathos. For the underclass, the negative form of the pathos of distance—the feeling of inferiority, awareness of higher types—does indeed produce an incentive for self-overcoming, but that is precisely the class that aristocratic radicalism is structured to prevent from realizing a higher existence. Among the aristocracy, in contrast, the positive form of the pathos of distance generates, as Nietzsche demonstrates in the Genealogy, a complacent, self-assured complacency: a lack of incentive for self-overcoming. We’ll critically examine Nietzsche’s final arguments about aristocracy’s role in enhancement in more detail in Chap. 8. But it is, in the end, a residue of his earliest prejudices, a position he defends with questionable arguments based in philosophical commitments he has long abandoned. Ultimately, it does not matter whether those arguments succeed, since they would do so at too great a cost. If Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism requires a vast underclass that tolerates its fate only with the opiate of noble lies, then there is no longer any plausible sense in which that state can be said to be, to any degree, legitimate. To accept one’s utility to some compensatory social goal is not the same as affirming the legitimacy of the social order. Although the underclass might ignore their questions about the state’s legitimacy in order to preserve the meaning it gives to their suffering, they would still question it (just as we already do in existing radical aristocracies of the liberal-democratic variety). Indeed, they must do so, since as Nietzsche’s materialist psychology tells us, their characters are formed by their class position, grounded in hatred, resentment, and envy of their superiors. Nietzsche cannot have it both ways: either the slaves’ inferiority is rooted in a fundamentally slavish psychology, a deeply reactionary character type that will never accept the nobility’s happiness, no matter how thoroughly they are ideologically indoctrinated to believe it is the source

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of their own meaning, or he must insist that his political order would entirely thwart the development of slavish psychology, its education so successfully instilling in the underclass the nobles’ own values that they would share the noble character type of their masters. However, the latter is practically impossible, since it rests on his early idealistic picture of human enhancement through education and culture. It assumes an idealist view in which the underclass’s ideological training would overcome the material social-political conditions they inhabit— where persuasion and exhortation to accept their useful role for the sake of a higher end would outweigh the reactionary drives that constitute their personalities and deepest dispositions. Even if we pretend that is possible, the successful production of an underclass with a noble psychology would be a practical disaster. For then, instead of being driven by resentment, they would be driven by a noble desire for power, motivated to direct political revolt rather than the indirect revolt of slave morality. Admittedly, an underclass of individuals who fell somewhere in between these two extremes—neither thoroughly slavish nor noble, driven neither entirely by resentment nor by a desire for conquest—might be made sufficiently complacent by the ingrained lie of their instrumental value to their superiors. (This might, again, be the dominant character type in existing liberal-democratic variants of radical aristocracy.) They (or we) might be deeply discontented, but not enough to stridently condemn or vigorously resist the political order that created them. But if Nietzsche has correctly identified the foundation of human happiness in the feeling of the will to power, the meaning of their existence is false, and their social condition is not in fact rationally desirable. And that is a critical problem for Nietzsche’s attempt to make aristocratic radicalism a practical solution to the theoretical problem of legitimacy. Recall that the virtue of Nietzsche’s ideal of health is that it is not just one among many values that might be legitimized through political practice; it is also the very criterion for choosing among values. Since many ideals can in principle be legitimized in the same way, Nietzsche needs a practical way of persuading us to endorse the political production and legitimization of his preferred ideal over others. And he can only do so by claiming his ideal is more legitimate in degree, producing a greater degree of the affirmation of the political order over a greater span of time. However, if aristocratic radicalism can produce a state of at best tolerable existence for the majority, then there is no rational reason, no practically effective motive for us to try to produce such a state. Consequently,

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Nietzsche’s solution to the legitimacy problem fails in two ways in practice: it fails to prevent the production of a slavish type that will inevitably revolt against it, and—even if, by some lucky miracle, it never leads to a new slave revolt—it fails to offer any rational incentive for the majority of presently existing individuals to want to bring it about in the first place.

References Acampora, Christa Davis. 2019. Agonistic Communities: Love, War and Spheres of Activity. In Conflict and Contest in Nietzsche’s Philosophy, ed. Herman Siemens and James Pearson, 122–144. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Ansell-Pearson, Keith. 1994. An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker: The Perfect Nihilist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berkowitz, Roger. 2003. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Code of Manu, and the Art of Legislation. Cardozo Law Review 24 (3): 1131–1150. Brobjer, Thomas H. 1998. The Absence of Political Ideals in Nietzsche’s Writings: The Case of the Laws of Manu and the Associated Caste-Society. Nietzsche-­ Studien 27: 300–318. Camus, Albert. [1942] 2018. The Myth of Sisyphus. Translate by Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage Books. Clark, Maudemarie. 2015. Nietzsche on Ethics and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Conway, Daniel. 1996. Nietzsche and the Political. Abington, Oxon: Routledge. Dombowsky, Don. 2001. A Response to Thomas H. Brobjer’s ‘The Absence of Political Ideals in Nietzsche’s Writings’. Nietzsche-Studien 30: 387–393. Drochon, Hugo. 2016. Nietzsche’s Great Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hägglund, Martin. 2019. This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. New York: Pantheon Books. Hegel, G.W.F. [1807] 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. [1837] 1991. Philosophy of History. Translated by J.  Sibree. Prometheus Books. Herrera, Dawn. 2020. Play as Watchword: Nietzsche and Foucault. In Nietzsche and Critical Social Theory: Affirmation, Animosity, and Ambiguity, ed. Christine A.  Payne and Michael J.  Roberts, 434–454. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Hussain, Nadeem J.Z. 2007. Honest Illusion: Valuing for Nietzsche’s Free Spirits. In Nietzsche and Morality, ed. Brian Leiter and Neil Sinhababu, 157–191. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Kafka, Franz. [1931] 1946. Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and the True Way. In The Great Wall of China: Stories and Reflections, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken Books. Kandiyali, Jan. 2014. Freedom and Necessity in Marx’s Account of Communism. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22 (1): 104–123. Lawler, Kristin. 2020. Labor’s Will to Power: Nietzsche, American Syndicalism, and the Politics of Liberation. In Nietzsche and Critical Social Theory: Affirmation, Animosity, and Ambiguity, ed. Christine A.  Payne and Michael J. Roberts, 173–207. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Marx, Karl. [1867] 1975–2005. Capital, Volume I. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 35. New York; Moscow; London: International Publishers; Progress Publishers; Lawrence and Wishart. ———. [1894]. Capital, Volume III. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 37. ——— [1939]. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volumes 28–29. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. [1848]. The Communist Manifesto. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 24. Miyasaki, Donovan. 2014. Nietzsche’s Naturalist Morality of Breeding: A Critique of Eugenics as Taming. In Nietzsche and the Becoming of Life, ed. Vanessa Lemm, 194–213. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2022. (NI) Nietzsche’s Immoralism: Politics as First Philosophy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Owen, David. 2002. Equality, Democracy, and Self-Respect: Reflections on Nietzsche’s Agonal Perfectionism. Journal of Nietzsche Studies 24: 113–131. Roberts, Michael. 2020. Toward a Gay Social Science: A Nietzschean-Marxist Alternative to Conventional Sociological Theory. In Nietzsche and Critical Social Theory: Affirmation, Animosity, and Ambiguity, ed. Christine A. Payne and Michael J. Roberts, 279–339. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Sartre, Jean-Paul. [1943] 1992. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Translated by Hazel E.  Barnes. New  York: Washington Square Press. Schutte, Ofelia. 1984. Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche without Masks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tillich, Paul. [1933] 1977. The Socialist Decision. Translated by Franklin Sherman. Eugene, Ore.: WIPF and Stock Publishers. Urs Sommer, Andreas. 1999. Ex Oriente Lux? Zur vermeintlichen ‘Orientierung’ in Nietzsches Antichrist. Nietzsche-Studien 28: 194–214.

PART II

Justice Beyond Exchange

In an unstable society the privileged have a bad conscience. Some of them hide it behind a defiant air and say to the masses: “It is quite appropriate that I should possess privileges which you were denied." Others benevolently profess: “I claim for all of you an equal share in the privileges I enjoy.” The first attitude is odious. The second is silly, and also too easy. —Simone Weil, “Human Personality” I want to make them braver, more persevering, simpler, gayer. I want to teach them what is today understood by so few, least of all by these preachers of compassion (Mitleid): to share not suffering, but joy (Mitfreude)! —The Gay Science 338

CHAPTER 4

Nietzsche’s Failed Theory of Aristocratic Justice

Until there is an England in which every man is Cromwell, a France in which every man is a Napoleon, a Rome in which every man is a Caesar, a Germany in which every man is a Luther plus a Goethe, the world will no more be improved by its heroes than a Brixton villa is improved by the pyramid of Cheops. —George Bernard Shaw, “The Revolutionist’s Handbook,” Man and Superman

1   Criteria for Reconstructing Nietzsche’s Incompatibilist, Immoralist Politics As we cross the threshold from the past era of scarcity to the future era of abundance, the mind is learning the controls required to remain zestfully engaged with life, throughout increased longevity devoid of drudgery and poverty. It must also learn to generate a new sort of man, capable of preserving, amplifying, and passing to our human or post-human followers the striving for mastery of reality, while preserving its elements of intellect, character, freedom, and joy. Especially joy, for we are entering some of the most joyous of all the moments of man. —Huey Newton, “The Mind Is Flesh”

We have seen that Nietzsche’s political project of aristocratic radicalism fails in three crucial respects. First, it produces higher types only on the model of animal strength, a strong hierarchy of drives leading to effective © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Miyasaki, Politics After Morality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12228-6_4

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action and domination over one’s environment, but does not produce the material conditions of the higher, distinctly human health of Nietzsche’s later work: the manifold soul of hierarchical drives in tension, producing a feeling of power and freedom that grounds amor fati in the pleasure of an internal tension of proportionally equal drives, rather than in the relative, extrinsic power to overcome obstacles. Nietzsche’s project of breeding fails because, like the law of Manu, it merely reverse-engineers the historical noble, imitating, in ironically slavish fashion, the historical conditions of the higher type that preceded the development of interiority and value agency that made higher, distinctively human kinds of enhancement possible. In this respect, Nietzsche’s political philosophy is mediocre according to his own criteria: its goal is to produce higher health relative to the all-too-­ low standard of the slavish type, but it does not maximize health, for it does not qualitatively intensify the will to power through greater complexity and tension among drives. Instead, the will to power is increased in a strictly quantitative way, producing a stronger drive hierarchy through a greater simplicity of drives and increasing the overall number of individuals who meet this mediocre, animalistic ideal of health. The middling last man is to be compensated for with an equally middling last beast.1 Second, by reproducing the political conditions of the historical noble, Nietzsche also reproduces the conditions of the nobles’ defeat. By grounding the nobles’ affirmative character and amor fati in a strictly comparative form of power—their domination, exploitation, and political superiority to the slaves—Nietzsche guarantees that the underclass will be an essentially slavish type, their characters built entirely upon resentment, hatred, and envy. And so Nietzsche’s middling new aristocratic order will be fragile, doomed to eventually bring about a new variation of slave morality, a new revolt, and another victorious slave morality. In this regard, Nietzsche’s political program is also utterly impractical according to his own criteria. Nietzsche recognizes that the enhancement of humanity requires a kind of legitimacy: a state is legitimate to the degree it produces greater degrees of amor fati, individuals capable of a more 1  Compare Herman W. Siemens on “the strongest response to imperialistic interpretations of Nietzschean power”: “if relations of struggle or tension are necessary for the creation of complex living wholes out of processes of self-organization, then life-enhancement would seem to require a maximization of tension” which in turn “excludes relations of domination, subjection, incorporation or destruction; for it takes a kind of equilibrium among a multiplicity of more-or-less equal forces” (2013, 99).

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complete affirmation of their existence, but the continued production of such types requires that the noble social order that produces them also be preserved. And that, in turn, requires that the underclass also attain some degree of amor fati sufficient to prevent a slave revolt. Nietzsche’s politics fails because it produces strength rather than health, higher power rather than the maximized feeling of power and, moreover, produces them only temporarily. His political order cannot maintain its production of higher types, and so its legitimacy cannot, in practice, be made to last. Finally, Nietzsche’s attempt to resolve this impracticality leads, as we have seen, to an even more serious failing: the intentional ideological promotion of a new slave morality that is absolutely inconsistent with the naturalism, immoralism, and determinism of his mature philosophical commitments, a profound philosophical regression to the idealism and nihilism of his early—again, ironically slavish—devotion to Schopenhauer, Wagner, and the Greeks.2 Nietzsche’s proposed solution to the dangers of resentment is to provide the underclass with an alternative to slave morality, a noble ideology that imbues the slaves’ suffering with a higher meaning by portraying it as an admirable service to humanity’s goal of producing higher types. However, as we have also seen, this requires promoting a thoroughly nihilistic ideal for the underclass, a solution that is both illegitimate and impractical. It is illegitimate because it demands that the majority of humanity merely tolerate rather than truly affirm their existence and political order. Even if it is successful, members of the underclass do not affirm existence directly; they do not find joy or a feeling of power in their concrete circumstances and immediate activities. They find toleration for their existence only abstractly and instrumentally in their utility to their superiors and to the endlessly deferred goal of their political order. That goal is every bit as “other-worldly” as Christianity’s, since it aims not at the affirmation of the present but at a unrealized future, not at the affirmation of individuals’ own concrete lives but those of future higher types. It is the affirmation of a world that is not their own, grounded in an imaginary identification with states of power and joy that are not their own, literally an “out of body” experience. And it implies values that are every bit as nihilistic and life-denying as Christianity’s, since individuals 2  This slavish devotion was not entirely metaphorical in Wagner’s case, who sent Nietzsche on errands to buy him silk underwear. As Nietzsche proudly commented: “Once you’ve chosen a God, you’ve got to adorn him” (Sue Prideaux 2018, 70).

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can achieve this goal only through the direct negation of their own power, their self-reduction to instruments of society, not agents but organs, their entire character shaped around the fundamentally negative goal of entirely suppressing their own drives’ tendency toward power, tension, and complexity. What is this but a paradigmatic example of what Nietzsche derides in Christianity as “anti-natural morality”—a morality that does not improve but sickens, organizing the drives not toward complexity and power but toward self-contradiction, anarchy, and decadence? It is, then, ultimately based, like slave morality, on a moral illusion: the belief that anyone, much less a suffering underclass, can morally exterminate their own will to power, the illusion that a perfect asceticism is not only desirable but materially possible, and not for a few but for the overwhelming majority of human beings. This is, of course, the very same naïve assumption that Marx (1867) reveals lies at the ideological heart of capitalism: what a surprisingly rosy, even altruistic, view Nietzsche’s radical aristocrats, like the capitalist, secretly hold of human nature, what confidence they have in the heroic capacity of human beings to indefinitely sacrifice their individual drives for power on the altar of human progress! Nietzsche’s solution is illegitimate, then, because it amounts to the endorsement of nihilism for the many, in turn destroying his immoralist solution to the problem of state legitimacy. It is, quite simply, a regression to a moralistic ethical naturalism that he cannot consistently endorse: the insistence that the majority ought to serve the highest types simply because they are the highest types. Nietzsche can hold such a view only by rejecting the core commitment of his value philosophy: his immoralism, his refusal to make substantive, normative claims or resort to the methods of moral exhortation for promoting his political goals. And Nietzsche’s solution is impractical because, as we have seen, the central lesson of his value theory is that “the whole morality of improvement, including that of Christianity, has been a misunderstanding” (TI II.11): morality is, as such, the mistaken belief that individuals’ deepest characters can be transformed through rational and moral persuasion, that they can change themselves if persuaded to try. Nietzsche accepts that view in the early Untimely Meditations’ optimism about the role of culture and education as Bildung. But the later Nietzsche can return to that view only by rejecting the core commitment of his mature philosophical theories of human nature and society—by rejecting his profound naturalism, specifically his psychology of the will to power as the defining principle

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and aim of human life, according to which it is only the feeling of power generated by proportional resistance, and never moral or rational persuasion, that motivates individuals, and so only the will to power can provide a causally effective, material basis for shaping human character types and social orders. Consequently, we have decisive reasons for not only doubting but definitively rejecting Nietzsche’s failed solution to the problem of political legitimacy. Even if Nietzsche’s general theory of political legitimacy and his broader political theory turn out to be correct, his applied political program is, from its very beginnings and according to its own criteria, a complete and irreparable failure—a desperate, last-minute regression to theoretical assumptions he had long abandoned. And so, in order to preserve the best and most original philosophical insights of his late works, we are forced to either entirely reject his political philosophy as hopelessly incompatible with those insights or to critically reconstruct it, resolving its contradictions by rejecting what is incompatible with his mature commitments and thus preventing its regression to the nihilism and idealism of his early work. As we saw in the previous volume, to reject his entire political philosophy is, first of all, unnecessary, since his metapolitics is not only logically independent but intentionally grounded in the same philosophical commitments as left philosophy: the rejection of moral realism and natural authority (NI 8). Moreover, a reconstruction of the rest of Nietzsche’s political theory and program cannot be rejected on grounds of interpretative fidelity, since a faithful interpretation of Nietzsche’s politics would lead to hopeless inconsistency. If we are to salvage something of his political philosophy, we can do so only by being unfaithful; we can develop his philosophical reasoning in one respect only against his reasoning in another. We must choose both for and against him, saving some ideas or arguments at the expense of others. In other words, we must reject interpretative fidelity on higher grounds: fidelity to only his best, most consistent, and most productive thoughts. It is not my concern here to directly argue for which of Nietzsche’s ideas are truly his best or most productive, but only to make an experiment, to see where certain candidates for that title might lead, in the hope of demonstrating how productive they might become. For now, it is sufficient for my purposes to note that the commitments I’ve emphasized— his immoralism and his incompatibilist, naturalist psychology of the will to power—are central topics in the current secondary literature, so we can

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proceed on the assumption that they are plausibly among his most worthwhile and productive, as well as in the certain knowledge that many contemporary scholars believe them to be so. In this respect, by reconstructing a more consistent version of a truly naturalistic, immoralist Nietzschean politics, we can overcome an embarrassing paradox in the current scholarship. On one hand, the dominant view holds that Nietzsche’s methods are naturalist and his value philosophy anti-realist. On the other hand, the dominant view holds that Nietzsche’s principal philosophical project is a moral one, with no consensus or plausible explanation of how his central devotion to a moral project might square with his naturalism and anti-realism. By recognizing that his supposed moral project is really a naturalist, anti-realist politics that is grounded in his rejection of morality and moral philosophy and by demonstrating that he might have realized it in a more convincing and coherent form, we can resolve this awkward tension in the current scholarly interpretation of Nietzsche’s work, recognizing that it is a residue of his failure to transform morality into politics—a failure it may be possible to correct.3 Not only are there no prima facie reasons for rejecting any attempt to critically reconstruct Nietzsche’s political philosophy, there are strong independent reasons in its favor. We have seen that Nietzsche’s political philosophy is novel in the way it reconceives and answers two foundational questions of normative philosophy. First, granting moral anti-realism, can political authority be legitimate? Can there be a politics without a positive moral philosophy—especially when we consider that the entire history of political philosophy, with few exceptions, begins by grounding political principles in moral claims?4 For the specific form of Nietzsche’s attack on political philosophy is truly unprecedented. It has long been the assumption that if state authority is 3  Compare Conway: “Nietzsche’s particular contribution to the era of ‘great politics’ is meant to precipitate a decisive break from the past…. The struggle between the immoralists and the moralists is not simply a matter of providing morality with yet another new shape and direction…” (2013, 206). 4  Marx’s historical materialism is a true precedent. However, because he focuses on descriptive and predictive claims, like Machiavelli (1532) he sidesteps normative questions. Marx first recognizes the priority of political practice over value theory, but Nietzsche goes further, founding the authority of values in political practice as its causal consequence. On Nietzsche’s relation to Machiavelli, see Bonnie Honig (1993), David Owen (1994, 1995), Don Dombowsky (2004), and Diego A. von Vacano (2007).

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meaningful, political philosophy must find its ultimate ground in an ethical philosophy. If there is no ground for ethical authority, there is no ground for political authority. Only Nietzsche has raised the possibility of an alternative to the traditional choice between moral realism and moral anti-realism: the possibility of real legitimacy without morality, a political philosophy of legitimacy grounded in politics as a practice, rather than a political practice grounded in an ethical philosophy. This novelty in relation to such a long theoretical tradition of tired, uncreative, and endlessly recycled solutions is alone good reason to follow his innovation through to its end, in hopes of opening up new avenues for political thought. Second, by rejecting morality and moral philosophy, transforming political philosophy into a normative first philosophy, Nietzsche has radically shifted the critical target of the traditional philosophical problems of free will and moral responsibility. Moral philosophy has long worried about the possibility that there may not be freedom of the will of the kind necessary to justify moral responsibility. It has long engaged in the anticipatory defensive-reactive task of redefining the concept of moral freedom against the threat of determinism, attempting to neutralize that threat with ever more elaborately jerry-rigged, Rube Goldbergian variations on moral compatibilism. How is it, then, that while moral philosophy has spent millennia preparing for this question and the crisis of authority it provokes, political philosophy has barely considered the question of what becomes of politics without free will or moral responsibility? How can that be possible when, for the last 500 years, the central concept of Western political philosophy has been precisely liberty or political freedom? Nietzsche’s attempted solution to these questions fails, but he is the only political philosopher who has fully recognized the gravity of the questions, the only one who has raised them in their fullest and deepest form. In doing so, Nietzsche has not merely contributed something new. He has radically reinvented both ethics and politics, rejecting all of their foundational concepts—freedom, responsibility, and authority—attempting to rebuild them from the ground up. It is an unprecedented critical reappraisal of the entire ethical and political philosophical tradition, an innovation on an almost Cartesian scale. Like Descartes (1641), he has attempted to overcome skepticism and nihilism—in this case, about values rather than facts—by following them through to their logical end, “razing to the ground” the entire edifice of value philosophy in order to discover what remains and can withstand

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them. The attempt is extraordinary not only in its novelty and ambition, but in the degree to which it has been misunderstood, and in how thoroughly it has been overlooked by Nietzsche’s readers, who reduce his position to one of the usual, tired suspects: either moral skepticism or a narrow critique of only certain kinds that criticizes morality only to better redeem it. But this entirely misses his originality, the fact that he is calling into question the entire history of normative philosophy (“the entire history of the morality of improvement is a misunderstanding”) and attempting, however provisionally and imperfectly, to rebuild political philosophy on entirely new foundations and from the ground up, emancipated, once and for all, from the myths of free will and moral truth, agency, and responsibility. That is the principal reason why an attempt to critically reconstruct Nietzsche’s political philosophy is justified. His very failure, given its roots in internal inconsistency, indicates not a philosophical dead end but a beginning—an unprecedented, unexplored, and increasingly urgent and relevant philosophical question: what becomes of politics after freedom and after morality? Our critical reconstruction of Nietzsche’s political philosophy must begin with the complete rejection of its foundational error: aristocratism. We have seen that the normative illegitimacy and impracticality of his politics follow directly from its aim of reproducing the material conditions of the historical noble, his attempt to ground human enhancement in a pathos of distance maintained through rigid class hierarchy and inequality. There is simply no way to save his political philosophy without excising this utterly wrongheaded beginning. His own analysis of noble morality demonstrates with historical necessity that wherever aristocracy goes, slave morality follows. An aristocratic politics necessitates a mass psychological negation of reality, producing other-worldly longing for another reality and the development of an anti-natural morality to satiate it, increasing resentment of and culminating in revolt against the highest exemplars of human will to power, happiness, and amor fati. The long history of aristocracy, like the recent history of capitalism, demonstrates that it is a machine of self-destruction. This may, of course, seem to be an unreasonable first step in a critical reconstruction, since it requires rejecting one of the two principal characteristics of his “aristocratic radicalism.” However, it would be far more unreasonable to sacrifice the two principal characteristics of Nietzsche’s entire mature philosophy—his deterministic naturalism and

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immoralism—to his desperate aristocratic prejudice, a prejudice that is largely an unacknowledged, unexamined residue of his earliest and least original work, grounded more deeply in his personality—ironically, in a slavish resentment of his humble origins and failed ambitions—than in his best philosophical insights. Consequently, we can unapologetically demand complete infidelity to Nietzsche on this point: his political philosophy can only be saved and more fruitfully developed if we begin its reconstruction with the absolute rejection of aristocratic politics. The historical Nietzsche will certainly refuse to follow us beyond this point, but this is precisely the point at which we would do well to say good riddance to the historical Nietzsche. What follows is a Nietzschean theory of politics that remains, in important respects, anti-Nietzsche: a politics grounded in his immoralist metapolitics of breeding, inspired by his political theory of amor fati as the basis of legitimacy, but developed directly against his political program. In addition to the rejection of aristocratism, our reconstructed version of a Nietzschean, incompatibilist, immoralist politics (that is, a politics that acknowledges the full consequences of his twin commitments to deterministic naturalism and immoralism) must meet two key criteria to avoid the Nietzsche’s mistakes. First, it must identify the material, social-­ political conditions of Nietzsche’s distinctly human ideal of health, the manifold soul, rather than the merely strong, well-ordered soul. Second, it must identify material, social-political conditions that can ensure the prevention of slave psychology and morality rather than their ideological amelioration. In other words, an incompatibilist, immoralist politics must synthesize the historical material conditions of master and slave types and their moralities, rather than reproduce them.5 We have seen that Nietzsche seeks to solve the problem of legitimacy by preventing it from being raised, breeding types that constitutionally affirm the social order that produced them. So, the legitimate state is equivalent to a synthesis of society and individual, their essential unity in an order of values that structures both 5  This synthesis of master and slave is not their sublation. Rather than revealing their essential identity, it reveals their essential untruth: that each depends on the rejection of the other—as demonstrated by the slaves’ need for revenge and the nobles’ need for conquest, for comparative superiority to the slave. As Babich says of attempts to read Nietzsche and or with Marx, we should instead read between them: “reading between two authors is always a non-dialectical exercise however much one may assume that one can come to a synthesis” (2020, 256).

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the social-political order and the order of its subjects’ values and internal drive hierarchy. In this respect, Nietzsche’s theory of political legitimacy is a variation on the Platonic (1997) view of justice as a harmony of part and whole. In the Platonic view, however, this harmony is a simple, rigid hierarchy—one that makes “a tyrant of reason,” in Nietzsche’s words, (TI II.10)—an ideal analogous to Nietzsche’s ideal of animal rather than human health. In Nietzsche’s reworking, in contrast, the legitimate state is not just a harmony of part and whole, but a tension of diverse and opposed, though not contradictory or anarchic, drives. Nietzsche’s notion of the manifold soul is, then, also his ideal of a healthy social organism. The legitimacy of the state is, at bottom, the criterion of the highest form of health of the most primary and objectively real kind of agency: the agency of a society rather than of the individual. So, just as the problem of legitimacy can only be solved by a synthesis of society and the individual, legitimacy only be maintained by a politics that synthesizes the noble and slavish types, overcoming the class division that ensures their endless reproduction. Although Nietzsche does not go that far, he recognizes that at least the higher type must incorporate qualities of both: “today there is perhaps no more distinguishing feature of the ‘higher nature,’ the intellectual nature, than to be divided in this sense and really and truly a battle ground for these opposites” (GM I.16).6 He adds that the only alternative to “Rome against Judea” is represented by Napoleon, in whom “the problem of the noble ideal as such” has been “made flesh.” Why is the noble ideal—which so many take for Nietzsche’s own—a problem? Napoleon surpasses the noble type as “a synthesis of the inhuman and superhuman.” Consequently, nobility is only a necessary, not sufficient condition for a Nietzschean politics. The nobles’ health depends upon a simple hierarchy of drives, the source of their domination of their environment, of a strong, decisive will expressed in effective external activity, an uninhibited fulfillment of their drives through the direct imposition of form on their surroundings: “what they do is to create and imprint forms instinctively; they are the most involuntary, unconscious artists there are” (GM II.17).

6  See also BGE 260: “There is master morality and slave morality—I will immediately add that in all higher and more mixed cultures, attempts at mediation (Vermittlung) of these two moralities also appear.”

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The slave’s form of health, in contrast, is a side effect of the internalization of the drives, the redirection of that noble thirst for power toward the internal rather than external world, the production of interiority, soulfulness, and a rich inner life—of the pleasures of internal contests and conquests. That inner field of experience, suffering, and pleasure is the basis of a more reliable, less variable, and far more independent feeling of power, a self-mastery that does not require the relative superiority and precarious good fortune of social-political power. It is a kind of power so independent from the accident of circumstance that even a slave can attain the feeling of sovereignty. Nietzsche’s late ideal of human health synthesizes both forms: it maximizes the feeling of power by increasing the complementary tension and complexity of the drives even as it preserves their strength, the hierarchical order of rank that allows the drives to manifest themselves in effective external action. Consequently, a successful Nietzschean politics must also synthesize the material conditions that have historically produced both kinds of health. It must overcome the material divisions that produce these forms of health as two distinct and opposed classes, producing in the noble a complexity of the soul only at the eventual cost of their nobility, the infection of conscience by moral guilt. The solution is simple in principle though, as we will see, far from simple in practice. Nietzsche’s failed politics preserves the divide between noble and slavish forms of health by preserving the divide between their material conditions. In doing so, he preserves his philosophical commitment to naturalism and immoralism only for the ruling class, whose affirmation of existence does not come from obedience to moral command but is a direct expression of real material conditions of higher power. For the underclass, in contrast, their role in legitimizing the state’s authority presupposes an effective morality of improvement: they will supposedly be persuaded that they have an obligation to devote themselves to a higher purpose than their own happiness and power, that the ruling class is owed their loyalty and service. And this, in turn, means that Nietzsche preserves his philosophical commitment to an incompatibilist version of naturalism only in relation to the ruling class. Birds of prey will not be expected, against their deepest character and the nature of the will to power, to withhold their power, to morally refrain from acting upon that nature. Yet the underclass is somehow expected to be satisfied with the imaginary compensation of externally imposed moral meaning found in their instrumental social purpose. Little lambs, will somehow, after all, have the freedom not to behave like little lambs.

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It is, then, first and foremost the political division of noble and slave that is the source of the fatal contradiction in Nietzsche’s politics. To overcome that division, a successful critical reconstruction must, in addition to rejecting aristocratism, ensure that all of the core concepts of his political philosophy are forced back into consistency with the two primary commitments of his mature political philosophy: incompatibilism and immoralism. By reconstructing his politics in a form consistent with his philosophy as a whole, we will not only preserve its radicalism, his rejection of conservative aristocratism’s ethical naturalism, but also ensure that it meets his own standards of legitimacy, according to which a state becomes legitimate not in virtue of foundational moral principles but through the prevention of the problem of legitimacy, the breeding of subjects for whom its authority is not a live question. We will, further, ensure that his political program is not only legitimate in theory but realizable in practice. We will establish its practical relevance by grounding its possibility not in the otherworldly aspirations of a disenchanted nihilism or an aristocratic nostalgia for metaphysical forms of meaning, but in the concrete realization of social and individual health and happiness, a legitimizing affirmation of the social order based in the real determining causes of character, morality, and society—not in meaning but matter, not in ideas but bodies, not in purposes but in play.

2  Nietzsche’s Early Contractarian Theory of Justice: Self-Interested Exchange So far, we have considered only a broad sketch of Nietzsche’s political philosophy as an aristocratic radicalism that proposes a rigidly hierarchical society ordered in the service of the breeding of higher types. This is, in part, because Nietzsche begins to recognize that his value philosophy is properly political rather than moral only very late in his work, too late to fully develop its details. Having rejected the aristocratic foundations of that broadly sketched politics, we do not yet have specific guidelines for reconstructing its alternative. The rejection of aristocratism leaves open, after all, many possibilities: a liberal-democratic politics, a socialist politics, forms of oligarchy other than aristocracy, and so on. In order to narrow the scope of the alternatives and determine what kind of non-aristocratic politics is most amenable to our primary criteria—the immoralist form of legitimacy and an incompatibilist method of realizing higher types—it will be necessary to examine Nietzsche’s treatment of the traditional core concepts of political philosophy: justice, rights, democracy, and equality.

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This is, after all, one of the great curiosities of the common view that Nietzsche has no political philosophy: he not only discusses all of these core concepts throughout his works, early and late, he also subjects each one to distinctively philosophical critique. Nietzsche’s complaint, for example, that conceptions of justice are rooted in slavish values are every bit as philosophical—if just as vulnerable to criticisms of lack of rigor or precision—as his criticism of contemporary morality’s roots in the same. His attack on the egalitarian concept of rights as incompatible with the historical origins of rights in social privilege is every bit as philosophical— if just as vulnerable to charges of the genetic fallacy—as his attack on the origins of Christian morality in class resentment. And his criticism of democracy’s supposed incompatibility with human enhancement is not substantially different from his criticisms of the moral values of selflessness and pity or compassion. In other words: if Nietzsche’s treatment of these traditional political concepts does not count as political philosophy, then why does his analogous treatment of traditional moral concepts count as moral philosophy? More peculiar still is the apolitical reading’s disregard for his relationship to the history of political philosophy. We have already seen that Nietzsche not only critically responds to but directly borrows—if in subversive ways—from central figures in the history of political philosophy, especially Hegel and Plato. Nietzsche’s theory of legitimacy draws directly on the Hegelian theory of recognition both as, in Phenomenology of Spirit, the psychological foundation of the social and political subject and, in The Philosophy of Right, the foundation of the authority of the state, thanks to its role in actualizing the essential unity of individual consciousness and absolute spirit. Nietzsche’s theory of the unity of individual and state, in turn, draws directly on the Platonic view that this unity cannot begin with abstract intellectual identification, as in the Hegelian recognition that precedes and enables the absolute state, but must begin with the social production of a symmetry between the political order of the state and the psychological order of the soul. How can Nietzsche directly borrow from the core concepts of two of the most influential political thinkers in the history of philosophy and still somehow not have a political philosophy? And of course, even when he does not explicitly address his historical predecessors, he often does so implicitly. It is impossible, for example, to understand the centrality in all of his late writings of the role of conquest in the origin of civilization, human nature, morality, and politics without

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recognizing that this is an argument directed against Hobbes (1651), Locke (1690), and Rousseau’s (1762) contractarian views.7 He does not name names, but he is explicit about what tradition he is targeting: “I think I have dispensed with the sentimentalism which has it begin with a ‘contract’” (GM II.17). What can it possibly mean to say that a philosopher who explicitly criticizes every major political theory in the history of philosophy has no political philosophy? It must mean either that he does not substantially engage that history or that his criticisms are not sufficiently philosophical. But we have already seen that his critical engagement of the history of political philosophy is substantial. We’ll now see that it is also entirely philosophical—indeed, often more so than his moral philosophy. Let’s begin with the central question of political philosophy, one that Nietzsche, like every other political philosopher, gives substantial attention to: the nature of justice. (How curious that a philosopher who has a theory of true and false conceptions of justice manages to mysteriously avoid being a political philosopher!) Nietzsche’s treatment of the concept of justice in his early and middle works follows a broadly contractarian model—again, demonstrating that he is directly engaging the political philosophical tradition throughout his writing life. In Human, All Too Human, he argues that justice originates among parties of equal power, “where there is no clearly recognizable superiority of force and a contest would result in mutual injury” (HH 22). It is, consequently, in the self-interest—the “enlightened self-preservation”—of both parties to find some compromise among their competing demands: “the character of exchange is the original character of justice.” There is, then, no strictly normative or moral element to justice: it isn’t the case that one “ought” in any strong moral sense practice justice; rather, if one cares about self-preservation, then one ought—solely from self-interest—practice justice.8 It is only, Nietzsche claims, thanks to the forgetting of the origin 7  On Nietzsche’s relationship to contract theory, in particular, Locke’s liberalism, see Peter Sedgwick (2013, chapters 3 and 7). See also Drochon (2017). 8  Here we detect the beginnings of Nietzsche’s immoralist break from contractarian moralism, its attempt to ground political authority in moral claims. For example, Hobbes moves from a descriptive account of the laws of nature to a prescriptive theory of moral and political law, connecting them through the “law of reason”: “so that Injury, or Injustice, in the controversies of the world, is somewhat like to that, which in the disputations of Scholers is called Absurdity. For as it is there called an Absurdity, to contradict what one maintained in the Beginning: so in the world, it is called Injustice, and Injury, voluntarily to undo that, which from the beginning he had voluntarily done” (Hobbes 1651, XIV). Nietzsche, in contrast, remains on the descriptive level.

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of justice in self-interested exchange that it “has gradually come to appear that a just action is an unegoistic one”—an appearance that makes possible its misidentification as a matter of moral obligation, a categorical moral imperative rather than hypothetical imperative of self-interested, practical reason.9 So, according to Nietzsche’s early view, justice is—consistent with an incompatibilist, immoralist theory of politics—a social agreement motivated by self-interest that has as its precondition a material—as opposed to symbolic, legal, or recognitional—equality of power among participants. Consequently, as a lasting form of political organization and a normative political ideal, justice also requires a relatively stable power equality among participants, the preservation of that founding contractual equality and its restoration through redistribution when that balance is upset: “equilibrium is the basis of justice” (WS 22). Justice does not, then, only originate in material equality of power; it aims for equality’s continuance and perfection; it is a self-sustaining ideal of relations and interactions among persons of equal power, an ideal that individuals try to realize not out of moral duty but to maximize their self-interest as members of a community. But Nietzsche’s early theory of justice is also, at the same time, a contractarian theory of the origins of society: “the community is originally the organization of the weak for the production of an equilibrium with powers that threaten it with danger” (WS 22). Rather than a temporary relationship among equals who happen to cross paths, self-interested exchange becomes a form of political organization grounded in enduring social institutions only because the weak need it to survive: justice is an organization of the weak into communities powerful enough to force compromise from the strong. Both communities and the normative principle of justice that orders them are, then, created and motivated by weakness.

3  Nietzsche’s Late Theory of Justice: Symbolic Exchange Between Classes In his later work, Nietzsche will substantially revise this early view in two key ways. First, he will reject the contractarian theory of justice’s individualism: justice is an exchange or contract not among individuals but among 9  This emphasis on egoism should be understood in marked contrast to Hobbes’ appeal to logical consistency: to demand we uphold promises out of duty to reason is a moralistic demand to act independently of self-interest.

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communities, specifically, among classes. Second, he will reject its universality: there are distinctly noble and slavish forms of justice corresponding to their distinct class origins. On the first point: if, as we see in the Genealogy’s account of the origin of the sovereign individual as a product of social, moral, and cultural breeding, moral agents are not the cause of, but the products of, a social order and its system of justice, then they do not, as independent, self-­ interested, and rational agents, preexist the social contract or exchange that supposedly founds both the community and the institution of justice.10 Far from being the outcome of a negotiation of the individual interests of a community of subjects, justice produces both those very subjects along with their interests, in such a way that their supposedly independent, individual demands are instead ultimately reflections of the supra-­ individual interests of the kinds of community that produced them. In other words, this is another instance of the error of confusing cause and effect. If communities produce subjects rather than the reverse, a system of justice is a system of exchange not by and on behalf of those subjects, but by and on behalf of the communities that produced them. While justice remains, as his early view had it, a system of exchange that binds communities, the parties it binds are not individuals but classes, for the simple reason that communities historically arise through force rather than contract or implied consent, and among unequals rather than equals: The shaping of a population, which had up till now been unrestrained and shapeless, into a fixed form, as happened at the beginning with an act of violence, could only be concluded with acts of violence,—consequently the oldest ‘state’ emerged as a terrible tyranny, as a repressive and ruthless machinery, and continued working until the raw material of people and semi-animals had been finally not just kneaded and made compliant, but shaped. (GM II.17)

Because communities arise from relations of force between unequal groups, justice originally takes a dramatically different form than in his earlier view. It is not a free, self-interested exchange among equal parties that, on the larger social level, favors the protection and interests of the weak, but instead an exchange imposed by the strong upon the weak, in 10  See Strong: “There can be no Nietzschean Contrat Social, because the unit of philosophy and politics (the ‘dominating philosophy’) which would correspond to it does not (yet) exist” (1975, 189).

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the interest of a community of the strong against the threat of individual interests. Justice begins in the interest of a noble community in the form of an involuntary organization of the population into unequal classes. There is then, a more primary form of justice than the contract, one produced by the strong and grounded in material inequality, that uses agreements of exchange and principles of equilibrium only instrumentally as means to preserve a more primary disequilibrium, the continued imbalance of power between classes and the promotion of the interests of the noble classes over those of the underclass.11 Nevertheless, a modest kind of material equality of power remains a necessary condition of justice: equality among members of the ruling class. In this respect, Nietzsche’s definition of justice in the Genealogy is almost unchanged: “justice at this first level is the good will, between those who are roughly equal, to come to terms with each other, to ‘come to an understanding’ again by means of a settlement” (GM II.8). However, his new addition is crucial: “and, in connection with those who are less powerful, to force them to reach a settlement amongst themselves.” This is crucial because it tells us what the true relata of justice as “exchange” are: the unequal parties of noble and slave communities, not an exchange among equal members of the broader social community as a whole. This is a critical change because it tells us what the original, noble purpose of justice is. On Nietzsche’s earlier view, justice begins in the mutual self-interest of equals, but on the level of the community, it is transformed into an alliance of the weak against the strong. Justice develops from free individual exchange into the majority’s imposition of its interests upon a minority. It is, in effect, a manifestation of slave morality, of resentment against the strong, a form of revenge against their superior power. Nietzsche now explicitly rejects that earlier view: “now a derogatory mention of recent attempts to seek the origin of justice elsewhere,—namely 11  Here Nietzsche anticipates Charles W. Mills’ (1997) view that historical social contracts do not merely fail in practice to meet their principles, their purpose is precisely to use symbolic forms of equality to conceal and institutionalize existing racial, gender, and economic inequalities. Like Mills, Nietzsche suggests contract theory cannot ground justice, since who counts as a contractee and which terms count as fair is determined by the contract, rather than constraining it. See also Joseph Pugliese (1996), who draws on Nietzsche to make a related point about the rationalization of colonial violence, and Lawrence Hatab, who draws on Nietzsche to argue that “if traditional egalitarianism was fueled by power relations, then equality-talk can be unmasked and shown the dangers of exclusionary effects inimical to its professed rhetoric” (2014, 129).

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in ressentiment” (GM II.11). Far to the contrary, “concerning Dühring’s specific proposition that the seat of justice is found in the territory of reactive sentiment, for the sake of accuracy we must unceremoniously replace this with another proposition: the last territory to be conquered by the spirit of justice is that of reactive sentiment!” (GM II.11). And far from protecting the weak, its purpose is precisely the opposite, to protect the strong from the resentment of the weak: Historically speaking, justice on earth represents—I say this to the annoyance of the above-mentioned agitator (who himself once confessed: “The doctrine of revenge has woven its way through all my work and activities as the red thread of justice”)—the battle, then, against reactive sentiment, the war waged against the same on the part of active and aggressive forces, which have partly expended their strength in trying to put a stop to the spread of reactive pathos, to keep it in check and within bounds, and to force a compromise with it. (GM II.11)

Notice that justice begins not from a moral principle but against one. That is, politics begins as a properly immoralist strategy, enacted in opposition to morality—just as, for Nietzsche, political philosophy only truly begins with the overcoming of moral philosophy rather than being founded in a moral philosophy. So, justice originates in the very problem of aristocratic social organization that Nietzsche’s politics is intended to resolve. Because inequality produces not only resentment but slavish psychology, a human type entirely organized around its negative reaction to its political superiors, justice becomes necessary for the neutralization of this dangerous side effect. The task of the original, noble form of justice is to prevent the slave revolt—which it succeeds, in Nietzsche’s account, at doing only on the political level, failing catastrophically to prevent the slave revolt in morality. In striking contrast to Nietzsche’s earlier view, justice does not succeed by preserving an equilibrium among powers, but by creating the false impression of such an equilibrium: Everywhere that justice is practiced and maintained, the stronger power can be seen looking for means of putting an end to the senseless ravages of ressentiment amongst those inferior to it (whether groups or individuals), partly by lifting the object of ressentiment out of the hands of revenge, partly by substituting, for revenge, a struggle against the enemies of peace and order, partly by working out compensation, suggesting, sometimes enforc-

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ing it, and partly by promoting certain equivalences for wrongs into a norm which ressentiment, from now on, has to take into account. (GM II.11)

Notice that justice strategically imposes equilibrium only on the slaves in their individual relations to one another, not between the classes. Noble justice’s ultimate defeat by slave morality is inevitable precisely because it is designed to protect the foundational class inequality that is the primary source of the slaves’ resentment—the uncompensated political harm they have suffered not from other individuals but from the very inequality of the political order that this system of justice is created to protect.12 As in Nietzsche’s failed attempt to give meaning to the suffering underclass, the decisive mark of noble justice’s failure is a shift from the material to the ideal, the attempt to preserve the political order through the imaginary compensation of legal equality rather than a real, material equality of power: “the most decisive thing, however, that the higher authorities can invent and enforce against the even stronger power of hostile and spiteful feelings—and they do it as soon as they are strong enough—is the setting up of a legal system, the imperative declaration of what counts as permissible in their eyes, as just, and what counts as forbidden, unjust” (GM II.11). In its legal structure, noble justice takes its initial failure to fully compensate for the foundational material inequality of the classes a step further, transforming even its paltry individual compensations into a system of symbolic equivalences and abstract compensation. In marked contrast to the decidedly incompatibilist, immoralist form of his earlier theory of justice, in the later theory, those subjected to justice are no longer to be motivated only by self-interest, the desire to preserve a real equilibrium of power. They are instead impossibly expected to accept the decisions of legal justice out of an impartial adherence to a concept of justice that affirms only their abstract equality before the law. So, noble justice, a system of abstract equivalences and compensations for individual harms that does nothing to ameliorate the profound differences in real political power that causes the slaves’ resentment, is a purely 12  Sedgwick’s interpretation of this point is too charitable. Although “spurning equivalence and vengeance,” it does not truly “foster an impersonal ethos” (2013, 140). Given Nietzsche’s incompatibilism, such impartiality is illusory. The noble “stays the vengeful hand” not as “the freethinker who resists the power of custom” (141), but from the necessity of noble psychology which makes him “unable to take his enemies, his misfortunes, and even his misdeeds seriously for long” (GM I:10).

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idealist rather than naturalist means to the goal that noble justice is supposed to achieve: the prevention of slave revolt. It is a predecessor to Nietzsche’s own feeble attempt to prevent slave revolt through the idealist compensation of meaning for suffering. And it is, consequently, a form of justice that presupposes, against Nietzsche’s incompatibilism, that subjects possess sufficient moral freedom to act on the purely rational grounds of symbolic and procedural equality, against their natural drive to avenge their thwarted will to power, a drive that Nietzsche’s psychology makes the very core of their actions and character. In other words, Nietzsche’s revised theory of noble justice fails our first criterion for a successful reconstruction of his political philosophy: an incompatibilist solution to the problem of state legitimacy. And, consequently, any concept of justice that relies on the merely symbolic equilibrium of a compensatory system of legal equivalences also fails that criterion. Most important, the classical liberal conception of justice as procedural and symbolic equality before law fails this test, as well.13 And because noble legal justice fails the criterion of incompatibilism, it also fails the criterion of immoralism: the requirement that the state be legitimized through the production of its subjects rather than through grounding moral principles. In this shift from the realm of direct, self-­ interested exchange among equals to a merely symbolic equal exchange imposed by a ruling class, justice pretends to be an impartial, selflessly pursued moral norm rather than a non-moral act of self-interest in keeping with the psychology of will to power: Once the legal code is in place, by treating offence and arbitrary actions against the individual or groups as a crime, as violation of the law, as insurrection against the higher authorities themselves, they distract attention from the damage done by such violations, and ultimately achieve the opposite of what revenge sets out to do, which just sees and regards as valid the injured party’s point of view:—from then on the eye is trained for an ever more impersonal interpretation of the action, even the eye of the injured party (although, as stated, this happens last). (GM II.11)

Nietzsche’s early theory has almost been inverted: it is not a forgetting of the self-interested origins of justice and its cooption by the weak 13  Compare Drochon’s critique of anti-democratic readings that make “Nietzsche ‘safe for liberal-democracy’ by lining him up with less threatening liberal critiques of democracy such as Mill and Tocqueville” (2016, 1057).

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against the strong that turns justice into a moral norm that commands selfless, dutiful obedience. Far to the contrary, it is the use of justice by the strong to control the resentment of the weak that produces the moralized concepts of “justice” and “injustice as such” in contrast to the morally neutral conception of exchange among equals: “therefore ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ only start from the moment when a legal system is set up” (GM II.11). This is a rather stunning admission: it is noble politics, not slave morality, after all, that first invents a normative concept of the good. One ought to accept legal settlements on purely rational grounds, because they provide truly equivalent compensations for harm. What a feeble attempt to overcome the dangers of resentment and the desire for revenge! To tell the harmed to be more impersonal, not to seek revenge because, given some symbolically equivalent token of their harm, revenge would be mathematically illogical! Nietzsche himself points out its impracticality. If the goal of a legal system is to depersonalize harm, detach it from “the eye of the injured party” to quell the desire for revenge, noble justice acts against the will to power, which demands not abstract compensation but a material, self-­ interested, exchange in power, whether through “the proper response of action” (GM I.10) or revenge: To talk of “just” and “unjust” as such is meaningless,14 an act of injury, violence, exploitation or destruction cannot be “unjust” as such, because life functions essentially in an injurious, violent, exploitative and destructive manner, or at least these are its fundamental processes and it cannot be thought of without these characteristics. One has to admit to oneself something even more unpalatable: that viewed from the highest biological standpoint, states of legality can never be anything but exceptional states, as partial restrictions of the true will to life, which seeks power and to whose overall purpose they subordinate themselves as individual measures, that is to say, as a means of creating greater units of power. A system of law conceived as sovereign and general, not as a means for use in the fight between units of 14  Scholars rarely note that the target of this notorious criticism is the nobles, not the slaves—it would not serve their use as a prop for anti-political readings. How, they ask, can Nietzsche have a politics if he thinks states of legality “can never be anything but exceptional”? In context, however, the point is precisely that political systems are not “states of legality” but states of force that produce legal orders. The point is not skepticism but realism: any politics is maintained by power.

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power but as a means against fighting in general, rather like Dühring’s communistic slogan that every will should regard every other will as its equal, this would be a principle hostile to life, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of fatigue and a secret path to nothingness. (GM II.11)15

Nietzsche intends in this passage to argue only against the slavish conception of justice, according to which harm should not be exchanged or compensated for but simply abolished. However, his argument works too well. For it proves that noble justice is equally doomed to failure. It is just as much an “attempt to assassinate the future of man” as slavish revenge, since it is itself the machine that manufactures the slave, slave morality, and slave justice. If, as Nietzsche argues, states of legality are “exceptional states,” then a noble political order that attempts to quell the “injurious, violent, exploitative and destructive” drives of the overwhelming majority of its subjects must be the most fragile political state of that exception imaginable. Once again, Nietzsche repeats the hypocrisy of the noble, demanding from the underclass exactly the sort of moral selflessness, ascetism, and defiance of our nature as will to power that he simultaneously forbids us from demanding of the noble.

References Babich, Babette. 2020. Between Nietzsche and Marx: ‘Great Politics and What They Cost. In Nietzsche and Critical Social Theory: Affirmation, Animosity, and Ambiguity, ed. Christine A.  Payne and Michael J.  Roberts, 226–276. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Clark, Maudemarie, and David Dudrick. 2007. Nietzsche and Moral Objectivity: The Development of Nietzsche’s Metaethics. In Nietzsche and Morality, ed. Brian Leiter and Neil Sinhababu, 192–226. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Conway, Daniel. 2013. Nietzsche’s Immoralism and the Advent of ‘Great Politics’. In Nietzsche and Political Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, 197–217. London: Bloomsbury.

15  Since noble justice makes an impossibly anti-natural demand for impartiality and the satisfaction of merely symbolic equality, we should reject the attempt to draw from it a positive conception of justice, as Clark and Dudrick do: “The just person is the one who no longer evaluates actions from the narrowly personal perspective to which we are all at least initially inclined, but from a general perspective…. Training in ‘impersonal appraisal of deeds’ is thus the beginning of objectivity” (2007, 220).

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Descartes, René. [1641] 1998. Discourse On Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Translated by Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Dombowsky, Don. 2004. Nietzsche’s Machiavellian Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Drochon, Hugo. 2016. ‘An Old Carriage with New Horse’: Nietzsche’s Critique of Democracy. History of European Ideas 42 (8): 1055–1068. ———. 2017. Nietzsche Theorist of the State? History of Political Thought 38 (2): 323–344. Hatab, Lawrence. 2014. Nietzsche’s Will to Power in Politics. In Nietzsche as Political Philosopher, ed. Barry Stocker and Manuel Knoll, 113–133. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Hobbes, Thomas. [1651] 1994. Leviathan. Edited by Edwin Curley. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Honig, Bonnie. 1993. Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Locke, John. [1690] 1980. Second Treatise on Government. Edited by C. B. Macpherson. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Machiavelli, Niccolò. [1532] 1988. The Prince. Edited by Quentin Skinner and Russell Price. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, Karl. [1867] 1975–2000. Capital, Volume I. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 35. New  York; Moscow; London: International Publishers; Progress Publishers; Lawrence and Wishart. Mills, Charles W. 1997. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Miyasaki, Donovan. 2022. (NI) Nietzsche’s Immoralism: Politics as First Philosophy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Owen, David. 1994. Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason. London: Routledge. ———. 1995. Nietzsche, Politics, and Modernity: A Critique of Liberal Reason. London: SAGE Publications. Plato. Complete Works. 1997. Ed. John M.  Cooper and D.  S. Hutchinson. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Prideaux, Sue. 2018. I Am Dynamite: A Life of Nietzsche. New  York: Tim Duggan Books. Pugliese, Joseph. 1996. Rationalized Violence and Legal Colonialism: Nietzsche ‘contra’ Nietzsche. Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 8 (2): 277–293. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. [1762] 1994. The Social Contract, Discourse on the Virtue Most Necessary for a Hero, Political Fragments, and Geneva Manuscript. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College/University Press of New England. Sedgwick, Peter R. 2013. Nietzsche’s Justice: Naturalism in Search of an Ethics. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

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Siemens, Herman. 2013. Reassessing Radical Democratic Theory in the Light of Nietzsche’s Ontology of Conflict. In Nietzsche and Political Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, 83–105. London: Bloomsbury. Strong, Tracy. [1975] 1988. Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Vacano, Diego A., and von. 2007. The Art of Power: Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and the Making of Aesthetic Political Theory. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

CHAPTER 5

An Immoralist Theory of Right: Doing Justice to the Drives

One may be just, if one is not human. —Comte de Lautréamont, Poésies

1   Types, Not Classes, as the Aim of Justice So, we can now assess the development of Nietzsche’s theory of justice in its relation to our reconstructive project. On one hand, Nietzsche’s early theory treats justice as a practice with origins that reflect his own incompatibilist, immoralist commitments: individuals are motivated not morally but by their own drives, by the will to power, to participate in exchanges that preserve an equilibrium among parties of equal power. And because they are not acting morally but on the basis of self-interest, the success of such forms of justice does not require that human beings possess a morally substantial freedom of agency. However, Nietzsche’s later revisions transform justice into a moral obligation to recognize symbolic equality as established by a system of legal equivalences, a form at odds with his incompatibilist immoralism. Noble law demands that subjects accept its judgments as “justice as such,” despite its failure to achieve true equilibrium, to overcome the class inequality it is intended to protect, and so it requires its subjects to affirm its legitimacy in virtue of a non-existent freedom to deny their own will to power. And so, in our search for an alternative conception of justice that might ground a truly incompatibilist, immoralist politics, we must reject this © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Miyasaki, Politics After Morality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12228-6_5

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inconsistent development. At the same time, we should preserve an important characteristic of noble justice, one correct in its end, if not means. Recall that Nietzsche’s early theory mistakenly accepted the contractarian error of individualism: it presupposed the existence of independent, self-­ interested agents who enter into a contract to produce society when, on the contrary, it is society that produces agents as well as their interests. Contractarian theories mistakenly assume the purpose of justice is to negotiate among and mutually protect the preexisting, competing interests of diverse individuals. But it cannot be the primary goal if justice itself, by founding communities, produces those very individuals and their interests. In principle, their interests do not preexist the contract and so cannot be fairly negotiated by it.1 In the noble form of justice, that aim has changed: the practice of justice is intended to quell resentment among the underclass. In other words, its aim is to protect class interests rather than individual interests. But this makes a similar mistake: it treats classes as agencies that exist prior to and independent of the social order they supposedly impose. However, the noble class and type do not exist independently of the aristocratic political order and fortuitous material circumstances that produced them. Just as individuals produced by a society do not create the contract upon which their society rests so much as reflect and regenerate it, so too the noble class does not create noble justice but is its accidental product. Noble justice attempts to preserve an accidental political order rather than provides a theory that explains the existence of that order. If the goal of noble justice is to prevent resentment, then its true purpose is not even to serve the interests of the present ruling class, but rather its future members; its purpose is the continued existence of the class. It does not primarily aim to serve the particular interests of a class but rather to preserve the relations between the classes, to preserve the social order as a whole. It protects a political order first and foremost; it protects classes or individuals only secondarily, as a means for the preservation of that political order. Noble justice is conservative, not radical, aristocratism. In practice, however, noble justice fails in its goals by giving priority to the interests of the present aristocratic order at the expense of its future. In doing so, noble justice fails to successfully quell resentment and prevent the slave revolt. The noble form of justice can succeed only if it makes the

 Compare communitarian critiques of John Rawls’ (1971) “original position.”

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continual production of a future aristocratic order its goal, rather than sacrificing its future to the present. And this tells us how noble justice must be revised if we are to successfully reconstruct an incompatibilist, immoralist theory of justice: the aim of justice, of the practices of exchange and equilibrium that found and preserve a social order, cannot be to serve the interests of either individuals or classes, since both are its products. Instead, justice serves the interest of the political order that produces individuals and classes. Consequently, in an incompatibilist, immoralist politics, the true agent or subject of justice is society rather than classes or individuals, and the true aim of justice is to serve the interests and preservation of that subject: the social order as a whole. Justice is not a negotiation of the interests and values of its members or classes—whether treated equally, as in Nietzsche’s early contractarian theory, or unequally, as in his later aristocratic theory. Justice is determined according to the interest and value of a social order taken as a whole. Nietzsche’s view here is not simply historical. He is not merely claiming, in his early theory, that justice happened to arise out of individual interests or, in his later theory, that justice happened to arise out of class interest. Both are claims about the relation of the practice of justice to state legitimacy. If individuals freely enter into a social contract out of self-­ interest, then the question of illegitimacy does not arise; so such a form of justice would, to the degree equilibrium is maintained, produce a legitimate state. And if, on the later theory, the ruling class could successfully control resentment through a legal system that symbolically compensates individuals for harms, then it would produce citizens who affirm the social order that produced them, again producing state legitimacy. Of course, both forms of justice must in fact fail—the former because the equal, independent contracting agents it requires do not exist prior to society, the latter because symbolic equality cannot effectively prevent a resentment grounded in material, systematic inequality. But this same broader point will apply to our critically reconstructed incompatibilist, immoralist theory of justice: the goal of justice is to promote a social order, not a given class. Specifically, the goal of justice is to preserve whatever material social-political conditions are most conducive to the enhancement of humanity. To the degree that justice, as a means to preserving such an order, succeeds, its consequence is state legitimacy: the breeding of individuals whose internal hierarchy of drives complements and affirms the political order that produced them, preventing the problem of illegitimacy from arising.

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So, our revised Nietzschean conception of justice aims to protect whatever political organization of society turn out to be the most conducive to breeding the healthy types that legitimize political states. And if the ultimate aim of justice is to promote higher humanity, then justice has as its true object—that is, justice is owed to—not individuals or to classes, but to those higher types. It is on behalf of future human beings who will make the present order legitimate that we have something approximating a duty to be just. To the very limited degree that Nietzsche’s immoralist politics can assert a normative foundational form of “right”—a privilege which, in a broadly rational but not truly morally obligating sense, a political system “ought” to protect, it is not liberalism’s rights of individuals qua human, nor aristocratic radicalism’s rights of class privilege, but the right of future humanity to happiness against its present state, the right of healthier future human types against present ones. Justice seeks to protect the future from the present.2 As Kafka reminds us, “there is an infinite amount of hope— only not for us” (as quoted in Brod 1937, 75). To be sure, if we are to consistently maintain Nietzsche’s immoralism, this cannot be duty in a strictly moral sense. A system of justice shares the paradox of legitimacy that Nietzsche attributes to all value systems: they begin “immorally,” imposed by force or pious lie. But justice in our newly revised sense can become a duty to the degree that it succeeds. In a state that successfully maintains a political order that produces citizens who constitutively affirm that order, acting in accordance with its system of justice would be rationally required by individual self-interest. We “ought” to pursue justice in this sense, then, because we have good reason to seek to attain and preserve a political order that (1) we have no deep reasons to reject or treat as illegitimate and (2) is more likely to produce the kinds of human beings we would prefer to be, even if it is too late to personally, individually become them (compare NI 6.2).

2  This is a tricky case of Fraser’s “injustices of misframing,” in which “a polity’s boundaries are drawn in such a way as to wrongly deny some people the chance to participate at all in its authorized contests over justice” (2008, 62). While Fraser’s focus is on justice to a transnational “who,” here it is a transtemporal “who”—a reframing of particular importance to environmental justice. Compare also Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s call “that we be accountable and responsive to people who aren’t yet in the room, and that we build the kinds of rooms in which we can sit together, rather than merely seek to navigate more gracefully the rooms history has built for us” (2022, 84).

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2   Breeding, Not Improvement, as Means to Justice: How to Make Unequals Equal To strive against evil is to do it too much honor. —Comte de Lautréamont, Poésies To the dimmed understanding of our age there seems nothing odd in claiming an equal share of privilege for everybody—an equal share in things whose essence is privilege. The claim is both absurd and base; absurd because privilege is, by definition, inequality; and base because it is not worth claiming. —Simone Weil, Human Personality

We now have a revised definition of the aim of Nietzschean justice. Justice aims to preserve a social order that enhances humanity in ways that legitimate that social order. Its aim, consequently, is future, enhanced human beings; it is for their sake, and to them, that justice ought to be done; they are the primary bearers of rights. Justice protects the right of happier, healthier, future humans to come into existence, a right protected against the once accidental and, under both noble and slave moralities, intentional reproduction of decadent forms of humanity—in other words, against us, against our self-reproduction.3 But our redefinition of justice now leads to two important questions. First, if justice is ultimately directed to future rather than present humanity, how can this immoralist duty to the future be effective in the present? Since we practice politics in the present, what is the immediate object of its exercise—upon what does it act? Second, what particular concrete form will our new conception of justice take? Is it still, for example, a matter of exchange, equilibrium, or compensation? In answer to the first question, we’ll see that because the enhancement of humanity requires the reconfiguration of subjects’ drives, the present 3  Marx anticipates this idea, but Marcuse takes it further: “frequently brushed aside is the question of what has to be repressed before one can be a self, oneself. The individual potential is first a negative one, a portion of the potential of his society” (1965, 114). See also An Essay on Liberation: “The radical change which is to transform the existing society into a free society must reach into a dimension of the human existence hardly considered in Marxian theory—the ‘biological’ dimension in which the vital, imperative needs and satisfactions of man assert themselves. Inasmuch as these needs and satisfactions reproduce a life in servitude, liberation presupposes changes in this biological dimension, that is to say, different instinctual needs, different reactions of the body as well as the mind” (1969, 16–17).

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object of justice—the material upon which it works in order to achieve its future aim—is not individuals but the drives that constitute them. This, in turn, will answer our second question: the concrete form that justice must take is not the production of an equilibrium among individuals or classes but among the drives, the promotion of an increased proportionality of power of diverse drives in their relation to one another. Justice is realized by promoting Nietzsche’s ideal of the manifold soul. So, we now know that justice preserves social orders that promote human enhancement; it protects the right of healthier, more affirmative future humans to be brought into existence. But how can this be accomplished when any system of justice designed to protect class inequality in the service of human enhancement is doomed to fail? We will find clues to the answer in Nietzsche’s late remarks about justice, remarks from the same period in which he develops the ideal of the manifold soul as a distinctly human form of health. In Twilight, for example, he notoriously appears to reduce justice entirely to aristocratic radicalism: “‘Equality for the equal, inequality for the unequal’—that is what justice would really say: along with its corollary, ‘never make the unequal equal’” (TI IX.48). We might assume that this formulation is inseparable from the primary failure of his political program: the failure to acknowledge that aristocratism inevitably reproduces slave morality. So, we might conclude that we should discard his final thoughts on justice in our critical reconstruction of Nietzsche’s politics. While it is true that Nietzsche intends, as part of this formula, to link justice to class inequality, that is not the only point being made. The spirit—even something of the letter—of this definition is salvageable. In historical context, the remark criticizes the “doctrine of equality” that Nietzsche attributes to Rousseau (1754) and to the political goals of the French Revolution. The implied claim is that it is harmful to justice to abolish social, cultural, and political privileges. But that may not be all that he has in mind here. We should hesitate, first of all, to equate the formula “never make the unequal equal” with aristocratism because, as we have seen, his aristocratism is a radical one. Given the context, which opposes justice to the French Revolution, that surely complicates matters. After all, the ancient régime was hardly a radical aristocracy; it did not seek to artificially breed a social order of unequal classes. It was, instead, a conservative aristocracy that sought to justify the given order by appeal to a supposedly natural hierarchy. Nietzsche’s radical aristocratism not only cannot promote

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conservative aristocratism, it must actively oppose it as an obstacle to its realization. For while radical aristocracies are achieved by a conscious social system of breeding according to precise criteria of enhancement, conservative hierarchies are products of historical accident and good fortune, producing political types that do not coincide with Nietzsche’s preferred criteria of health or enhancement. This is clear, for example, in Untimely Meditations, where Nietzsche insists that the greatest obstacles to the production of genius are the existing economic and political oligarchies of modern capitalism and the military state.4 Because such orders do not promote truly higher types, in such cases, Nietzsche surely would not endorse an abstract, universal principle of “equality for equals, inequality for unequals.” Again, keeping in mind the Rousseauean, revolutionary context, we might ask: why would an aristocratic radical think it unjust to overthrow a traditional aristocracy? There is more to it than Nietzsche’s distaste for the Republican ideals intended as its replacement. Rather, as an aristocratic radical, Nietzsche believes that human enhancement requires a long process of social engineering on the scale of generations. The revolutionary demand for equality was an “end of justice” not because it makes “equal what is unequal,” but precisely because it failed to do so: ending the ancien régime, declaring the rights of man, and initiating a Republican form of government did not fundamentally change the character of the subjects of that state. For they were the product of a long accidental process of social engineering in the same way that the characters of the early nobles and slaves were fixed by the long history of their social and political conditions.5 Compare, in contrast, the much more qualified way in which Nietzsche expresses his fear that “‘equal rights’ could all too easily end up as equal wrongs” (BGE 212, emphasis mine). The conditional language suggests that equal rights are not categorically incompatible with justice, only potentially so. The rest of the passage makes clear the nature of that danger: “(I mean, in waging a joint war on everything rare, strange, 4  See UM III.6 on “misemployed and appropriated culture” that serves the “greed of the money-makers” and the “greed of the state.” 5  Compare Robert Gooding-Williams: “Rousseauean man has a shallow and false understanding of the ‘this-worldly and earthly conditions that allow for the radical transformation of human beings’ lives. More exactly, Rousseauean man mistakenly believes that the revolutionary seizure of state power can fundamentally transform human life” (2001, 192). On Nietzsche’s relation to Rousseau, see Ansell-Pearson (1991).

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privileged, on the higher man, higher soul, higher duty, higher responsibility, on creative power and mastery)—these days, the concept of ‘greatness’ will include: being noble, wanting to be for yourself, the ability to be different, standing alone and needing to live by your own fists.” In other words, there are forms of inequality that are expendable, even objectionable, from Nietzsche’s point of view. His true worry is that the indiscriminate condemnation of inequality leads to the eradication of all forms of inequality, of the valuable as well as harmful, of true as well as false higher types. To emphasize this qualification, let’s critically revise Nietzsche’s claim from “never make the unequal equal” (ungleiches niemals gleich machen) to “never treat the unequal as equal.” This resolves an oft-overlooked paradox. If an egalitarian movement such as the French Revolution were to succeed in its aim of creating a new humanity of truly equal individuals, then it would not violate Nietzsche’s doctrine. For “equality for equals” must include the newly equal. Nietzsche’s formula would be consistent only if we assume every attempt to make unequals into true equals must fail, ensuring that trying to make the unequal equal will always violate justice’s demand of “equality for equals.” But we cannot consistently ascribe the latter view to Nietzsche. The principal distinction between radical and conservative forms of aristocratism is that radical aristocratism sees true superiority as a fortunate and rare accident, to be promoted only through artificial systems of breeding. As we have seen, Nietzsche believes social classes are not natural givens and can be preserved only by being bred—that is, by continually being made. If we were forbidden from making unequals equal, then his entire aristocratic project would be an absurdity. For creating a class of higher types from present ones necessitates making unequals equal, eliminating whatever false hierarchies currently exist in favor of a new, superior one.6 Nietzsche’s view is subtler: he does not think human character can be substantially improved on the individual level. Individuals cannot directly be made equal, as revolutions often pretend to do simply by changing the political order; we can change the deep character of human beings only over the course of generations. As he says in the section immediately 6  Nancy S. Love points out that Marx and Nietzsche both criticize equal right and that “like herd morality, capitalist commodity production conceals qualitative differences as quantitative equality” (1986, 156). However, she finds their positions contradictory because, like Nietzsche, she ignores that noble breeding also makes the unequal equal.

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preceding this doctrine: “Beauty is no accident.—Even the beauty of a race or family, the grace and goodness in all its gestures, have been worked on: beauty, like genius, is the final result of the accumulated labor of generations…. All good things are inherited: anything that is not inherited is imperfect, a beginning” (TI IX.47). So, we must refine Nietzsche’s doctrine of justice further, from “never treat unequals as equals” to “never attempt to make unequal individuals equal.” However, we must also add: “always make individuals who are more equal.” In other words: expand the population of higher types. At its limit, this would mean: “raise everyone to the highest possible level.”7 Nietzsche, of course, believes this is impossible, since he thinks aristocracies are a necessary condition of enhancement. We will see why that view is mistaken in Chap. 8. For now, we only need to note that Nietzschean justice must in principle demand universal human enhancement and so, at its limit point, universal human equality. For if higher types legitimize the state, the more there are, the greater its legitimacy will be. Indeed, this is one of the rare instances where Nietzsche’s earlier views about justice are complimentary to his later ones. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche contrasts an objectionable version of egalitarianism, “a desire to draw everyone down to oneself,” to a positive form that desires “to raise oneself and everyone else up (through recognizing their virtues, helping them, rejoicing in their success)” (HH I.300). Notice that this positive form of egalitarianism is completely separable from his misguided aristocratism. For if it is possible to make unequals equal through the multi-generational breeding of types, then it is possible to produce a non-­ aristocratic society consistent with his doctrine of justice. For such a project does not attempt to produce equality on an individual level; it treats individuals as equals only after they have been successfully bred to be equal in fact. 7  In this way, Nietzsche’s elitism anticipates the social constructionist critique of elitism, which acknowledges the concrete reality of socially-produced inequality in order to short-­ circuit its self-justifying logic. See, for example, Mary Wollstonecraft (1792) and Simone de Beauvoir: “The same vicious circle can be found in all analogous circumstances: when an individual or a group of individuals is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he or they are inferior. But the scope of the verb to be must be understood; bad faith means giving it a substantive value, when in fact it has the sense of the Hegelian dynamic: to be is to have become, to have been made as one manifests oneself. Yes, women in general are today inferior to men; that is, their situation provides them with fewer possibilities: the question is whether this state of affairs must be perpetuated” (1949, 13).

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Nietzsche might object that any such political order would, in its beginnings, necessarily treat as equal individuals who are not yet so. But that would only be a temporary injustice and no worse in that respect than his own aristocratic radicalism. If, as Nietzsche claims, every new value system is founded in acts of injustice, then a successful egalitarian society would legitimize itself the same way Nietzsche’s aristocratism would: retroactively, over the course of time, through the social production of subjects who affirm it. Any new political system, whether aristocratic or egalitarian, temporarily treats unequals as equals. So, the strictly anti-egalitarian reading of Nietzsche’s late theory of justice is misleading. The real heart of that theory is not a normative condemnation of equality but an incompatibilist rejection of voluntary individual change: we should not treat unequal individuals as equals because they are not free to be otherwise than they are; only future humanity can become the equal of its present highest types. It is not, at heart, a moral doctrine about how different human types “ought” or “deserve” to be treated, but an immoralist doctrine about how to effectively achieve human enhancement: human enhancement cannot be accomplished by decree; it must be bred. Until equality among individuals or groups is made concretely real, any attempt to impose it requires, if only temporarily, some degree of injustice. But then making unequals equal is not just compatible with this definition but is its very precondition. The correct formulation is not “never make the unequal equal” but: equals are not recognized but made. Whether this is accomplished through an aristocratic radicalism, in which the inequality of classes is supposed to create a desire, among the elite, to strive toward higher states, or through an egalitarian politics in which all citizens are bred to greater states of wellbeing, any project of enhancement necessarily raises some individuals from a previous state of inequality—of inferiority to future possible individuals—to a state of equality with other members of that new type. Even aristocratic radicalism produces tomorrow’s higher type from the present one—from a relative unequal.8

8  Compare Amy Allen’s suggestion that Nietzsche, along with Freud, Melanie Klein, and the Marquis de Sade, “could be placed among the dark writers of the bourgeoisie who make progress possible precisely through their ‘unsparing criticism’ of its alleged instances…the ability to break through respectable ideology, to fracture existing social reality, and in so doing to make room for its radical critique” (2019, 131).

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The crux, then, is not the transition from unequals to equals, but whether individuals are made so or falsely declared and merely treated so. The new formula, then, of justice is: make equals rather than improve unequals. And its correlate is not that we should never make individuals or classes equal, but: never make future individuals equal to present individuals.

3  Drives, Not Individuals, as the Object of Justice: Difference to the Different Task: None should equal the other, but each should equal the highest! How is this to be done? Be everyone perfect in themselves. —Friedrich Schiller, “Aufgabe” Equilibrium alone destroys and annuls force. Social order can be nothing but an equilibrium of forces. As it cannot be expected that a man without grace should be just, there must be a society organized in such a way that injustices punish each other through a perpetual oscillation. Equilibrium alone reduces force to nothing. If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale. Although the weight may consist of evil, in handling it with this intention, perhaps we do not become defiled. But we must have formed a conception of equilibrium and be ever ready to change sides like justice, “that fugitive from the camp of conquerors.” —Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

With this adjusted formulation of Nietzsche’s doctrine of justice, we can now return to our original question: if justice is a means to state legitimacy, the protection of a social order that enhances humans—at bottom, the protection of the right to existence of a future superior human type— then what is the object or material upon which justice acts in the present? How can we do justice to persons who do not exist yet? How do we protect the rights of merely potential individuals? The ultimate recipient of justice is future humanity, but who is its recipient in the present? This dilemma is easily resolved if we keep in mind two key characteristics of Nietzsche’s moral psychology. First, the agent of ethics is not the individual, but society. As we have seen, this means moral projects become political ones, achievable only through the agency of the social order, rather than through individual initiative or moralities of improvement. This also means that the recipient of political action is not the individual. Second, in Nietzsche’s theory of agency, the conscious self is largely

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epiphenomenal, an after-the-fact identification with our deeds that falsely takes credit for the work of the “undersouls” or drives that actually determine them. If there is no substantial subject other than a “social structure” of drives, then to whatever degree individuals are the recipients and objects of political justice, it is first and foremost on the level of their drives. It is, after all, the organization of those drives that grounds the continuity of present-day, decadent humanity with its potential future, healthier form. As we have seen, Nietzsche’s ideal of human health is one of form without content, an ideal arrangement of drives that does not designate particular drives as virtuous or vicious, noble or base. The only difference between individuals of varying degrees of health is the power and relation of their drives, both internally in relation to one another and externally in relation to their environment. So, we can now more precisely formulate our reconstructed Nietzschean account of justice: the aim of justice is to protect a social order that enhances humanity as a means to the aim of producing higher, state-­ legitimizing types, while the object of justice, the material acted upon to achieve that aim, is the drive configurations of existing individuals, since they are the material foundation and actually existing potential for higher types. Justice protects the rights of a higher future humanity from present humanity by protecting the rights of the drives against their present configuration, of potential psychological types from given ones. Justice is owed not to humanity, nor to classes, whether aristocratic or proletarian, nor to individuals: justice is owed to our drives, the real foundation and agent of human wellbeing and health and, as such, the real material bearers of our best and highest possible selves.9 Furthermore, doing justice to the drives consists precisely in defending them from our current selves, from an accidentally given configuration of the drives that seeks to dominate those drives, to preserve and reproduce itself through them. Consequently, justice not only does not have individuals as its primary object, it not only does not act primarily for them; it acts principally against them. It liberates our future from our present by 9  This is why Nietzsche’s non-liberalism is not anti-liberalism. It opposes the rights of the drives (as potential future types) to all individuals, rather than the rights of some individuals to others. Contrast Conway: “Legislating from an ‘immoral’ perspective beyond good and evil, the lawgiver cannot be concerned with (or even acknowledge) the ‘rights’ and ‘freedoms’ of individual tribes and peoples, much less those of individual human beings; nothing less than the future determination of the species is at stake” (1996, 11).

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freeing our drives from the constraints of our present individual identities, remolding the political and psychological order of values that produces them. This, in turn, allows us to answer our second question: what particular form does the practice of justice take? How does justice protect the rights of the drives against their present configuration? To answer this question, it will be helpful to make one final adjustment to Nietzsche’s late doctrine of justice. Translated literally, the formula is: “To the same sameness, to the different difference…. Never make difference the same (Den Gleichen Gleiches, den Ungleichen Ungleiches…. Ungleiches niemals gleich machen).” This translation emphasizes what the anti-egalitarian reading downplays: the central aim of justice is to protect qualitative differences, and not necessarily to protect quantitative differences of political or economic power. To be sure, he does distrust quantitative egalitarianism of political and economic power, but only to the degree that it brings with it qualitative egalitarianism, the reduction of qualitatively diverse human types to the same.10 In other words, Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarianism is motivated by a form of pluralism. Political equality, he worries, is “a certain factual making-­similar (Anähnlichung) that the theory of ‘equal rights’ only gives expression to,” a state that is harmful only if it also produces qualitative conformity and harms “the multiplicity of types (die Vielheit der Typen), the will to be yourself, to stand out, what I call the pathos of distance” that “is characteristic of every strong age” (TI IX.37). Notice the symmetry between this pluralistic social ideal and his ideal of the healthy, manifold soul. In both cases, the key is qualitative diversity, whether of drives or individuals—inequality of power is part of the goal only to the degree that it is necessary to that aim. We will consider in Chap. 8 whether Nietzsche is right to correlate, as he does here, the quantitative equality of power sought by political egalitarianism with the consequence of qualitative sameness that justice prohibits. For now, we need only to underline that the goal of justice is first and foremost to protect qualitative difference from reduction to sameness. As a future project, justice is the defense of future humanity—its potential for greater power, health, and happiness—from its present decadent form, 10  Martha Nussbaum suggests Nietzsche believes liberal egalitarians “deny that differences among people exist in abundance, including differences of achievement” (1997, 10). However, Nietzsche’s real objection to liberalism is that distribution should be based on the enhancement of individuals rather than merit or desert.

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overcoming its indefinite reproduction. By protecting a “multiplicity of types,” justice seeks to protect the “lucky hits,” then learn how to recreate them and increase their number. As an immediate project to be realized in the present political order upon which that future depends, justice takes the form of a defense of qualitative pluralism not among human types but among the drives. “Never make difference the same” means: protect weaker drives in the social structure of the self from complete suppression or extinction by stronger drives. Never let the soul’s strength destroy its manifoldness. To clarify this point, recall Nietzsche’s contrast between animal strength and human health. Animal health is characterized by a strong but simple hierarchy of drives that produces an effective will to external action, manifested in quantitative power over the individual’s environment. However, in his late works, Nietzsche begins to articulate a distinctly human ideal of health, in which power is increased qualitatively rather than quantitatively, through the intensification of the power of our drives in their relations of resistance to one another, rather than in our power relative to our environment. Consequently, the higher type in Nietzsche’s late work is neither the unconscious, brutish, instinctive conqueror found in his account of noble morality, nor the mechanically reliable promiser plagued with delusions of freedom found in his account of the sovereign individual. Instead, the highest types are characterized by a greater feeling of freedom as equality to resistance, thanks to a greater variety and tension within the hierarchy of the drives that constitute their characters. Consequently, human health is not a vertical expansion of power that increases the strength of the hierarchical order of the drives, making stronger drives more decisively in control of weaker drives and increasing the gaps between power levels in our drive hierarchy. On the contrary, such vertical expansions of power are a primary obstacle to greater qualitative feeling of power, a feeling that is, in turn, the foundation of amor fati, our ability to affirm our fate and, consequently, to affirm and legitimize the political order that created and sustains us. Unlike the noble ideal of animalistic strength, this affirmative form of character does not directly depend upon the ability to dominate our environment, for our feeling of power is grounded primarily in the resistance provided by our own drives to one another. In other words, our feelings of power and freedom coincide directly with a multiplicity of and tension among our drives rather than the strength of their hierarchical ordering, a

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horizontal increase of power across the drives rather than a vertical increase of the power of ruling over obeying drives: the more manifold our soul, the freer and more powerful we feel regardless of our environmental, social, or political power. In this way, this unique ideal of human health as the horizontal rather than vertical expansion of the will to power within the social structure of the drives is the real foundation of the possibility of justice—the realization of a self-legitimizing state that does not undermine itself by producing resentment and slave psychology as an inevitable side effect. Notice, however, that the principal obstacle to the horizontal expansion of power that characterizes human health is precisely the older noble ideal of animal strength. Recall that for Nietzsche, the very measure of the feeling of freedom is “the resistance that needs to be overcome, by the effort that it costs to stay on top” (TI IX.38). The feeling of freedom does not coincide with an absence of obstacles but greater obstacles. That is why we must “look for the highest type of free human beings where the highest resistance is constantly being overcome: five paces away from tyranny, right on the threshold, where servitude is a danger.” In healthy, manifold souls, this resistance that borders on servitude is internal rather than external to individuals: they experience freedom in the powerful tension of their drives’ struggle against one another, rather than in their attempt to overpower or dominate their environment. But this tension and diversity of the drives can exist only at the limit of the strength of the drive organization—the greater the tension, the greater the risk of weakening the order of the drives and vice versa. For the greater the vertical expansion of power, the more decisively the stronger drives will dominate the entire structure, the more completely they will subordinate and entirely thwart weaker drives, eliminating the tension and manifoldness of the soul. Therefore, the vertical increase of the will to power that produces a more rigidly hierarchical soul comes at the direct expense of the horizontal expansion of the power of the drives. The stronger lower-order drives become, the more tension and resistance is felt in the soul, and the greater the feeling of power experienced in effectively acting despite their resistance. However, the stronger the higher-order drives become in relation to their inferiors, the weaker resistance to their command becomes, thus weakening our feeling of power in the determination of our will and in effective action.

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Nietzsche emphasizes this point by suggesting that the “freest” individual—in his qualified sense of “freedom” as a purely epiphenomenal feeling—is one whose drives border on the tyrannical: “This is true psychologically, if you understand ‘tyrant’ to mean the merciless and terrible instincts that provoke the maximal amount of authority and discipline against themselves” (TI IX.38). The dilemma here is that the more successfully one drive tyrannizes and conquers the others, the less resistance it receives from them, consequently, the less need there is for a “maximal amount of authority and discipline” against oneself. And so the maximization of the feeling of freedom, the true enhancement of human beings, requires that all component drives be increased in their power to a point of near tyranny, so that they not only provide resistance but also prevent the decisive conquest of any one drive or group of drives by another.11 Translated into the language of Nietzschean justice: justice seeks to produce not a strict equilibrium but a precarious, tense, and minimal disequilibrium or near equilibrium, an equality not of the power of the drives but between their opposing tendencies toward either unity or tension, a balance between an equality of power that would destroy the order of the drives and a radical inequality of power that would eliminate their diversity. On the one hand, in order to preserve the soul’s strength and unity, our capacity for volition, promising, and effective action, justice requires preserving a degree of drive inequality, a rank-ordering in which stronger drives control weaker ones. However, this order must not allow stronger drives to tyrannize the weaker, entirely suppressing or even extinguishing them (a defining feature, you will recall from NI 6.2, of “anti-natural” morality). Instead, a near-equality of power must be preserved among the drive-­order’s hierarchical levels to ensure continued tension and resistance, preserving the existence of distinct, manifold drives. The practice of justice, then, promotes a tension equilibrium rather than a strict power equilibrium among drives. It seeks to strengthen all drives, not just ruling drives, but not absolutely—only within the limit of the unity of the social structure of the soul. In doing so, justice bestows “to the same sameness, to the different difference” by preventing strong drives from extinguishing the weaker, protecting the diversity of drives in their 11  Nietzsche is borrowing again from Plato. In Republic, Socrates argues that tyrants, despite being able to act as they please, are not truly free. For like a city, the soul is defined by the whole. If an individual’s ruling drives suppress every other drive, then “a man’s soul, wholly enslaved by its inner tyrant, will be least able to do what it wants” (577d).

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difference from the strongest drives’ tendency toward tyrannically reducing the qualitative differences of the order of the drives into a homogenous unity. We might, following Plato, call this a harmony of the soul, provided we recognize that his conception of harmony is fundamentally false. A true harmony is a unity of distinct voices, a happy unity in which plurality is preserved. It is a modest order that unifies while protecting against excessive order, as in the collective artistic work of a well-managed choir, orchestra, play, or film. That happy kind of order-against-order is what Plato only pretends to provide in his theory of the tripartite soul: a unity of distinct parts with distinct virtues and forms of happiness. However, Plato’s secret is that he doesn’t really believe the soul has three parts, after all. In reality, the soul is singular, for the mind survives the death of the body. Our emotions and appetites are just accidents of our attachment to a body, and not part of the real self. They do not play an equal role in governance because they are not separate agencies but mere instruments of reason. So, the correct metaphor for Platonic justice is not harmony but integrity. Holding to his preference for musical metaphors, the just soul is less like the harmony of an orchestra than an individual musician’s mastery of an instrument that has become an extension of herself. Our Nietzschean conception of a just soul in which the drives maintain an order of minimal disequilibrium or near-equilibrium is a truer harmony of the soul precisely because it is a dissonant harmony. So, we can now fully summarize our revised conception of Nietzschean justice. The final aim of justice is to produce a lasting, legitimate social-­ political order. The proximate aim of justice, the means to that final aim, is to change the existing social and political order to produce the material conditions necessary to breed higher types who will legitimize the social order through their fate-affirming characters, the constitutive ordering of their drives in harmony with the values of the society that produces them. Because the aim of justice requires the production of this higher type, the final object or recipient to whom justice is owed is future humanity: justice protects the rights of future humanity over and against the repetition of its present form. And because the material possibility of a healthier form of future humanity is equivalent to the drives and their organization, the proximate object or recipient of justice in the present is the drives rather than the individuals who possess them. Consequently, justice takes the general form of the protection of weaker drives from stronger drives in the constitution of present-day types: the

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decadent, the animalistic noble, and the self-mastered sovereign. In other words, the general task of justice is to protect our weakest drives from ourselves, from our mistakenly perceived self-interest in obeying either an anarchy of contradictory drives or tyrannical ruling drives. Consequently, justice takes the specific form of the protection of weaker drives from stronger ones through the horizontal expansion of their power in a tension equilibrium that reduces their hierarchical inequality within the limit of preserving their hierarchical order. The “true voice of justice” demands “equality for equals” in the form of the production of ever-greater numbers of higher types who are also truly equal to one another. That is how one really prevents the different from being made the same—by preventing the difference of future humanity, the manifold diversity of drives that will create it, from being extinguished by the same—by the internal anarchy or homogeneity of decadent, noble, and sovereign types that endlessly reproduce humanity in the same pattern of masterly and slavish drive-organizations. We can now conclude that this revised formulation of justice successfully meets both criteria of an incompatibilist, immoralist politics. Unlike Nietzsche’s noble formulation of justice, our revised version does not fall into moralism by treating justice as due to or merited by individuals in virtue of their class status. “Equality for equals” is not a moral imperative but a practical one; it simply points out that recognizing and treating people as equals does not truly make them so. Moreover, because the demand to protect difference from sameness takes the practical form of preserving the plurality of the soul by protecting our own weakest drives, it does not imply a morally substantial notion of freedom. As present-day individuals, we are motivated to promote this form of justice not out of moral duty, but simply in obedience to and in the interests of the will to power of the weaker drives that constitute our agency. The suffering of those drives beneath either—as the case may be— an anarchy of drives or a tyranny of our ruling drives is a source of our own very real suffering, a material rather than abstract motivation. Consequently, the goal of empowering those drives in a way that increases the feeling of freedom and power is entirely in our own rational self-interest. This non-moral convergence of the interest of justice for both future higher types and for the empowerment of present individuals allows us to move beyond a theory of justice and toward a reconstruction of Nietzsche’s conception of rights. We have seen that he believes every new value system begins with an immoral act: it must be imposed by force or coerced through lies, since a state’s legitimacy can only be realized after the fact through the production of legitimizing subjects.

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However, we now know that the question of how to produce legitimacy is not identical to the question of how to motivate individuals to adopt a Nietzschean politics. Legitimacy comes too late for present humanity, but political incentive does not. For if the future of humanity is shaped through the empowerment of present humanity’s drives, every individual has a direct interest in promoting it. We can, consequently, completely reject Nietzsche’s view that, because legitimacy is produced by societies rather than founds them, every new normative social order must be unjustly imposed through force, coercion, or lies. On the contrary, if a new evaluative order designed to breed higher types accidentally coincides with the intensification of the will to power of present-day individuals, then present-day individuals have a rational incentive to promote that social order, even before it has attained legitimacy. A state’s necessary initial illegitimacy does not necessitate its imposition by force. Furthermore, although justice is not strictly owed to individuals but rather to their drives, it has as its practical consequence, if not its aim, the promotion of an authentic social and political pluralism that is in individual interest. The protection of the qualitative diversity of individuals’ drives is, at the same time, also the protection of qualitative individuality, of the complexity and uniqueness of individual drive organizations that allows individuals to differ from one another. Humans possess individuality to a greater degree than animals precisely because they are diverse in their socially constituted interests and motives: the diversity of their own drives is the source of their diversity relative to one another. So, while justice is owed strictly to the diversity of the drives, the diversity of individuals is its accidental beneficiary. This is our first clue to how we might construct an immoralist Nietzschean alternative to the classical liberal conception of rights. If justice primarily protects the rights of higher types by protecting the rights of the drives, it may, secondarily, provide us with a foundation for a derivative theory of individual rights.

4   Non-liberal Rights: Never Make the Different the Same Men who have resolved to hate their own kind are not aware that this must begin by self-hate. —Comte de Lautréamont, Poésies

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Of course, “individuals,” as peoples and philosophers have understood them so far, are a mistake: individuals are nothing in themselves, they are not atoms, they are not “links in the chain,” they are not just legacies of a bygone era,—each individual is the entire single line of humanity up through himself. —Twilight of the Idols IX.33 By hoping and desiring, the revolutionary suicide chooses life; he is, in the words of Nietzsche, “an arrow of longing for another shore.” —Huey Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

From our critical reconstruction of Nietzsche’s theory of justice, we can now derive a novel theory of rights. As we have seen, if the final end of justice is a form of state legitimacy obtained only through the successful production of higher, healthier types, then there is a non-moral kind of rational duty or obligation—once that legitimacy has been realized—to continue producing those types. Put differently, once we have become so affirmative in our character and our relation to the political order that produced us that the problem of legitimacy no longer arises, we have a rational self-interest in continuing to produce individuals who will also affirm and preserve that social order, since it created and continues to enable our power and happiness. The higher type, we might say, has a “right” to existence in such a social order, with the qualification that this is not strictly a moral right, but a practical obligation of rational self-interest. Note that for the moment, we are leaving open the practical possibility of an egalitarian political order that brings everyone up to the highest level of health, so we do not yet need to ask if this right obligates everyone or only the members of a higher aristocratic caste. In Chap. 8, we will critically examine Nietzsche’s belief that aristocratism is necessary for the production of higher health. Consequently, to the final aim of justice corresponds a primary form of rights, the protection of which constitutes the practice of justice: higher, happier, more life-affirming human types than presently exist have a right to exist in the future. The principal form of injustice, then, is any action or social order that obstructs the enhancement of human beings. For existing higher types in a realized legitimate state, this would be an injustice on the part of the existing members of that state, because to prevent enhancement would be to violate their own nature: to contradict their affirmation of their own existence and of the social order that produced it. Actually realized healthy types have every interest in the promotion of their social

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order, and no interest in preventing a future higher order. The right of ever-higher types to exist and of existing higher types to allow and promote this is then an immoralist kind of right. It follows not from duty but from their very nature. However, an initial dilemma arises from the fact that this right only exists in an actualized legitimate state. Higher types have a right to exist that has authority only over other higher types, not over more decadent types. For the right of the higher type to exist follows from the aim of justice: the legitimization of the state. Consequently, their right to exist depends on their affirmation of an achieved legitimate state and does not exist until that legitimacy does. We can, however, insist that higher types have a qualified preliminary right to exist, a right with authority over individuals even in illegitimate states. By a preliminary right, I mean that there is a rational obligation that decadent individuals have to themselves—a right that is not a right of the higher type to existence—which, when realized, will eventually coincide with the right to existence of higher types in a legitimate state. In the present, it is generally in our interest to promote the future existence of higher types, but there is no necessity or obligation to do so. For present individuals to refuse to promote the enhancement of humanity might be a pragmatic mistake, but not in contradiction with their very nature. For future higher types, in contrast, affirming the social order of human enhancement is their very nature; it is what they have been bred to do, and so they have a stronger interest that we may, in a non-moral sense, call an “obligation”: namely, they cannot do otherwise. That kind of rational self-interest, grounded in causal necessity, is what I will call an “immoralist right” in the strict sense. In contrast, the present-day individual’s strong but defeasible self-­ interest in promoting human enhancement is not strictly an immoralist right, but an interest that, when realized, will be transformed into a strict right. Put slightly differently, decadent individuals have good reason to try to become less decadent; that is their preliminary obligation toward human enhancement, corresponding to the non-existent higher type’s preliminary right to exist. However, once a society successfully overcomes decadence (over the course of generations, not on an individual level), then its subjects will, in virtue of their very character, affirm and promote the continued overcoming of decadence through the continued production of higher types; the preliminary obligation of prior generations then becomes

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a strict obligation toward human enhancement, one necessitated by their nature rather than by a defeasible belief about their general self-interest. I am insisting, even in an immoralist context, on the preservation of the language of “rights” and “justice” for the same reason I have preserved the language of state “legitimacy”—to emphasize, in keeping with Nietzsche’s insight, that there are objective reasons for preferring some values to others, some social-political goals to others, and some forms of human agency and character to others, even if these reasons are not moral in nature. Immoralism can serve the critical function that moral claims have unsuccessfully tried to fulfill, preserving the distinction of better and worse, more and less preferable systems of value. Now, recall that in our examination of justice we saw that the future higher type’s existence depends on the drive organization of present-day individuals: the reality of higher types, the materially existing potential for their existence, is equivalent to the social structure of existing individuals’ drives, since higher types are realized by increasing the horizontal power of the drives in that social structure. Horizontal power is increased through a tension equilibrium in which weaker drives are strengthened to the highest degree possible in their relation to stronger drives, strengthening the tension-in-diversity of the drives, while preserving their hierarchical order and the overall unity and strength of the individual’s character. Consequently, the higher types’ preliminary right to exist, which they hold over and against present-day individuals, is identical in practice to the preliminary right, in present-day individuals, of their weaker drives to a tension equilibrium with their stronger drives. Realizing our obligation to future human types thus coincides in practice with the self-interested project of increasing our feeling of power by strengthening our weakest drives. The foundational kind of right in a Nietzschean politics does not, then, belong to classes or individuals but to our weakest drives, specifically, their right to continue to exist and to expand their power in relation to stronger drives that tyrannize them, threatening to extinguish or suppress them. This right of the drives is, as a kind of obligation, nothing but a self-­ interested duty to more effectively realize our individual self-interest—the “self,” understood, of course, not as a substantial conscious agency, nor as equivalent to our strongest drives, but understood as reducible to the order and diversity of the entire sum of our individual drives. The individual is, as Nietzsche stresses, both the commanding and obeying parties in any action, both the successful, effective ruling power and the suppressed, vanquished power. In this respect, our real interests

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are essentially conflicted, a reflection of the very nature of agency as a hierarchy of drives: every act of volition, no matter how unified or efficient, defies and subdues some other drive that constitutes who we are. We act in service of our true interest—in the service of our entire will to power, of every drive that constitutes our interests—only to the degree that we maximize the horizontal power of our drives, minimizing their hierarchical inequality, thus reducing the subordination of our weakest drives. The more manifold the soul, the higher the tension among the drives, and so the more completely we satisfy our will to power, acting in our own interest in the deepest and fullest sense. If the primary form of political right in a Nietzschean politics, that of the drives, is realized through the empowerment of all drives toward a state of tension equilibrium, and if that state, as we have seen, coincides with the optimal conditions for maximizing the feeling of freedom, then from that primary form of right we can now derive a secondary one. The right of the drives is to be protected from individuals’ ruling drives, their weaker drives defended from their stronger. This means that the right of the drives is first and foremost a right against their possessor. Consequently, the primary kind of right in a Nietzschean politics cannot be entrusted to the agency of individuals. The drives must be emancipated, so to speak, from their owners; they must be given the relative freedom necessary to expand their power within the drive structure, to act with a degree of independence from ruling drives. The drives are emancipated not by, but from, the individual. Consequently, a Nietzschean politics can provide us with a theory of individual rights, but one in marked contrast to the classical liberal theory of rights, since its foundational form is a right against rather of the individual.12 For if we followed that tradition in making individuals—who are contingent products of past social orders, their drives organized in decadent or tyrannical ways that diminish their health and feeling of power— the primary bearers of rights, we would transform their accidental, unfortunate production into a moral obligation.13 We would absurdly assume that simply because former social-political orders happened to 12  Contrast Barry Stocker (2014), who argues for a more positive relation between Nietzsche and the classical liberal tradition. 13  Against Geuss’s claim that “ethics is usually dead politics: the hand of a victor in some past conflict reaching out to try to extend its grip to the present and the future” (2010, 42), ethics is more often living politics, the source of the continued victory of past conflicts because that past constitutes who we are more than our present does; we are in our own grip.

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create people constitutionally doomed to self-contradiction, self-tyranny, and misery, we ought to make that accident into a destiny, to make the accidental will of an unhappy, misfortunate creature arbitrarily into a duty to be honored and promoted by all human beings, present and future. Nietzschean rights, on the contrary, are rights we hold against ourselves. They are nevertheless the rights of drives we really possess, and so rights that are in our true interest. We have a right to be emancipated from our selves’ accidental form, a right to our transformation into selves that are not, in their very essence, internal war and self-imposed misery. Recalling that our decadent and tyrannical forms of agency are neither true agencies nor truly our own—they are the products of societal agency, bred by brutal, unhappy social orders—we can conclude that this right of our higher potential self against our present one is also a right of the individual against past social orders. To emancipate ourselves from our current forms of selfhood is at the same time to finally emancipate ourselves from the past societies that produced them.14 Because the Nietzschean right of individuals is that of our whole being against the tyranny of a part, of our potential against our accidental self, it takes the form, not of liberty, the right to certain forms of activity, but of a right to certain forms of society. Our primary right as individuals is to whatever material social-political conditions will best enable the enhancement of humanity, to whatever forms of social organization will maximize the tension equilibrium of our drives.15 In Chap. 8, I will examine the question of which form of social organization that might be. For now, I will only underline the extraordinary contrast between Nietzschean and classical liberal theories of rights. 14  This answers our earlier dilemma, based in Fraser’s (2008) “injustices of misframing,” about justice toward a transtemporal “who.” Justice to future humanity is justice to our weakest drives, whose call for emancipation from oppressive organizations of agency is the concrete potential for future, emancipated forms of humanity. 15  In this way, a Nietzschean politics expands Marx’s critical political theory, providing positive principles. And by focusing on any aspect of material life shaped by the social-­ political order, it complements critics of Marx who emphasize the transformation areas of life beyond the strictly economic. Compare, for example, Angela Y. Davis’s criticism that increased economic equality gained by the growth of women in the workforce has not eliminated gender oppression, which also requires the alleviation of less directly economic forms of inequality rooted in the family structure under capitalism, through measures such as childcare, maternal leave, and reproductive healthcare (1977, 183). On the place of the economic in Nietzsche’s social thinking, see Gary Shapiro (1991, 1994), Peter R. Sedgwick (2007), and Allison Merrick (2020).

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Because the primary form of rights in liberalism is that of individual rights, it consecrates whatever accidental form individuals’ interests take in a given social order, thereby consecrating the values of the past social-­ political orders that produced them. In practice, the liberal prioritization of individual rights upholds the tyranny of past societies’ values over our present and future; it imprisons us in forms of selfhood that are, in effect, internalized versions of past societies, a constitutive form of servitude to the arbitrary moral authority of the past. The liberal prioritization of individual rights is, consequently, a deeply conservative principle, a way of preserving past social orders and values.16 In this respect, classical liberal theories of right are moralistic not only in their theoretical claims about the existence of absolute duties to individuals or humanity. In practice, they protect the embodied value structures of past moralities, reproducing and reinforcing them through the medium of individual will. In contrast, our reconstructed Nietzschean theory of rights is thoroughly immoralist, in that its principal task is to emancipate individuals, in their very character, from the moral prejudices of the past—even to the degree of emancipating us from past moral prejudices that we have mistaken for ourselves. If the liberal theory of rights makes politics into an extension and protection of the prejudices of morality, Nietzsche’s theory, in contrast, makes decisively overcoming morality, emancipating individuals from every moral prejudice, into the foundation of all politics. Nietzschean politics is non-moral because it is not grounded in moral claims, but it is truly immoralist because it would emancipate us from morality entirely, overcoming moral prejudice not theoretically but in the very heart of personhood, on the level of the tyrannical drives that structure the unhappy forms of modern individual agency. This does not, however, mean that it is an anti-liberal politics—no more than Nietzsche’s incompatibilism entails unfreedom or his immoralism is anti-morality. As always, Nietzsche’s position is articulated not against the dichotomies of the tradition but independent of them. Nietzsche’s incompatibilism rejected the choice between morally substantial freedom and passive unfreedom, because it rejected the essential causal distinction between individuals and the external causal forces that shape 16  Compare Táíwò’s argument that the neoliberal rise of the politics of deference, an “elite capture” of an originally subversive identity politics, is often in practice “deference to the built structure of society” and, as such, a failure of a “constructive approach to politics” (2022, 83 and 118).

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them. His immoralism rejected the choice of realism or subjectivism, because he rejected the assumption that evaluations must be true to be objectively preferable. Likewise, Nietzsche’s non-liberalism is not an attack on the value of freedom of thought and action, because he has rejected the liberal presumption that the social order and individual agency are fundamentally distinct, antagonistic parties. On the contrary, the will of the individual is a product and reflection of the social order. For that reason, one cannot successfully give greater freedom of thought and action to individuals simply by protecting their right to think and act without interference. It is not sufficient to do so, because individuals are not fully free in their relation to others to successfully act on their choices, and it is not necessary to do so, since even successful actions will be free only in relation to individuals’ ruling drives, not in relation to the totality of their drives and on the level of the individual as a whole. Consequently, even in relation to the purported aims of classical liberalism, we can emancipate thought and action effectively only through changes to the social order that produces individuals, that imposes its values and order through their character and drives. Simply protecting rights in the form of political liberties will not guarantee, and in practice may reduce, a more practical and concrete freedom that can only be realized by a more effective ordering of the soul—achievable not through non-­ interference but breeding. Of course, greater practical freedom is not Nietzsche’s goal at all. Nietzsche seeks to make us not freer but more affirmative, to enhance our feeling of power and freedom as a means to amor fati. On a Nietzschean view, individuals have fundamental rights not to liberties, to forms of unimpeded thought or action, but to forms of society, to social and political conditions that most effectively promote the feeling of freedom.17 For, 17  In this way, a Nietzschean critique of “negative liberty” goes much further than that of communitarians like Charles Taylor (1979). Nietzschean positive liberty is not a right to the conditions for particular actions, but to entire forms of social and political organization. Compare, for example, Onora O’Neill’s suggestion (2005) that abstract rights are overcome only by rights to goods and services, which in turn require a right to the forms of social organization that can provide them. In the end, the entire distributional framework is misguided. Because the true good to be distributed is the feeling of power, “the relative goods of distribution contribute to happiness only when possessed in relationships of relative equality. Equality is itself the good to be distributed as the basic ground of any form of wellbeing” (Miyasaki 2014).

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as we saw in earlier chapters, Nietzsche’s ideal of health as manifoldness of soul coincides with the qualitative maximization of power as a feeling of resistance which is, in turn, the basis of the epiphenomenal or illusory feeling of freedom. In this respect, there is a profound foundational difference between Nietzschean and liberal politics: liberal theories of right make moral claims about real liberties, distinguishing proper from improper actions, real from false forms of freedom, while Nietzsche’s non-liberal theory of rights asserts only the existence of the feeling of freedom.18 There is no substantive difference between true and false freedom from which criteria of true and false propriety or property might follow.19 However, for precisely this reason, a Nietzschean politics should in practice be paradoxically attractive to the liberal sensibility. What does the abstract negative liberty of that tradition really achieve except to allow me to be left alone in my pretense to liberty—feebly trying to persuade me that on some level I’m really free even if I don’t feel free? The Nietzschean alternative is not to prioritize the mere feeling of freedom over its reality, but to reject the distinction entirely. In this respect, it is much more attractive than traditional liberalism. The liberal conception of rights, thanks to its belief in a meaningful criterion of “real” freedom, guarantees only the abstract right in principle to their exercise. It promises only that it will not interfere with our opportunities for actualizing those rights.20 A Nietzschean non-liberal theory of rights, in contrast, promises not merely opportunity but reality: the concrete, material conditions that enhance the feeling of freedom. Such a theory cannot tell us, as liberalism so often does, that despite our all-too-common and all-too-real feelings of 18  On the importance to Nietzsche of the feeling of freedom despite his incompatibilism, see Miyasaki (2016). 19  Compare Alan D. Schrift’s claim that Nietzsche allows us “to avoid what, since Kant, has been seen to be the necessary assumption for doing politics…that one must make an appeal to something or someone transcendent in order to legitimate one’s political or ethical position” (2013, 108). Schrift rightly sees this as the basis of our prejudice that the only live political options are Rawlsian or Habermasian. But I would add: or any socialism that takes as transcendent ground the distinction of objective and subjective interest, true and false consciousness. 20  Rejecting the feeling/reality distinction also saves us from G. A. Cohen’s (1981) well-­ meaning but empty debate about whether capitalism violates freedom. Such arguments score points against libertarians at an unreasonably high cost, weakening the common, correct intuition that no one is free to sell their labor in any practically important sense.

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unhappiness, powerlessness, and unfreedom, our condition is in reality a just one, because our abstract opportunity for happiness, power, and freedom remains intact. In fact, our non-liberal theory of rights shows a commitment to individual freedom that is more substantial than that of classical liberalism. For it includes a positive obligation to create the material conditions necessary for individuals to feel free, conditions not of opportunity but ability, an obligation to realize individual freedom on a concrete rather than abstract level.21 The production of a drive organization that combines strength with health, power with the feeling of power, and a unified will with a rich diversity of drives would bring about a social-political order in which individuals are not merely permitted but concretely able to realize the concept of liberty, in which the feeling of freedom would coincide with a real capacity for action. In a non-liberal Nietzschean politics, individuals would have a right not to the mere possibility and pursuit of happiness, but to happiness itself.

References Allen, Amy. 2019. Progress and the Death Drive. In Transitional Subjects: Critical Theory and Objection Relations, ed. Amy Allen and Brian O’Connor, 109–134. New York: Columbia Press. Ansell-Pearson, Keith. 1991. Nietzsche Contra Rousseau: A Study of Nietzsche’s Moral and Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beauvoir, Simone de. [1949] 2010. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany Chevallier. New York: Vintage Books. Brod, Max. [1937] 1995. Franz Kafka: A Biography. Edited by Max Brod and translated by G. Humphreys Roberts. Boston: Da Capo Press. Cohen, G.A. 1981. Illusions about Private Property and Freedom. In Issues in Marxist Philosophy, ed. John Mepham and David-Hillel Ruben. Brighton: Harvester. 21  This is a concrete liberty of the body rather than an abstract liberty of the mind. As Schrift says, Nietzsche “moves questions of politics from those of individual rights and common goods to questions of what this body, itself comprised of other bodies, can do” (2013, 119). This is somewhat similar to Geuss’s solution to the “discontents of liberalism”: “As long as the real social, economic, and political institutions and circumstances of our life do not change, we cannot expect to rid ourselves completely of our discontent with liberalism” (2005, 11, 28). However, rather than “a vindication of one strand in the liberal tradition,” it suggests the aims of liberalism may be better achieved through non-liberalism, just as the aims of morality may be better achieved through politics.

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Conway, Daniel. 1996. Nietzsche and the Political. New York: Routledge. Davis, Angela Y. [1977] 1998. Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation. In The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Fraser, Nancy. 2008. Scales of Injustice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World. Cambridge: Polity Press. Geuss, Raymond. 2005. Outside Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2010. Politics and the Imagination. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gooding-Williams, Robert. 2001. Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Love, Nancy S. 1986. Marx, Nietzsche, and Modernity. New  York: Columbia University Press. Marcuse, Herbert. [1965] 2007. Repressive Tolerance. In The Essential Marcuse: Selected Writings of Philosopher and Social Critic Herbert Marcuse, ed. Andrew Feenberg and William Leiss. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1969. An Essay on Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press. Merrick, Allison. 2020. Nietzsche’s Economy: Revisiting the Slave Revolt in Morals. In Nietzsche and Critical Social Theory: Affirmation, Animosity, and Ambiguity, ed. Christine A. Payne and Michael J. Roberts, 135–143. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Miyasaki, Donovan. 2014. A Nietzschean Case for Non-liberal Egalitarianism. In Nietzsche as Political Philosopher, ed. Barry Stocker and Manuel Knoll, 155–170. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ———. 2016. Feeling, Not Freedom: Nietzsche Against Agency. Journal of Nietzsche Studies 47 (2): 256–274. ———. 2022. (NI) Nietzsche’s Immoralism: Politics as First Philosophy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Nussbaum, Martha. 1997. Is Nietzsche a Political Thinker? International Journal of Philosophical Studies 5 (1): 1–13. O’Neill, Onora. 2005. The Dark Side of Human Rights. International Affairs 81 (2): 427–439. Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schrift, Alan D. 2013. Spinoza vs. Kant: Have I Been Understood? In Nietzsche and Political Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, 107–122. London: Bloomsbury. Sedgwick, Peter R. 2007. Nietzsche’s Economy: Modernity, Normativity and Futurity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Shapiro, Gary. 1991. Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gifts, Noise, and Women. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 1994. Debts Due and Overdue: Beginnings of Philosophy in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Anaximander. In Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on

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Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, ed. Richard Schacht, 358–375. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stocker, Barry. 2014. A Comparison of Friedrich Nietzsche and Wilhelm von Humboldt as Products of Classical Liberalism. In Nietzsche as Political Philosopher, ed. Barry Stocker and Manuel Knoll, 135–153. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi O. 2022. Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else). Chicago: Haymarket Books. Taylor, Charles. 1979. What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty? In The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honor of Isaiah Berlin, ed. Alan Ryan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wollstonecraft, Mary. [1792] 1995. A Vindication of the Rights of Men with a Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hints. Edited by Sylvana Tomaselli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PART III

Democracy After Liberty

And so gradually individual concrete life is extinguished, in order that the abstract life of the whole may prolong its sorry existence, and the State remains eternally alien to its citizens because nowhere does feeling discover it. Compelled to disburden itself of the diversity of its citizens by means of classification, and to receive humanity only at second hand, by representation, the governing section finally loses sight of it completely, confounding it with a mere patchwork of the intellect; and the governed cannot help receiving coldly the laws which are addressed so little towards themselves. Finally, weary of maintaining a bond which is so little alleviated for it by the State, positive society disintegrates (as has long since been the fate of the majority of European States) into a moral state of Nature, where open force is only one more party, hated and eluded by those who make it necessary, and respected only by those who can dispense with it. —Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Sixth Letter In certain critical respects, Nietzsche progressed further than Marx, insofar as he had a greater aversion vis-à-vis the bourgeois…. Nietzsche shows that he is not only a critic of culture, but he was also against that kind of critique of culture that remained individualistic. In other words, Nietzsche’s critique is directed not only against democracy, but also against individualist society. Objectively the concept of love for him means solidarity. —Theodor Adorno, “Discussion of a Paper by Ludwig Marcuse” Nietzsche’s struggle against the “swindles” of democracy places him closer to us than the ideology of petit bourgeois social democracy—sincere in its

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worship of the “little gods” of democracy, freedom, truth, morality, even god. We are one with Nietzsche in his struggle against individualism, the anarchy of capitalist society, his passionate dream of the union of the earthly globe, his struggle with nationalism. We are one with Nietzsche because he, like many of the best minds of the bourgeoisie, of necessity, against their own will, often reach our truth. And all that is sunny and joyous in him, his “Yes to life,” his superhuman happiness, his exultation of lords of the earth and rulers of the world—this will also be close and comprehensible to us, when the lords of the earth are not the small circle intended by Nietzsche but the millions. —Moris Leiteizen, Nietzsche and Finance Capital (1928)

CHAPTER 6

An Immoralist Theory of Peoples: Nobility as Collective Agency

1   A Herd Animal Without Instincts: Nietzsche’s Misleading Animal Rhetoric We have seen that an incompatibilist, immoralist politics abandons classical liberal theories of justice and rights only in their abstract form, replacing the liberal foundation of rights in personhood—the illusion of the free, rational agency of the conscious ego—with a more fundamental theory of the rights of the drives that constitute and determine individuals. This theory of right, in turn, produced a system of secondary rights on the level of the individual: the right of individuals as manifestations of the drives to the conditions of a tension equilibrium of drives that produces the synthesis of external strength and internal diversity that characterizes Nietzsche’s ideal of the manifold soul. We then found that those conditions, in turn, coincide with the material social-political conditions of the individual feeling of freedom, found in resisting activity against proportionate obstacles, which is, finally, the foundation of human happiness and amor fati. So, from a non-liberal, incompatibilist, and immoralist theory we were able to derive a concrete form of individual rights far more substantial and extensive than classical liberalism’s abstract rights to negative liberty and self-ownership—non-liberal rights are a better protection of individual freedom (or the illusory experience or feeling of it) than the liberal form. For every individual has a right to concrete social happiness, not just its promise or opportunity. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Miyasaki, Politics After Morality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12228-6_6

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We’ll now see that, just as our reconstruction of Nietzsche’s immoralist politics promotes a more substantial and extensive kind of “liberty” than liberalism, it also provides the foundation for a far more substantial form of democracy. Of course, like our reconstructed theory of individual rights, this claim goes against the spirit of Nietzsche’s own political aims. We have moved beyond mere reconstruction of Nietzsche’s political philosophy into extrapolation. We must now ask: of the logically available options entailed by Nietzsche’s metapolitics as rooted in his incompatibilist psychology and immoralist value theory, which are the strongest, most interesting, and consistent for us to consider and develop—even if Nietzsche would reject them? So we will, once again, have to show that Nietzsche’s rejection of democracy is not one of principle but prejudice, not only not necessitated by his key philosophical commitments but incompatible with them. We must betray Nietzsche to whatever degree he betrays us with philosophically inconsistent positions, and to whatever degree he betrays himself by preferring his arbitrary prejudices to his own philosophy, failing to be equal to his best, most fruitful and interesting insights. So, what is the source of Nietzsche’s profound antipathy to democracy, and does this antipathy follow necessarily from his fundamental philosophical commitments? Nietzsche believes, first and foremost, that democratic institutions encourage cultural values harmful to the promotion of higher types. By promoting belief in the basic equality of worth of all humans, democracy supposedly destroys the pathos of distance, our sense of superiority and inferiority among persons: “democracy represents the disbelief in all great human beings and all elite societies: ‘everybody is everybody else’s equal. At bottom we are one and all self-seeking cattle and mob’” (KSA 11.26 [282], WP 752). In other words, democracy, both as an evaluative ideal and as a form of political organization, promotes value egalitarianism, which in turn harms the promotion of higher types. In Chap. 8, I will critique Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarianism, so we will defer this objection for now. Why else does Nietzsche abhor democracy? Let’s focus on the two most substantial remaining objections. First, he thinks democratic institutions are a symptom of and inseparable from “herd morality”—which in turn he considers inseparable from Christianity and slave morality: “morality in Europe these days is the morality of herd animals…. things have reached the point where this morality is increasingly apparent in even political and social institutions: the democratic movement is the heir to

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Christianity” (BGE 202). Slave morality’s negative foundation in resentment makes it essentially opposed to enhancement, so if he’s right that democratic politics cannot be disentangled from its slavish origins, it must inevitably harm the promotion of higher types.1 Second, Nietzsche believes that the democratic political movement coincides with a decline of social institutions and of the human character types that make strong, lasting social institutions possible: “After we lose all the instincts that give rise to institutions, we lose the institutions themselves because we are not suited to them anymore. In every age, democratism has been the form in which the organizing force manifests its decline” (TI IX.39). So democracy is not just harmful to certain forms of politics, but to politics as such: it is “a form of the decline of the state.” Because Nietzsche believes a strong political state, along with strong social institutions and individuals, is a precondition for his project of breeding, democracy may be fundamentally incompatible with enhancement. His position on this point is complicated by the fact that he treats democracy as a symptom, the “manifestation” rather than cause of this decline. In addition, he thinks this decline, along with the rise of democratic institutions, is inevitable. So, neither position counts as a normative objection to democracy, a reason we ought not support democratic institutions, if they are not, after all, the cause of the problem and unavoidable, anyway. I will clarify Nietzsche’s position on this point below. Let’s begin by examining the charge that in democracy a “herd morality” gains the upper hand, an expression of slavish morality that endangers the project of promoting higher types. This objection is based in a misleading ambiguity in Nietzsche’s rhetoric. On the one hand, Nietzsche’s use of this language reflects his naturalism, his refusal to view the human as a type essentially different from other animals. Throughout the Genealogy, he describes the development of human consciousness, agency, and morality as the development of a form of animal life—and not merely metaphorically. In Beyond Good and Evil, he insists on its literality: Let us immediately repeat what we have already said a hundred times before, since there are no ready ears for such truths—for our truths—these days. We know all too well how offensive it sounds when someone classifies human 1  This claim is connected to another assumption of Nietzsche’s that I have argued against (Miyasaki 2010): that nobility cannot recognize obligations to others in their difference and so noble morality excludes all moral conscience, not just guilty conscience.

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beings as animals, without disguises or allegory; and we are considered almost sinful for constantly using expressions like “herd,” and “herd instinct” with direct reference to people of “modern ideas.” So what? We cannot help ourselves, since this is where our new insights happen to lie. (BGE 202)

On the other hand, Nietzsche also uses this language in a figurative, pejorative way to suggest regression from a higher, human state to an inferior, historically earlier, animalistic state. This normative rhetoric goes against the grain of his descriptive, literal usage and complicates his critical argument against democracy.2 If we take Nietzsche at his word, his claim that democracy is an expression of the “herd instinct” of a “herd animal” (BGE 202) would suggest—against Nietzsche’s intentions—that democratic institutions are the natural expression of human nature. If herd behavior is essentially and instinctively human, if it is our biological nature to treat “herd utility” as “the only utility governing moral value judgments” and to think immorality is “limited to those things that seem to threaten the survival of the community” (BGE 201), then democracy would be inevitable and pointless to decry. Indeed, it would not merely be pointless but—far worse on Nietzschean grounds—an example of “anti-natural morality.” For endorsing the suppression of humanity’s defining animal instinct is “attacking the root of the passions,” which “means attacking the root of life” (TI V.1). It is no less absurd to ask humanity, if it is essentially a herd animal, not to express that nature than to ask birds of prey not to prey and little lambs not to mind when they do. But of course this is not Nietzsche’s view. He cannot mean that humanity is literally a herd animal, that herd behavior is instinctive, rooted in an essential biological disposition. We know this, first of all, because it is incompatible with his claim that life is essentially will to power, a drive not toward obedience or survival but toward the feeling of resisting activity that, in its animalistic form, manifests itself as domination of one’s environment. How can he possibly reconcile the view that humans are essentially herd animals with his view that “life itself is essentially a process of 2  Compare his rhetorical ploy of identifying the taming of humanity with the “regression of mankind” (GM I.11), implying that herd morality is anti-natural, not a regression to a more primary nature.

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appropriating, injuring, overpowering the alien and the weaker, oppressing, being harsh, imposing your own form, incorporating, and at least, the very least, exploiting” (BGE 259)? Moreover, we also know this cannot be his view because he has already exhaustively explained how the herd instinct is produced by slave morality. Nietzsche’s use of the phrase “herd instinct” does not become common in his work until Beyond Good and Evil. And it is not used as a term of art until the Genealogy. There it appears as part of his rejection of the utilitarian theory of the origin of moral concepts: The word “good” is absolutely not necessarily attached to “unegoistic” actions: as the superstition of these moral genealogists would have it. On the contrary, it is only with a decline of aristocratic value judgments that this whole antithesis between “egoistic” and “unegoistic” forces itself more and more on man’s conscience,—it is, to use my language, the herd instinct which, with that, finally gets its word in (and makes words). And even then it takes long enough for this instinct to become sufficiently dominant for the valuation of moral values to become enmeshed and embedded in the antithesis. (GM I.2)

From its very first technical use, the herd instinct refers to something that is not biological but the product of a long historical process that “finally” comes to the fore a process that comes into existence with the decline of noble morality.3 It is not an “instinct” (Instinkt) at all, but a “drive,” a distinctively human, socially constructed pattern of motivation and behavior that becomes possible only after the internalization of animal instincts that is initiated by civilization and morality. Since Nietzsche often uses Instinkt to refer to biological demands and Trieb to refer to socially shaped psychological motivations, his decision to call herd behavior an “instinct” is surely an intentional—if misleading— part of its rhetorical purpose: to indicate that this behavior is a regression to an earlier, inferior form of animal. But there is not any “herd instinct” for the simple reason that humanity is not, in fact, a “herd animal.” The human herd animal is not an original form, but a secondary creation of the slave revolt, made possible only through the moralization of bad conscience into guilty conscience. 3  Contrast Rolf Zimmermann’s claim that “the collective, ‘herd,’ is older than the ‘I’” (2014, 42). This is true of the collective but not the herd, which is a slavish variation of the collective that produces the “I.”

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Consequently, it is consistent, after all, for Nietzsche to criticize herd morality, to suggest that it is anti-natural for humans to behave as though they were essentially a herd creature—a social conditioning deeply at odds with their nature rather than an expression of it. The “herd instinct” and “herd morality” are, then, an exception to the rule of Nietzsche’s naturalistic use of animal rhetoric. It is a figurative, pejorative comparison that misleadingly implies not only a deep divide between human and animal nature, but a value-laden one, in which the animal’s lack of individual freedom and consciousness is supposedly a kind of moral inferiority. It is a regrettably inconsistent and confusing rhetorical ploy, but he is at least consistent in his descriptions of herd humanity as a social product rather than a natural category. So, “in the spirit of true enlightenment” we must ask, as Adorno praises Freud for doing in his critique of Gustave Le Bon’s (1896) group psychology, “what makes the masses into masses?” (1951, 121). Like Freud (1921), Nietzsche avoids the error “of inferring from the usual descriptive findings that the masses are inferior per se and likely to remain so.”4 In Beyond Good and Evil, for example, he tells us that “as long as there have been people, there have been herds of people as well (racial groups, communities, tribes, folk, states, churches), and a very large number of people who obey compared to relatively few who command” (BGE 199, italics mine). The herd instinct is not, then, an instinct, but a distinctly social and cultural artifact of political organizations and relationships. It is not nature but training that produces it; it is not intrinsic but a product of “breeding”: “humanity has been the best and most long-standing breeding ground for the cultivation of obedience so far” (italics mine). It is an “innate need” not of instinct but “conscience,” a product of the internalization of conventional morality: “the average person has an innate need to obey as a type of formal conscience that commands: ‘thou shalt unconditionally do something, unconditionally not do something’” (BGE 199). Even as an ingrained but socially originated drive, it is not truly a “herd” drive in the sense of a primary positive disposition toward social obedience but a negative disposition secondary derived from fear of the 4  Compare Gary Shapiro on the nuances of Nietzsche’s use of Menge or the “multitude” (2013). If anything, Freud and Nietzsche take the rejection of the primacy of masses too far. Their tension with the left is due not to conservative contempt for the “masses” but to their anti-conservative emphasis on dissolution, the inevitable splintering of groups and individuals into conflict. See Freud (1920, 1938) and Miyasaki (2004). Like Hobbes (1651) their conservative politics are misguided developments of their radical theories of human nature.

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herd: “Ultimately, the ‘love of the neighbor’ is always somewhat conventional, willfully feigned and beside the point compared to fear of the neighbor. After the structure of society seems on the whole to be established and secured against external dangers, it is this fear of the neighbor that again creates new perspectives of moral valuation” (BGE 201). In fact, it is not herd behavior that is “instinctive” but its opposite, for herd morality turns out to rely on the suppression of instincts associated with individuality: “when the highest and strongest drives erupt in passion, driving the individual up and out and far above the average, over the depths of the herd conscience, the self-esteem of the community is destroyed—its faith in itself, its backbone, as it were, is broken: as a result, these are the very drives that will be denounced and slandered the most.” But this should not come as a surprise. Nietzsche makes abundantly clear in the Genealogy that, prior to the cultural invention of bad conscience and its moralization by slave morality, human nature as exemplified in the noble type is far from herd-like. The herd animal is not nature, not a beginning, but the end of a long process of domestication in which an animal does not regress to earlier instincts but is instead weakened in its true nature: The project of domesticating the human beast as well as the project of breeding a certain species of human have both been called “improvements”: only by using these zoological terms can we begin to express the realities here…. To call the domestication of an animal an “improvement” almost sounds like a joke to us. Anyone who knows what goes on in a zoo will have doubts whether beasts are “improved” there. They become weak, they become less harmful, they are made ill through the use of pain, injury, hunger, and the depressive affect of fear.—The same thing happens with domesticated people who have been “improved” by priests. (TI VII.2)

Nietzsche’s so-called herd morality is, then, just a synonym for “slave morality,” part of his rhetorical attempt to redirect our anti-natural moral contempt for the body, passions, and animal instincts against itself by comparing our supposedly higher faculty of moral conscience to the blind, unintelligent, and automatic collective behavior of herd animals.5

5  He is, in other words, enacting that book’s call for “an intertwining of bad conscience with the unnatural inclinations, all those other-worldly aspirations, alien to the senses, the instincts, to nature, to animals” (GM II.24).

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But my purpose is not to disentangle Nietzsche’s literal and rhetorical usage of animal language in order to make his critique of herd morality consistent. Rather, it is to make clear why his critique of democracy as an expression of herd morality fails.6 If herd morality is simply a synonym for slave morality, then its primary cause is not democracy at all, but instead aristocratic politics. For it is the division of societies into noble and slave classes that produces the resentment that gives birth to slave psychology and motivates the slave revolt in morality. Nietzsche’s rejection of democracy as herd morality is, consequently, another instance of that most common “great error,” the confusion of cause and consequence. If herd morality is the true cause of the democratic movement, then he cannot fight herd morality by attacking its symptoms. He must attack it at the source: the psychology of resentment and the aristocratic political orders that generate it. So, by rejecting Nietzsche’s misleading rhetoric of herd morality, we have restored the causal picture of human development that he elaborated in the Genealogy: slave morality is not a reflection of original human nature but a social-cultural historical product, a reaction to noble morality’s institutionalization as an aristocratic politics. Democracy, in turn, is a symptom and consequence of slave morality’s attempt to overthrow aristocratic morality and cannot therefore be coherently blamed for slave morality.7 This point, in turn, leads us to a further complication in Nietzsche’s confused attack on democracy. As I mentioned earlier, Nietzsche sometimes suggests that the rise of democratic institutions is inevitable, 6  Consequently, although Drochon is correct that Nietzsche opposes democracy “as the coming of herd morality” (2016, 1066), we must separate the historical facts about his views from their philosophical reasons in order to avoid overlooking inconsistencies. We should acknowledge what Nietzsche wants to say, but acknowledge that his reasoning sometimes fails to give him what he wants. For example, Drochon rightly notes that “herd-morality still captures something about how we do live our lives today,” but leaves unquestioned his equivalence of democracy and herd morality. That our lives are dominated by herd morality should not make one “rethink one’s commitment to democracy” (1067), but instead rethink the assumption that liberal democracies are substantially democratic at all. 7  So, although Robert Guay is right that “what Nietzsche thought was wrong with the democratic movement” is that “it is continuous with Christianity” (2013, 59), this proves Nietzsche’s argument is incoherent, for then it is also continuous with Christianity’s true creator: the noble. Far from it being true that “Nietzsche has nothing to say about how social arrangements might shape our psychological features” (66), the Genealogy is precisely that: a historical-materialist analysis of how a political system bred distinct psychology types as forms of value agency (NI 7.2).

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making the criticism of democracy seem trivial: if it cannot be avoided, why criticize it? We see the first suggestion of democratic inevitability fairly early in his work. In 1880, he declares “the democratization of Europe is irresistible,” concluding that it should not be directly resisted but utilized for further goals (WAS 275). He compares democracy to building a protective barrier against the dangerous backwardness, ignorance, and authoritarianism of the Middle Ages, “dams and walls against barbarians, against plagues, against physical and spiritual enslavement.” But rather than stopped, the rise of democracy should be affirmed as a temporary means to a greater political project: “we must not bear too heavily upon the workers of the present when they proclaim that the wall and the fence are already the end and the final goal; after all, no one yet sees the gardener and the fruit for whose sake the fence exists.” By the mid-1880s, Nietzsche believes he has recognized the gardener and its fruit. In his notebooks, he announces his optimism about the utility of democracy for his own decidedly anti-democratic project of breeding: I have not yet seen any reasons to feel discouraged. He who acquires and preserves a strong will, together with a broad mind, has a more favorable chance now than ever. For the trainability of men has become exceedingly great in democratic Europe; men who learn easily, who readily adapt themselves, are the rule: the herd animal of a higher order of intelligence is prepared. He who would command finds those who must obey. (KSA 11.26 [449], WP 128)

The suggestion, then, is that a shapeless, docile, obedient population is ideally suited to Nietzsche’s political project of breeding higher types. Far from opposing the development of democratic values and institutions throughout Europe, Nietzsche instead suggests promoting them: “For the present we support the religions and moralities of the herd instinct: for by means of them, a type of man is being prepared, which must one day fall into our hands, which must actually desire our hands…. We should probably support the development and the maturing democratic tendencies, for they enhance weakness of the will” (KSA 11.35 [9], WP 132). Just as aristocratism once produced the conditions for the victory of its opponents, so slavish politics and morality now prepare the way for their opposite: the subordination of a docile public to the higher aims of an aristocratic cultural elite. Democracy is a means, in other words, back to

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aristocratic radicalism.8 By 1887, Nietzsche is ready to explicitly make this case in his published works: “Europe’s democratization amounts to the creation of a type prepared for slavery in the most subtle sense” (BGE 242). It creates, in other words, the conditions for a new aristocratic social order that, as every “good, healthy aristocracy” must, “accepts in good conscience the sacrifice of countless people who have to be pushed down and shrunk into incomplete human beings, into slaves, into tools…as the substructure and framework for raising an exceptional type of being up to its higher duty and to a higher state of being” (BGE 258).9 So, we now have a qualified, consistent version of Nietzsche’s critique of democracy: treated as an end rather than a means, democracy subordinates the social order to the needs and interests of the herd at the expense of its higher types. The alternative is not the wholesale rejection of democracy but its temporary promotion, provided it is subordinated to the aristocratic aim of breeding a new slave caste engineered to serve the production of higher types. However, Nietzsche’s critique of democracy has been made consistent at the expense of its power, for we have simply returned to the original dilemma of aristocratic radicalism. Nietzsche cannot successfully enhance humanity by repeating the original mistake of noble morality, indirectly creating through a radically unequal, oppressive aristocratic order an entire class of individuals whose very character is grounded in resentment, ensuring the regeneration of slave morality. Indeed, Nietzsche seems to have been duped by his own misleading rhetoric about humanity as “herd animal.” If it were true that human beings are biologically disposed toward obedience to a herd, then it would, after all, be possible to create an aristocratic order grounded in the obedience of a slave class that would not regenerate the old dilemma of slave  Cf. Drochon (2016, 1060).  Clark claims Nietzsche aspires only to aristocratic values, not a politics. Why, she asks, conceive of Nietzsche’s “new caste to rule Europe” as one “involving force and violence as a matter of imposing their will on a resisting populace?” (2015, 170). She rightly emphasizes that the “slavery” at issue is not institutional but spiritual, as in his preferred examples of scholars and scientists (171), but wrong in her puzzling claim that he “says nothing at all in Beyond Good and Evil about the kind of political organization or institutions (of the larger society) that are required for the enhancement with which he is concerned” (170). Putting aside this strange dismissal of The Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christian’s discussions of Manu, Nietzsche also directly addresses the issue in Beyond Good and Evil, where he says to “look for once at an aristocratic commonwealth—say, an ancient Greek polis, or Venice—as an arrangement, whether voluntary or involuntary, for breeding” (BGE 262). 8 9

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morality. For Nietzsche’s political fantasy to work, there must exist a biological ground for the existence of truly willing slaves “who must obey” (KSA 11.26 [449], WP 128). But this is not simply fantasy, it is incoherent. For if humanity is a herd animal, then there cannot be higher types anyway—enhancement would be an impossible, anti-natural ideal, directly at odds with human nature. Either Nietzsche must hold to his naturalistic psychology of the will to power, in which case the perfect slave—and an aristocratic order not doomed to face revolt—can never exist, or he must return, as we have seen he sometimes does, to idealism and moralism, to the fantasy that humanity can will itself, against its nature and drives, to states independent of nature, to an overman who is equally over and beyond nature, psychology, and physics. But that would be to share in the delusions of the sovereign individual, which Nietzsche should have outgrown with his discipleship of Wagner and Schopenhauer. His critique of democracy is, like his aristocratic radicalism, a regression to the failings of his early works. Nietzsche should have, by now, finally gotten over his overman.

2   Herds Versus Peoples: The Possibility of Noble Collective Agency and Self-Rule If we reject Nietzsche’s instrumental account of democracy as a temporary means to the end of aristocratic radicalism, does this leave him with any alternative? Or should we conclude that a politics of breeding must fail even in reconstructed form? Even if he is mistaken that democracy causes herd morality, he might still insist that it is so deeply correlated with it and ultimately inseparable from it that there is no possibility of a democratic politics compatible with human enhancement. Democracy may not be equivalent to slave morality, but it might still be incompatible with noble morality and inseparable from slave psychology’s desire to avenge political inferiority by reducing the higher type to the lower. However, this objection also arises from Nietzsche’s misleading rhetoric of the herd. It assumes that democratic politics, as rule by and for the people, is equivalent to rule by and for the herd. But equating “the people” with the “herd” is precisely the mistake of the rhetoric of herd morality. According to Nietzsche, justice historically originates among the nobles rather than the slaves. The herd is, consequently, not the origin of peoples, understood as political communities and collective agencies, but a late transformation and perversion of such communities. A people—far

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from synonymous with the herd—is precisely the original agent, the founder of noble morality and politics. Nietzsche often forgets this distinction between peoples and herds, but it is absolutely crucial to his genealogy of morality, one of the principal tasks of which is to deny that slave morality is the original form of society and social normativity, including morality and legal justice. But if there is a form of social normativity more primary than slave morality, there must be a kind of collective agency that precedes slave psychology, a noble form of the people. Consider, for example, the contrast Nietzsche draws in Thus Spoke Zarathustra between a people and a state: “State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. It even lies coldly, and this lie crawls out of its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’ This is a lie! The ones who created the peoples were the creators, they hung a faith and a love over them, and thus they served life” (Z I.11). As part of his critique of statism, Nietzsche here conceives of the people as a collective agency that exists before the slavish form of society that imposes herd morality: “every people speaks its own tongue of good and evil—which the neighbor does not understand. It invented its own language through customs and rights.” In contrast to slave psychology, in which members of the slave class are unified by shared hatred and resentment of their political superiors, negatively united by a shared rejection of another people and its values, a true people are united by a set of values that directly reflect and promote their own wellbeing: “A tablet of good hangs over every people. Observe, it is the tablet of their overcomings; observe, it is the voice of their will to power” (Z I.15). In other words, in contrast to herds, peoples are the original, noble form of community and social agency. Like herds, peoples are united by shared values, but their value systems correspond to the noble rather than slavish form: Praiseworthy to them is whatever they consider difficult; what is indispensable and difficult, is called good, and whatever stems from the highest need and still liberates, the rarest, the most difficult—that is praised as holy. Whatever lets them rule and triumph and shine, to the dread and envy of their neighbor, that they consider as high, the first, the measuring meaning of all things.

Notice that Nietzsche’s description of a people in this passage is almost interchangeable with his description, in the Genealogy, of the noble

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originators of morality. The noble human type not only founds morality and justice, the very origins of society, of human collective agency, are essentially noble. Holding Nietzsche to this view, it would be absurd to conclude that democracy, a self-ruling collective agency that legislates “its own tablet of values” and speaks “its own tongue of good and evil” according to its own “customs and rights” is equivalent to rule by the herd. It would be absurd to assume that the only kind of democracy possible is a herd democracy, when collective agency originates with noble peoples and noble moralities. This is not to deny, of course, that historically noble forms of collective agency have originated in aristocratic social orders. That is why Nietzsche attributes a people’s tablet of good to creators who “hung a faith and a love over” their people in the form of moral codes, customs, and laws. That is also why Nietzsche believes that a future aristocratic politics might overcome noble morality’s self-undermining production of the slave revolt. He naively, idealistically hopes that the creation of values can instill servitude with meaning, producing a contented slave class. But we have found that view is utterly at odds with his incompatibilist, immoralist commitments. More important, it is a superfluous view. We need not believe in some mysterious artistic ability of philosopher-legislators to directly bestow social meaning in order to explain the existence of peoples. For Nietzsche has already given a perfectly consistent, naturalistic, and plausible explanation of the origins of the tablets of value that unify a people. Peoples are not created by the creators of their value systems; peoples, including the creators of their value systems, are not causes but effects, not agents but products of the material conditions of their existence. Their values simply reflect those conditions, and the so-called creators of value systems simply institutionalize those values in more explicit and practical forms. It is the mountain, after all, that molds both Moses and his commandments.10

10  Compare Vanessa Lemm: “the people are the true agent of greatness (whole) where their power and creativity finds in genius only its contingent and ephemeral messenger” (2013, 191). As Nancy S. Love says, for Nietzsche “society’s value creators…are themselves functionally determined and hence explained by the will to power” (1986, 100). For the same reason, however, we should reject Love’s claim that he thinks all states “are illusory communities” (146) and “understands original man as an isolated individual” (164), as well as her view that Marx “understands original man as a herd being,” a highly misleading description of Gattungswesen.

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Notice, after all, the tellingly passive language Nietzsche uses to describe the value system that unifies a people. Their values articulate what is “indispensable and difficult”; they affirm “whatever stems from the highest need and still liberates” and promote “whatever lets them rule and triumph and shine” (emphases mine). Noble morality is not a true creation for the simple reason that it is, at bottom, nothing but an affirmation of a fortunate people’s needs, the necessities imposed by their material condition. It does not command or determine their happiness but reflects it.11 As always, Nietzsche’s language of “creativity” should always be read ironically—or at least with suspicion—in light of his commitment to fatalism.12 In Beyond Good and Evil, he claims that noble morality is “value creating”—but carefully qualifies this to indicate that this is, once again, about the phenomenological feeling, not fact, of freedom: “the noble type of person feels that he determines value…he knows that he is the one who gives honor to things in the first place” (BGE 260, emphasis mine). In the same breath, Nietzsche explicitly gives the game away: “such a morality is self-glorification.” Either the noble glorifies what he happens to be or he creates value. Either he congratulates himself on his good fortune or he produces it; it cannot be both. Either “moral designations were everywhere first applied to human beings and only later, derivatively, to actions” or, in Nietzsche’s misleading hyperbole, “the ruling group determines what is ‘good’”; it cannot be both. In the Genealogy, however, there is no ambiguity: noble morality is not a creation but a mirror: a direct reflection of feelings of happiness, specifying and celebrating the conditions of those feelings: “we the noble, the good, the beautiful and the happy!” (GM I.10). Nietzsche’s key historical example of the distinction between the morality of a people as product of fortune in contrast to the herd as product of 11  This is also why Nietzsche’s error theory does not treat values as strictly false. Values are, like all perspectives, partial truths that become false only when universalized or treated as intrinsic to objects. A people’s values reflect objective, environmental conditions that produce and support or constrain their wellbeing: “every naturalism in morality, that is, every healthy morality, is governed by an instinct of life—some rule of life is served by a determinate canon of ‘should’ and ‘should not,’ some hindrance and hostility on the path of life is removed this way” (TI V.4). This is another reason to be wary of Hussain’s “fictionalism” (2007). 12  Contrast Leiter: “the legislation of values is a creative exercise, and the values so created are just that: creations, not features discovered in a pre-existing reality” (2019, 6), as well as Clark and Dudrick: “To create values…. Nietzsche does this in his own writings by offering new interpretations of the dispositions he induces in people (to which he seduces them), ones designed to induce people to regard these dispositions as justified” (2007, 212).

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regressive social engineering is found in the nation of Israel, a division sharply marked by the opposed value-systems of the Old and New Testaments. Judaism, Nietzsche tells us, was originally a noble, naturalistic value system: “Originally, particularly in the time of the kings, Israel had a correct, which is to say natural, relation to all things. Its Yahweh expressed a consciousness of power, Israel’s joy in itself and hope for itself” (A 25). Notice, once again, that this morality is not creation but reflection; it mirrors the conditions of their wellbeing, their will to power, corresponding directly to the social, economic, and political conditions of their good fortune, their success as a people. It is their material conditions that create and unite them, that make them a single collective agency, not their values.13 Once that good fortune is lost, once the harmony of their material conditions with their will to power is lost, those natural values are transformed, a transformation effected when, as a conquered people, Judaism gives birth to Christianity: “The old God could no longer do what he formerly could. One should have let him go. What happened? One altered the conception of him: at this price one retained him. Yahweh the God of ‘justice’—no longer at one with Israel, an expression of national self-­ confidence: now only a God bound by conditions.” It is only then, when a naturally derived, self-affirming tablet of values has failed, reflecting a materially conditioned political failure, that a people’s morality is degraded into a herd morality, that the original, natural morality that was not created but read out of the conditions of their happiness, is transformed into a condemnation of the happiness of others: “the new conception of him becomes an instrument in the hands of priestly agitators who henceforth interpret all good fortune as a reward, all misfortune as punishment for disobedience of God, for ‘sin.’” It is, then, only with the birth of a slavish herd morality that reflects not nature but the priests’ cunning, that leadership takes a dominant and more creative role in the production of values. Nietzsche ridicules the priests’ sham creativity, since they only invert the values of the noble class. But 13  That a people exists only on the basis of shared material conditions of happiness poses a dilemma for the solidarity of movements on behalf of such conditions: how act toward a common aim if solidarity requires that aim already exist? This is aggravated by the modern condition of what Nietzsche calls hybridity: values originating in contradictory, often externally derived and no longer relevant material conditions. How expand solidarity without endangering the materially grounded identities from which we act? I examine this problem more in Chap. 9. On the problems that intersectional, multiple, agonistic, and conflicting identities pose for solidarity in political action, see the Combahee River Collective (1977), María Lugones (2003), Chantal Mouffe (2018), and Rochelle DuFord (2022).

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although at his most consistent, Nietzsche acknowledges there is no true value creation at all, the priest comes closer to a modest kind of creativity than the self-glorifying noble. For the priest proposes values that do not simply mirror the slaves’ conditions of existence but negate them— although only evaluatively, as imaginary revenge rather than change to those conditions through true political action.14 It is only after the transformation of a people into a herd that creators, legislators, and commanders are necessary to found a morality. For it is only then that the members of a community do not find their values naturally, in the very conditions of their lives, and only then that do not find values that are natural, that can affirm their condition rather than negate it, born of conquest and happiness rather than servitude and impotence. It is only slave morality that requires a priestly caste, precisely because the members of a herd must be deceived into adopting values that contradict their instincts rather than beautify them, values that undermine their will to power rather than celebrate and perfect it. We can conclude then that Nietzsche’s equation of democracy with herd rule is inconsistent with his own distinction between peoples and herds. The original form of community and collective agency is the noble agency of a people, a population unified not by values created and externally imposed from above by an aristocratic elite but born directly out of material social and political conditions of fortune and power. There is no reason to assume that a noble form of democracy is impossible, since the existence of a people does not depend on the existence of an aristocratic order. More important, we have reason to suspect that a true people cannot continue to exist alongside the profound class inequality of an aristocratic political order. From Nietzsche’s own explanation we have found that the primary precondition of a people is shared happiness, specifically, material conditions of wellbeing and fortune shared by all members of a community, reflected in their shared tablet of values. Whenever substantial inequality is introduced into a group, a people is transformed into a herd, as we see in Nietzsche’s interpretation of Israel following its subordination to the Roman Empire. To be sure, the original historical form of noble peoples is aristocratic, as in the case of Israel. But as inequalities between classes grow, a single people is divided into two distinct peoples, two distinct collective  This is less surprising when we remember that the priest is part of the noble class (Anderson 2011). On why the priest’s nobility does not enable true value-creation, see NI 7.3. 14

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identities, value systems, and agencies.15 Increasingly, the will to power of an oppressed class is turned against the natural foundations of its social unity: shared conditions of wellbeing. This is particularly noticeable in Nietzsche’s description of the health of a nation: a healthy people’s superfluous power inevitably overflows in the form of conquest, the subordination of other nations. Yet, as we see in the case of Israel under the Roman Empire, it is precisely this dramatic division of shared natural happiness into gross inequality that makes slave revolt inevitable. Had Israel remained victorious, had it not been subjugated by the Roman Empire, it would have produced its own slave morality rather than been transformed into one: either through an aristocratic division of its own population into separate peoples by class (as has happened in all successful empires and nations, including liberal-democratic ones) or, alternately, preserving the unity of its own population through conquest, subordinating other peoples and reproducing slave morality in a subjugated foreign nation.16 So, we can now conclude that Nietzsche’s own contrast of the origins of a true people to that of a herd entails, first, that a noble form of democracy in which a true people governs itself is in principle possible and, second, that a true people, a noble collective agency, cannot be maintained under an aristocratic politics. Whether through class inequality or foreign conquest, aristocratic politics is a machine for regenerating herds, and with them the victory of slavish forms of morality. Far from democracy being inseparable from herd morality, as Nietzsche’s failed critique of democracy pretends, only aristocratic politics is inseparable from herd morality. If there is any hope for Nietzsche’s project of producing a noble society of higher, fate-affirming human types, it lies only in democratic forms of 15  Nietzsche’s account complements Marx’s view that capitalism will collapse not because it exploits and immiserates but because it produces the conditions that make the proletariat into a people, a collective agency capable of revolution. 16  As has arguably happened in Israel’s occupation of Palestine, European colonialism, and the United States’ military interventions in the Middle East. The alternative case, the internal division of a people generating a slave class, might be an apt analysis of the recent rise of right- and left-wing populism in liberal democracies like the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and France. As in Nietzsche’s analysis, the cause of such “slave revolts” is not the moral character or ideology of the people, but the neoliberal economic order that produces the conditions for their unity, inadvertently producing that character and ideology. A central lesson of immoralist politics for the present is that to blame ideology for revolt is to commit the great error of confusing cause for consequence.

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politics and organizations of society. It might turn out, of course, that those aims are impossible under any form of politics. But for now, we can conclude that democracy at least remains a possible form of a reconstructed Nietzschean politics, but aristocratism is decisively off the table.

3   Peoples and Institutions: The Place of Strong, Manifold Souls in the Social Order Though need may drive Man into society, and Reason implant social principles in him, Beauty alone can confer on him a social character. Taste alone brings harmony into society, because it establishes harmony in the individual. —Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Twenty-­ Seventh Letter

What of Nietzsche’s second charge against democracy, that it undermines the strength of soul that individuals must possess in order to build and maintain social institutions? There are two problems in this argument. The first is that it is incoherent in relation to Nietzsche’s project: if it is true, Nietzsche’s own politics of aristocratic radicalism must fail. The second is that it falsely assumes that the only foundation for strong social institutions is a people whose form of agency embodies the animal and sovereign ideal of health as strength, forgetting that his highest ideal of health is not merely strength but manifoldness. On the first point, Nietzsche’s charge against democracy undermines his own political project in two ways. First, it entails that the philosophical elite that is supposed to enact his aristocratic radicalism will never be numerous, strong, or influential enough to obtain the cultural power to impose it. Second, it entails that the widespread weakness of will that democracy supposedly produces will create an underclass that is incapable of practically obeying and upholding the ruling elite’s aristocratic values. If he is right that democracy destroys the will to institutions, then both the sculptors and the stone for his great but fantastic politics are lacking.17 17  Here Nietzsche uncritically borrows from Plato, repeating his mistakes. Either Plato is right that democracy creates anarchic individuals and wrong that guardians, warriors, and producers are natural human kinds, or he is right about natural kinds and wrong in his aristocratism, since true producers are naturally moderate and will obey just laws without need for guardians. As in Nietzsche: either the material to build society exists and the aristocratic program is irrelevant, or it does not, in which case philosopher kings and obedient subjects are needed but do not exist.

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Nietzsche’s argument is founded on a claim about the relation between social institutions and the organization of individuals’ drives. On the one hand, he argues that modernity—particularly, the liberal tendency toward expansion of rights and the democratic tendency toward increasing public power—aggravates decadence, a state of anarchic contradiction among the drives. On the other hand, by destroying agents’ psychological unity and strength, decadence undermines the agency necessary to produce and uphold strong, lasting social institutions: After we lose all the instincts that give rise to institutions, we lose the institutions themselves because we are not suited to them anymore. In every age, democratism has been the form in which the organizing force manifests its decline…. For there to be institutions, there needs to be a type of will, instinct, imperative that is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, authority, to a responsibility that spans the centuries, to solidarity in the chain that links the generations, forwards and backwards ad infinitum. (TI IX.39)

The form of the will that is necessary for institutions is, as he says, “anti-­ liberal”—a will opposed to liberty in the negative sense of absence of law or constraint, a will to both commanding and obeying and, consequently, requiring the division of the people into commanding and obeying classes. It is a will to the institution of a “tradition” that could serve as an “authority,” both a governing set of cultural values and a governing body that imposes them, creating a form of “solidarity” between those in authority and those who obey. For the ruling class, this means they must have the strength of will necessary to “be indifferent to hardship, cruelty, deprivation, even to life,” to follow Nietzsche’s injunction to be “ready to sacrifice people for your cause, yourself included” (TI IX.38). His higher philosophers, tasked with the legislation of new values must, above all, be hard: “And if your hardness does not want to flash and tear and cut apart, how could you one day create with me? For all creators are hard. And it must seem like bliss to you to press your hand upon millennia as if on wax” (Z III.29). However, if it is true that “the West in its entirety has lost the sort of instincts that give rise to institutions” (TI IX.39), then Nietzsche’s new philosophers are never coming, after all—or surely not in sufficient numbers or with sufficient strength of will to gain substantial cultural, much less political, influence over humanity. Nietzsche’s belief that higher types are rare accidents and his general theory of culture, according to which

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lower types always vanquish the higher, guarantee that his plan to subvert democracy by welcoming as instruments of aristocratic radicalism the weak-willed, willing slaves it produces is pure fantasy—yet another regression to his old idealist belief that spirit, especially creative, artistic spirit, can move matter, that the rare, relatively weak, isolated accident of higher types can through sheer strength of will overcome and command the combined strength of an entire population that has been socially engineered for centuries to embody decadent values. As for Nietzsche’s imagined slave army, cultivated by modern liberal-­ democratic culture to be the willing instrument of imaginary philosophical legislators, it is an even more improbable fantasy. The production of lasting institutions does not require strength of will only in its rulers but also in its servants. It is not enough that the democratic type be sufficiently weak-willed to desire to obey. An effective underclass must also possess an ability to obey: a positive capacity for active, self-imposed obedience. Its members must have internalized the authority they obey, so that they are able to hold themselves to their will to obey despite “suffering, hardship, deprivation”—despite, above all, their own will to power, their own natural drive to resist or conquer rather than obey. Consequently, the “solidarity” of the will to institutions requires that both ruling and underclass share the same character form that enables both commanding and obeying: sovereign individuality. The slaves, too, must possess the permission, right, or prerogative to make promises, for they require sufficient self-mastery to truly obey in the sense of successfully holding themselves to the authority of the tradition created by the aristocratic governing class.18 18  This is also a paradox that plagues Marx’s will to counter-institutions to capitalism, a will to be realized by a revolutionary proletarian class. Fortunately, capitalism dehumanizes workers in Goldilocks fashion: not too little to require revolution, but not so much that it reduces them entirely to a lumpenproletariat, incapable of revolutionary discipline. Compare Engels’s barely-suppressed, semi-murderous contempt in his portrait of this Manichean Dorian Gray of the proletariat: “The lumpenproletariat, this scum of the decaying elements of all classes, which establishes headquarters in all the big cities, is the worst of all possible allies. It is an absolutely venal, an absolutely brazen crew. If the French workers, in the course of the Revolution, inscribed on the houses: Mort aux voleurs! (Death to the thieves!) and even shot down many, they did it, not out of enthusiasm for property, but because they rightly considered it necessary to hold that band at arm’s length. Every leader of the workers who utilises these gutter-proletarians as guards or supports, proves himself by this action alone a traitor to the movement” (1870). This contemptuous nose-holding for the Marxist Chandala is also characteristic, by the way, of many of his descriptions of the presumably true proletariat in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).

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Yet Nietzsche has defined the democratic type precisely by the decline of this capacity. Even if there were a sufficient number of higher types with the influence and hardness of will necessary to build institutions, thanks to the work of democratic culture, the building material is lacking: People today live for today, people live very fast,—people live irresponsibly: and this is precisely what people call “freedom.” The things that make an institution into an institution are despised, hated, rejected: people think they are in danger of a new sort of slavery when the word “authority” is so much as spoken out loud. (TI IX.39)

Nietzsche believes that liberal-democratic institutions make a populace ready and willing to obey his future aristocratic legislators by weakening their will. However, in doing so, they also weaken the general population’s ability to obey. Because democratic types lack the strength to independently impose upon themselves the legislated commands of the elite, they can uphold its new institutions and traditions only by force. But this returns us to the problem of the sovereign individual. If the obedience of the populace is to successfully ground new political institutions, a weak-willed populace must be made to uphold those institutions by force. However, unlike the noble class of Nietzsche’s just-so story in the Genealogy, his higher philosophers do not have political power, their type is too rare, and their demands of the general populace too anti-­natural to imagine they might ever gain that power. They do not have the capacity to impose obedience by force, hence Nietzsche’s wishful fantasy that democracy will conveniently create a populace that longs to obey. But even if that fantasy were true, the populace’s desire to obey is produced simultaneously with its incapacity to obey. So we see, once again, that Nietzsche’s political project can never, on its own terms, get off the ground. Even granting the thoroughly unlikely possibility that his future philosophers somehow gain political power, their rule would still be doomed to swift failure. For the story of the Genealogy must recur: either the underclass will be too weak-willed to serve as stable stones in the edifice of Nietzsche’s new society, or they will, over time, become capable of obedience only through the “social straightjacket” of their society’s new conventional values—consequently, the long obedience of a weak-willed populace to new masters will once again transform it into an underclass of sovereign individuals. So, precisely to the degree that a new underclass gains the ability to uphold new institutions, it will in

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the same measure develop the kind of strength and independence of will that guarantee its eventual revolt. Even if Nietzsche’s project could get off the ground, we find, once again, that it is ultimately self-undermining; it leads inevitably to the repetition of slave morality’s victory. So far, we have seen that Nietzsche cannot, while maintaining his aristocratic radicalism, argue that democracy is incapable of maintaining social institutions. At best, he can consistently argue that neither his own politics nor democratic politics can produce lasting social institutions. However, we can now go further: not only does Nietzsche’s aristocratic politics fail to solve the problem of the cultural and individual will to institutions, democratic politics provides a possible solution. We have seen that because Nietzsche’s ideal of the manifold soul combines both a strong drive hierarchy with a diversity of the drives, it provides us with an alternative to his mutually reinforcing dichotomies of noble and slave moralities and types. But the ideal of the manifold soul also provides us with a model of society that resolves Nietzsche’s dilemma of social institutions: how can we create individuals strong enough to uphold social institutions, without destroying the very unity on which the strength of a noble form of society depends? For Nietzsche, this dilemma is insurmountable because his aristocratic radicalism requires a social order paradoxically comprised of an army of servants strong enough to outgrow their desire to obey and revolt against their servitude. However, once we have abandoned his aristocratism as a lost cause, his late ideal of the manifold soul can save his broader goal of a politics of enhancement. To be sure, if the only possible forms of human character were either the noble’s simple, animalistic, and rigidly hierarchical soul or the decadent’s weak-willed, anarchic, and contradictory soul, then a synthesis of the noble form of justice with a democratic social order would be impossible. In a thoroughly aristocratic society, composed and controlled by an elite class of strong, well-ordered souls, there can only be endless conflicts for the sake of each individual’s expansion of personal power, endless cycles of the overcoming of one noble group by another, leading to the endless regeneration of new slave classes, moralities, and revolts. In a thoroughly democratic society as depicted by Nietzsche, in contrast, there could only be cultural deterioration, the collapse of the state, culture, and all social meaning, thanks to the destruction of the individual

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discipline necessary to maintain lasting institutions. Since a democratic society, on his view, can be preserved only through the universal dissolution of the hierarchical organization of individuals’ drives in tandem with the dissolution of the hierarchical organization of social institutions and groups, such a society could never ground the kind of large-scale, centuries-­ long, social and individual discipline necessary for Nietzsche’s project of breeding higher types. However, Nietzsche himself has sketched, in his ideal of the manifold soul, an alternative picture of health and strength in which the will to power is maximized in internal tension rather than external conquest, a form of soul strong enough to uphold social institutions, yet rich and varied enough to find happiness in the very activity of responsibility, in exercising power over internal resistance rather than in the expansion of its power over others. The possibility of the manifold soul is the possibility of a noble society without slavery—of a noble form of democracy. The manifold soul is, as we have seen, a form of human character that transfigures suffering, deriving its happiness, its feelings of freedom and power, from the tension created by proportionate resistance among its diverse drives. This higher type is not merely “indifferent” to “hardship, cruelty, deprivation” but even capable of finding joy in suffering and hardship—provided it originates in the resistance and tension of its own soul, rather than in subordination to any master. The manifold soul is “anti-liberal” not out of “malice” but amor fati: it possesses a will to authority, not out of weakness that longs to obey, but from a surfeit of authoritative, effective, and balanced internal drives. It wills its own authority over itself, as well as the continued resistance of its own drives to that very authority: a tension equilibrium that produces the strength of soul necessary to uphold the social institutions that might breed future higher types. We can now pinpoint more exactly how Nietzsche’s critique of democracy fails: his positive political philosophy has not kept up with his critical moral philosophy. Despite recognizing the manifold soul as a higher ideal of health than mere strength, he has failed to recognize that the very same alternative exists in literal social structures, not just in the metaphorical “social structure” of the soul. Just as the soul can balance unity with diversity, strength with tension, effective action with resistance, so too a noble society can take a manifold form. There can be societies grounded in

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strong, stable, and lasting institutions whose values express the shared conditions of the wellbeing not of a class but of an entire people, whose unity depends not upon a rigid social hierarchy of command and obedience but upon the complexity and tension of diverse interests among individuals, groups, and types. There is simply no more reason to deny the possibility of a noble form of pluralistic democracy than there is to deny the possibility of the manifold soul.19

References Adorno, Theodor. [1951] 1985. Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda. In The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gephardt, 188–137. New York: Continuum. Anderson, Lanier. 2011. On the Nobility of Nietzsche’s Priests. In Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Simon May, 24–55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, Maudemarie. 2015. Nietzsche on Ethics and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clark, Maudemarie, and David Dudrick. 2007. Nietzsche and Moral Objectivity: The Development of Nietzsche’s Metaethics. In Nietzsche and Morality, ed. Brian Leiter and Neil Sinhababu, 192–226. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Combahee River Collective. [1977] 1983. A Black Feminist Statement. In On This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, 234–244. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. Drochon, Hugo. 2016. ‘An Old Carriage with New Horse’: Nietzsche’s Critique of Democracy. History of European Ideas 42 (8): 1055–1068. DuFord, Rochelle. 2022. Solidarity in Conflict: A Democratic Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Engels, Friedrich. [1845] 1975–2005. Condition of the Working Class in England. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 2. New York; Moscow; London: International Publishers; Progress Publishers; Lawrence and Wishart. ———. [1870]. The Peasant War in Germany. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 10.

19  Compare Owen: “just as our ascetic activity aims beyond itself towards a certain mode of being, that is, a certain form of subjectivity, so too it aims beyond itself in the sense of aiming towards relations of intersubjectivity which foster this mode of being. Ethics is always already politics” (1994, 206).

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Freud, Sigmund. [1920] 1953–1974. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In Standard Edition, Volume 18. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. London: Vintage/The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–1974. ———. [1921] 1953–1974. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 18. ———. [1938] 1953–1974. Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense. In Standard Edition, Volume 23. Guay, Robert. 2013. Movements and Motivations: Nietzsche and the Invention of Political Psychology. In Nietzsche and Political Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-­ Pearson, 55–69. London: Bloomsbury. Hobbes, Thomas. [1651] 1994. Leviathan. Edited by Edwin Curley. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Hussain, Nadeem J.Z. 2007. Honest Illusion: Valuing for Nietzsche’s Free Spirits. In Nietzsche and Morality, ed. Brian Leiter and Neil Sinhababu, 157–191. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Le Bon, Gustave. 1896. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Leiter, Brian. 2019. Moral Psychology with Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lemm, Vanessa. 2013. Nietzsche’s Great Politics of the Event. In Nietzsche and Political Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, 179–195. London: Bloomsbury. Love, Nancy S. 1986. Marx, Nietzsche, and Modernity. New  York: Columbia University Press. Lugones, María. 2003. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Miyasaki, Donovan. 2004. Nietzsche or Freud: Desire, Pleasure, and Social Happiness. PhD diss., University of Toronto. ———. 2010. Nietzsche contra Freud on Bad Conscience. Nietzsche-Studien 39: 434–454. ———. 2022. (NI) Nietzsche’s Immoralism: Politics as First Philosophy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Mouffe, Chantal. 2018. For A Left Populism. London: Verso. Owen, David. 1994. Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason. London: Routledge. Shapiro, Gary. 2013. Kairos and Chronos: Nietzsche and the Time of the Multitude. In Nietzsche and Political Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, 123–139. London: Bloomsbury. Zimmermann, Rolf. 2014. ‘The Will to Power’: Toward a Nietzschean Systematics of Moral-Political Divergence in History in Light of the 20th Century. In Nietzsche as Political Philosopher, ed. Barry Stocker and Manuel Knoll, 39–57. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

CHAPTER 7

An Immoralist Theory of Democracy as the Production of a People

“Maybe it means that when there is pluralism, some parties say God exists, and some others say he doesn’t exist, and whoever wins the election decides what is right,” Elona mused. When freedom finally arrived, it was like a dish served frozen. We chewed little, swallowed fast, and remained hungry. —Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

1   Pluralism Versus Democracy: Why Popular Power Harms Individual Feelings of Freedom Nietzsche’s criticisms of democracy not only fail but give us further reason to reject his aristocratism. It is not democracy but aristocracy, the division of the people into classes, that ultimately promotes herd morality and endangers lasting social institutions. However, there is a more serious potential problem with democracy that Nietzsche has not considered, one that follows from a central philosophical commitment to which I have tried to consistently hold him. Namely, if there is no morally substantial form of freedom or agency, no true self-determination on the individual level, then neither can there be a morally substantial form of self-determination on the social level. If individuals are not in any deep sense free, then neither are peoples, even in democratic societies. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Miyasaki, Politics After Morality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12228-6_7

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Consequently, Nietzsche’s incompatibilism entails that democracy in the sense of true self-rule by and for a people cannot exist. Just as an individual’s character, thoughts, beliefs, and actions are entirely determined by their physiological, psychological, and sociological history, so the actions of a collective agency or people are entirely determined by the physiological, psychological, and sociological facts about its members. While a democratic society may offer its citizens more practical freedom in the form of negative liberty, fewer constraints upon expression, speech, and action, it does not offer them more freedom in a positive, morally substantial sense: neither its individual citizens nor its collective agency as a whole are authentically self-determined. For if, as Nietzsche’s incompatibilism requires, no individual’s character and actions are ever truly self-determined, then no collective agency’s actions are truly self-determined. Even in an imaginary, ideal democracy of perfect consensus, in which every elected representative and act of legislation has the unqualified support of every citizen, it is still a matter of necessity that those citizens have the characters, values, and dispositions that they do. They could not have been, chosen, or made themselves to be otherwise in a way that would make them the true causal agents of their politics and bearers of true responsibility for their government. Once again, we are confronted with that most common of “great errors,” the confusion of cause and effect. Democracy is not rule by a people, in which agents in agreement with one another freely bring about a government, its leadership, and laws in conformity with their causally effective shared will. Rather, a democracy is a society in which its social organization—its prior values, the prior character of its members, and the moral, cultural, and political forms of social training those prior facts have generated—has produced increasing harmony between its citizens and that social order. A democracy is not a political order caused by a people, but a people caused by a political order. The harmony of popular will with the values, institutions, and classes that govern a society is not caused by the free decision of the people, but is instead caused by those values, institutions, and classes themselves—that is, by a society’s production of shared material conditions of wellbeing that generate popular approval. So, holding Nietzsche to his incompatibilism, democracy is an illusion, just like moral freedom and agency-free will. Regardless of political system, peoples are no more free, no more self-governed or autonomous than individuals are. Nevertheless, just as there are material conditions for the individual feeling rather than fact of freedom, so there are material

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conditions for the feeling, rather than fact, of democracy: for the illusory experience of popular self-rule, the feeling of collective freedom.1 In individual agency, I experience this illusion as the feeling of power generated by acting against a proportionate resistance, a coincidental harmony between intention and ability in the face of obstacles to my will. As Nietzsche describes it, in a successful act of will—one in which my power is equal to obstacles both internal and external—it is really the hierarchy of my drives that accomplishes the action. My consciousness merely identifies with that hierarchy and retroactively takes credit, identifying itself and the entire social structure of my soul with its victorious drives. Likewise, in the case of a literal social structure, the illusion of collective agency depends upon a similar accidental coincidence of intention and power that supports a similar misidentification of causal agency. The feeling of democratic power arises with the coincidence of political power and popular will. It does not matter how this coincidence occurs; when we as a citizenry find ourselves in a state of relative consensus and, further, find our consensus to be in harmony with the current values and actions of our government, we feel that we are the collective cause of that course of governance. Because the state’s actions coincide with what we want it to do, and because our personal will coincides with that of the general population, we misidentify our personal will with a popular will (ignoring that consensus is never absolute or identical in object, instead consisting of diverse, overlapping individual wills), as well as misidentify that popular will as the true cause of the state’s actions. But the true cause of the state’s actions is never obedience to popular will, but obedience to the greater material and social forces that produced both the general consensus of the people and the independent will of the state. We have seen that the rejection of a morally substantial sense of freedom does not require rejecting the importance of the mere feeling of freedom for Nietzsche’s psychology of higher types. Likewise, the rejection of a morally substantial conception of democracy does not require the rejection of the political ideal of democracy, only its phenomenalist reinterpretation.

1  Compare Paul Patton’s suggestive question: “can we envisage a society in which the affirmation of the equal rights of all citizens is a means to the feeling of power for individuals and the community as a whole?” (2013, 14). On Nietzsche’s hard incompatibilist distinction between the feeling and fact of freedom, see Miyasaki (2016).

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Just as the illusory feeling of freedom is important for understanding Nietzsche’s ideal of higher types, so the illusory feeling of effective popular will is important for determining the political conditions that best promote the breeding of those types. However, unlike the feeling of freedom, which Nietzsche positively incorporates into his political ideal, the illusion of democracy and feeling of effective popular will is, on the contrary, a serious obstacle to that ideal. For the feeling of popular rule is antagonistic to social pluralism and, consequently, incompatible with the maximization of the individual feeling of freedom upon which the production of Nietzsche’s higher types depends. Of course, it comes as no surprise that a feeling of collective agency might sometimes be incompatible with the feeling of individual agency. There are two obvious reasons. First, where there appears to be effective collective agency, individuals have less room to diverge from the popular will. They feel powerful only if they are part of the consensus. Second, even where their will coincides with popular will, they feel powerful only to the degree that they wholly identify with collective agency. To whatever degree I compare my own power to that of the collective agency I find myself in agreement with, I will feel less powerful. For the collective remains powerful whether or not I contribute my own efforts to its goals, while I have effective power only as long as I am in alliance with it. Consider, for example, the way in which a voter in a politically “locked” state may feel less motivated to vote precisely to the degree they agree with their region’s political leanings. That passivity stems from a sense of powerlessness: I can’t do any harm by not voting, so why bother? I assume “they” will vote my way whether I show up or not; this abstract “they” feels to me—rightly or wrongly—to be the true causal agent at work, not me. Nietzsche’s analysis of power also provides us with a third and much more important reason for tension between individual and collective feelings of freedom. Consider his description of an individual’s feeling of power in successful action. In most ordinary acts of volition, we experience a feeling of resistance—from external obstacles to action and from weaker drives that oppose our stronger ones—followed by a victorious feeling of overcoming those resistances in obedience to our strongest drives. The feeling of power comes not simply from our identification with victorious drives, but from a feeling of resistance to those drives. So, our feeling of freedom increases with the degree of resistance to which our strongest drives are equal—with the proportionality of internal and external resistances to our will.

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This point applies equally to the feeling of democratic power in the decisions of actual social structures, just as it does to the social structure of the soul. The feeling of democratic power, of an effective popular will, also requires a feeling of resistance, not just successful action. In democratic politics, this feeling depends in part upon practical obstacles to success. But it cannot be just any obstacle; we must feel ourselves as resisting and overcoming the obstacle of opposed political power. As a contrasting example, the American popular will to put a man on the moon depended in part on the creation of the necessary technology. And although the overcoming of those technological obstacles may have increased Americans’ feeling of popular power, it did not do so specifically in relation to the state—it was not a feeling of political power over government or a feeling of self-governance. Rather, we feel collective power as a specifically democratic power of self-governance more keenly to the degree that resistance appears to be directly against self-governance. Such resistance must come from one of two directions: either from a state that resists the popular will or from a minority will that opposes the popular will. Now, we have acknowledged that Nietzsche’s incompatibilism reduces democracy to an illusion, a feeling of effective popular power and self-rule rather than its actuality. But can a Nietzschean politics consistently promote the feeling of democracy, just as it does the feeling of individual freedom in the ideal of higher types? To do so, it would have to promote the conditions of resistance upon which that feeling depends. But it surely cannot promote resistance by the state to popular power, for doing so would harm the effectivity of popular will. On the other hand, promoting the resistance of a minority will to the popular will would create a greater political divide between the majority and minority. So, we cannot heighten the feeling of democratic power without further dividing the popular will, without dividing society into opposed collective parties in contest for governance. Party politics is not, then, an obstacle to the illusory feeling of democratic power, but its precondition. We require internal democratic enemies in the form of minority collective wills in order to experience the feeling of effective popular will that comes from overcoming them. But these oppositional wills cannot be too weak. For if they are too weak to offer substantial resistance to the majority’s will—as is the case with third parties in American politics—there will be little feeling of power experienced in their overcoming. For the same reason, an ideal democracy in which there is an absolute popular consensus would paradoxically

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destroy any feeling of democracy and popular self-rule by eliminating any basis for the feeling of overcoming resistance. On the other hand, these oppositional wills cannot become too numerous, since too many minority wills would create a stalemate of power, destroying the proportionality of resistance upon which the feeling of power depends. So, in both two-party and multi-party democratic systems, the preferable outcome from the standpoint of a heightened feeling of democratic power is at odds with the democratic ideal of equality, whether in the form of an overwhelming consensus, a singular popular will, or in the form of a broader pluralism, many smaller, equally powerful popular wills. But this suggests the psychology of democratic politics contradicts its practical condition of legitimacy: the increase of everyone’s feeling of power. For the feeling of democratic power can only be heightened by promoting a dualistic party politics (or dualistic factions or coalitions in multi-party systems) in which every supposedly democratic victory comes at the expense of the feeling of power of a substantial proportion of the population. It is heightened, therefore, only at the expense of the feeling of individual freedom and through the suppression of an authentic cultural pluralism—the suppression of the very manifold character of society that we have posited as the possibility of a noble form of democracy. Not only does the feeling of democratic power require a party or factional dualism incompatible with political pluralism, it also diverts individuals’ personal will to power toward collective forms of power since, as we have seen, the feeling of collective power dwarfs that of individual power. The more individuals remain independent of that party dualism, the more keenly they feel their personal political impotence. This gives them an overwhelming incentive to easily increase their feeling of freedom by more wholly identifying with a powerful party collective, rather than by maximizing the power of their own drives and practical capacitates for action.2 Notice that this is not a point of contrast between the American two-­ party system and multi-party systems, but a point about the best conditions for a feeling of popular power in any system and, consequently, the suggestion of a psychological motive in democratic politics to produce those  Compare Táíwò’s application of C. Thi Nguyen’s (2020) notion of “value capture” to social life: “Value capture is a process by which we begin with rich and subtle values, encounter simplified versions of them in the social wild, and revise our values in the direction of simplicity—thus rendering them inadequate. This kind of process is always a possible result of social interaction, but the distortions to our values are sharpest in social systems and environments where this simplicity is built into the structures of reward and punishment” (2022, 52). 2

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conditions. For example, if true, the polarization, gridlock, and almost coinflip changes of power in the American two-party system would not be the accidental effect of some independent prior cause, such as an existing cultural divide in the population. Instead, on this view, our two-­party system motivates us to produce and aggravate that cultural divide as a means to a greater feeling of popular power, motivating us to downplay both our real underlying unity—overlapping interests and values that we ignore to preserve our team divisions—and to downplay the extent of our real underlying differences—the many smaller communities of interest and value that we suppress into conformity with one of the dominant dueling factions. If true, this view would also suggest that multi-party systems will tend to replicate the broader pattern of two-party systems—that the American system is the unhappy destiny of all liberal democracies. While multi-party systems better protect plurality, they do so at the expense of the feeling of popular power. They disperse power more broadly; the feeling of victory in overcoming the political opposition is weaker and, because there are so many worthy competitors, rarer. But that motivates such systems toward alliances and coalitions to increase political power, the weakening of component smaller parties, and the growth of dual dominating parties. So, on one level, multi-party systems still largely play out as conflicts between dual parties, on another, they play out as conflicts between dual coalitions controlled by dominant parties—as, for example, in Canada’s Liberal and Conservative Parties, the United Kingdom’s Labour and Conservative Parties, and Germany’s Social Democratic and Christian Democratic Union Parties. This was also once true of France’s Socialist and Republican Parties, although the rise of Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Renaissance party (formerly La République En Marche!) and the recent successful coalition of the left against Macron suggest a growing backlash against such factional-dualism—as does, in the United States, the dramatic increase in voters identifying as independent (rising, over the last 60 years, from 20 to 45 percent of all voters), alongside a steady decline in Democratic or Republican voters (with Democrats falling from 45 to 30 percent of all voters in that same time period). Consequently, heightening the illusory feeling of popular freedom and democratic power is paradoxically harmful to democracy in two ways. First, in its dependence upon proportionate resistance from a minority will, the feeling of democratic power requires the absence of a true popular will, its division into contesting, near-majoritarian wills. The feeling of democracy requires the division of society into two distinct peoples with opposed value-systems and rule by a nearly minority will.

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Second, by transforming individuals’ incentive to heighten their personal will to power into an incentive to identify with and conform their will to that of a powerful collective faction, heightening the feeling of democratic freedom destroys political pluralism, reducing a people to two contesting factions, a dualism of minority wills, and suppressing all individual and collective values and tastes that diverge from those dual minority wills. Let’s emphasize a crucial point: this is not merely a tendency toward a political and ideological conflict between dual parties or factions but a tendency toward dualistic policies that materially condition and transform ideological dualism into a deep dualism of geographies, forms of life, value systems, and identity. Democracy does not merely aggravate conflicts among factions and parties but, in Nietzsche’s language, breeds two materially determined and distinct peoples. It is a party or faction dualism that transforms into a dualism of peoples. Consider the gravity of these points, if true. How stable or happy can democracy be if it necessarily tends toward (1) a continual, direct frustration of the will of nearly half of the population (possibly more than half, accounting for those who do not participate in democratic procedures) and (2) the development, deepening, and reinforcement of the existence of two diametrically opposed, well-defined peoples or collective agencies in a single nation—toward a default state of civil cold war? In other words, heightening the feeling of democracy coincides in practice with the production of an aristocratic politics under the guise of democracy. The aristocratism at issue occurs on two levels. First, to the degree that either party decisively or over the long term politically overcomes the other, it becomes an aristocratic class, cementing and expanding its political power in ways that make the other party a permanent minority, serving only as a token resistance against which the victorious party can experience its pathos of distance. Multi-party systems have an advantage here, since the defeat of a major party still allows for substantial opposition from other parties of non-negligible power, particularly when they form coalitions. In two-party systems, the separations of power offer some protection but, as we have seen in recent years in the United States, it is far from certain that it offers enough. Second—and more important, since the tendency toward a dualism not just of parties or factions but peoples will make this more likely in the long run—when neither party is able to establish hegemony over the other, then each party’s need for resistance in order to feel its own power mutually reinforces the proportionality of the other’s power. That is, they

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develop a mutually beneficial equilibrium of power, preserving only minor and temporary fluctuations and together become an entrenched aristocratic class in relation to the rest of the citizenry and to any political collectives that defy their symbiotic domination of the political system. Each party is a temporary or aspiring aristocracy (not unlike the contentious dualism in the Genealogy between knightly and priestly elements of the aristocratic class), while both parties together form a relatively stable aristocratic class in their shared power relation to the people as a whole. Multi-party systems are not necessarily immune to this danger since, as we have seen, in such systems two parties often maintain substantial hegemony over the rest, and even coalitions tend to serve that hegemony, preserving one party in the duality against the other, rather than undermining it. In the last half-century, this tendency has accelerated with the help of the decline of welfare-state capitalism and social democracy and the rise of neoliberalism, an economic policy and ideology that allows for a closer alliance between once deeply divided dominant parties. This has muddied the lines between Democratic, Liberal, and Labour parties and Republican and Conservative parties, often pushing moderate-left parties to the center or right, as in the case of the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton, the Labour Party under Tony Blair, and the Christian Democratic Union under Angela Merkel, and recently leading to the replacement of the usual dualism of right and moderate-left parties with a war of the center against all, as in the case of Macron’s Renaissance party. We have seen, then, that both the traditional theory of democracy as a morally substantial kind of collective self-rule and a purely phenomenalist alternative promoting the illusory feeling of collective power are inconsistent with a Nietzschean politics. What alternative remains? Recalling our initial suggestion of a social order modeled on Nietzsche’s ideal of the manifold soul, we might ask, can a manifold social structure take a democratic form? How can a society defined by value and agency pluralism simultaneously possess the kind of unity necessary to create the feeling of collective power and popular freedom? That is, after all, the paradox of the manifold soul: it is a single, stable, unified identity, despite being an organization of disparate drives, incentives, and aims that are not rigidly hierarchized. It is a multi-dimensional person rather than a civil war of many persons trapped in a single body. A democratic manifold society would, then, be a multi-dimensional people rather than a civil war of opposed peoples trapped in a single nation. Nietzsche’s solution to the paradox of the manifold soul depended on our careful clarification and reconstruction of his theory of the will to

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power. The will to power is a tendency toward the feeling of power rather than quantitative power, satisfied in resisting activity against proportionate obstacles that provoke the will to power without thwarting it. It would be a mistake, then, to see the manifold soul as consisting of a kind of check and balance of opposed interests, a compromise in which a mild frustration of every drive is tolerated in order to protect each drive from being tyrannized by the others. It would, likewise, be a mistake to imagine a manifold democracy preserved only by institutional and procedural checks and balances—or as the “radical democratic” Nietzscheans prefer—a deeply agonistic politics. Both amount to the mutual tolerable frustration of all peoples rather than the production of a true people, the political equivalent of Freud’s interpretation of Solomon’s choice: “if one woman’s child is dead, the other shall not have a live one either” (1921, 121). It is, in other words, a view of democracy rooted in precisely the slavish conception of justice that Nietzsche abhors. As Freud describes it, “social justice means that we deny ourselves many things so that others may have to do without them as well.” To anticipate the final chapters: anyone who defines democracy negatively as the “best worst” system rather than as a positive preparation for better ones is defining democracy directly against socialism and, ultimately, against democracy as such. Like the false mother in the story of Solomon, they are not defending democracy but burying it. They have brought us to where we are today; they have long given up, and have nothing to say worth hearing. On the contrary, a manifold democracy, like a manifold soul, would be multiple in satisfactions rather than frustrations. Nietzsche praises the manifold soul as an enhancement of the will to power, a heightening of qualitative feeling of power, achieving greater, not compromised, satisfaction of the drives’ most foundational tendency. That is the source of the unity of the manifold soul: every drive, no matter how disparate its particular object and activity, shares the same primary aim of the feeling of power, and every drive, no matter how disparate its content, achieves that aim through the same formal conditions: the achievement of a tension equilibrium of the soul that prevents any individual drive from completely overpowering the others. What we might call a Nietzschean version of the democratic soul is not a soul of homogenous drives in their particular content, but one in which diverse drives with different particular contents share a single form of the will, the will to power, a shared aim that is achieved for every particular

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drive by the same social organization: the absence of a ruling drive or set of drives that tyrannizes the rest. A manifold soul can, then, be democratic, an organization of drives ruled by the drives or by a popular will of “undersouls,” in the sense that it is ruled not by the will of any drive or group of drives, but by the interests of the entire social structure, the interest every drive has in preserving its individual feeling of power through the overall preservation of a tension equilibrium with other drives. I have previously specified this curious form of equality of the drives as a near-equilibrium, a minimal disequilibrium, or a tension equilibrium of powers to stress its compatibility with the modest hierarchy of power that preserves the structure of the soul. The same would apply on a political level: any equilibrium in the power of individuals and groups in a state presupposes a modest hierarchy in the form of the  state apparatus. For brevity, I will now refer to it as power equilibrium, with two qualifications. First, power is here defined as a relation, the qualitative feeling of power, and not as a property to be distributed, so it does not necessarily require equal quantities of power, equal abilities, or equal resources. Second, equilibrium is defined as a non-dominating relation of equal power over time, so it does not necessarily exclude temporary states of inequality even in the feeling of power. A Nietzschean form of democracy might follow the same basic model of pluralistic unity and dissonant harmony preserved by a lasting condition of power-equilibrium. There can be a manifold society, a social order comprised of individuals and communities with distinct identities, priorities, values, and ways of life, that nonetheless comprises a true people, if those disparate particular values are, on a more foundational level, manifestations of a shared set of formal values: namely, the value of that pluralism itself—or, more specifically, the value of the heightened feeling of will to power which that pluralism serves.3 Notice, however, that such a democracy is not a society in which everyone affirms the shared abstract moral value of “pluralism,” as in most liberal democracies, but one that produces the concrete political conditions that create and sustain moral and value pluralism and, in doing so, produces a people who affirm the shared value of those conditions of pluralism. The pluralism at issue is not about which 3  Leslie Paul Thiele rightly suggests that for Nietzsche “the role of the individual in politics should be subservient to the role of politics in the individual,” but politics does not end with the “politics of the soul”—even “heroic individuals” are subordinate parts in the organization of the social whole (1990, 4).

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primary political conditions ought to obtain, but presupposes that certain primary conditions of power-equilibrium already obtain and must be kept out of the sphere of pluralistic decision-making in order for there to be a real pluralism of identity and values in the first place. The “people” in a manifold democracy are united not by shared particular values but by the value of the shared material social-political conditions that protect their individual particular values, by the shared interest such a people have in preserving a social order that allows them to better satisfy their particular forms of the will to power, even as it prevents them from overcoming competing forms, while also constraining any form that directly undermines the material conditions of power-equilibrium. This means, of course, that a Nietzschean democracy is possible only if there are, in fact, social-political conditions that can produce a power equilibrium among individuals’ and groups’ value systems on the societal level, in a way analogous to that of the drives in the manifold soul. In Chap. 8, I will make the case for that possibility and attempt to specify what those social-political conditions might be. For now, we can more precisely define what a Nietzschean form of democracy would be. First, unlike traditional democracy, our reconstructed form denies that morally substantial collective agency and freedom exist. Second, unlike the feeling of freedom, which must be enhanced in order to create more affirmative human types, the feeling of collective freedom or popular power cannot be a goal of democracy, since it is heightened at the expense of the individual feeling of freedom. By analogy, consider the difference between the strength of the rigidly ordered souls of masters and sovereign individuals, who feel powerful as unified agents relative to their own weaker drives and their environment, expressed through a narrow set of activities and accomplishments in service to their strongest drives, in contrast to  the richness of those with a manifold soul who, precisely because they are constituted by many different, proportionately equal drives, will feel their power manifested more modestly in the exercise of a variety of different abilities and activities, rather than experiencing their power primarily as unified agency expressed in a narrow field of higher abilities and accomplishments. Consequently, a Nietzschean democracy is, first, a pluralistic social-­ political order that aims to protect every individual’s values, their particular form of power, and heighten every individual’s feeling of power, rather than enhancing the collective feeling of freedom at the expense of minority groups or individuals. Second, despite this pluralism, a democracy is a

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social order that produces a true people: a collective agency whose shared conditions of wellbeing are the source of a foundational set of shared values that harmonize with and affirm the conditions of its second-order value pluralism. Because freedom is illusory, democracy is, in our reconstructed sense, not truly rule by a people, but rule in harmony with a people, a coincidence of popular will and the activity of the state rather than the direct determination of the state by a popular will. Indeed, if the conditions for the existence of a popular will are, as Nietzsche suggests, material conditions of shared wellbeing, then the causal order is exactly the reverse: a democracy is a politics that produces a true people rather than being truly ruled by one, a social-political order that successfully creates the shared material conditions of wellbeing that bring into existence a community of individuals united by a shared set of primary values—namely, the value of those shared material conditions and the politics that achieves them—thus enabling them as a people to affirm and legitimize the social order that produced them. Put simply, democracy is the successful breeding of a people. It follows then, that democracy, like legitimacy, exists only in practice, as a retroactive outcome rather than a grounding principle. A society is not democratic until it successfully creates a people in harmony with its values and political order, a community sufficiently united in their values and identity by shared material conditions of wellbeing to collectively affirm the social order that produced them. And a society continues to be democratic only as long as it continues to successfully produce such a people. Consequently, against the traditional conception, democracy cannot be defined by the sufficient criteria of particular kinds of political institutions or procedures. No set of laws, rights, or institutions, such as suffrage, charters of rights, representational government, and so on, are by themselves sufficient to accurately describe a state as democratic. Particular political institutions are democratic only to the degree that they in fact bring about a true people whose collective will is in fact in harmony with those institutions. Likewise, the lack of any particular political institution is not a sufficient reason to call a society undemocratic. Any society that does, in practice, produce a popular will in lasting harmony with the political order that produced it is democratic. Where there is a people whose collective will is in harmony with the state, there is democracy. Where the collective will is at odds with the state, there is no democracy. How that will came about or failed to come about is irrelevant, since there is no true collective agency

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freedom, no real government “by” the people. The only criteria of democracy left are government for the people, the harmony of the popular will with the state, and the very existence of “a people” at all. Of course, it may turn out that particular political institutions and procedures are more or less conducive to this end. So, there may be good reasons for loosely affirming certain institutional and procedural criteria of democracy, while recognizing they are not strictly necessary or sufficient. Nevertheless, the primary criteria of democracy remain consequential rather than procedural.4 A democracy is established by the consequences of its governance, not by its form of government. A true democracy produces a people in harmony with the state, regardless of the means used to achieve that consequence. And even in a procedural democracy—a society whose institutions are based in procedures designed to increase the feeling of popular self-rule—if it fails to produce a people, it fails to be democratic.

2   The Aristocratism of Procedural Democracy: Majoritarianism, Elitism, and Ideology After the uprising of the 17th June The Secretary of the Writers Union Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee Stating that the people Had forfeited the confidence of the government And could win it back only By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people      And elect another?   —Bertolt Brecht, The Solution 4  Note that this is not a consequentialist definition since it is not committed to the principle of the greatest net good of the greatest number and does not evaluate decisions according to projected consequences. Nietzsche’s true political predecessor is Beauvoir (1947), who turns consequentialism’s priority of practice over principle against itself. While the consequentialist argues decisions are morally justified by a form of decision-making, Beauvoir and Nietzsche insist they have value only afterward, in their actual consequences, which are never final. Beauvoir underestimates how radical that position is. It is not an “ethics,” not even an ambiguous one, but an immoralist politics situated beyond good and evil. On Nietzsche and Beauvoir, see Bergoffen (2004, 161).

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We now have a fully reconstructed incompatibilist, immoralist definition of democracy: a social order is democratic to the degree that it in practice produces a true people, defined as a community that experiences itself as a collective agency thanks to a harmony of its shared values and will with the values and actions of the political order that produced it. A democracy is a harmony of individual wills with one another and with the social order, but one that is a product of that social order rather than its cause, and so not truly rule by the people. Notice that democracy turns out to be an ideal instance of Nietzsche’s conception of legitimacy. To the degree that a society produces a true people, the issue of legitimacy is not resolved but has no reason to be raised. The harmony of individual value and collective value, of popular will and governance, makes the justification of political authority superfluous. However, having overcome traditional democratic theory’s compatibilism, we now encounter a new problem. We were able to construct an incompatibilist theory of democracy by making its criterion one of consequence and rejecting the criterion of procedure; no particular institutions are sufficient. But in practice, existing democracies are procedural, identified in virtue of the form of their institutions rather than their consequences. So, we must now answer the possible objection that an incompatibilist, immoralist democracy is impossible to realize. It is, to be sure, a surprising problem: the only democracies that may be possible are incompatible with Nietzsche’s politics not because they are too democratic, but because they are too aristocratic! We have seen why aristocratism is a problem: it relies on an idealistic, moralistic, and anti-­ natural morality to bestow meaning on an underclass whose will to power is entirely suppressed in the service of aristocratic enhancement, an impossible fantasy that will merely regenerate slave psychology, resentment, and revolt. But in what sense is the procedural form of contemporary liberal democracies also aristocratic? Recalling our revised criteria, according to which a democracy must produce an authentic people and popular will in harmony with the values and actions of the state, we will discover that procedural democracies are consequentially aristocratic in three ways. First, they presuppose the division of a people into opposed factions which they transform into distinct peoples. Second, the practical political power of their economic elite outweighs the procedural political power of the people. And, third, they produce consensus not by producing a true people but by producing popular

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ideology, a superficial unity on the level of belief that does not have a deeper foundation in the structure of the social order and the material conditions of the lives and wellbeing of its citizens. However, by combining our reconstructed theories of democracy, justice, and rights, we will see that a Nietzschean democracy would avoid all three failings of procedural democracy. Our first dilemma is perhaps the most difficult. For on our new definition of democracy, the procedural commitment of existing liberal democracies to majoritarian power, particularly in the election of representatives, is intrinsically undemocratic. For it operates on the assumption that the nonexistence of a true people is the norm. It assumes that only factions exist, that there is no true people or popular will, and that, consequently, power must be granted, as a second-­best option, to a majority faction rather than to a people. Consider how awkward it is, for example, to claim that the United States—where only 60 percent of the population vote in presidential elections and only 40 in midterms, where the margin of victory has surpassed 10 percent of the popular vote only twice in the last 50 years—qualifies as a “rule by the people.” The majoritarian procedures of liberal democracies are at heart a disguised cynicism toward the very possibility of democracy, an attempt to cover up the absence of democracy rather than truly instantiate it. For to equate the majority with the people is to give up from the start the principle of rule by the people, a principle supposedly grounded in belief in the essentially equal moral worth of all persons, a principle that is incompatible with granting greater power according to an individual’s accidental relationship to the majority. After all, granting greater power to individuals belonging to a majority is not essentially or obviously any more democratic than granting greater power to individuals belonging to hereditary, political, or economic elites. It is not more democratic, just more arbitrary, which makes it even less democratic, since oligarchies at least purport to grant power according to merit, rather than the entirely accidental coincidence of an individual’s will with the majority’s. Of course, the fact that procedural democracy begins from the assumption of the impossibility of a true people or popular will does not necessarily make it incompatible with our new definition. Procedural democracy might, over time, produce a broad enough consensus to consequentially achieve a popular will. After all, popular wills are perfectly common in existing democracies; in particular cases, candidates and policies do indeed

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achieve a strong enough consensus to be considered the will of the people rather than of the majority. However, we must distinguish a popular will—a broad consensus in a particular case based in the temporary overlapping interests of otherwise distinct communities of interest—from the popular will of a people in Nietzsche’s sense, where that consensus reflects the deeper unity of a substantial community of shared foundational values and conditions of life. The criterion of democracy is the production of a people: a lasting collective agency whose members share a single “tablet of the good,” grounded in the real material conditions of their wellbeing, health, and happiness, a “tablet of their overcomings” (Z I.15). The popular will is not passing agreement on a particular case, but a unity grounded in the entire social-­ political order that has produced both its members and their wills. The ephemeral popular wills of procedural democracies, in contrast, are an accidental coincidence of the varied interests of distinct communities with substantially different foundational values and material conditions of wellbeing. Procedural democracies are negotiations among multiple peoples whose wills occasionally overlap, not the will of a people. It might be argued that procedural democracy ultimately aims at a deeper consensus, that its procedures are designed to produce, as a long-­ term consequence, a true popular will. Perhaps procedural democracy is simply the most effective way to produce a deeply united people, a method for overcoming factional conflicts through a process of free, open, and reasoned deliberation and debate that enables individuals to identify or adopt more deeply shared values. The discourse model of procedural democracy, for example, operates on the analogy of democratic speech, debate, and governance to a public conversation that aims at ever-greater consensus about increasingly shared foundational social values, ideally ending in the production of a true people.5 Procedural democracy, on this view, is just a variation of consequential democracy: democratic procedures are the most successful ways in which a social order may, over time, produce a people, moving from the identification of the overlapping interests of disparate 5  Discourse theory is, consequently, a moralistic and ineffective means of enhancement. In addition to Nietzsche’s worry that we cannot persuade others on strictly rational grounds (NI 3), David Kinney and Liam Kofi Bright have argued it is often rational for members of dominant groups to avoid information that endangers their ignorance about the extent of their dominance (2021).

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communities to the identification of more foundational, underlying principles that, once made explicit through democratic discourse, will consolidate a unified people. However, this solution fails because, as we have seen, the psychology of democratic power, its incentive to increase the feeling of popular power through majoritarian politics, tends in exactly the opposite direction: toward the further entrenchment and the transformation of mere factions into opposed peoples who use democratic procedures in an adversarial way rather than in pursuit of rational persuasion and consensus-building. Each faction unifies itself as much through the negation of its opposing faction as an out-group as it does on internal consensus, eventually reaching a point where both factions’ values are developed primarily negatively in reaction to and differentiation from the opposing group.6 As a result, majoritarian democracy promotes an oppositional politics, in which any values that might serve as a synthesizing middle ground as required by the dialogical ideal of rational consensus-building are either too marginal to have substantial political influence or have influence only after they are co-opted, made complementary and subordinate to a dominant faction’s interests, thus losing any critical or synthesizing value in their relation to the disputes between the dominant factions. The psychology of majoritarian democracy is one in which the will to power is satisfied by taking sides with the dominant factions and reinforcing their oppositional antagonism rather than mediating it. Individuals and communities can obtain political power and further their interests only by working with a system that acknowledges their interests only to the degree that they 6  See Kwasi Wiredu, who contrasts the traditional non-party government of West African Akans to multi-party majoritarianism, arguing that “majoritarian democracy offers very little incentive to consensus” (1996, 176). Wiredu acknowledges that the “finely designed parliamentary palliatives” of the United States and the United Kingdom “mollify the opposition to some extent,” but suggests the true nature of majoritarianism is revealed in the African politics of his day, where victors “succumb to the temptation to drink deep of the spring of power and become drunken thereof, to the drastic disadvantage of civil and human rights,” leading the “frustrated oppositionist, bereft of all sympathy for the system” to militancy, “ushering in an era of uniformed predators, unhampered by even paper regulations.” This was surely meant, in 1996, as a cautionary tale and not, as it today appears, a prediction. Wiredu’s concerns may also pose a practical dilemma for agonistic readings of Nietzsche that valorize the adversarial nature of liberal democracy, for example, Hatab (2014).

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conform to its dualism. But this strategy does not further an individual or community’s interests to whatever degree they diverge from the interests of the dominant factions.7 Consequently, political power in majoritarian democracy necessitates the strategic sacrifice of an authentic pluralism of positively defined communities of value, replacing it with the division of the people into two peoples with opposed, mutually reinforcing slavish moralities whose internal unity depends on their mutual negation of each other. In practice, procedural democracy does not merely assume that true peoples do not exist, only majorities do; it also operates in a way that reduces the possibility of creating a people, failing to uncover and build a consensus around deeper shared values and conditions of wellbeing beneath the surface of factional differences. The first problem that we encountered concerned the premises of procedural democracy: it begins from the assumption that there is no unified collective agency, no existing people that can serve as the governing agency, and so resorts, as a second-best measure, to majoritarian representation as compensation for the lack of a people. In short, rule by the majority is not rule by a people and so not democracy. Moreover, because majoritarianism promotes a factional contest for power between increasingly opposed and powerful parties, this promotes a form of aristocratism: the control of the state by one powerful party or faction over another and of the populace by a privileged, powerful political elite who belong to the symbiotic power structure of their dualistic party system. But even if we were to accept the premise that majoritarianism is the closest practical approximation to democracy, procedural democracy would still fail on its own terms, for it does not even achieve true rule by majority. For its central political commitment to upholding procedural criteria denies it the political right and power to ensure democratic consequences, even for a majority rather than a people. By making procedurally gained power the necessary condition of all power, majoritarian democracy makes it impossible to protect procedural political power from 7  Compare Táíwò on “elite capture”: “in the absence of the right kind of checks or constraints, the subgroup of people with power over and access to the resources used to describe, define, and create political realities—in other words, the elites—will capture the group’s values, forcing people to coordinate on a narrower social project that disproportionately represents elite interests. When elites run the show, the interests of the group get whittled down to what they have in common with those at the top, at best” (2022, 32).

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non-­procedural forms, particularly economic power. Whether economic power is exercised directly in the form of lobbying and political contributions or indirectly through ownership of the means of production of news, media, entertainment, education, and culture, there is simply no way to, as the political rhetoric optimistically puts it, “get money out of politics” under the constraints of procedural democracy. On the one hand, while economic influence could, in principle, be reduced through measures such as public campaign financing and greater regulation of political contributions and media monopolies, such measures can only be achieved to limited degrees because they require the assistance of precisely the economic forms of political power they seek to limit. How are such measures to gain political influence except through their endorsement by candidates who rely on the very funds they would regulate? How can such measures gain popular awareness but through the same centralized, monopolized media organizations they seek to constrain? They can achieve political support and popular awareness only in necessarily attenuated forms that cannot outweigh the existing influence of economic power over politics. On the other hand, even in the most ideal procedural democracy, one in which we imagine parties and representatives guided only by their constituents’ interests, the nature of majoritarian politics as a contest for the attention of divided halves of the population ensures that this can only be achieved through the application of enormous economic power. Even if economic power did not prevent its own political regulation, it would still be necessary to meet the extraordinary strategic complexity and economic cost of majoritarian politics. The sheer scale of dual-party (or in multi-­party systems, dual-faction politics), with its increasing bifurcation of the population into two peoples with distinct value systems, is simply too vast for procedural power to operate effectively without financial assistance beyond citizens and the state. As a result, democracies produce policies that increasingly mirror the interests of an economic elite rather than the policy preferences of the majority of citizens.8 Since procedural democracy grants the majority power only over representation, it protects only the democratic mechanisms of the electoral process, while leaving the practice of governing unprotected and independent of majority power. The actual work of policymaking remains vulnerable to economic power. 8

 Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page (2014).

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Equally important, economic power not only inevitably gains greater power than the people over the activity of governance, it also gains greater power over the cultural production of citizens, shaping individuals’ worldviews through education, media, and entertainment. Economic power shapes the social production of the very agents whose wills procedural democracies seek to serve. Therefore, even to the minor degree that procedural democracy gives power to the majority, its will already reflects and reinforces the economic interests that manufactured it. Present individuals do not merely mistakenly perceive their self-interests to be in line with the status quo. Because they are produced by previous forms of social organization, their interests really do deeply coincide with the values of pasts social orders. This returns us to the central problem Nietzsche raises about the value of freedom and its centrality in Western moral and political philosophical traditions. How valuable can freedom be if individuals and peoples are products of social orders rather than their founders? Even if a degree of majoritarian power against economic power remains possible in procedural democracies, that majority has already been shaped to mirror the values of economic power. Our previous problem came from the fact that procedural democracy focuses on protecting the democratic procedure of electing representatives while leaving unprotected the actual process of governance from the influence of economics. This new problem arises from the fact that procedural democracy, thanks to its prioritization of property rights and market freedom, protects only the narrowly political sphere—only a very small part of everyday life—leaving the social and cultural spheres largely unprotected from the influence of economics.9 While procedural democracy purports to mirror an organic, preexisting majority will, by leaving the social-cultural order open to control by economic power, it simultaneously crafts that will at the same time that it represents it, producing the very people it purports to serve. What procedural democracy fails to recognize is that it can be effective only given the prior existence of a people whose will its procedures are designed to serve: in principle, there must be a people first, which, in practice, there cannot be. In other words, if procedures are to be truly democratic, a successful consequential democracy must exist first. Otherwise, those procedures will 9  See, for example, Elizabeth Anderson (2017) on the authoritarian character of “private government” in the workplace.

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protect not the will of a people but the manufactured will of a prior aristocratic order. They will promote values that originate not in the material conditions of a people’s shared wellbeing, but in a social order organized in the interest of a prior historical elite. Existing democratic procedures, as well as every variety of liberalism that champions them, are therefore a fundamentally conservative politics in practice: they represent the interests of the pre-democratic world, embodied in that past aristocratic world’s continuing cultural and economic power and maintained through the production of political subjects who identify with economic and political interests often deeply at odds with their own. There must already be democracy in order for there to be a people, and there must already be a people in order for democratic procedures to truly represent them and protect their power. The paradox of democracy is, then, the same paradox of moral improvement that Nietzsche has emphasized again and again. Because individuals are products of a social order, moral exhortation fails. I cannot tell them to change themselves, since they cannot transform their own deepest character traits and drives. Yet our social, political, and economic order does effectively transform individuals over time—on the level of generations rather than on the individual level—by changing the material conditions on which their flourishing or suffering depend, the conditions that produce the organization of their drives and structure their deep characters and values. However, this method of changing individuals is democratically troubling for two reasons. First, it is too slow to counteract the aristocratic influence of economic power. The modest power granted to the majority to change social conditions in the interest of their true will is not substantial enough to outweigh the effects of ideology, of the ruling class’s power to shape the majority’s values and beliefs through social-cultural means. Economic power over culture is greater than the majority’s power over political procedure, and the majority’s power over political procedure is already compromised by the degree to which it has already internalized the values of the ruling class, using much of its own meager political power on behalf of its rulers. Second, assuming that procedural democracy grants some capacity for the majority will to transform individuals by transforming their material social-political conditions, this capacity to change individuals is necessarily to some degree anti-democratic. For if the majority consists of individuals

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who have been deeply structured by values opposed to their own best conditions of power and happiness, that form of character is nevertheless who they really are. That their identities were formed by values and priorities at odds with their objective interests does not make those identities any less real. Acting politically against my true self-interest does not necessarily mean acting against my true self. For conflicted, self-defeating interests are my true interests to the degree that I possess a conflicted, self-defeating, or “decadent” form of agency—a “hybrid” self produced by conflicting social values and conditions, by the historical dialectic of noble and slavish moralities. So, any attempt to use democratic power to change such individuals requires using political power against their real identities, against the actual organization of their will, and so against the closest existing thing we have, in procedural majoritarian democracies, to a people. If procedural democracy is to be effective at producing a true future people, it must do so to some degree against the will of the present, approximate one. Consequently, procedural democracy cannot be repaired by procedural democratic means, through the exhortative moralistic methods of change upon which procedural democracy depends. The underlying assumption of that system is that there exist individuals who are free to be reasonably persuaded to better political positions, on the grounds of the true coincidence of their will with their own objective good. But if such individuals do not yet exist, exhortative methods must largely fail and, to the degree that they succeed, must be anti-democratic. To the degree that we appeal to the given majority’s will, we betray them. But to the degree we deny their will and paternalistically seek to convert them to their real, objective interests, we also betray them. In the end, the central mistake of procedural democracy is that it makes the morality of improvement and the illusion of freedom on which that concept of morality depends foundational to our concept of democratic freedom. But there are no preexisting democratic individuals to freely express their will through democratic procedures. If we desire to make democracy possible, to replace individuals who are products of non-­ democratic social and economic orders with democratic subjects, we can do so only undemocratically, through the force of social conditioning. Justice to present individuals in the democratic representation of the existing popular will is a continuation of the unjust social order that produced the present population, that produced worldviews and values that do not

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coherently or completely reflect our real interests, and so it is an injustice to future individuals who have a right to become higher, more flourishing individuals, freed from their past.

3   Principles of Immoralist Democracy: A Non-­liberalism of Consequences For the three great enemies of independence…are the indigent, the rich and the parties. I am speaking of democracy as of something yet to come. That which now calls itself democracy differs from older forms of government solely in that it drives with new horses: the streets are still the same old streets, and the wheels are likewise the same old wheels.—Have things really got less perilous because the wellbeing of the nations now rides in this vehicle? —Human, All Too Human 284

Procedural democracy, the dominant form in the contemporary Western world, fails our newly formulated criterion of democracy as a social order that produces a true people and popular will. On the contrary, we have seen that procedural democracies tend toward either a majoritarianism that divides the people into a ruling majority and suppressed minority class or a failure of majoritarian will in the face of the superior political power of the state and the economic, cultural, and political elite. In practice, procedural democracy creates either a tyranny of the herd, a tyranny of the state, or an aristocracy of the elite, often swinging back and forth among the three and, thanks to the cultural production of the ideology and character of the majority, often overlapping all three in mutually beneficial ways. For example, in the last two decades in the United States, we have seen a form of statism in the dramatic bipartisan expansion of state power— particularly in the military, police, and intelligence spheres—alongside a complementary aristocratism in the expansion of the power of the economic elite—a growing wealth gap, the reduction of the social safety net, and the deregulation of the financial sector—in turn coinciding with an equally symbiotic tyranny of the herd, the growing power of a politically centrist middle-class population that straddles the dualistic party system and whose ideology and voting habits represent the interests of an economic and political elite belonging to both parties, rather than the interests of the majority of either party’s voters.

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During that same period, in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Europe we have seen an increasing decline of social democracy, including the more substantive Nordic model, which once distinguished the more democratic outcomes of their multi-party systems, an increasing drift of dominant parties toward neoliberal values and economic policies and increasing success by the European Union in spreading those policies to other countries throughout Europe. We have, in short, witnessed the growth of a coalition of neoliberal aristocracies across the Western world under the guise of liberal democracy, composed of nations that, despite their institutional and procedural differences, have internally replicated the same unified neoliberal aristocratic system under the guise of a two-faction system of dominant right and center-left parties. We have also seen, throughout all Western nations, a rise in popular candidates who take adversarial positions in relation to their own parties or former parties, such as Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and an accompanying rise in both right and left variations of populism, indicating an increasing disillusionment with both the neoliberal aristocratic order and the factional-­dualist politics that has both concealed and supported it. The either/or we examined between a divisive factional-dualism that produces opposed peoples and a symbiotic-dualism of dominant parties whose policies converge has become a both/and that has produced a deep feeling of dissatisfaction and powerlessness among ever greater numbers of citizens in liberal democracies around the world. We see, then, that if the deep problems of procedural democracy are not limited to the American variety, it is because they are not due to which procedures define democracy but that democracy has been reduced to the procedural. There are two primary problems with procedural democracy. First, its method of producing merely ideological consensus fails to overcome its tendency toward factional-dualism, the division of a people into two distinct peoples with substantially different conditions of wellbeing and corresponding value systems, which in turn leads to a tyranny of the herd. Second, its focus on the protection of democratic procedures leaves largely unprotected the principal spheres of political power: the economic and cultural spheres. These forms of political power, in turn, become increasingly central with the growth of a factional-dualism that makes economic power over the media crucial to political success. So, the method of proceduralism as an end in itself tends toward the production of a herd by and in alignment with a political, cultural, and economic elite, and so to an

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aristocracy proper, disguised by that very tyranny of the herd as a supposed democracy. If our Nietzschean reconstruction of an immoralist theory of democracy is to be viable, it must avoid these two key problems. I believe it can do so, provided we situate this theory in the broader framework of his theories of legitimacy, justice, and rights. We have seen that for Nietzsche legitimacy does not exist in principle but in practice; it does not exist in advance, but is brought into existence through the production of subjects for whom the legitimacy of the state is not a live question. Furthermore, since this consequential form of legitimacy requires a radically new, more affirmative type of human character and psychology, his primary criterion of justice is the effective production of higher types. Finally, from this theory of justice it follows, first, that justice consists in the protection of the rights of the drives, as the material possibility of higher types, and the protection of the rights of individuals, as bearers of those drives, to material social-political conditions that promote those drives in the form of the manifold soul. So, in the framework of the Nietzschean theory of justice, democracy is neither an intrinsic good nor a right. Democracy is valuable to the degree it serves the aim of justice. And because on the Nietzschean theory of justice, individuals have rights only to the material conditions of the production of the manifold soul, we can conclude that an immoralist, consequential democracy will be, first and foremost, a non-liberal democracy. It is non-liberal in the sense that it does not have as its primary aim and limit the protection of a set of particular individual rights, such as property, speech, or action. This is not to say that it is antiliberal. For an immoralist democracy is limited by the protection of an individual right, but only of individuals’ general right to the material conditions of the manifold soul that promote their happiness, to the increase of their feeling of power through the horizontal expansion of the power of their drives. If democracy is limited only by individuals’ general right to material conditions of happiness, then it is not absolutely limited by particular rights of property, speech, action, and so on. Such rights will still exist in a relative form, since they are inseparable from the conditions of individual happiness. However, they cannot override the primary aim of democracy under the Nietzschean theory of justice: they cannot obstruct the realization of the material conditions of higher types. That, in the end, is our first principle and the defining feature of an immoralist democracy: an immoralist democracy prioritizes democratic consequences over procedures,

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prioritizing the production of material conditions for democracy over the protection of particular rights and the procedural production of ideological political consensus.10 In this way, the non-liberalism of immoralist democracy avoids the first problem of proceduralism. Proceduralism achieves democratic consequences only on a superficial, fragile, and ultimately failed basis: through moral exhortation, the attempt to bring factions with deeply different conditions of happiness into temporary ideological agreement. While procedural democracy seeks to change minds, to create a superficial consensus among deeply divided factions, immoralist democracy seeks to change the social conditions that produce those minds, the conditions of wellbeing that shape their identity and values in the first place. Immoralist democracy does not change minds but engineers new ones, changing the matters that create minds. Put differently, while procedural democracy seeks to resolve the symptoms of factionalism—the disparate beliefs and value systems it produces— immoralist democracy focuses on the cause of factionalism: the differing material conditions of wellbeing that divide a people into factions in the first place. For that reason, immoralist democracy avoids the fundamental problem of proceduralism: it not only avoids procedural democracy’s tendency to deepen factional-dualism, over time immoralist democracy diminishes that dualism. Instead of producing consensus, it produces a true people, a community whose will is unified not by persuasion or accident, but by a unified form of life and shared conditions of happiness. Because a successful immoralist democracy would transform the material conditions that create a people rather than transform factional ideologies, replacing factions with a true people, it would also prevent the first principal failure of procedural democracy: the transformation of democracy into a tyranny of the majoritarian herd. By reducing 10  Compare Paul Raekstad and Enzo Rossi’s argument for an “ineliminable conflict between seeing liberal basic liberties as basic and recognizing people’s right to resist oppression with strikes and other forms of direct action” (2021, 2). Notice that a Nietzschean democracy reverses Rawls’ prioritization of liberty over equality. Rawls recognizes that “the denial of equal liberty can be defended only if it is necessary to raise the level of civilization so that in due course these freedoms can be enjoyed” (1971, 61). However, he falsely assumes that such a level of civilization can be maintained without the prioritization of democracy over liberty, of concrete freedom over abstract freedom—a mistake only partly remedied in his later work by narrowing the category of “liberty” to exclude private property, rather than recognizing its secondary importance (1996, 298).

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factional-­dualism, an immoralist democracy would make possible a true political pluralism. Recall that under the dualism of procedural democracy, individuals can only promote their own feeling of power by aligning themselves with either major political power, leaving them with no incentive to form political movements or communities of value distinct from or antagonistic to dominant factions. Factional-dualism promotes a herd mentality, since an individual’s feeling of power depends upon identification with one of two near-majority social groups. When either political faction gains political power, in practice, this amounts to rule by the herd—by a faction large enough to be the majority or to regularly gain a political majority. In an immoralist democracy, in contrast, the successful transformation of the material conditions that produce a people’s character and values would not only prevent the polarization of politics into two opposed factions, but reveal the real diversity of values and forms of life that they conceal. Consider, for example, the deep differences in conditions of life, ways of life, and values of an economic conservative born into wealth, educated at elite universities, pursuing a powerful professional career in a global economic and cultural urban center, in contrast to a religious conservative born into a lower-middle class family in a dying rural town, with only a modest education and a life devoted to family, community, and church rather than career. On the basis of a handful of overlapping policy interests—often, in practice, not overlapping at all, as in the abstract opposition to taxation that only reduces the tax burdens of the very wealthiest—these individuals believe they share an important identity, feeling solidarity with one another as a part of a single political collective agency. The same absurd abstract kind of political identity, utterly detached from deep material differences in conditions of life and the values they condition can, of course, just as easily be found among liberals and the left. Once an individual or minority community’s feeling of power no longer depends upon alliance with one side of a powerful political dualism, true value pluralism becomes possible: a societal form of the unity in diversity of the manifold soul. For once divergence from the majority no longer entails the complete destruction of individual or minority power, the incentive to reject counterpowers, which are sources of proportionate rather than overwhelming resistance, is lost. It is only the powerful factional-­ dualism of procedural democracies that makes a diversity of

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communities of identity and value a direct threat to the power and existence of one’s own. A successful immoralist democracy would not only eliminate the danger of a majoritarian tyranny of the herd, it would also prevent the transformation of herd-democracy into either a tyrannical statism, a disguised aristocracy, or a fusion of both, and so prevent the danger of recreating the material conditions that inevitably produce slave psychology and a slavish revolt in morality. Procedural democracy’s factional-dualism limits the power of the majority to that of a minimal majority, a power checked and exhausted by the relatively equal power of its near-majority opposing faction. Consequently, the procedural power of the majority is always in danger of being overwhelmed by the power of the state. By creating the conditions of a unified people, a successfully immoralist democracy would expand the procedural power of the majority beyond this dualistic limit, expanding the majority toward the ideal of a unified popular will, and so decrease the risk of a tyrannical state. At the same time, a successful immoralist democracy would also be able to prevent that majority from devolving into the instrument of an economic and cultural elite, and so avoid procedural democracy’s risk of producing an aristocracy disguised as a democracy. Recall that proceduralism focuses on protecting the democratic process of elective representation independent of its consequential outcomes. This is why, to return to earlier examples, the proceduralist has no problem with calling the United States a democracy despite the fact that only 40–60 percent of our eligible population votes and despite the fact that, over the last two decades, policy has consistently tracked the interests of economic power against popular opinion. If the purpose of procedural democracy were to obtain a democratic outcome in which legislation and policy in fact reflect the majority will, this would be incomprehensible. But for proceduralists this is not a problem, since they define democracy by procedures that exist for their own sake, as ends in themselves, not as a means to democratic outcomes. As long as the population is not seriously hindered from voting (at least in principle, since historically this has not been and is not true in the United States), then a low voter turnout has no bearing on whether a nation is democratic. And as long as elections are free and fair according to minimal rules of procedure, the ability for economic powers to consistently and

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substantially, if indirectly, bring about policy outcomes at odds with expressed popular opinion has no bearing on democratic status. It is this treatment of democratic procedures as ends in themselves, regardless of whether their outcome is policy that reflects the majority will, that leads to the transformation of procedural democracies into true aristocracies. First, by protecting only political procedures, they leave the procedural power obtained by the majority unprotected from economic and cultural power—such as the power of campaign donation, lobbying, monopoly media bias, and control of the ideological content of cultural programming and goods. As a result, where popular will conflicts with the interests of the economic elite, the economic influence of that elite in the election of and policy decisions of political officials, combined with its economic control of media and culture, outweighs the modest procedural power possessed by the majority. Second, because the economic elite has disproportionate power over culture, education, and media, its own value system is the “morality of mores” or Sittlichkeit that is internalized in the production of individual subjects, the foundation of the drive organization of their “sovereign individuality.” Consequently, the majority is already produced to be predisposed to the interests and values of the economic elite, using what modest political power it does possess on the elite’s behalf rather than its own. So procedural democracy devolves into aristocracy on two fronts: on the one hand, economic power overrides popular counter-power, on the other hand, popular power often fails, and increasingly fails, to oppose economic power in the first place. A Nietzschean, immoralist democracy would resolve this problem very simply: by extending the democratic protection of popular power to all spheres of political influence—to the activity of governance, not just the electoral process, and to the economic and cultural spheres, not just the political sphere. And only an immoralist form of democracy is capable of doing so, because it treats democratic procedures as means to democratic outcomes, rather than as ends in themselves. Consequently, an immoralist democracy can consistently suspend democratic procedures to whatever degree they produce aristocratic outcomes. A procedural democracy cannot, for example, simply impose regulations on the market, on political contributions, or on media ownership that would be severe enough to counter the aristocratic power of the economic elite. For to do so would, first, ignore the primacy of democratic

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procedure, which tolerates substantial structural and economic changes only given a strong popular consensus expressed through proper representative processes—an unlikelihood given, as we have seen, the ability of the economic elite to use its cultural power to manufacture political consensus in its interest. Second, to do so would require regulation of the market and the private sphere to a degree incompatible with procedural democracy’s commitment to basic particular rights, particularly the rights of speech and property. However, in an immoralist democracy, the only primary right of individuals is to the material conditions of the manifold soul, which are in turn the conditions for the production of higher types, as well as individuals’ own feeling of power. So, such a democracy has no a priori constraints that prevent directly intervening in the economic and cultural spheres to prevent their use by an economic elite to affect political processes and outcomes. It is, in other words, only the foundational non-liberalism of this conception of democracy that allows it to effectively prevent aristocracy, for it must prevent the aristocratic elite from using its rights of speech and property to gain greater political power than the will of the majority. A Nietzschean democracy would, on the one hand, maximize the power of the majority by creating the material conditions of a true people, thus reducing the risk of excessive state power. On the other hand, it would enable the state to have sufficient power over the economic elite to directly constrain and regulate their intervention into and influence over political processes. In this way, such a democracy could simultaneously ward off both dangers: the tyranny of the majoritarian herd and its cooption by a covert aristocracy.

4   The Danger of Non-liberalism: The Gay Science as Experimental, Democratic Verification Excellent poultry and potatoes are produced to satisfy the demand of housewives who do not know the technical differences between a tuber and a chicken. They will tell you that the proof of the pudding is in the eating; and they are right. The proof of the Superman will be in the living; and we shall find out how to produce him by the old method of trial and error, and not by waiting for a completely convincing prescription of his ingredients. —George Bernard Shaw, “The Revolutionist’s Handbook,” Man and Superman

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I have argued that a consequential, immoralist democracy grounded in a Nietzschean conception of justice and rights can avoid the problems raised by procedural democracy, especially the tendency of such democracies to move toward a tyranny of the majoritarian herd or toward a disguised aristocracy of the economic elite. However, in our discussion of the problem of procedural democracy, we encountered the problem that procedural democracy can only be democratic given the preexistence of a true people, a community of shared values and shared conditions of flourishing. We also saw that such a people can only be brought into existence in the future through the transformation of social-material conditions that are at odds with the actual interests of present individuals. For present individuals are the product of past social orders and have internalized the value systems of those past orders, organizing their own interests accordingly in the very structure of their agency. So, they have a very real interest, based in their identities and characters, in preserving the values and social order of the past, against the profound changes to the social order and its values that an immoralist democracy would require. Consequently, it might be argued that even if an immoralist democracy could, with time, overcome the anti-democratic tendencies of procedural democracy, it could only do so through dramatically unjust and anti-­ democratic measures in the present. But as we have already seen, Nietzsche’s project of human enhancement has no normative weight—it is not the case that we have any moral obligation to promote it—and he rejects the efficacy of moral exhortation—so he cannot persuade us against the strongest demands of our deepest character to uphold such a moral obligation even if it existed. So, the only way Nietzsche can hope to get present individuals to assist in its realization is if he can show us that its present means of political realization are also in the interests of present individuals. The worry, then, is that an immoralist democracy can only get off the ground by force, in which case it will produce the same problem that Nietzsche’s own aristocratic radicalism does: by subjugating a majority of the population, it will create the material conditions of resentment that lead to slave psychology and the slave revolt. (Indeed, this may be an apt description of the outcome of the failed Soviet attempt to replace a bourgeois dictatorship with a proletarian one, anti-democratically attempting to impose the necessary material conditions for a truer, non-­procedural democracy.) However, this objection too quickly assumes that the origin of present individuals’ characters and values in past social orders guarantees a deep conflict or even contradiction between their present interests and the

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conditions of higher types. Consider Nietzsche’s distinction between the soul as a social structure of the drives and the individual drives that compose it. Nietzsche treats as an illusion our psychological tendency, when we will an action, to identify ourselves with victorious individual drives and conflate those drives, in turn, with our entire soul. This is precisely the illusion of free will: by identifying consciously with victorious drives, I experience a vicarious feeling of power and am led to believe that it was my conscious act of volition that was the efficient cause. This misidentification allows me to conflate the interest of a minority of my drives with my selfinterest as a whole, and so experience the practical freedom of one part of myself—which coincides with the suppression and unfreedom of another part of myself—as the freedom of the whole. To be sure, there is a social structure of the drives, a unified, effective self, only to the degree that there is a hierarchy, so there is a self only to the degree that some drives are controlled by others. In that sense, it is not entirely false to identify the soul, and the interests of the entire soul, with some degree of the unfreedom of weaker drives. However, in Nietzsche’s ideal of the manifold soul, the highest form of the will to power is achieved through a heightened tension among diverse drives: an equilibrium between ordered hierarchy and nearly equal power among the drives that increases the horizontal power of the soul across all drives. This ideal not only achieves a maximal feeling of power but also best represents the freedom of the self when considered as a whole, for it is an organization of the drives in which every individual drive experiences the highest degree of the feeling of power, rather than just the strongest drives in relation to the weaker or the entire structure in relation to the external world. This is the basis for a Nietzschean distinction between an individual’s true objective self-interest—the combined interests of every drive that composes the self—and subjective, merely perceived self-interest—the conscious self’s identification with its most powerful, ruling drives. Now, returning to the problem raised by the critic: do the interests of present individuals contradict the interests of immoralist, consequential democracy? The potential conflict comes from two possible sources. First, to the degree that most individuals are, as Nietzsche claims, decadent in their organization, their drives are in a state of anarchic self-contradiction that leads to a weak, impotent will. So, any strong, consistent set of values, and any political policies or legislation that reflect such a value system, will likely be experienced as an imposition—as a demand to act or refrain from

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acting in ways that most individuals lack the strength and self-control to uphold. Second, as we saw in the account of the sovereign individual, present individuals who are less decadent are so thanks to their internalization of the conventional morality of the social order that produced them. The stronger, less decadent individuals will, in other words, represent the success of previous aristocratic orders (whether explicit or disguised as procedural democracies) in using their power over the economic, cultural, and political spheres to manufacture the consent of the majority of the citizenry. To the degree that the ruling class succeeds in promoting its interests as a social ideology, it will reproduce that social order in the drive organization of stronger subjects. Consequently, an immoralist democracy’s demands for changes to the material conditions of the social-political order will necessarily be at odds with the overall value system and hierarchy of drives that characterizes these relatively healthier subjects. In the first case, however, of decadent contemporary individuals, it is unlikely that the necessarily non-liberal origins of an immoralist democracy would pose a problem. For by definition, such individuals have no will to thwart: they are an anarchy of contradictory drives that suppress and frustrate one another, leading to no overriding effective values, choices, and actions. In the severest cases, such individuals already experience every act of will as a source of frustration and impotence, so there is no reason to think that imposed values, policies, or legislation that fail to mirror their absent will should be experienced as a greater or particularly grievous violation of their will. So, such individuals would not, on the level of their values and the organization of the drives, pose the danger of a return of slave psychology. They do not have a sufficiently strong agency or value system to experience an imposed one as a deprivation of their power or freedom. However, this does leave open the possibility that they could experience any constraint on a particular drive as a greater degree of unfreedom. If individuals have no well-established system of values, they cannot experience an imposed set of values as a great violation of their identity or freedom. Likewise, if they have no strong, ordered set of motives, dispositions, and desires, they are unlikely to experience an imposed set of actions or constraints as essentially limiting or oppressive. For their every drive is already suppressed, thwarted, and frustrated by another. However, this suppression of particular drives could be aggravated by a new social order and new social values. That is, after all, the condition of anti-natural

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morality, which by suppressing instincts at their root, rather than simply moderating one drive on behalf of another, aggravates the frustration of the drives rather than simply redistributing that frustration. Consequently, the decadent individual presents a constraint on the non-liberal foundations of an immoralist democracy. Such a democracy may act against the values and will of such individuals without provoking slave psychology, but it cannot act directly against the individual drives of those individuals without producing the kind of resentment that generates slave psychology. Democracy cannot begin democratically, but if it is to be successfully produced over time, it must be anti-democratic only in its relationship to individuals’ explicit value systems and expressed wills; it cannot be anti-democratic in its relation to their drives. The two may, of course, overlap. But, given the condition of decadence, in which a strong will is absent and the soul is a fluctuating plaything of contradictory drives, it is likely that the real interests of individual drives will often fail to coincide with an individual’s explicit will or value system.11 This is the gap between objective self-interest—the combined interests of all drives—and subjectively perceived self-interest—the interests of the strongest ruling drives, as perceived through the lens of a corresponding ideological system of value. An immoralist democracy can only become truly democratic, producing legislation, policy, and material social-­political conditions that produce a true people, if it threads the needle of that gap, non-liberally legislating against the majority will only on the ideological level rather than on the level of the individual drives. Consider, as an example, the relatively fast and successful implementation of smoking bans in public areas in recent decades. A smoker, like any addict, is the victim of a tyrannical organization of the soul: many diverse 11  This form of a non-liberal violation of liberty on behalf of democracy differs from Lenin’s interpretation in The State and Revolution of Marx’s “dictatorship of the people” because its success depends on the divided nature of the individual: it liberates one part of the self by violating the liberty of another. Lenin’s version ignores the complexity of individuals, reducing them to purely opposed class identities: “The dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of crushing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy…. their resistance must be broken by force; it is clear that where there is suppression there is also violence, there is no freedom, no democracy” (1917, 337–338). This makes two dangerous mistakes. First, it makes the practical error of ignoring that a proletarian dictatorship, just like aristocratic or capitalist ones, will create resentment and counter-revolution. Second, it makes the psychological error of equating force with violence, an error Nietzsche’s distinction between qualitative and quantitative power helps us avoid.

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motives, needs, abilities, and desires are frequently constrained or entirely suppressed under the command of the single drive of that addiction. That organization has an ideological component: smokers identify themselves with the desire to smoke and so believe the constraint of that will is a substantial harm to their freedom. When anti-smoking legislation was first proposed, many people strongly objected, seeing it as a violation not only of their will and their subjectively perceived interests, but correctly recognizing it as an encroachment on liberty in the negatively defined, classical liberal sense. That this conception of liberty is incoherent and misguided is irrelevant, since in practice the aristocratic structure of our liberal democracies, the liberty of “markets” above all, depends on the propagation of that misguided, incoherent view. So, these policies directly violated the dominant ideology of freedom: the liberal prioritization from Locke to Rawls of liberty over equality. And so they inevitably violated smokers’ subjective, ideological understanding of their own interests and were, in a qualified sense, anti-democratic. But these policies did not violate smokers’ interests as whole persons, the objective interest of their drives to freedom from suppression. Precisely by forcibly constraining the tyrannical ruling drive of their addiction, they helped many reduce their habit or quit, resulting in a dramatic drop in worldwide smoking rates in only a few decades. Public protest against smoking bans quickly declined, too. They did not create deep or lasting resentment because although they violated smokers’ ideological understanding of their interests, they were in the real interest of every other drive that constituted their personhood. This does not mean they did not feel their freedom was constrained. But because they already constantly felt their freedom constrained by their own addiction, these policies did not dramatically change their overall feeling of power. Moreover, for those who gained greater control of their addiction or quit, it effectively changed their subjective sense of their self-interest, increasing their overall feeling of power. So, a violation of subjective, ideological interest is not necessarily a problem where it simultaneously promotes an objective interest rooted in someone’s deep character, needs, and values. What matters is not the state of our beliefs: whether or not we temporarily think we are empowered or disempowered. What matters is the organization of our drives: whether or not we feel empowered or disempowered overall and in the long run.

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Now let’s consider our second problem: the potential obstacle posed by the will of individuals who are healthier, less decadent, and shaped in their values and character by the conventional morality of the previous social order. Will the non-liberal origins of an immoralist democracy provoke in such individuals the kind of resentment that would regenerate slave psychology? The answer is clearly no, for the same reason. For the strong, conventional agent whose will and values reflect the interests of the previously dominant social order, the same distinction of objective and perceived self-interest will apply. Because the majority of such agents have internalized the value system of a status quo whose advantages and conditions of happiness they do not in fact share, the conventionally healthy individual already experiences their own values and self-organization as impotence and deprivation. For their strongest conscious values serve the interests of their social superiors more than they serve their own drives. Their value systems reflect the satisfaction only of a small, ruling minority of their drives, at the expense and impotence of the rest. And so the relatively healthy conventional agent presents the very same constraint on an immoralist democracy that the decadent agent does. Namely, an immoralist democracy may impose a new social order against the explicit will of those individuals, provided it does not do so through increased suppression and frustration of their drives. Immoralist democracy may initially—and only temporarily, since its legitimacy depends upon the production of a true popular will—violate the perceived self-interests of its subjects, but it cannot violate their true interests, the will to power of their component drives, without risking regenerating the slave revolt in morality. Democracy may non-liberally oppose individuals’ structural will—the reflection of the hierarchy of their drives—because it is only a partial will, a reflection of a part, and a minority part, of their entire self. But it may do so only on behalf of their entire will, promoting the individual drives of which that structural will is composed. Let’s call this constraint that of a materialist, in contrast to an idealist, conception of democracy. An idealist democracy is one in which the principal constraint upon political procedures and consequences is that they must not violate the majority’s perceived or ideological self-interest. A society is democratic or self-ruling, on this view, if it is ruled by the ideas and beliefs held by the majority of its citizens. Of course, this is simply

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what such a democracy seeks to achieve in principle—we have seen that even the idealist form of self-rule rarely exists in practice. In contrast, a materialist democracy is one in which the principal constraint upon political procedures and consequences is that they must not violate the people’s material interests. Since abiding by the majority’s perceived, ideological self-interest can violate their real, material interests, a materialist democracy may violate the principles of an idealist one. Consider, for example, the debate in American politics over the estate tax, which has gained the misleading popular name, the “death tax.” The policy has been unpopular for decades, with a majority of Americans favoring its repeal, largely due to public ignorance of its real consequences, as well as deeply dishonest and manipulative reporting on the issue. But the policy has no bearing at all on the real, material interests of the overwhelming majority of Americans—only the estates of the wealthiest 0.2 percent of Americans owe any tax at all. On an idealist conception of democracy, this disconnect between a policy’s approval and the public’s material interests is irrelevant: democracy is rule by the ideas of a people, whether those ideas are in their interest or not. On a materialist conception of democracy, on the contrary, repealing the estate tax would be undemocratic, even if it is done with the consent of an overwhelming majority, since the tax negatively affects only a very small minority, while positively affecting, through the public funding it raises, every citizen. It may be objected, of course, that an idealist conception democracy is a necessary safeguard against the dangerous non-liberalism of the materialist conception. While it may be desirable in principle to make democratic policy conform to real material needs and interests, in practice there is far too much room for rational disagreement about what our objective public interest truly is. Given the degree of disagreement that exists among individuals, communities, and political parties about our real material interests, any attempt to impose objective over perceived interest is bound to lead to warring factional interests, often imposed at the expense of real shared ones—producing exactly the same tendency toward disguised aristocratism that characterizes procedural democracy. This is a reasonable worry, to be sure. The problem is that idealist democracy is not a truly effective safeguard against the imposition of factional interests under the guise of objective ones. On the contrary, idealist democracy is exercised through procedural means that, as we have already seen, lead to either a tyranny of the majority, a disguised aristocracy of the economic elite, or an amalgam of the two.

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So, we cannot exclude a materialist conception of democracy on the grounds that it would present greater dangers in this regard than idealist democracy already does. More important, while any form of democracy includes the danger of the imposition of factional interests under the guise of objective public interests, only a materialist democracy can incorporate an effective corrective to this danger. For on the idealist conception, any policy, once effected, is treated as essentially democratic, since it has been realized through democratic procedures. It cannot then, after the fact, be recognized as undemocratic, as a failure of democracy in need of correction. If a policy is repealed, this appears not as an admission that it violated the true interests of the people but as an indication that the popular will has simply changed. On the materialist conception, in contrast, the measure of whether a policy is democratic is whether it does, in fact, satisfy the real, material interests of the people. If a policy fails to do so, this does not indicate a change in popular will or interest, but the falsification of the policy’s claim to have been democratic in the first place. The policy’s claim to democratic status is, in such a case, refuted by its consequences. In this way, a materialist democracy operates in a way analogous to a science. Its goal is not rule by a people  in the sense of rule by popular ideology, but rule according to a scientific conception of the real objective interests and wellbeing of a people. And its method is not that of an authoritarian imposition of majority opinion about people’s interest, but a scientific conception of their interests grounded in their real material conditions, material conditions which, in turn, allow for any claim about a people’s real interests to be verified or falsified. That this is the implication of a Nietzschean reconceptualization of democracy should not, after all, be a surprise. It is just another way of saying what Nietzsche has already said: that morality must be replaced by politics, by legislation and command rather than ideology, and that this politics must take the form of “a physio-psychology” or a psychology grounded in a “physics.” Democracy is a physical science of the social body and its health, of both individual and social enhancement and flourishing. Politics, then, is the truest form of Nietzsche’s “gay science”: the science of a community’s happiness. We can now further refine our earlier definition: a materialist democracy is a democracy in which democratic procedure and popular ideology are constrained by the best existing science of social happiness and flourishing. Objective knowledge of human nature, psychology, physiology, and economics must take priority over

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ideology, over individual or majoritarian perceptions of self-interest. Within the limit of the best available science, policy is determined by majoritarian rule, but where the two conflict, the gay science, not majoritarian will, determines policy. But what does this mean? To say that the best available science of social happiness determines policy does not mean that science strictly or finally limits or overrides perceived popular interest. On the contrary, it is scientific precisely to the degree that it is subject to testing, verification, or refutation. Democracy is truly a political science of social happiness only to the degree that it is not a dogmatic but experimental science. Science does not determine policy in order to dictate human happiness, but to test and improve hypotheses and theories of social happiness. Its policies are not legitimized a priori but in practice. Just as, for Nietzsche, a state only becomes legitimate after the fact, a policy does not begin as a democratic one but may become democratic to the degree it does in fact fulfill real, shared social needs, in turn producing a true popular will that retroactively justifies it.12 The materialist conception of democracy as an experimental, gay science of human happiness has, therefore, two principal advantages over the traditional conception of democracy. 12  In this respect, a Nietzschean democracy is a “politics of ambiguity” in the same sense as Beauvoir’s “ethics of ambiguity.” Although “the good of an individual or a group of individuals requires that it be taken as an absolute end of our action,” at the same time “we are not authorized to decide upon this end a priori” (1947, 142). Consequently, every ethical decision takes the form of a hypothesis about what the affected individual will take to be to their good. In Beauvoir’s example, if I prevent someone from committing suicide, the act will become justified if, after the fact, they find themselves happy, while “a man whom I snatch from the death which he had chosen has the right to come and ask me for means and reasons for living.” For Beauvoir, this follows from a core precept “to treat the other…as a freedom so that his end may be freedom” (142). In Nietzsche’s case, in contrast, the core precept is to treat others so that their end may be the love of fate. But both reject a priori criteria and both reject any substantial criterion beyond the feeling of the subject affected. Democracy is nothing but the feeling of being a free people. For Beauvoir, whether your action allows my end to be freedom is entirely decided by me, and in a Nietzschean democracy, whether a political policy increases the popular love of fate, whether it creates a people, is entirely decided by the people. We cannot, for example, dismiss the professed unhappiness of the people as a “false” one. Political division, regardless of whys and wherefores, regardless even of the truth or untruth of the claims of the divided parties, is always proof of some degree of illegitimacy, for it proves a true people does not exist. Even divisions based on lies are based on divided conditions—in which some, but not all, need lies in order to be able to affirm their fate.

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First, in the traditional conception, a policy that is truly in the popular interest but for ideological reasons unpopular cannot be legitimately imposed. But it is precisely through the imposition of such a procedure that the fact that it is actually in the people’s interest is demonstrated—so this constraint also reduces the chances that a society will discover that its conception of its self-interest is erroneous. An experimental, materialist democracy, in contrast, institutionally grants the state the authority to impose policy against majoritarian will if it is in accordance with the best existing scientific evidence, thus making possible the practical discovery of real interests that have been ideologically concealed by the partial interests of either the majority or the ruling class. Consider, for example, the history of Medicare in the United States. Public opinion was deeply divided at the time the legislation was passed, but the program is overwhelmingly popular today. From a procedural standpoint, the legislation was democratic, enacted through procedurally correct means. From the idealist point of view, however, it represents a questionable use of democratic procedures, since it did not, at the time of its implication, reflect the ideas, beliefs, and perceived interests of a strong majority. On a traditional view, it is, then, a failure in principle if not practice. We can easily imagine a scenario in which the proposed legislation had been so unpopular that it might not have been passed at all. A materialist, experimental democracy has the advantage that it does not, as a matter of procedure and principle, refuse to acknowledge and test, and thus discover and confirm, real material needs and interests that are perfectly available to scientific study and evidence—simply because accepted ideology ignores or denies them. Had public opinion not merely been divided but resolutely opposed to Medicare, a materialist democracy would still have had the right to impose the legislation against the popular will, allowing the public to subsequently discover and produce a more objectively correct ideological will that accurately reflects its real material interests. Moreover, the procedural and idealist standpoints do not sufficiently acknowledge the early popular stance on Medicare for what it clearly was: an objective error on the part of the public about their real material needs and interests. Instead, the idealist and procedural views only allow us to assume that perceived interests changed, leaving entirely off the table the question of why they changed and whether they changed for better or worse—since it is perceived, not real, interests that establish for the idealist

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whether a policy is democratic. That is the second advantage of an experimental, materialist democracy. Not only can it experimentally discover real interests that would otherwise have been ideologically concealed, it can also refute false claims of popular interest. Unlike traditional democracy, its claims to democratic status are experimentally falsifiable. In this respect, a materialist democracy may actually be less prone to the danger of imposing factional interest under the guise of majoritarian interests. We have already seen that procedural democracies do this all the time, so they are not clearly preferable in that regard. But they may be less preferable. For an idealist, procedurally democratic policy is treated as de facto legitimate—if it is enacted through correct procedures and reflects the perceived popular interest, it cannot be said to be illegitimate, even if it does grave harm to real interests. Consider, as a contrast to the example of Medicare, the more recent case of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). While Medicare initially divided popular opinion only to become overwhelmingly popular after its implementation, public opinion about the ACA has remained deeply divided since its initial passage in 2010. Although it is relatively young legislation, it has not experimentally proven itself, failing to demonstrate in practice to the majority of citizens that it is in their real material interest. In such cases, a policy often fails to correspond to the real, shared material interests of the people precisely because it is enacted in the true interest of a minority faction, while ideologically portrayed as in the popular interest. The ACA was the result of substantial compromises with the health insurance industry, often at the financial expense, in the form of higher premiums, of the very patients it was intended to assist. Recall, too, our earlier example of the estate tax. Not only is the tax in the real material interest of the overwhelming majority, the popular conception to the contrary is not simply an error, but the outcome of a long political campaign, organized and funded by members of the miniscule population of citizens negatively affected by the policy. So, because such policies are enacted through a minority’s power over the ideological perception of policy, once put in place, it becomes difficult to recognize their failure, for the economic power of a minority over the production and shaping of popular ideology ensures that the real, practical failure of those policies is kept from view.

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In an experimental, materialist democracy, we would be no more and no less protected from policy that runs counter to the real interests of the people. However, we would be better protected from indefinite errors of this sort, since a policy is not treated as de facto legitimate but only becomes legitimate when it proves itself in practice, satisfying real needs and increasing social wellbeing and happiness. While procedural democracy starts and ends with criteria of procedure, then hopes for the best when it comes to consequences, an experimental, materialist democracy reverses the order: it hypothesizes, then tests policy in practice, and finally brings in democratic procedure, allowing the public to democratically identify and reject policies that have materially failed.13 Once again, the Nietzschean approach, while non-liberal in principle, is more liberal in practice. Materialist democracy is non-liberal in that it practices democratic procedures only within the limit of the best available science of social happiness, giving expert knowledge priority over public liberties. However, it is a form of concrete liberalism in contrast to abstract liberalism, because it imposes the best available science of happiness only

13  In this respect, Nietzsche’s oft-remarked skepticism is best understood, like his emphasis upon experimentation, in light of his politics of breeding human types rather than as an individual epistemic attitude (Jessica Berry 2011) or critical practice and way of life (Katrina Mitcheson 2017). Compare, for example, Urs Sommer’s discussion of Nietzsche’s own distinction between a “skepticism of weakness” and a commanding, experimental skepticism of courage (2006, 263). Nietzschean skepticism is a political practice based in his rejection of moral forms of human improvement, one that suspends a priori judgments about the value of a state, policy, or human type, allowing experimental results to determine judgments only after they are confirmed in practice and only to the degree the results continue to hold. As I have mentioned before, a fruitful comparison might be made to Beauvoir’s semi-skeptical, semi-experimental view of the moral status of actions in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947). Far from abandoning his middle period interest in the sciences, Nietzsche has only abandoned a pre-modern, dogmatic conception for a skeptical and experimental one better suited to his political aims. Moreover, because he is committed to a conception of science that prioritizes experimental refutation of false explanatory and predictive claims, we should question accounts of his naturalism, such as Leiter’s (2002), that emphasize a predominantly positive picture of scientific methodology. On this point, see my argument that Nietzsche’s will to power is a minimalist, critical metaphysics aimed at rejecting false explanatory claims rather than generating alternatives (Miyasaki 2013).

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within the limit of Nietzsche’s foundational principles of justice and the rights of higher types and the drives.14 Recall that Nietzsche’s principle of justice demands the protection of higher types from the decadence of the present. That protection, in turn, depends on the real material possibility of higher types found in the existing drives of present individuals. Consequently, democracy is constrained by the rights of the drives—a right, you will recall, to the horizontal expansion of their power as necessary for the promotion of the manifold soul. The form of rights that constrains even a materialist, immoralist, and consequential theory of Nietzschean democracy is, then, the right of every individual to expand the power of their weakest drives in relation to their strongest drives. It is the right of every drive to the feeling of power, a right to the happiness of each and every one of our “undersouls” that is, in turn, our right to the concrete conditions of our happiness as such—to the heightened feeling of power that accompanies our realization of a more manifold form of health and organization of the social structure of the soul. Consequently, a materialist democracy is an experimental science of social happiness in which policy becomes and remains legitimate only to the degree that it is concretely liberal in practice—producing real, shared conditions of happiness, in turn promoting the formation of a real people, resulting in the popular ideological affirmation of concretely successful policies.

14  Here we see how deep Nietzsche’s differences from Michel Foucault really run. Foucault’s equivocal description of a socially constructed subject that somehow manages to be an object of domination by the very agency that produces it—an oppressed subject that preexists itself—leads him to an exaggerated libertarian worry that the human sciences lead to objectification and subjection. A Nietzschean politics, however, uses the sciences as an experimental, democratic instrument, making the people both the subject and object of that science. If there is a true continuity to be found in their thought, it is most likely in a positive reconception of “biopolitics” against Foucault’s critical version (1978 and 1978–1979). A Nietzschean biopolitics would reject Foucault’s covert idealism, his belief that biopolitics is the effect of forms of rationality—a privileging of forms of rationality over their material causes that leads left-Foucauldians like Wendy Brown (2015) astray. While Foucault is not a liberal as some have charged, he is a moralist and, as such, of limited value to the critique of neoliberalism. For a discussion of Nietzsche’s positive relation to biopolitics, see Lemm (2009).

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References Anderson, Elizabeth. 2017. Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don’t Talk About It). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Beauvoir, Simone de. [1947] 2018. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Citadel Press. Bergoffen, Debra B. 2004. Engaging Nietzsche’s Women: Ofelia Schutte and the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. Hypatia 19 (3): 157–168. Berry, Jessica. 2011. Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Brooklyn: Zone Books. Foucault, Michel. [1978] 1990. History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. ———. [1978–1979] 2004. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, Edited by Michael Senellart. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Freud, Sigmund. [1921]. 1953–1974. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. In The Standard Edition, Volume 18. London: Hogarth Press. Gilens, Martin, and Benjamin Page. 2014. Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. Perspectives on Politics 12 (3): 564–581. Hatab, Lawrence. 2014. Nietzsche’s Will to Power in Politics. In Nietzsche as Political Philosopher, ed. Barry Stocker and Manuel Knoll, 113–133. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Kinney, David, and Liam Kofi Bright. 2021. Risk Aversion and Elite-Group Ignorance. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12837. Leiter, Brian. 2002. Nietzsche on Morality. London: Routledge. Lemm, Vanessa. 2009. Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics, and the Animality of the Human Being. New York: Fordham University Press. Lenin, Vladimir. [1917] 1966. The State and Revolution. In Essential Works of Lenin. Edited by Henry M. Christman. New York: Dover Publications. Mitcheson, Katrina. 2017. Scepticism and Self-Transformation in Nietzsche—On the Uses and Disadvantages of a Comparison to Pyrrhonian Scepticism. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (1): 63–83. Miyasaki, Donovan. 2013. Nietzsche’s Will to Power as Naturalist Critical Ontology. History of Philosophy Quarterly 30 (3): 251–269. ———. 2016. Feeling, not Freedom: Nietzsche Against Agency. Journal of Nietzsche Studies 47 (2): 256–274. ———. 2022. (NI) Nietzsche’s Immoralism: Politics as First Philosophy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Nguyen, C. Thi. 2020. Games: Agency as Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Patton, Paul. 2013. Nietzsche, Genealogy and Justice. In Nietzsche and Political Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, 7–22. London: Bloomsbury. Raekstad, Paul and Enzo Rossi. 2021. Radicalizing Rights: Basic Liberties and Direct Action. Political Studies Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1478929920984616. Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi O. 2022. Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else). Chicago: Haymarket Books. Thiele, Paul Leslie. 1990. Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individualism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Urs Sommer, Andreas. 2006. Nihilism and Skepticism in Nietzsche. In A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, 250–269. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Wiredu, Kwasi. 1996. Philosophy and the Political Problem of Human Rights. In Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ypi, Lea. 2021. Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History. New  York: W. W. Norton & Company Publishing.

PART IV

Egalitarianism After Morality

But although there is no natural and general society among men, although they become unhappy and wicked on becoming sociable, although the laws of justice and of equality are as naught to those who live at the same time in the freedom of the state of nature and subject to the needs of the social state; far from thinking that there is neither virtue nor happiness for us, and that heaven has abandoned us without resource to the corruption of the species; let us endeavor to derive from the evil itself the remedy which will cure it…. Let our violent interlocutor himself be the judge of our success. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Geneva Manuscript Something about Nietzsche. They call him unphilosophical. His works read like witty gimmicks. He seems to me like someone who has created a hundred new possibilities and isn’t executing any of them. That is why he is loved by those who need new possibilities, while those who cannot live without mathematical certainty call him unphilosophical. Nietzsche, considered in himself, has no great value. But Nietzsche and ten diligent intellectual workers who actually do what he has only shown us would together bring about an advance in culture of a thousand years. Nietzsche is like a park, open to the public—but no one goes in! —Robert Musil, Diaries The true Superman is possible only as the creation of new, approaching, living forms, fastened together by widely understood principles of community, imbued with the mighty idea of socialism. —Alexandra Kollontai, quoted in Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism

CHAPTER 8

An Immoralist Theory of Egalitarianism: Toward a Nietzschean Theory of Socialism

1   The Breeding Conditions of Higher Types: Nietzsche’s Hothouse Politics Beauty, like genius, is the final result of the accumulated labour of generations.... Good things are inordinately expensive: and it is always the case that the one who has them is different from the one who acquires them. All good things are inherited: anything that is not inherited is imperfect, a beginning…. It is crucial for the fate of individuals as well as peoples that culture begin in the right place—not in the ‘soul’ (which was the disastrous superstition of priests and half-priests): the right place is the body, gestures, diet, physiology, everything else follows from this. —Twilight of the Idols IX.47 I love the one who works and invents in order to build a house for the overman and to prepare earth, animals and plants for him: for thus he wants his going under. —Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue 4

So far, I have reconstructed Nietzsche’s political philosophy in a predominantly negative and critical way, arguing that his radical aristocratic politics fails on its own terms. It fails, first, to achieve the only kind of legitimacy Nietzsche thinks is possible, the harmony of a people’s “tablet of values” with its material conditions and social order and the production of subjects who affirm the value order that created them, because its class © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Miyasaki, Politics After Morality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12228-6_8

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inequality reproduces the slavish psychology of resentment. And it fails, second, to maintain the enhancement of humanity through higher types by reproducing, through that slavish psychology, the conditions for a slave revolt and the victory of slave morality. However, my critical reconstruction of Nietzsche’s political philosophy has not been entirely negative or critical in form. In part three, I argued that a noble, Nietzschean form of democracy that is not reducible to rule by the herd is possible on Nietzsche’s own grounds—namely, his identification of the noble origins of peoples as true collective agencies, as communities of shared conditions of wellbeing and tablets of value. However, the possibility of a noble form of democracy does not demonstrate that such a social order would be any more successful than Nietzsche’s own proposed radical aristocracy at enhancing humanity through the breeding of healthier human types. It is, after all, possible that there simply is no form of politics that can successfully achieve that goal. My reconstructed democratic alternative might be noble in character, might produce a real people, and yet it might still fail to continually or substantially enhance human types. It would create an affirmative, healthy type, since by hypothesis a successful Nietzschean democracy produces a community of individuals whose internal organization of the drives and system of values reflect the values of their social order. However, it might be a minimal health, sufficient only to produce subjects who are content with their lot and their social order, yet not strongly affirming that order, much less achieving the love of fate that is Nietzsche’s ultimate measure. Put bluntly, it remains possible that Nietzsche’s political philosophy is doomed to failure even in reconstructed form—that the best it can do is to replace the endless dialectic of noble and slavish types with a permanent social order of the last man, characterized by a mediocre happiness defined negatively as the absence of excessive suffering or social conflict. I will now make a positive case for the possibility of a Nietzschean form of democracy that not only meets his demand for legitimacy through the production of a true people but also meets his demand for justice defined as the continued breeding and further enhancement of higher types. Against Nietzsche’s view that only an aristocratic society can enhance humanity, I will argue not only that democracy can promote higher types but that only a radically egalitarian democracy provides the material conditions necessary to best promote and sustain them.

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I will begin by examining Nietzsche’s account in Beyond Good and Evil of the optimal material social and political conditions for breeding, arguing that those conditions are a social analogue of the organization of the manifold soul. Consequently, like the organization of the manifold soul, the conditions of political breeding are optimized by pluralism and power-­ equality rather than simplicity and hierarchy. I will then examine Nietzsche’s arguments against egalitarianism in order to show they rely on a confusion between qualitative and quantitative kinds of equality. Once we have overcome his confusion on this point, we will see that his theory of the will to power as the qualitative feeling of power entails that conditions of political, social, and economic equality are more conducive to the maximization of the will to power and the enhancement of individual health than conditions of inequality. Finally, I will argue that a Nietzschean democracy that can successfully enhance human types can do so only through a kind of equality that is so extensive and radical—an egalitarianism as multidimensional as the soul and society it must produce—that it can only be achieved and protected through a socialist form of politics that, in keeping with our theory of immoralist democracy, enables the democratization of economic and cultural power, not just procedural political power. I conclude that Nietzsche’s politics, reconstructed and made effective, can only take a form exactly opposite to the one he desired: egalitarian socialism rather than radical aristocracy. In the previous chapter, I described Nietzschean, immoralist democracy as an experimental gay science in which, within the limits of the best current science of social happiness—defined as the material conditions of shared social wellbeing—a society conducts tentative, hypothetical experiments in policy, with the aim of producing a united people and popular will. This is, of course, another way of saying that an immoralist democracy would be a form of what Nietzsche has called breeding: the intentional political production of particular human types through changes to their material conditions. As he describes it, “new philosophers” will “prepare for the great risk and wholesale attempt at breeding and cultivation and so…put an end to the gruesome rule of chance and nonsense that has passed for ‘history’ so far” (BGE 203). As in Nietzsche’s own proposed political project, this experimental science of the political production of human types focuses its energies and targets its legislation at the transformation of the material social-political conditions that shape and organize human subjectivity, “the conditions

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that one would have to partly create and partly to exploit for their genesis.” It is this form of political activity, in contrast to the activities of exhortation, persuasion, and debate that characterize liberal procedural democratic politics, the direct transformation of the material conditions that produce the present character and values of humanity, that enables the “favorable accumulation and increase of forces” required to produce future human types that overcome the decadence of present individuals. Unlike Nietzsche’s politics, however, our reconstructed concepts of Nietzschean state legitimacy, rights, justice, and democracy, add a primary constraint on this conception of politics as an experimental science in the production of peoples. For it is an experiment in which present individuals are both the object and subject, a science that must produce future types only within the will and interest of present ones. For the real potential for higher types exists concretely in the drives of existing individuals. It is only insofar as promoting future individuals coincides with the increased satisfaction of present individuals’ drives that Nietzsche can persuade us to promote it, rather than resorting to forms of domination that regenerate slave morality. For that reason, the fundamental difference between Nietzsche’s aristocratic project of breeding and our reconstructed democratic project of breeding is that its non-liberal, imposed, and hypothetical experiments in the production of a true people are entirely refutable. They only become legitimate to the degree that they do in fact increase the unity and happiness of the entire population. To whatever degree they fail to do so, they have been experimentally falsified, proven illegitimate. This criterion does not, by the way, imply a deep distinction between the real, objective interest of the people and a perceived subjective one. As we have seen, even subjective, ideological beliefs about self-interest are rooted in a material reality: the real dominance of some drives over others. Moreover, the criterion of higher types is amor fati, the mere feeling of power and freedom rather than a substantial form of freedom or agency. That feeling alone—in contrast to claims about “real” rights, freedom, or interests—is the final goal and criterion of successful democratic policy, even if that feeling is determined by objective material conditions that can be identified with greater certainty through experimental scientific methods. It is a political science rather than a political art, but it is a political “aesthetics” in the sense of a science of the production of feeling. A policy that increases the unity and degree of popular happiness becomes democratic. A policy that creates unhappiness refutes democracy. Every claim of

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illegitimacy is, almost a priori, its proof. The degree of a state’s illegitimacy just is the degree of its lack of social happiness, the degree to which there are any motives to challenge legitimacy. This is yet another way in which the non-liberalism of an immoralist democracy is more concretely liberal than liberalism. It is common in liberal democracies to blame the public for being unhappy for the wrong reasons, to argue, for example, that popular disapproval of policy is an error or that claims of economic anxiety or discontent with government are uninformed or unreasonable. But if the ultimate criterion of democracy is the very existence of a people, of a community of shared values and conditions of happiness, then whether a substantial segment of the population is unhappy for justifiable reasons is irrelevant or misguided: if there is a deep enough divide in their values and material conditions of wellbeing to make a substantial segment of the population unhappy—including an unhappiness that seduces them to conspiracies, lies, or illusions—then, regardless of the rationality of their explicit reasons, there simply is no democracy. Wherever you encounter the “irrational” unhappiness of the “masses” you will find the people’s opiates, and beneath such opiates you will always find not a people but a divided one—the failure of democracy. Granting that a Nietzschean democracy is a more carefully controlled experiment than Nietzsche’s and that it is, in the end, the perceived feeling of happiness, unity, and popular will that is the criterion of that control— that democratic politics is an experiment in breeding by a people upon themselves—we may still ask what specific material conditions are necessary to produce human enhancement. After all, Nietzsche believes those material conditions are so at odds with the egalitarian character of the democratic movement that a democratic society simply cannot enhance humanity. What specific material social-political conditions does he believe make enhancement possible? Consider what Nietzsche takes to be the characteristics of the present that stand in the way of breeding higher types. He believes our current condition is one of decadence: individuals suffer from a will-weakening, self-contradictory organization of the drives. But what specific conditions have made us this way? Nietzsche’s answer is that we are the product of “hybrid” societies, of disparate cultures, values, and conditions of wellbeing: The different standards and values, as it were, get passed down through the bloodline to the next generation where everything is in a state of ­restlessness,

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disorder, doubt, experimentation. The best forces have inhibitory effects, the virtues themselves do not let each other strengthen and grow, both body and soul lack a center of balance, a center of gravity and the assurance of a pendulum. But what is most profoundly sick and degenerate about such hybrids is the will: they no longer have any sense of independence in decision-making, or the bold feeling of pleasure in willing. (BGE 208)

Remember, our focus is no longer on criteria of decadence, but on the material conditions that produce it. The project of breeding is about the transformation of those conditions as the effective cause of values, beliefs, and forms of subjectivity. So, in this passage, what is important is not that our present condition is the product of “diverse standards and values,” but what concrete circumstances produced this contradictory state. For Nietzsche, the primary cause is the modern breakdown, heightened by democratic values, of cultural and class divisions: That enchanting and crazy half-barbarism into which Europe has been plunged through the democratic mixing of classes and races…. Thanks to this mixture, the past of every form and way of life, of cultures that used to lie side by side or on top of each other, radiates into us, we “modern souls.” At this point, our instincts are running back everywhere and we ourselves are a type of chaos. (BGE 224)

This analysis is not so far from Marx and Engels’s analysis of the modern soul and its material causes. In both accounts, the defining feature is the destruction of cultural and societal hierarchical orders and the well-­ defined identities and values they reinforce. But while Nietzsche emphasizes the role played by democratic movements, Marx and Engels emphasize the role of capitalism, of the bourgeoisie that “wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’” (1848, 487). This might seem, at first glance, to indicate a deep disagreement about the primary material cause of the decline of hierarchical values. But recall that for Nietzsche the principal factor is not one of value—such as the democratic belief in human equality—but the social and political developments that produce value: the mixture of classes, nations, and cultures.

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And so the primary material cause is the same as for Marx: the global expansion of markets, a mixture of material conditions of wealth and happiness that leads to an intermixture of values and identities. In Marx and Engels’s explanation, “the need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” So, focusing on the material conditions that produce decadence rather than on their ideological and moral effects, we see that the primary obstacle to enhancement is the existence of diverse and incompatible material conditions of life produced by an increasingly global market. An increasingly shared condition of all humanity, our economic participation in a single market, brings together widely divergent ways of life and values, producing new generations of individuals whose dominant drives and drive organization are produced by contradictory sources. If the problem of decadence, the hybrid soul, is based in the material condition of the intermixture of cultures, we might expect that the solution is to restore the division of cultures and value systems in order to overcome this hybridity. Nietzsche does, at times, seem to suggest something of the sort. Consider his suggestion that “a kind (Art) originates, a type grows fixed and strong, in the long struggle with essentially constant unfavorable conditions” (BGE 262). Drawing on the historical example of “an aristocratic community (such as Venice or an ancient Greek polis) as an organization that has been established, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, for the sake of breeding,” he claims that such social orders produce types through narrow, rigid, and homogenous conditions of life: “the species needs itself to be a species, to be something that, by virtue of its very hardness, uniformity, and simplicity of form, can succeed and make itself persevere in constant struggle with its neighbors or with the oppressed who are or threaten to become rebellious.” So it is aristocratic class division that best promotes the breeding of particular human types, since class members derive the strength and unity of their identities from their strict division from and opposition to another class. And on an international level, it is national and cultural divisions that promote breeding, since members of nations and cultures derive the strength and unity of their identities from their separation from, and political struggles with, other nations and cultures. This might suggest that the solution to decadence is to reverse the modern development of a global, multicultural economy. Perhaps a politics of breeding would have to

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restore the isolation, the “hardness, uniformity, and simplicity” provided by the existence of well-defined, distinct, and even antagonistic cultures and classes. But that is not, in fact, Nietzsche’s conclusion. He believes democratization is irreversible. If a new aristocratic politics is to be possible, it is through the completion of that process rather than its reversal. We have already considered his view that the overall weakening of the will produced by democratization is useful to aristocratic politics, since he mistakenly thinks it prepares a population bred for willing servitude. But he also claims the hybrid character of the modern soul is distinctly advantageous to his political ends: An immense physiological process is taking place and constantly gaining ground—the process of increasing similarity between Europeans, their growing detachment from the conditions under which climate- or class-­ bound races originate, their increasing independence from that determinate milieu where for centuries the same demands would be inscribed on the soul and the body—and so the slow approach of an essentially supra-national and nomadic type of person who, physiologically speaking, is typified by a maximal degree of the art and force of adaptation. (BGE 242)

Here we must distinguish two aspects of Nietzsche’s analysis. On the one hand, he is identifying conditions useful to his specifically aristocratic project. Because the present European type has been bred to be independent of specific cultural values and conditions of life, it is useful to his hope to create an aristocratic empire through the unification of Europe. Europe will “acquire one will by means of a new caste that would rule Europe, a long, terrible will of its own that would be able to cast its goals millennia hence”—a program that he calls “large-scale” or “great politics,” in contrast to “petty politics” (BGE 208).1 This aspect of his analysis is one we can leave aside, since it presupposes his failed program of aristocratic radicalism. On the other hand, however, Nietzsche is identifying a similarity between the present 1  See Drochon (2016) on this aspect of Nietzsche’s program for “great politics.” However, to understand the philosophical aspect of that program, we must focus on its theoretical basis. Given its foundation in his failed aristocratic theory of legitimacy, his “great politics” is just his petty prejudices writ large—of greater historical and biographical than philosophical interest.

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decadent individual and his own ideal of the healthy manifold soul—a similarity that supports alternative, non-aristocratic material conditions for human enhancement. The hybrid soul may be ideally conditioned for transformation into the manifold soul, and it may give us a rough image of the material and social conditions that would make such a transformation possible.2 According to Nietzsche, in contrast to the unfavorable conditions that breed strong, fixed, well-defined types, more favorable conditions of “superabundant nourishment” and “extra protection and care” will produce “variations of the type” that “become rich in marvels and monstrosities” (BGE 262). The consequence of such favorable conditions of superabundant nourishment is a social condition that Nietzsche compares to a tropical climate, a greenhouse, or “hothouse for rare and exceptional plants” (WP 898): Variation, whether as deviation (into something higher, finer, rarer) or as degeneration and monstrosity, suddenly comes onto the scene in the greatest abundance and splendor; the individual dares to be individual and different. At these turning points of history, a magnificent, diverse, jungle-like growth and upward striving, a kind of tropical tempo in the competition to grow will appear alongside (and often mixed up and tangled together with) an immense destruction and self-destruction. This is due to the wild egoisms that are turned explosively against each other, that wrestle each other “for sun and light,” and can no longer derive any limitation, restraint, or refuge from morality as it has existed so far. (BGE 262)

It is also in this hothouse atmosphere of “boon” and “excess” that the grip of old moralities over communities declines and individuals begin to appear, allowing the conventional moral agent to transform into the sovereign individual: “the ‘individual’ appears, obliged to give himself laws

 Since Nietzsche connects this mixture of value and culture with race, Jacqueline Scott makes a compelling case for seeing Nietzsche as a forerunner of contemporary philosophy of race: “Nietzsche could be understood as a first essay in responding to the call of those (e.g., Zack, Alcoff, and Goldberg) who want to emphasize the concept of mixed race as a way of subverting the still accepted ‘purity’-based conception of race” (2006, 160). On the politics of mixed-identity, see also Lugones (2003). For a critique of the racist origins of “multiracial” language, see Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields (2012). 2

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and develop his own arts and wiles for self-preservation, self-enhancement, self-redemption.”3 But this is, once again, precisely the condition of hybrid humanity that Nietzsche seemed to lament in his nostalgia for the “hardness, uniformity, and simplicity” of aristocratic “arrangements for breeding” such as the ancient Greek polis and Renaissance Venice. Moreover, this celebration of the capacity of tropical or hothouse conditions to promote a jungle-like growth of variation and individuality seems deeply incompatible with his insistence in the same book that “what is essential ‘in heaven and on earth’ seems to be, to say it once more, that there should be obedience over a long period of time and in a single direction,” in keeping with our “need,” “implanted” by nature, “for limited horizons and the closest tasks. It teaches a narrowing of our perspective and so, in a certain sense, stupidity as a condition for life and growth” (BGE 188). Nietzsche is here distinguishing two stages of his political project, each depending on distinct, almost opposed, material social conditions. On the one hand, the modern decline of cultural and political hierarchies under the shared life conditions of an increasingly global market economy produces “the leveling and mediocritization of man,” a development that creates a “useful, industrious, handy, multi-purpose” underclass “of herd animals,” ideally suited to obey a future aristocratic caste. On the other hand, “the same new conditions…are to the highest degree suitable for giving rise to exceptional people who possess the most dangerous and attractive qualities” (BGE 242). Consequently, the initial 3  This clarifies Nietzsche’s emphasis upon the earth as the foundation of enhancement: (1) the earth as soil in the horticultural sense, the material foundation of economy and culture, and (2) the earth as global, the expanded economic and multicultural conditions of enhancement. This reveals an aspect of Nietzsche’s physiological language that avoids Lamarckism: we inherit traits through our inheritance of a culturally transformed earth, “all the things about life that deserve to be taken very seriously—questions of nutrition, residence, spiritual diet, treatment of the sick, cleanliness, weather!” (EH IV.8). For objections to Lamarckian readings, see Clark (2013). On breeding as horticultural metaphor, see NI 7.2. On Nietzsche’s political concept of earth, see Shapiro (2016) and Gooding-Williams: “The Rousseauean revolutionary modernist…is not radical enough: taking her nourishment from the surface of the earth, she does not, like the overman Zarathustra imagines, speak ‘out of the heart of the earth’” (2001, 193).

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stage of his aristocratic politics is one that takes advantage of the conditions of the present to experimentally produce “marvels and monstrosities” until we discover one worthy of making into an ideal of humanity.4 That type, in turn, is supposed to bring an end both to the experiment of breeding and the hybrid, tropical conditions that enabled it.5 Once the higher type has been identified, then Nietzsche’s higher philosophers can begin to erect the moral, cultural, and political institutions that will, through a rigidly hierarchical and aristocratic order, impose the conditions for recreating and multiplying that type.6 Since we have long since abandoned Nietzsche’s poorly defended, self-­ contradictory, and self-undermining fantasy of an aristocratic politics, we

4  We should, consequently, take Nietzsche’s language of “experimentation” (versuchen, “attempt” or “tempt”) literally: an experiment that attempts to politically produce and tempt us toward higher types, rather than an epistemological virtue of curiosity (Reginster 2013) or a voluntarist strategy for overcoming conventional morality (Rebecca Bamford 2019). 5  Drochon (2016, 60–64) argues that Nietzsche’s identification in Twilight of the Idols of democracy with the state’s decline demonstrates he preserves in later writings his earlier view of the state, including Human, All Too Human’s suggestion that “private companies” will “step by step absorb the business of the state” (HH 472). He describes “a European-wide decentralized and regulatory state, within which different institutions will be allowed freer rein to pursue their respective activities, some—the private companies, probably the vast majority—for private gain within a broader economic and material framework, while others—the new institutions, a select few—their cultural goals” (Drochon, 68). However, nowhere outside of Human, All Too Human does he suggest that private institutions should replace the state or play a central role in his political project. On the contrary, in the later work, the decline of the state is a temporary stage on the way to its revival as an instrument of breeding. 6  This resembles Amy Mullin‘s distinction between Nietzsche’s concept of free spirits and philosophers of the future: “Whatever philosophers of the future are, they are not decadent, while even mature free spirits may well be, particularly since cleverness and an eye for nuance are associated with decadence…. The philosophers of the future integrate the many perspectives illuminated by the free spirit. Wanting to see differently, as the free spirits do, is preparatory to the task of the philosopher of the future, who employs a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge” (2000, 401).

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can completely disregard this two-stage picture of a Nietzschean politics.7 If there is to be any successful and lasting enhancement of humanity, it must be achieved on the level of humanity in general rather than a particular class and must produce a unified people with a truly unified will that affirms their social order. Because the production of democracy requires the production of a people whose affirmation can legitimize the state, the experimental gay science that underlies Nietzsche’s materialist politics must remain experimental, always vulnerable in its experiments to verification or refutation by the population’s actual consequential feeling of power and happiness. So, how can we synthesize Nietzsche’s aristocratic stages and conditions of enhancement in a way compatible with a continual democratic experiment in human enhancement? By recognizing that the conditions of Nietzsche’s variation- and individuality-promoting tropical hothouse mirror those of the manifold soul. Consequently, those social conditions can combine variation and unity, richness and strength, just as the manifold soul does. There is simply no conceivable reason why, if Nietzsche allows for the synthesis of the plurality of the drives and their unity in a strong, affirmative will at the level of the individual, he should deny such a possibility on the level of society. Consider the contrast he draws between his ideal type and the present-­ day, decadent form of the hybrid soul. In our “age of disintegration where the races are mixed together, a person will have the legacy of multiple lineages in his body, which means conflicting (and often not merely conflicting) drives and value standards fight with each other” (BGE 200). The 7  Notice that even Nietzsche’s aristocratic two-stage model does not fit the conventional view that his politics is essentially violent, repressive, or destructive. Democracy provides the ideal conditions for a proliferation of precarious types that appear and disappear in the unstable material, social, and cultural conditions of cultural hybridity, allowing us to experimentally discover those most conducive to amor fati, then create material and political conditions that will protect, preserve, and reproduce those types—not destroying other types, but no longer reproducing their conditions. Even at its most provocative, Nietzsche’s violent rhetoric preserves this distinction. For example, when he complains that Christianity preserves what “ought to perish” (BGE 62), his alternative is to allow them to go out of production, to no longer intentionally breed or, more precisely, to no longer produce negatively defined types by intentionally harming or weakening positive abilities and traits. Nietzschean breeding follows the model of natural selection: to select is not to destroy the unselected but to protect the selected from extinction. On this distinction between the affirmative, protective, and empowering nature of breeding in contrast to the negative, weakening, and destructive nature of taming, see Miyasaki (2014).

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result is “a weaker person: his most basic desire is for an end to the war that he is.” In contrast, for the higher human type, “the opposition and war in such a nature have the effect of one more charm and incentive to life.” But why this difference? As we have seen, the crucial difference is that the healthy type is characterized by a non-contradictory diversity of drives, while the decadent type is characterized by an anarchy of mutually antagonistic drives. This matters because, as long as the soul’s diversity is non-­contradictory, the tension among the drives does not lead to their mutual frustration or the tyrannizing of weaker drives by stronger ones. In the manifold soul, all drives may still find satisfaction, every drive can still be a regular source of effective activity and the feeling of the will to power. As Nietzsche puts it, the healthy type possesses, “in addition” to diverse, contesting drives, “a real subtlety and mastery in waging war against oneself,” because “self-­ control, self-outwitting has been inherited or bred, too.” But what enables this difference? What has been inherited in the case of the lucky hit or should be bred in the case of a Nietzschean politics? The answer can only be that the two forms of soul differ only in the strength of their drives. For what does it mean to say that two drives are or are not contradictory? Leaving aside, of course, the possibility of anti-natural drives produced by the social implantation of anti-natural moral values, this can only be a quantitative difference in power, not a qualitative difference in the form of the drive. Insofar as I pursue the aim and activity of any single drive, I cannot pursue another. In that broad sense, all drives are contradictory. But insofar as any of my drives are proportional in power, one cannot decisively incapacitate or frustrate the other, but only temporarily do so, gaining the upper hand according to circumstance. For example, my hunger can, in the face of the dessert tray, momentarily overtake my will to diet. On the other hand, through a temporary strategic alliance, my desire not to overspend at an extravagantly priced restaurant might bolster my will to diet, even directly in the face of the dessert tray! If my drives for health and culinary pleasure are roughly proportional, varying circumstances will allow one or the other to find satisfaction, with neither completely tyrannizing the soul nor completely suppressing the other. So, the difference between decadent hybridity and manifold health is simply the relative power of each of my drives. How then is a soul made manifold rather than hybrid? Simply through the promotion of proportionate power among the drives. The hybrid type is made healthy by any material and social conditions that increase the capacity and independence

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of its weaker drives, bringing them into a relationship of greater proportionality to its stronger drives, preserving their order of rank while preventing either the complete frustration of weaker by stronger or mutual frustration in the case of their mutual weakness. In other words, the material conditions of the decadent, hybrid soul are also the material conditions of the healthy manifold soul: “these types belong together and derive from the same set of causes” (BGE 200). Notice that in the last statement, Nietzsche’s position is inconsistent. Earlier we saw that he attributed strength of type to unfavorable conditions of uniformity. If that were true, the manifold soul could not be brought about by the favorable, superabundant conditions that produce variation and hybridity. But it is not an innocent slip. For he repeats the claim later, telling us that “the very same” conditions that lead to the “leveling and mediocritization of man” also ensure that “the strong person will need…to get stronger and richer than he has perhaps ever been before” (BGE 242). Notice that here—unlike in his simplistic contrast of the aristocratic breeding of strong types to the variation of types—Nietzsche carefully preserves his distinction between simple animal health and the distinctly human ideal of the manifold soul. The conditions of decadence do not simply also produce strong types, but specifically rich forms of strength, “thanks,” he adds, “to the absence of prejudice from his training, thanks to the tremendous manifoldness of art, practice, and mask.” Thanks to hybrid types’ manifold origins in an intermixture of classes and cultures, they are free from the prejudice of an overly narrow or singular set of life conditions, customs, activities, and forms of identity—of art, practice, and mask. This internal diversity allows—in “single, exceptional cases”—for the lucky hit, for individuals who possess these diverse drives in proportionately equal power, a horizontal extension of power that allows them not only to enjoy all of their drives in their rich diversity, but enjoy even their tension and mutual resistance to one another as “one more charm and incentive to life” (BGE 200). Now, if the only difference between manifold and hybrid souls is the relative strength of their diverse drives, and if there is no difference between the material and social conditions that produce them, then why should we accept Nietzsche’s belief that only an aristocratic society can enhance human beings? Specifically, why accept his assumption that enhancement, the breeding of manifold souls from the material condition

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of hybrid souls, can only be accomplished for an elite few, rather than democratically, across a population at large? From his own explanation of their differences, we can already begin to see how one might be transformed into another through democratic rather than aristocratic social and political conditions. Any political order that universally increases the horizontal power of the drives, that enables all individuals both opportunity and means to develop and strengthen any and all of their innate capacities, would increase the proportionality of the powers of their drives in relation to each other, thus reducing both the anarchic contradiction of drives that characterizes the weak, hybrid soul and the tyrannical simplicity of drives that characterizes souls that are strong but lack manifoldness. Indeed, the very existence of lucky hits, of individuals who combine a strong, well-ordered, hierarchical soul with diverse drives in relations of proportional tension, presupposes the possibility that strength and richness are not incompatible but complementary. So why should not that complementary relationship be possible on the social level, as well? Nietzsche’s answer is very simple—and, as we will see, very wrong. The manifold soul relies, at the end of the day, on a relative if not exact equality of power among the drives. Each drive must be strong enough to frequently resist the others, to maintain relative independence from the others, enabling its regular satisfaction as a source of the feeling of the will to power. This rough proportionate equality of drives is compatible with a minimal degree of hierarchical organization: on balance, one drive or set of drives might, in moments of internal conflict or indecision, usually overpower the others, while still allowing that in appropriate circumstances, any drive has the potential to command the will, and to do so regularly enough to avoid the feeling of powerlessness.8 The same will apply on the social level. A manifold, pluralistic, immoralist democracy will require that every individual be proportionately equal in power to every other, even at the same time that the non-liberal structure of immoralist democracy necessitates a minimal degree of hierarchical organization that 8  Compare Siemens: “Nietzsche’s commitment to life-affirmation or enhancement implies a politics of equality not in the sense of universal equal rights that protect us from conflict and incursion, but a politics of enmity among more-or-less equal powers that allows individuals to be productive multiplicities while maintaining their unity as individuals…. The question is what kinds of political institutions and settlements would make for such an equality of power among the diverse and shifting drives that characterize contemporary democracies” (2013, 99–100).

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can impose the conditions of that proportionate equality on the political body.9 And that is what Nietzsche denies: that the relative equality of drives that enriches the manifold soul can, in the form of the equality of individuals, enrich the social order. Only on the level of the drives does Nietzsche think equality is compatible with strength and richness. On the level of society, equality is, he thinks, fundamentally at odds with human enhancement. We will now turn to his arguments for that view.

2  Nietzsche’s Failed Case Against Equality: Pathos from Distance Versus Pathos for Difference Against Qualitative Equality: Ähnlichkeit or Vielheit, Similarity or Multiplicity? Nietzsche’s rejection of egalitarianism is grounded in the belief that it is harmful to the promotion of the highest individuals, that it benefits the majority at the expense of the most valuable. He presents two arguments in favor of this view: first, that equality is directly harmful in aim to the promotion of higher human beings and, second, that it is indirectly harmful in consequence rather than aim.10 The former criticism presupposes a narrow definition of egalitarianism as the direct expression of what Nietzsche calls slave morality: a morality that originates in the resentment 9  Notice that this is egalitarianism in a narrow, above all, materialist sense: equal conditions of social power, the equal ability to resist domination. It is also broadly compatible with Marx’s socialism, even though he is not conventionally egalitarian. For example, communism’s credo “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (1891) is incompatible with strict equality of rights, opportunities, resources, or outcomes. However, the rejection of domination by groups is the primary form of inequality at issue, as seen in Nietzsche’s focus on class-based political orders in the Genealogy. As a materialist egalitarianism of power against group domination, a Nietzschean approach to equality undermines the inequality/domination distinction used by stratification theories of class to critique Marxist class conflict theories. On this distinction, see Lillian Cicerchia (2021). Recognizing that domination is inseparable from inequality also helps us recognize, as Vanessa Wills (2018) has shown, that Marxism is best suited to a non-reductionist analysis of the relationship between class domination and race and gender inequality. 10  This distinction of morality as directly harmful in aim and indirectly in consequence is somewhat comparable to Leiter’s distinction of the critique of morality as theory and as cultural practice, since morality’s aims are explicitly, theoretically articulable demands made upon subjects, while the consequences of a culture’s adoption and practice of a morality may not be contained in explicit doctrines or conscious aims (1997, 280–285).

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of privilege, expressed in vengeful values that seek to reduce the power and happiness of the most fortunate. I will call this the slavish form of egalitarianism, to be distinguished from the possibility of a noble form of egalitarianism, one compatible with the spiritually aristocratic value of promoting humanity’s highest individuals. Slavish egalitarianism is assimilationist; it seeks to establish qualitative equality, understood as similarity. Noble egalitarianism, in contrast, is pluralist; it supports only quantitative equality—proportional resistance as the foundation of qualitative multiplicity—thus it is anti-egalitarianism in the slavish sense.11 The distinction of noble and slavish egalitarianisms is not my own invention. Nietzsche draws it explicitly in middle period works like Human, All Too Human: The thirst for equality can express itself either as a desire to draw everyone down to oneself (through diminishing them, spying on them, ripping them up) or to raise oneself and everyone else up (through recognizing their virtues, helping them, rejoicing in their success). (HH 300)

It also appears in The Wanderer and His Shadow, where he condemns Hesiod’s “bad Eris,” in which an envied individual “exceeds the common measure” and so one “desires to push him down to it,” but contrasts this with the “good Eris” of “nobler natures,” in which an individual seeks “to raise himself up to the height of the other” (WS 29). Although explicit references to a beneficial egalitarianism disappear in Nietzsche’s later work, he still implicitly acknowledges its possibility. For example, in Beyond Good and Evil, when he worries that “‘equality of rights’ could all too easily end up as equal wrongs,” he implies the possibility of an equality that is not so changed, and so does not violate rights (BGE 212, italics mine). 11  Consequently, only slavish egalitarianism is vulnerable to the “leveling down objection” (Larry Temkin 1993). This is also why we ought, when considering the possibility of a Nietzschean left politics, to underscore how much the socialism Nietzsche attacks resembles the utopian socialism rejected by Marx and Engels (1848) and Engels (1878, 1880). Jonas Cˇeika argues persuasively that Nietzsche mistakes socialism for the “ascetic ideal,” which Marx opposed just as adamantly (2021, chapter II). It is also worth remembering that despite knowledge of socialism and modest second-hand awareness of Marx, Nietzsche “did not even know the word ‘Marxism’ or ‘historical materialism’” (Thomas Brobjer 2002, 299). For, as Mazzino Montinari points out, “The socialism of which Marx speaks, existed at the time—as theory—solely in London” (1982, 301–203).

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But when Nietzsche attacks the ideal of equality as directly harmful to human flourishing, he ignores the distinction. He objects to equality as a form of assimilation, “a certain actual rendering similar (Anähnlichung) of which the theory of ‘equal (gleichen) rights’ is only an expression,” targeting only the narrow, slavish sense of egalitarianism. In such arguments, he is committed to rejecting only attempts to make “equal” in the narrow sense of making the same or making qualitatively identical—to impose a qualitative similarity of type, value, and life, and not quantitative similarity of ability, power, or right (TI IX.37).12 But of course, not only is it patently false to equate equality with sameness, as we’ll see, equality is a condition for the protection of difference from sameness. This critique of anti-egalitarianism is based, in other words, in his commitment to pluralism of human values and types.13 Equality defined as identity or similarity—a connotation more pronounced in the German Gleichheit (literally “sameness” or “likeness”)—is harmful to “the pathos of distance” understood in an equally narrow sense: as a feeling for qualitative difference, for “the multiplicity (Vielheit) of types, the will to be oneself, to stand out.” While Nietzsche does suggest that the demand for political equality (which ignores “the chasm between man and man, class and class”) is symptomatic of a general cultural desire for uniformity, it is the latter narrow tendency against multiplicity (Vielheit) and diversity (Vielfältigkeit) that is the direct source of harm to higher human beings. Nietzsche’s demand for qualitative inequality of worth—differing mutual evaluations  Interpretations that accept Nietzsche’s self-assessment as necessarily anti-egalitarian give insufficient attention to this distinction of qualitative and quantitative equality. See, for example, Leiter (1997), Hatab (1995), and Bruce Detwiler (1990), although Siemens (2009) and Zimmermann (2014) are a helpful corrective. Hatab claims that Nietzsche’s primary target is egalitarianism, but as “the weak majority grabbing power to incapacitate the strong few,” a very narrow sense opposed to the noble form Nietzsche acknowledges is possible (1995, 28). Hatab rightly insists that Nietzsche’s view is incompatible with belief in the equal value of persons (22–24 and 57–61). However, egalitarianism need not include such claims. Indeed, an immoralist egalitarianism would make no claims about the substantive value of persons at all. 13  See, for example, TI V.6. 12

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of persons, values, and types—is not, then, directly a demand for quantitative inequality of political right, economic or class status, ability, or talent.14 Against Quantitative Equality: Pathos of Distance as Superiority or Difference? But why call it a mere game, when we consider that in every condition of humanity it is precisely play, and play alone, that makes man complete? —Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Fifteenth Letter But the category of men who formulate claims, and everything else, the men who have the monopoly of language, is a category of privileged people. They are not the ones to say that privilege is unworthy to be desired. They don’t think so and, in any case, it would be indecent for them to say it. —Simone Weil, “Human Personality” Retention of strangeness is the only antidote to estrangement. —Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

Of course, Nietzsche’s case against equality does not depend only on the claim of direct harm. He also believes that equality indirectly harms the promotion of higher types, a claim that may apply to all forms of egalitarianism. His criticism focuses on three causally interrelated conditions for the promotion of higher types: material and political inequality, the cultural dominance of aristocratic values, and a narrower sense of the “pathos of distance” as belief in, and a feeling for, superiority (an equivocal, quantitative sense of “pathos of distance” grounded in Nietzsche’s equivocal use of “power”). He claims that “every enhancement so far in the type ‘man’ has been the work of an aristocratic society—and that is how it will be, again and again” (BGE 257). However, this apparent claim of a direct causal link between political inequality and human enhancement is quickly qualified. 14  Clark and Hatab both argue that Nietzsche’s rejection of the equal value of persons does not require rejecting political equality, since democratic institutions “need not depend on the belief that persons are of equal worth” (Clark 2015, 178). Both, however, agree that the proper target of his criticism is equality rather than liberal-democratic institutions—redeeming liberal democracy for Nietzsche at the expense of equality (Clark, 182, and Hatab, 57). But we have seen a Nietzschean liberalism is impossible, and certainly not worth the cost of equality.

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An aristocratic society, he says, is one that “believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and differences in value between man and man, and that needs slavery in some sense or other.” So, the direct cause of human improvement is not political inequality, but aristocratic beliefs and values. Indeed, he goes out of his way to qualify the language of slavery, the context clearly indicating psychological rather than political subordination and obedience.15 As the passage continues, this shift from material to psychological and evaluative conditions is repeatedly underlined: Without this pathos, that other, more mysterious pathos could not have grown at all, that demand for new expansions of distance within the soul itself, the development of states that are increasingly high, rare, distant, tautly drawn and comprehensive, and in short, the enhancement of the type “man,” the constant “self-overcoming of man. (BGE 257)

So, material inequality is a necessary precondition for a culture of aristocratic values, which is in turn necessary for the production of the pathos of distance in two forms: first, as a feeling of social superiority and, second, as a feeling of self-superiority—the basis of any incentive toward self-­ overcoming or self-improvement. In other words, the primary foundation of Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarianism is the belief that a pathos of quantitative distance in social power and status is necessary to a pathos of qualitative difference in value. So, he is insisting on a necessary positive relation between a pathos from distance and a pathos for difference. Notice that the former is primarily a reactive, after the fact judgment, a comparative measure rather than a feeling, and implies a negative attitude toward the object of distance, while the latter suggests a positive attitude toward the object. The  pathos from  distance is needy; its superiority depends on and desires greater distance. Whereas a pathos for difference is contented; its pleasure in its own difference enables pleasure in the contrasting shade provided by the proximity of another’s difference.

15  Clark emphasizes this point as part of her argument that although social hierarchy was a historically necessary condition for the development of a spiritual pathos of distance, it is no longer so (2015, 176). Owen makes a similar claim, arguing that in the slave’s inward redirection of ressentiment, the “pathos of inner distance” or the “reflexive ethical relationship of the self to itself,” becomes independent of the “pathos of social distance” or recognition of social rank. This, in turn, creates “the possibility of a form of noble morality in which the consciousness of power is similarly not predicated on relations of social hierarchy” (2002, 124).

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This should immediately arouse our suspicions: the last place we might expect to find a pathos for difference, a true “the will to stand out,” is among those of high social power and status, so it’s far from plausible that differences in social status are a psychological support for—rather than disincentive to—the will to stand out. Indeed, it’s almost laughable on its face to suggest that a preoccupation with either material superiority or social recognition would encourage authentic or sincere concern for higher values, much less for values that “stand out” rather than embody and reinforce the values of the social systems that grant such rewards or recognition. Imagine, as an experiment, what Nietzsche’s own philosophy might have looked like had it been highly successful, socially recognized and rewarded in his own lifetime! Indeed, if Nietzsche’s own pathos of difference has a root in social inequality, it is in precisely the wrong way: he was driven by resentment of his modest origins, driven by envy against the dominant social measures of status and achievement of his day. It was precisely slave morality that promoted his own pathos of distance. The overman may have the distance, but it’s always the underdog who has the pathos. If the claim of a link between social inequality and the pathos of distance is at all plausible, it is only because Nietzsche encourages us to conflate distance with difference, to mistakenly interpret human enhancement on the model of power as quantitative superiority—a view that I have argued is incompatible with his core claims about the will to power (NI 3.3). In the passage, enhancement is defined as the self-overcoming of human beings, indicating that an individual’s value is measured according to comparative quantity of ability or achievement, as superiority to other individuals or to an individual’s own previous states, not according to ability or power simply. For the demand for continual self-overcoming and “ever higher” states indicates that no degree of excellence or ability has any intrinsic worth: only the supersession of a given quantity matters in the assessment of human value. Second, this conception of enhancement focuses on quantitative rather than qualitative power. To be sure, it culminates in a feeling of superiority, but one tied directly to quantity: a sense of the quantitative distance between one person or state and another. So, the pathos of distance is a feeling of power defined as quantitative superiority: the sentiment of possessing greater power, ability, or worth in relation to others or to previous states of the self. Notice that, as rooted in social recognition and comparison, this is a pathos of “distance” as degrees of sameness rather than difference—a will to “stand out” precisely by “joining in” a shared value system,

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a social game measured by the same scorekeeping system. Notice too that this is a perfect analogue of the slavish mode of value creation in the Genealogy: well-being is measured through the “reversal of the value-­ establishing glance…toward the outside instead of back onto oneself,” in contrast to the noble self-evaluation of the well-born who “simply felt themselves to be the ‘happy’” and did not “need first of all to construct their happiness artificially by looking at their enemies, by talking themselves into it” (GM I.10).16 Assuming this dubious conception of power and flourishing—the pathos of distance as comparative degrees of evaluative sameness, as aspiration to more of the same value—Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarianism is no mere prejudice. It is at least plausible, if not entirely convincing, that a desire to produce higher states in oneself requires recognizing spiritual superiority and inferiority in others, a recognition that, in turn, might depend upon the recognition of quantitatively measured inequalities, whether of wealth, power, status, or privileges. If so, then it might be true that aristocratic societies enhance the pathos of distance as superiority, promoting the pursuit, among the most able, of states of greater excellence. And it might, further, be possible—although, again, far from evidently true—that a society of relative equality would be characterized by individuals with a weaker pathos of distance—a weaker belief in differences in individual worth— and, consequently, with a lack of incentive toward achievement or excellence. 16  It is also no coincidence that in the same passage Nietzsche identifies the slavish mode of evaluation with anti-egalitarianism in the narrow sense of anti-pluralism: “Slave morality says ‘no’ on principle to everything that is ‘outside,’ ‘different,’ ‘non-self.’” This is our first clue, which I explore in more detail below, that Nietzsche’s opposition to qualitative equality is, in fact, compatible with quantitative egalitarianism: that the cultivation of Vielheit as proportional resistance, a form of equality, is inseparable from the condemnation of Gleichheit as assimilation, the harmful, slavish mode of egalitarianism. Nietzsche makes a similar point in Human, All Too Human 457, where he criticizes a form of egalitarianism based not in the demand for equality as human dignity, but rather as “vanity, which experiences Not-beingequal-to or Publicly-being-esteemed-lower as the harshest fate.” Here the demand for equality is, like the demand for quantitative superiority of power, not a desire for the feeling of power, but for comparative superiority of power in relation to another, a self-affirmation through comparison to and devaluation of another. See also Assorted Maxims and Opinions, where he identifies a false pathos of distance, a prosperity that is excessively “external and provocative of envy,” indicating not true “well-being” but “spurious, histrionic” pleasures “which lie more in the feeling of contrast (because others do not have then and feel envious) than in feelings of realized and heightened power” (AOM 304).

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However, if, on the contrary, we do not take for granted the quantitative conception of power as superiority, and instead hold Nietzsche consistently to the priority of qualitative, proportional power, this argument against egalitarianism fails. Qualitative power is measured as the degree of the feeling of power that accompanies successful action. Individuals can achieve and enhance this form of power without possessing superior ability, indeed, without even believing themselves to be superior in power. Consider, for example, a beginning tennis player who is only slightly inferior in ability to her opponent, yet still inferior in every respect.17 On the qualitative interpretation of the will to power I have argued for, the feeling of power comes not from the overcoming of obstacles but from being equal to proportionately equal obstacles, able to resist, to act in the face of them. So, despite moments of feeling disempowered, our inferior tennis player will feel frequent moments of power with each successful serve, each successful return, each point scored. More important, because their ability is proportionally equal, she will feel an overall feeling of power even if she loses: she will rightly feel throughout the game that she is able to win, and rightly feel at its end that she may win the next game. She feels power not in winning but in being, on the whole, equal to the game and equal to an equal at the game.18 Consequently, enhancing the qualitative feeling of power does not require a pathos of distance—at least not of “distance” understood as ever-greater superiority to oneself or others. And, consequently, neither aristocratic values nor social conditions are required for the promotion and enhancement of power. Our tennis player need not believe that her abilities have improved to feel powerful in her playing, nor does she need to believe that she is substantially more able than her competitors.19 Here we must be wary of Nietzsche’s quantitative, spatial metaphors for the pathos of distance (“widening,” “higher,” “further,” etc.), which imply that power increases in direct correlation with quantitative superiority over a previous state or another person. As we saw in Nietzsche’s  For a more detailed discussion of this example, see NI 3.3.  See my criteria of proportional equality as relations that are non-debilitating, non-dominating, and non-demoralizing (NI. 3.3). 19  This claim might, at first glance, appear to be empirically false: do not athletes seek to feel the improvement of their abilities? While this is true, it is consistent with proportionality: successful athletes require increasingly more challenging opponents and so must improve their ability to preserve proportionality with new opponents. The feeling of power, then, comes not from superiority (to opponents or to prior states), but from proportionality. 17 18

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critique of equality as assimilation, a true pathos of distance is first and foremost one of qualitative distinction rather than superiority, of difference rather than distance. The feeling of power depends not on unequal quantities of power, but rather on proportional, oppositional resistance. But disproportionately unequal abilities produce less resistance and, consequently, little feeling of power. Recall that Nietzsche directly defines the feeling of power as “the good,” while the will to power and power itself are merely means to that feeling.20 What heightens feeling, intensifying the pathos of distance, is not the expansion of inequalities, but the qualitative increase of oppositional intensity. That is, the pathos of distance is enhanced by (1) promoting the quantitative increase in human powers and abilities generally, (2) promoting proportionally equal power among agents, and (3) promoting a multiplicity of oppositional powers that can serve as resistances to one another, grounding the feeling of power as the feeling of resistance.21 Consequently, we may draw a first key conclusion about the relationship between equality and human flourishing: the promotion of equality does not necessarily harm the pathos of distance. The promotion of equality in the form of oppositional, proportional resistance preserves this pathos as awareness of qualitative difference rather than superiority of wealth, status, or privilege. Not only does egalitarianism not destroy this form of the pathos of distance, material inequality diminishes it. Increased inequality undermines the pathos of distance, because the ablest individuals will find fewer opportunities to test their abilities against resistances of proportional power.22

20  “What is good?—All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that a resistance is overcome” (A 2). See my interpretation of this crucial and much misunderstood passage in NI 3.3. 21  Compare Siemens’s suggestion that Nietzsche’s principal objection to democracy lies in its failure to cultivate pluralism: “It is that Nietzsche doubts—while expressing—democracy’s claim to be the site of genuine pluralism; and without genuine pluralism, there can be no genuine freedom for Nietzsche, no effective resistance to tyranny, be it a single genius or a singular ‘people’” (2009, 25). 22  Siemens makes a similar point: “The agon, if it is to be a nondestructive and productive conflict among more or less equals, depends not just on relations of reciprocal provocation and stimulation but also on relations of reciprocal limitation” (2009, 31).

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3  Objections and Replies to Noble Egalitarianism: Why Equality Is Enhancement Against Liberal Egalitarianism: Aristocracy as Qualitative or Quantitative Power? My interpretation of qualitative power’s relation to equality also has the virtue of more fruitfully explaining Nietzsche’s critique of liberalism. He frequently insists upon constraint, in contrast to negative liberty, as a precondition of human enhancement, a demand that some interpreters view as evidence that his position is necessarily aristocratic.23 He insists that liberal institutions “undermine the will to power, they are the leveling of mountain and valley exalted to a moral principle” and that “the highest type of free human beings” should be sought “where the highest resistance is constantly being overcome: five steps from tyranny, on the very threshold of the danger of servitude” (TI IX.38). The source of the decadence of modern humanity is a profound conflict of instincts that “contradict, disturb, destroy each other” to such a degree that “today the individual would first need to be made possible by being cut down and pruned: possible here means complete” (TI IX.41). However, if we treat such passages as objections to egalitarianism as well as to liberalism, they are no longer plausible. Nietzsche thinks that individuals are enhanced through relative constraint: through the overcoming of resistance and the continual presence of proportional resistances. An aristocratic politics, by politically institutionalizing and enforcing radical inequalities of power, does produce constraints, but only directly upon the subordinate class. Thus, if political inequality enhances human beings, it enhances the lower at the expense of the higher. It does not, as Nietzsche must really intend, create productive resistance for the highest. On the contrary, an aristocratic politics eliminates counter-powers to the ruling class. Surely, we are not to find in a political aristocracy those free beings “near the threshold of the dangers of servitude”? Aristocratic inequality cannot, on Nietzsche’s argument, enhance the power and ability of the highest, since 23  For example, Detwiler: “Nietzsche’s and Zarathustra’s goal, which is the elevation of man, is fraught with political consequences. It would appear that this goal cannot be achieved without a reversal…of the democratic tendency that characterizes the modern world in favor of aristocratic social and political arrangements” (1990, 45–46).

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it removes resistance precisely away from the higher and to the lower. Nor can it be said to enhance the ruled, as an indirect means for producing rare, higher individuals. For an aristocracy does not impose upon the lower class a proportional political power; it does not provide mere constraint or discipline, a resistance conducive to enhancement, but rather subjugation and impotence—the end of all capacity for resistance. It is not “five steps from tyranny,” but tyranny simply. Again: the overman gets all the distance; the underdog gets all the pathos. Consequently, Nietzsche’s critique of liberalism is consistently interpreted only as a critique of the attempt to remove all constraints and obstacles, to abolish power altogether, including proportional counter-­ powers and resistance. This, in turn, is a critique that can be applied to only the slavish form of egalitarianism: the universal reduction of all power and resistance, the promotion of equality as similarity, and the absence of opposition. But it does not apply to the noble form of egalitarianism that I have developed from Nietzsche’s qualitative theory of power: the proportional promotion of every individual’s power as a means to the cultivation of oppositional counter-powers, an egalitarianism that produces the very conditions of constraint that Nietzsche believes necessary to the cultivation of greater human types. An egalitarianism based in the affirmation of oppositional resistance as the ground of human enhancement, rather than in the negation of all power as limitation, does not promote the laissez-­ faire form of liberalism Nietzsche critiques, and so it need not harm the pathos of distance. Against Equality as Complacency: Will to Domination or Will to Resistance? Life in hunt for profit constantly forces people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense or out-smarting or forestalling others: the true virtue today is doing something in less time than someone else. —The Gay Science 329

Even if egalitarianism does not harm the enhancement of humanity directly by reducing the pathos of distance, it might be argued that it does so indirectly, by reducing the psychological incentive to achieve higher states. For I have interpreted the pathos of distance as a feeling of

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difference rather than superiority, on the grounds that the pathos of superiority is inconsistent with Nietzsche’s primary conception of power as the feeling of ability in relation to proportional resistance. It might be argued that a pathos of difference that lacks a pathos of superiority inevitably promotes complacency and mediocrity. For if power can be felt in relative equality and does not depend on superior quantity or degree of ability, then there is no psychological incentive to increase one’s power, heighten one’s abilities, or seek additional, greater achievements. Of course, the first thing to note is that this is not a consistently Nietzschean objection to a noble egalitarianism. I have argued that Nietzsche’s immoralism is incompatible with virtue ethics and perfectionism, the view that there is intrinsic value in the overcoming of greater resistances that corresponds with the maximal improvement of abilities (NI 4). Nietzschean “enhancement” is not measurable by a scorecard of any kind, not even a qualitative one. If the true criterion of enhancement is not an ever-higher number on an arbitrarily chosen scoreboard but the maximization of amor fati, the love of fate, the non-instrumental affirmation of suffering found in the enjoyment of resistance for its own sake, then the correct response to the charge that equality reduces “achievement” is simply: so much the better. Our reconstructed Nietzschean politics would rather lounge beneath Zhuangzi’s useless tree or meander with Marx through a day of fishing, hunting, and afternoon criticism than join the frenzied mob of would-be meritocrats slavishly grubbing and squabbling for ever-greater recognition of ever-greater achievements—even if those achievements take the particular cultural, artistic, and intellectual forms preferred by Nietzsche and his readers. Nevertheless, if the charges of complacency and mediocrity are irrelevant to Nietzsche’s core commitment to amor fati, they are also simply false—though I include a reply to this criticism only to console those who simply cannot bear to part with the office-motivational-poster sorts of excellence that I critique in NI 4.3. Not to worry: although our happiness does not require a world in which, say, runners continue to cover arbitrarily chosen distances in ever-shorter increments of time, a Nietzschean politics need not deprive us of one. Not only does proportional, oppositional equality not harm “enhancement” in the non-Nietzschean sense of increased quantitative power and ability, it actively motivates and promotes it. Indeed, only on the qualitative interpretation of power is there such an incentive. Qualitative power motivates immediately: the present feeling of power experienced in the successful exercise of an ability

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motivates the individual to continue to exercise that ability. And this direct, immediate incentive to continue activity is, in turn, also an indirect incentive to improve the ability through its continued exercise. Consider the example of learning to play a game. If I completely fail to understand how to play the game, feeling powerless in the process, I will quickly give it up. If, on the other hand, I immediately find it far too easy and unchallenging, I will grow bored and give it up. Finally, if I find it challenging but experience some success, I will be motivated to continue playing it. And by continuing to play the game, I will improve my playing skill. Consequently, proportional equality to the task provides a direct incentive to action and an indirect incentive to the development of ability. Contrast this immediate, affective incentive to develop ability to the quantitative model of power. On that model, the motive to enhance ability is indirect, a product of reflective judgment rather than immediate feeling. For it is my desire for comparative superiority over others, a superiority only reflectively realized in contrast to the immediate affective knowledge of qualitative power, that can provide an incentive to excel. In the case of an agent of inferior power acting in the face of superior obstacles, the lack of proportional resistance produces a feeling of impotence, a disincentive to continue to act.24 In the case of an agent of superior ability, there is, again, a lack of proportional resistance. In the absence of challenge or feeling of worthy competition, the agent of superior power experiences no feeling of power and thus no incentive to continue in the exercise of her abilities. Moreover, her reflective awareness of her complete superiority to any obstacle or competitor does not provide incentive but instead provokes complacency: her substantial superiority demonstrates that she has

24  Note, again, that the quantitative form of power mirrors the slavish form of evaluation. In the case of the weaker agent, the feeling—and reality—of practical impotence is a disincentive to self-development. Instead, it is a strong incentive to revenge: the reduction of the other’s power, rather than the development of one’s own. And where it does motivate selfdevelopment, achievement comes from slavish rather than noble motives. It is not, after all, an accident that Nietzsche’s aristocratism often resembles meritocratism or that existing liberal democracy resembles his equation of democracy and slave morality precisely to the degree that its reigning meritocratic ideology resembles Nietzsche’s failed aristocratism. When Nietzsche’s immoralism fails him, he reveals himself to be what every moral and cultural variety of aristocrat usually is: a permanently embarrassed plebian.

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no need to further develop her abilities.25 Yet again: the overman may have the distance, but only the (modest) underdog has the pathos. So, power equality motivates continued exercise of ability and secondary enhancement of ability through that exercise. Moreover, because this incentive is based in proportional power—the exercise of ability in the face of relatively equal resistances—as ability increases, the agent has an accidental incentive to find ever-greater challenges to meet, thus further heightening ability. In my example of successfully learning a new game, as my skill increases, decreasing the challenge and enjoyment, I will be motivated to seek out more challenging opponents or a new, more challenging game, further increasing my skills in the process. Qualitative power is not, then, a teleological desire for ever-greater levels of achievement (nor is Nietzsche’s endorsement of power an inconsistent regression to teleological, essentialist, or progressivist moral perfectionism), but rather a tendency toward the continual exercise of power in relation to proportional resistances, having the increase of ability and power and the seeking of ever-greater resistances as an accidental consequence of improvement through power’s exercise. In this way, qualitative power promotes the quantitative increase of power. But it does so only given new obstacles, only if proportional opposing powers are cultivated. The tennis player in our earlier example is motivated by her feeling of power to continue in the exercise of her ability, and through continued exercise she improves that ability. However, if her competitors fail to improve their abilities to a comparable degree, the resistance upon which her feeling of power depends will be lost. She will be motivated to become a more skillful player only provided her competition becomes more skillful, as well. Consequently, it is strong anti-egalitarianism (opposition to both quantitative and qualitative equality, rather than only to qualitative similarity) that is harmful to the promotion of human powers. By cultivating radical inequalities in power, society reduces the incentive of both weak and

25  Detwiler accurately notes that it is “obvious why Nietzsche contends that the enhancement of the type ‘man’…will continue to be the work of an aristocratic society…. Because the political distinctions that are the defining characteristic of such societies give rise to spiritual distinctions, which in turn engender a perpetual and life-affirming striving for self-conquest and self-perfection” (1990, 119). But it is far from obvious that we should take Nietzsche’s view here seriously.

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strong to develop their abilities—the incentive of the feeling of power, based in proportional, oppositional power.26 Against Equality as Inefficient Enhancement: The Critic’s Distribution Argument When two people test their skills against one another, it starts out brightly enough but usually ends darkly; when it really gets extreme, they end up engaging in all sorts of outrageous tactics to defeat each other. A drinking ritual is orderly at first but usually ends up in turmoil, and when it really gets extreme, the amusements start to get perverse. All things are like this. They begin in good faith, but in the end they get ugly. They start out simple but end up oversized and unwieldy. —Zhuangzi, “In the Human World”

It might also be argued that equality is practically incompatible with human flourishing for simple economic reasons of efficiency: the improvement of humanity might be better served by the unequal allocation of economic resources and cultural support to the highest, most able

26  This is also a reason to abandon Cohen’s “luck egalitarian” commitment to remedying only involuntary disadvantages (1989): the beneficiary of comprehensive, deep equality is not only those whose disadvantages are eliminated but the already advantaged for whom the newly equal can serve as effective sources of resistance and the feeling of power. Of course, from the standpoint of Nietzsche’s immoralism, many debates surrounding egalitarianism fall away, exposed as moral prejudice disguised as politics—for example, scandalized responses to Phillipe Van Parijs’s (1991) suggestion that surfers should be fed, Ronald Dworkin’s (2004) handwringing over equal welfare for people with expensive tastes, and Robert Nozick’s (1974) fretting about disruptions to previously just distributions. As Iris Marion Young (2011) notes in her arguments for an equal focus on individual and structural causes of injustice, the moralistic tendency to overemphasize personal responsibility is shared by the right and the left. Elizabeth Anderson is correct that egalitarianism’s aim is not eliminating luck but “to create a community in which people stand in relations of equality to others” (1999, 288–289). However, the question is precisely what social and political relations will both prevent oppression and achieve the positive aim of maximizing feelings of freedom and power. That this is not reducible to compensating for bad luck is true, but falsely downplays the temporary role such compensations might play in bringing about lasting future conditions in which bad moral luck is minimized. That egalitarianism, as a temporary means to that end, sometimes “invades our privacy and burdens the personal ties of love and affection that lie at the core of family life” is, once the feeling of freedom is our standard, no longer a deep disagreement about political principle but a practical one about how to achieve our principles.

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individuals at the expense of others. Nietzsche makes this argument about the development of artistic achievement in an early essay, “The Greek State”: In order that there may be a broad, deep, and fruitful soil for the development of art, the enormous majority must, in the service of a minority be slavishly subjected to life’s struggle, to a greater degree than their own wants necessitate. At their cost, through the surplus of their labor, that privileged class is to be relieved from the struggle for existence, in order to create and to satisfy a new world of want.27 (GSt 6–7)

We should note, first, that this is not strictly an argument against egalitarianism but for elitism. If correct, it suggests only that egalitarianism is a less efficient means of human enhancement, not that it is incompatible with human enhancement. So, it would be compatible with my principal claim that Nietzsche’s arguments against egalitarianism fail on the qualitative conception of power. Second, this practical worry, like the logical one, is based in the quantitative theory of superiority of power. An unequal distribution of resources to the most able may have the immediate practical benefit of heightening the abilities of ever fewer individuals, but at the long-term cost of diminishing opportunities for resistance and thus diminishing both the incentive and ability of higher individuals to maintain and further develop their abilities. In contrast, in a society in which material cultural resources are devoted to the cultivation of proportionally equal abilities, any short-term diminishment in the development of the highest individuals will be outweighed by a greater long-term overall enhancement of human abilities through the continued preservation of proportional power. A steady, egalitarian enhancement of humanity as a whole would outpace the accomplishments of a self-defeating aristocratic society in which the psychological incentive of proportional power—of ever-greater challenges to past achievement—is lost.

27  Similar arguments can also be found in HH 439 and BGE 258. Thomas Hurka makes this view, which he calls a “maximax” principle (in contrast to Rawls’ maximin principle of maximizing the wellbeing of society’s least fortunate), central to his reading of Nietzsche as a moral perfectionist (2007, 18). John Richardson (1996) also endorses a version of this view. While I agree Nietzsche holds the view, it is inconsistent with his qualitative theory of power and mistaken in its assumption that inequality practically promotes excellence. Clark, in contrast, argues that Nietzsche does not continue to hold it in his later works (2015, 174).

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So, Nietzsche’s explicit arguments against anti-egalitarianism are neither logically nor practically incompatible with a form of egalitarianism based in a consistent qualitative interpretation of power. Moreover, because the qualitative feeling of power depends not on quantitative inequality of power but instead on qualitative difference (oppositional human types, values, and ends), we can also conclude that the noble promotion of the proportional power of every individual is a form of egalitarianism consistent with, even conducive to, the narrower form of anti-egalitarianism that Nietzsche does endorse: the rejection of equality in the form of qualitative similarity. Noble egalitarianism, by promoting equality in the form of proportional, oppositional resistances, also promotes a multiplicity of human types and values, since proportional power enables differing individuals and groups to resist domination by one another. For Equality in Moderation: The Critic’s Argument for Progressive Elitism Finally, it might be argued that there are forms of elitism compatible with both the anti-egalitarian allocation of resources and the preservation of proportional equality among elite members. This view seems to fit well with Nietzsche’s own representation of Homeric Greece as an anti-­ egalitarian, agonistic society of equal elites, as well as his frequent depiction of noble morality as one that includes equal respect and treatment among peers (BGE 260). Such an anti-egalitarianism society would not diminish the proportional equality of ability needed to promote resistance and the feeling of power. Thus, Nietzsche could reject egalitarianism as the less efficient means of enhancing both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of human power. Let us call this alternative to egalitarianism progressive elitism: elitist because it unequally distributes resources, progressive because it has as its goal the absolute quantitative enhancement of human powers. The identification and promotion of an elite group is merely a means to that end and, consequently, progressive elitism may sacrifice the interests of current members for the sake of that end. In contrast, conservative elitism produces an elite for its own sake and not for any further end. Consequently, the unequal distribution of resources to an elite is intended to protect and preserve the advantages of its members; it is not intended primarily to enhance those members or

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humanity generally. Broadly speaking, the progressive form advances a higher form of humanity through the cultivation of elite individuals, while the conservative form preserves a higher form of humanity through the protection of elite individuals. It may be argued that progressive elitism is a more efficient means of human enhancement than egalitarianism, because it devotes greater resources to the cultivation of the most able. In doing so, it achieves the greatest absolute quantitative increase in individual abilities. Moreover, by placing the most able in competition with their peers, progressive elitism establishes a community of equals, thus promoting the highest levels of the feeling of and will to power. Therefore, as an efficient means to both qualitative and quantitative human enhancement, progressive elitism is superior to the broad, gradual promotion of power that characterizes egalitarianism. However, even if this is correct, the progressive form of elitism is incompatible with Nietzschean strong anti-egalitarianism, since it makes use of egalitarian means in its promotion of an elitist end. Nietzsche’s elitism fails precisely because it would, in practice, be closer to the conservative rather than the progressive model. Recall his motto of “equality for equals, inequality for unequals,” and his claim that “true voice of justice” demands that we “never make equal what is unequal” (TI IX.48). An elite society identifies superior individuals, sacrificing humanity’s resources, interests, and welfare to their interests (BGE 258), but it does not actively promote individuals’ entrance into the elite. The goal is not to produce superiority but to separate it, not to directly cultivate higher individuals but to protect them. Consequently, Nietzsche’s elitism is not a means to the enhancement of humanity but an end in itself: “the essential feature of a good, healthy aristocracy...is that it does not feel that it is a function (whether of the kingdom or of the community) but instead feels itself to be their meaning and highest justification” (BGE 258). Progressive elitism, in contrast, cannot be reduced to the separation and protection of an elite. For its aim is the absolute increase of human powers. Admittedly, Nietzsche tries, inconsistently, to endorse both aims. Shortly after declaring a healthy aristocracy to be an end in itself, he adds that society is the “scaffolding on which a choice type of being is able to raise itself to a higher task.” Even the image of scaffolding suggests his elitism is one of protection, not cultivation, it establishes conditions in which the higher type may “raise itself,” rather than actively elevating individuals through elitist institutions. In any case, in his attempt to portray

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elitism as a means to human advancement, he fails to acknowledge that not only society but also the present elite must serve as the scaffolding for future higher types: the primary threat to the cultivation of a future elite is the power and desire for self-preservation of the members of the present elite. Consequently, the absolute enhancement of humanity may be hindered by the protection of a given elite, by the “healthy” aristocracy’s conviction that it is the meaning and justification of society. An elite that is an end in itself will merely preserve its present level of achievement rather than increase it, protecting superiority only relative to a given state of humanity’s development. Consequently, the progressive aim requires that members of the elite be chosen and promoted not only according to ability but also according to their potential to increase their abilities. And this, in turn, means that progressive elitism requires a system of selection that monitors potential as well as actual ability. Individuals with greater potential for development must be raised or cultivated into the elite, and once-superior individuals who decline in achievement or potential must be removed from the elite. Progressive elitism is a sorting mechanism to promote only those higher individuals who enhance their abilities and only for as long as they continue to do so. Nietzsche’s elitism, in contrast, is conservative in practice—ironically so, given Nietzsche’s attempt to ground his radical aristocratism on the distinctly anti-conservative basis of a politics of breeding.28 It identifies superior individuals not to improve them, but to protect them. It ensures the survival of those who happen to be relatively superior to the average, but does not continually sort or select to increase the probability of absolute human enhancement. It cannot, for to do so would require a limited form of egalitarianism. It requires that we do the one thing Nietzsche repeatedly claims we must not do: make equal what is unequal. For in order to promote the continual absolute enhancement of humanity, progressive elitism must continually identify and cultivate a future elite: those who will meet and exceed the achievements of the present— who are, consequently, as yet unequal in power and resources to the current elite, though potentially greater. And potential ability can only be identified through testing: individuals of unproven ability must be given the same opportunities as those of proven ability, the unequal made equal. 28  That is, Nietzsche’s metapolitics is radical, indeed progressive, but his political program is conservative and reactionary (NI 8).

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The same, of course, is true of the cultivation of potential ability through practice: if practice is to enhance ability, it must strain it, again requiring that individuals encounter opportunities to which they have not yet proven themselves equal. The primary task of progressive elitism is, then, an egalitarian means to an elitist end: the wise investment of resources in these not-yet-equals, their transformation through testing and training into challengers to the elite status quo. Consequently, progressive elitism not only defies Nietzsche’s cardinal rule of “inequality for unequals” but also ensures that the reigning elite is an unstable class. New challengers will displace old, necessitating an additional, complementary form of limited egalitarianism: members of the elite, equal to other elites in privilege thanks to once equal accomplishments, must sometimes be made unequal, their privileges withdrawn when their abilities prove to be misjudged or outpaced. Progressive elitism seeks to create a risky, unstable, changing class of high-level competitors, and such an elite can be maintained only through a continual process of making equal: making those of greater potential but unequal ability equals in resources and opportunities, so they may, through the use of those resources, be cultivated into eventual equals, as well as making former equals of declining potential into unequals. Furthermore, because progressive elitism is a system of sorting individuals according to absolute potential as well as present ability, it requires two added conditions that are incompatible with the strong classism and radical inequality of Nietzsche’s conservative elitism. The first requirement is a system of graduated classes, of varying levels of elite status rather than a single elite class, a system that implies a generous vertical distribution of resources among levels or classes. The second requirement is a generous horizontal distribution of resources across many areas of human ability and accomplishment. Both requirements are incompatible with radically unequal distribution to the top, and both follow from a simple problem: in a system of conservative elitism, where will the future members of the elite come from, and how will we efficiently discover and cultivate them? The first condition, a graduated hierarchy, is necessary to identify and promote potential as well as actual levels of ability. Because talent is identified only through training and testing (an allocation of resources and opportunities to individuals of as yet unproven ability), individuals of greater potential cannot be cultivated unless there are lower points of entry into the elite: graduated levels of elite status serving as transitions to

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higher levels. But such a system—typical of meritocratic social institutions such as educational and professional systems of qualification and rank— makes impossible a single, stable, and well-defined elite class. Indeed, although in practice meritocratic institutions often do preserve a stable elite, they do so precisely to the degree that they fail to be progressive. Insofar as they are progressive, they paradoxically approximate an elitism without an elite: a complex, changing, permeable hierarchy of differing levels of accomplishment, privilege, and opportunity, with no stable membership at any level. The second condition, a wide distribution of resources in many areas of human ability, is necessary because progressive elitism aims at human excellence absolutely, not in any particular ability. Just as individuals may possess greater potential ability than those with greater actual ability, certain abilities or forms of human achievement may, at any given time, have greater potential for development than others. Consequently, progressive elitism must invest resources not only at all class levels, but in diverse areas of human achievement. Once again, the principal concern is the future rather than current elite. Promoting the most accomplished current members of the elite in an activity that has little room for progress is less efficient than promoting individuals of lesser ability in an activity with a substantially higher potential for absolute development. Consequently, progressive elitism not only cannot preserve a true elite class, it also cannot sustain radical inequality. To the degree that it is efficient in practice, it will, paradoxically, be egalitarian: a graduated hierarchy of distribution that—if it is to ensure sufficient horizontal distribution across class levels and areas of achievement—cannot function with radical resource gaps between the highest and lowest levels. Note that since a truly progressive elitism would tend to undermine itself, developing in the direction of more egalitarian conditions, it is a good starting point for thinking about what a Nietzschean egalitarianism might look like. The broad distribution of resources across levels of ability and areas of achievement is particularly well-suited to the kind of manifold society of power equilibrium that Nietzsche’s manifold soul requires for cultivation. In Chap. 9, we’ll examine more closely what kind of egalitarianism a Nietzschean politics demands. Perhaps the most apt reply to Amartya Sen’s (1987) question, “Equality of What?” is Marlon Brando’s “Waddaya got?” Sen’s distinction of different “spaces” of equality (1992) is useful, but downplays the more important ground of solidarity among

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egalitarians in actual historical political practice: they demand more equality of ever more kinds, because most kinds tend, on balance, to be conducive to what a Nietzschean approach tells us matters for the feeling of freedom: a proportionate equality of power to act in the face of resistance. The egalitarian promotion of power in this sense does not directly entail any specific form of quantitative distributive equality and cannot easily be fitted to the usual categories, such as equality of welfare (Richard Arneson 2000), resources (Ronald Dworkin 1981), or capabilities (Amartya Sen 1979 and Nussbaum 1992). However, it is likely that equality of power can only be promoted through a high degree of equality in all three respects—welfare, resources, and capability—insofar as they are compatible. This would be necessary to promote equality of particular kinds of abilities and a generally equal ability to develop particular abilities to an equal degree, as well as to account for changes in what Michael Walzer calls “dominant goods” which allow for small inequalities to multiply when some goods are changed for others. A Nietzschean egalitarianism would in that respect resemble Walzer’s “complex equality” in which “no citizen’s standing in one sphere or with regard to one social good can be undercut by his standing in some other sphere, with regard to some other good” (1983, 19). The Case for Efficient Egalitarian Enhancement If you do not allow your neighbor to reach nine, you will never reach ten. —Akan maxim, Kwasi Wiredu, “Moral Foundations of African-­ American Culture” It is not the strength but the duration of high feelings that makes for high men. —Beyond Good and Evil 72

We are left with a choice between egalitarianism and a progressive hybrid of weak elitism and egalitarianism that bears little resemblance to Nietzsche’s nostalgic picture of classical aristocracies. But even this weakened version of elitism fails to provide a more efficient means of human enhancement. For progressive elitism aims at the greatest absolute quantity of power or feeling of power. Nietzsche’s view, in contrast, prioritizes increase over level. Recall that he defines the good in The Anti-Christian as “the feeling that power is

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growing” (A 2) and in Beyond Good and Evil identifies human enhancement as “the development of states that are increasingly high, rare, distant, tautly drawn (weitgespannterer) and expansive” (BGE 257). The emphasis in such passages is not on level but on ever-higher development, an increase of tension between past and present states. Consequently, goodness is not the absolute quantity but the relative increase of power, not the intensity of feeling but the act of intensification. And so enhancement does not track absolute quantity of power or intensity. On the contrary, it tracks changes in quantity and intensity, and egalitarianism best promotes positive, continual changes in both the quantity and intensity of power.29 Consider the case of two competitive runners. The first runner is a professional champion whose level of ability is 9 out of a maximum possible level of 10, while the second runner is a novice who scores 1 on the same scale. Progressive elitism must prioritize the first runner in the allocation of resources and opportunities, since the first runner is far more likely to attain the highest absolute level of ability. However, the first runner can only increase her level of ability by one point, while the second runner can potentially increase her ability by a factor of nine. If the measure of the human good is the increase of power and the feeling of power, the champion runner has a surprisingly small share: she cannot increase her power by a significant amount; she will not be able to continually increase it; and given the modest degree of increase, she is unlikely to experience a significant change in the intensity of her feeling of power. The novice runner, in contrast, can increase her power and intensify her feeling of power many times over. Consequently, on Nietzsche’s conception of the good and happiness as the increase of power and feeling of power, she is potentially the greater individual. What is most surprising about the prioritization of increase over absolute quantity is that it is precisely the most powerful and able who have the least share in the good, precisely because the potential for improvement declines with increased ability. Yet this counterintuitive outcome is perfectly consistent with Nietzsche’s own depiction of an ideal agonistic society. Recall that in “Homer’s Contest” Nietzsche admires the Ephesians for 29  Note that this does not contradict the qualitative nature of the will of power: a greater increase is successful action against greater resistance, and so produces a greater qualitative intensity in the feeling of power. Only relative not absolute increase has value. For example, it would be perfectly consistent with this model to intentionally let a skill decline in order to feel its increase again rather than try to increase it absolutely.

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removing contestants whose abilities were too superior. Once again— despite his professed prohibition against “making equal”—Nietzsche’s conception of power undermines his aristocratic nostalgia. The ancient strategy of ostracism is not merely a matter of saving the contest by ensuring equality among competitors. Like resetting the scoreboard to zero or reshuffling the deck of cards, this practice reduces the absolute level of achievement precisely in order to make room for continued and greater relative increases in achievement. It is an act of leveling (another Nietzschean taboo) that levels in order to enable to elevating and equalizes in order to make room for new inequalities, suggesting that the true good of the contest is found in the activities of resistance and overcoming as such, not in the state of ability or power achieved through them. Nietzschean enhancement promotes the activity of enhancing and the feeling of enhancement for their own sake, and not as a means toward any intrinsically valuable level of ability or degree of feeling. Consequently, egalitarianism is a more efficient means of Nietzschean enhancement than any form of elitism. First, by promoting equality of powers, it establishes conditions that promote competitive resistance, which, in turn, promotes the will to power, the feeling of power, and the increase of both quantitative and qualitative power. In contrast, conservative elitism protects an elite from competitive resistance, thereby undermining power. Second, by distributing resources widely at all levels and in all areas of human achievement, egalitarianism actively prevents the consolidation of power in the form of conservative elitism, in contrast to progressive elitism, which succeeds only insofar as it approximates egalitarianism, otherwise devolving into conservative elitism. Finally, by promoting human enhancement at all levels and in diverse areas of human ability through broad resource distribution, egalitarianism establishes conditions that better promote the continual increase of power and the feeling of power, in contrast to elitism, which promotes superior levels of ability at the expense of their continued increase.

References Alcoff, Linda. 2006. Mestizo Identity. In American Mixed Race, ed. Naomi Zack. Boston: Rowman & Littlefield. Anderson, Elizabeth S. 1999. What Is the Point of Equality? Ethics 109: 287–337.

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Arneson, Richard J. 2000. Welfare Should Be the Currency of Justice. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 30: 477–524. Bamford, Rebecca. 2019. Experimentation, Curiosity, and Forgetting. Journal of Nietzsche Studies 50 (1): 11–32. Brobjer, Thomas H. 2002. Nietzsche’s Knowledge of Marx. Nietzsche-Studien 31 (1): 298–313. Čeika, Jonas. 2021. How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty-First Century. London: Repeater Books. Cicerchia, Lillian. 2021. Why Does Class Matter? Social Theory and Practice 47 (4): 603–627. Clark, Maudemarie. 2013. Nietzsche Was No Lamarckian. Journal of Nietzsche Studies 44 (2): 282–296. ———. 2015. Nietzsche on Ethics and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cohen, G.A. 1989. On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice. Ethics 99 (4): 906–944. Detwiler, Bruce. 1990. Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Drochon, Hugo. 2016. Nietzsche’s Great Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dworkin, Ronald. 1981. What is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources. Philosophy and Public Affairs 10: 283–345. ———. 2004. Expensive Taste Rides Again. In Dworkin and His Critics, ed. Justine Burley. Oxford: Blackwell. Engels, Friedrich. [1878] 1975–2005. Anti-Dühring. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 25. New York; Moscow; London: International Publishers; Progress Publishers; Lawrence and Wishart. ———. 1880. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 24. Fields, Karen E., and Barbara J. Fields. 2012. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. London: Verso. Goldberg, David Theo. 2006. Made in the USA: Racial Mixing ’n Matching. In American Mixed Race, ed. Naomi Zack. Boston: Rowman & Littlefield. Gooding-Williams, Robert. 2001. Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hatab, Lawrence. 1995. A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy: An Experiment in Postmodern Politics. Chicago: Open Court Press. Hurka, Thomas. 2007. Nietzsche: Perfectionist. In Nietzsche and Morality, ed. Brian Leiter and Neil Sinhababu, 9–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leiter, Brian. 1997. Nietzsche and the Morality Critics. Ethics 107 (2): 250–285. Lugones, Maria. 2003. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Marx, Karl. [1891] 1975–2005. Critique of the Gotha Programme. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 24.

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Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1848. The Communist Manifesto. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 24. Miyasaki, Donovan. 2014. Nietzsche’s Naturalist Morality of Breeding: A Critique of Eugenics as Taming. In Nietzsche and the Becoming of Life, ed. Vanessa Lemm, 194–213. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2022. (NI) Nietzsche’s Immoralism: Politics as First Philosophy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Montinari, Mazzino. 1982. Nietzsche lesen. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Mullin, Amy. 2000. Journal of the History of Philosophy 38 (3): 383–405. Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books. Nussbaum, Martha. 1992. Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism. Political Theory 20 (2): 202–246. Owen, David. 2002. Equality, Democracy, and Self-Respect: Reflections on Nietzsche’s Agonal Perfectionism. Journal of Nietzsche Studies 24: 113–131. Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Reginster, Bernard. 2013. Honesty and Curiosity in Nietzsche’s Free Spirits. Journal of the History of Philosophy 51 (3): 441–463. Richardson, John. 1996. Nietzsche’s System. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. [1762] 1994. The Social Contract, Discourse on the Virtue Most Necessary for a Hero, Political Fragments, and Geneva Manuscript. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College/University Press of New England. Schiller, Friedrich. [1795] 2004. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Translated by Reginald Snell. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Scott, Jacqueline. 2006. The Price of the Ticket: A Genealogy and Revaluation of Race. In Critical Affinities: Nietzsche and African American Thought, ed. Jacqueline Scott and A. Todd Franklin, 149–171. Albany: State University of New York Press. Sen, Amartya. [1979] 1987. Equality of What? In Liberty, Equality, and Law: Selected Tanner Lectures on Moral Philosophy, ed. John Rawls and Sterling McMurrin. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. ———. 1992. Inequality Reexamined. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shapiro, Gary. 2016. Nietzsche’s Earth: Great Events, Great Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Siemens, Herman. 2009. Nietzsche’s Critique of Democracy. Journal of Nietzsche Studies 38: 20–37. ———. 2013. Nietzsche, Genealogy and Justice. In Nietzsche and Political Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, 83–105. London: Bloomsbury. Temkin, Larry. 1993. Inequality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van Parijs, Philippe. 1991. Why Surfers Should be Fed: The Liberal Case for an Unconditional Basic Income. Philosophy & Public Affairs 20 (2): 101–131. Walzer, Michael. 1983. Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. New York: Basic Books.

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Weil, Simone. 2005. Human Personality. In Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. Siân Miles. Penguin Classics. Wills, Vanessa. 2018. What Could It Mean to Say ‘Capitalism Causes Sexism and Racism?’. Philosophical Topics 46 (2): 229–246. Wiredu, Kwasi. 1992. The Moral Foundations of African-American Culture. In African-American Perspectives in Biomedical Ethics, ed. Harley E.  Flack and Edmund D. Pellegrino, 80–93. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Young, Iris Marion. 2011. Responsibility for Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zack, Naomi. 1996. Life After Race. In American Mixed Race, ed. Naomi Zack. Boston: Rowman & Littlefield. Zhuangzi. 2020. Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings. Translated by Brook Ziporyn. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Zimmermann, Rolf. 2014. ‘The Will to Power’: Toward a Nietzschean Systematics of Moral-Political Divergence in History in Light of the 20th Century. In Nietzsche as Political Philosopher, ed. Barry Stocker and Manuel Knoll, 39–57. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

CHAPTER 9

Conclusion: Toward a Nietzschean Socialist Politics

Games are the characteristic activities of utopian existence…a theory of utopia requires a theory of games as its foundation. —Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia The animal works when deprivation is the mainspring of its activity, and it plays when the fullness of its strength is this mainspring, when superabundant life is its own stimulus to activity. —Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Twenty-­ Seventh Letter

1   Why Should a Nietzschean Egalitarianism Be Socialist? Nietzsche taught us that the power and force of the capitalists who rule society need no other justification than the fact that they have the power and force and the will to power. Really have we not taken up this doctrine? Really, do we not say: yes, we agree. The relation between you and us is a question of force. But we are stronger than you and therefore we will come to power. —Moris Leiteizen, Nietzsche and Finance Capital (1928)

I have argued that Nietzsche’s ideal of amor fati, as embodied in the ideal type of the manifold soul, is best achieved not by an aristocratic

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political order but an egalitarian one. But why should a Nietzschean egalitarianism take the form of socialism? Recall that Nietzsche’s ideal of amor fati is not an arbitrary, useful fiction or an aesthetic matter of taste. It is a naturalist claim about human wellbeing, about a higher state of existence anyone would find preferable. But it is not a voluntaristic moral ideal: we are not, as individuals, free in our ability to instantiate or approximate it. While it would be better if we all loved fate, whether and to what degree we do so is also part of our fate. That is what led Nietzsche away from a moral theory of culture and education to a distinctly political philosophy of breeding. His preferred ideal must be promoted not on the level of individuals but of types and not through the transformation of existing types but through the industrial production of future ones. But as a political project—the transformation of the material social-­ political conditions that determine our feeling of power—it is not sufficient for Nietzsche to merely appeal to the desirability of his ideal in order to achieve it. He was able to imagine developing an elite of higher philosophers to implement new values through cultural projects and institutions only as long as he retained his early aestheticist view. But that was a variety of what he later rejects as a “morality of improvement,” the view that we can persuade one another to change our deep characters on the basis of categorical reasons. Nietzsche’s hard incompatibilism led to a resolute immoralism. Individuals cannot change themselves, but neither can cultural institutions or educators. Change happens over generations, not to individuals and types but through their production. So, why should a Nietzschean politics take the form of a specifically socialist egalitarianism? First, although we might try to imagine egalitarian societies in which individuals freely recognize the desirability of Nietzsche’s ideal of the manifold soul and choose to instantiate it to different degrees, his hard incompatibilism makes this impossible. Many egalitarianisms presuppose freedom and moral responsibility, so not just any egalitarian society will do. Second, the production of the manifold soul requires the promotion of the power of our weakest drives against an already existing hierarchy in the soul—that is, against what we perceive, in our identification with our strongest drives, to be our true selves. So, not just any egalitarianism will do because a political order can generate the manifold soul only, to some degree, against subjectively measured self-interest. As we have seen, that is why a Nietzschean politics must be non-liberal, if not anti-liberal: it must prioritize the production of equality over respect for individual rights and liberties. But even if our egalitarianism must be

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non-liberal, why a democratic egalitarianism? The answer is that this is necessary for legitimacy. The highest form of human existence is amor fati, the total affirmation of fate, a criterion of value that is not moral but descriptive: the love of fate is nothing other than the measure of will to power, the heightened feeling of power we experience in the activity of resistance for its own sake in relation to equal obstacles. Amor fati is, then, the possibility and criterion of political legitimacy. To the degree a politics breeds types characterized by higher degrees of amor fati—in other produces subjects with a manifold soul—those subjects will affirm the state that created them and the values upon which it depends, thus preventing crises of illegitimacy. This politically manufactured identity between the will of the state and its subjects, of its values and the hierarchy of the drives that constitute individuals, in turn requires democracy: the material production of a true people, a unity not merely on the level of belief or ideological consensus, but grounded in shared material conditions of happiness and the feeling of power. We might of course, have expected that Nietzsche’s immoralism would make him in different to legitimacy altogether. But legitimacy turns out to be a necessary precondition of his ideal. If the production of higher types is to continually succeed, if higher types are to survive, thrive, and multiply, then he must produce a legitimate state. That is why his failed aristocratic program had as its foundational concern the meaninglessness suffering of the underclass: he needed to create a nobility without recreating the psychology of the slave and reproducing the victory of slave morality. We have seen that his aristocratic solution to the problem of legitimacy is an utter failure. But an alternative Nietzschean politics must be democratic in order to avoid that failure: Nietzsche can successfully promote higher types only by promoting amor fati in the population at large—producing a people that shares the manifold form of the soul. That cannot be achieved through the consolations of meaningful suffering, but only through direct change to the concrete conditions of our happiness. So, because moral voluntarism cannot produce higher types, our egalitarianism must be non-liberal, and because the continued production of higher types requires legitimacy, our egalitarianism must be democratic. It is tempting to move directly to the answer to our question, “why socialism?” and conclude that a non-liberal, democratic egalitarianism just is socialism. But that would be too quick; we need to better specify what narrower kind of socialism is required, and that necessitates pinpointing the unique kind of egalitarianism that would produce the manifold soul.

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The egalitarianism required by the manifold soul does not fit the two dominant models: equality of recognition or equality of distribution. Both assume that equally valuable subjects should have equal access to some fundamental good, whether the psychological good of respect or various material goods and the opportunity to obtain them. Nietzschean egalitarianism, in contrast, does not presuppose the equal value of subjects but seeks to produce it by creating and preserving a power equilibrium among them, truly “making unequals equal.” The equality at issue is not of recognition or distribution but of a certain attitude in and relation among subjects. The goal is to produce in them an equal love of fate, which depends on an equal feeling of power and freedom, which finally depends on relationships of equal power. But power is not an item to be distributed, like income or commodities. Nor is it a social-political condition that can be distributed, like legal recognition or institutional opportunity. Power is not a relation of distribution but the distribution of a kind of relation. Individuals have internal equality of power if their drives have relatively equal ability to determine action on behalf of their satisfaction and to resist suppression by other drives. And individuals have external equality of power if they have a relatively equal ability to successfully act for the satisfaction of drives and to resist suppression by other agents. I have described this as proportional equality or power equilibrium, defined not in terms of distributions but relations: a relation is proportionately equal if it is (1) non-debilitating, allowing agents to act in particular instances with some degree of success, (2) non-dominating, allowing agents over extended periods of time the possibility of sometimes acting with a high degree of success, and (3) non-demoralizing, allowing agents the possibility of feeling powerful in the relation, regardless of success. Notice that a key consequence of understanding egalitarianism as equality not of distribution but relation is that we cannot make sense of it in abstraction from time. At any given moment, I may be subject to equal treatment under the law, have equal opportunity to vote or apply for a position, or receive equal wages or benefits or goods. But the equality of a relation does not measure a state but of a series of changing states: it is non-debilitating and non-dominating if I have in the past, and will in the future, continue to act with some degree of success, occasionally with a high degree of success. And it is non-demoralizing only insofar as I can, based on past successes, reasonably expect enough future success to feel proportionally equal, even when I fail.

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So, equality in our relations of power can only be determined over periods of time. That is because all relationships involve both expenditures and increases in power. Nozick (1974) is at least right on this small point: conceptions of justice modeled on “end states” are insufficient. And because Nietzschean justice is about non-dominating relations rather than distributions of relata, we should follow Iris Marion Young in defining injustice not primarily in terms of distribution but as domination and oppression (1990, chapter 1). However, rather than contrast this view to egalitarianism, we should emphasize their connection: domination just is the capacity to maintain or increase inequality over time. Distribution is, then, a key means to the eradication of domination. Injustice is still fundamentally about inequality, but an inequality in the relation rather than the relata, and it is still inseparable from distribution, since it is the unequal distribution of resources, opportunities, and goods that allows for the transformation of proportionally equal relations into dominating ones, of play into games that sort and preserve groups of winners and losers, the dominators and the oppressed. Let’s call this view power relation egalitarianism or, more simply, power egalitarianism, since Nietzschean “power” just is a kind of relation. Notice that it takes us away from traditional egalitarianism toward what I will call the tragic realism of Nietzsche’s politics. Like conventional political realism, tragic realism interprets all political conflicts through the lens of power contests, contests that operate with a degree of necessity that makes strictly moral interpretations and solutions misguided. However, unlike conventional realism, Nietzsche’s realism does not depend on a paradoxically moralistic picture of human nature as essentially egoistic, destructive, or competitive. For the will to power is not a will toward conquest and domination but toward the engagement of equal resistance for its own sake—toward play. Human nature is not evil, but beyond good and evil. We seek contests of power not primarily to win them but for the pleasure of the challenge. And we seek challenges not out of a natural desire for excellence, not to measure and heighten our abilities, but for the pleasure of struggle. So, both pessimistic and optimistic, moralizing interpretations of our nature mistake accidental outcomes for teleological aims. The realist pessimistically assumes we play only to win rewards or create losers to feel superior to, while the virtue ethicist and perfectionist assume we can play

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simply to improve ourselves, earn moral recognition, or better our world.1 An immoralist, tragic realism, in contrast, recognizes that the moral value of our actions is a consequence not their goal and that we seek specific goals only in the service of our more primary goal of play. But tragic realism also tells us that play always eventually devolves into a game, eventually producing winners and losers, widening gaps in ability and power, and finally destroying every field of freedom and play. The compatibility of this realism with left politics is that we need not conclude, as Nietzsche does, that harmonious social relations must be rare or fragile (BGE 259). On the contrary, since we are not motivated to actively produce unequal relationships, there is no intrinsic obstacle in human nature toward the preservation of non-dominating relationships. Nor is there an intrinsic tendency toward such relationships: neither our will nor our happiness demand inequality. On the contrary, we actively will equality as the basis of the feeling of resistance, the principal source of our happiness. So, in terms of human nature and human motivation, we are well-suited to power egalitarianism. However, although the will to power does not aim at or require quantitative superiority of power, it does have such inequalities as “one of the indirect and most frequent consequences” (BGE 13). Whenever a drive or an individual engages a proportionately equal resistance, the inevitable outcome over time is the production of unequal relationships. Take the case of a race between two proportionally equal runners—equal enough that we would reasonably place equal betting odds on either side. Any small advantage, intrinsic or circumstantial, can make a difference. If it were a matter of ideal equality, there would be no reason for those odds to change. With each race, both gain equal practice, strength, and ability.

1  Nancy S.  Love mistakenly concludes that Marx and Nietzsche’s critiques of labor are contradictory by forcing them toward these opposite poles. Her claim that for Nietzsche, “unlike production, play is effortless and purposeless” (1986, 189) ignores that it is a noninstrumental affirmation of suffering (NI 4.1, 6.2). And her claim that Marx “cannot conceive of activity except as labor” ignores how much broader his conception of labor is than Nietzsche’s. When Marx says that the “overcoming of obstacles is itself a liberating activity” when its external aims “become posited as aims which the individual himself posits—hence, as self-realization” in a “real freedom, whose action is, precisely, labor” (1939, 611), he is not opposing labor to play but distinguishing a disalienated form of labor that is closer to play than to work. Hägglund makes a similar mistake in his interpretation of Marx on labor (2019, II.5).

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But in a non-ideal relation of only proportional equality, as they both improve, a relatively small comparative difference in ability will result in a greater absolute difference—for example, everything else being equal, a slightly faster runner will gain an insurmountable lead over the course of the race. And that is only the immediate physical consequence. Given the larger social context, the social game in which competitive relationships exist, the advantage of the stronger grows exponentially. The social recognition gained by the winning runner boosts her pride and morale, giving her an incentive to work harder, while the advantages accrued through the win, such as opportunities to compete with better athletes or train in better facilities with better coaches, ensure that what began as proportional equality ends in the domination, demoralization, and often debilitation of weaker competitors. Notice, incidentally, the similarity of this picture to market capitalism, where producers play a zero-sum game that accelerates efficiency and productivity while transforming competition into monopoly and elimination of competition. This leads us to our first important difference between Nietzschean and Marxist socialism. For Marx  (1867), the existence of domination depends on contradictions internal to particular social systems. When we overcome those contradictions, we no longer generate the inequalities of power that create class domination. Nietzsche’s realism follows from his belief that just as human motivation accidentally generates self-preservation without being essentially egoistic, so too it accidentally generates domination without aiming at it, since every activity accidentally discharges and accumulates power. Notice, too, that this makes Nietzschean socialism more materialist. Marx’s view contains a degree of idealism, belief in the causal priority of mind over matter. For Marx, capitalism instills the conscious incentive toward competition. If we defeat the idea, the belief in its value, we also remove the incentive. For Nietzsche, the contradictions of capitalism are rooted in the contradictory nature of all activity as will to power, the necessity that every engagement of resistance will eventually produce inequality, a necessity that our conscious incentives, intentions, and beliefs cannot change. Notice, too, that this gives Nietzsche an advantage over Marx in avoiding the “vulgar” Marxism that reduces all explanations to economic ones. It is often assumed that the vulgar misreading of Marx is invited by his overemphasis on materialist and determinist explanations. However, the problem is quite the opposite: Marx’s psychology, drawn from Hegel’s idealist psychology of recognition, is insufficiently materialist and determinist. In Nietzsche’s psychology, in contrast, all human motivation is

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reduced to the will to power not as intention or belief, not as a specifically mental phenomenon, but as an anti-teleological principle of material events: every material power acts for the sake of resistance, having accumulation or discharge of power as an accidental side effect. Consequently, economic systems and relations of production are not directly material causes but products of rationally self-interested beliefs about what our needs are and about the most efficient ways to meet them given our environmental circumstances and levels of productive technology (Marx and Engels 1932, 31). So, they are not primary material causes, but ideas: secondary effects of unconscious drives that are, in turn, determined by material conditions of the feeling of power that do not directly track quantity of power, need, or rational self-interest. What Marx needs is a more materialist, more determinist psychology—a depth psychology, as Freud calls it—that recognizes the environmentally and materially conditioned mind, rather than relations of production, as the primary cause of economic relations and class conflict. The opposite of “vulgar”—common or base—Marxism would be a noble Marxism, according to which we act not from need (not even the less  vulgar, but still idealist, need for disalienation) but for power. So, although for Nietzsche we may not be, as the pessimistic realist has it, intrinsically evil, we are inevitably if unintentionally bad in the sense that we inevitably harm the conditions of our own and others’ happiness. But the language of “bad” is misleading. Nietzschean realism is the view that humans are not intrinsically evil but tragic: we mean well, but meaning doesn’t move matter. Matter is indifferent to meaning. Producing power inequalities is not what it intends; it’s just what material events do. Even though we naturally aim at relational power equality as the foundation of our happiness, we also naturally upset that equality. On the social level, we seek out equal challenges, but in engaging them we accidentally overcome them, increasing our power and forcing us to seek greater challenges, in turn, exercising our abilities to a greater degree, deepening our inequalities. On the level of the soul, we seek to act upon our various drives by satisfying them through engagement with equal resistances. We seek to be manifold souls, multi-dimensional in our abilities, tastes, pleasures, and pursuits. But some of our drives are slightly stronger, and our circumstances offer some drives more optimal conditions for expression and success. Over time, our strongest drives increase their power and opportunities, causing our drives to develop at unequal rates, and so with time the manifold soul tends toward becoming a one-dimensional soul.

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That, in the end, is why a Nietzschean egalitarianism requires socialism, if not communism. Because social relationships of non-domination actively and inevitably cause their own disruption, traditional egalitarianisms of recognition and distribution cannot by themselves maintain power egalitarianism. I noted earlier that the natural tendency of the will to power to produce inequality is aggravated by capitalism—a system that pits us against one another in zero-sum social games and redistributes resources and opportunities to their winners, ensuring an unequal development of powers. For that reason, power egalitarianism must exert dramatic control over the economy. But then the welfare state model of capitalism popular with many on the left will not suffice. That model might be described as a system designed to politically protect a social game in which players are guaranteed a level playing field, a fair start, and a fair finish: a healthy childhood, a tolerable adulthood, and a dignified old age. But it is also designed to minimize interference with the “fair” gameplay that happens in between. Between the opening and closing bell, it does not aim at power equilibrium. It aims, like Nietzsche’s aristocratism, merely at making our lives tolerable and our work meaningful, helping us remain live contenders in a game designed to sort us into more humane categories of winner and loser and fairly distributing more humane prizes and punishments, rather than emancipating us from games and establishing the true freedom of play, of activity for its own sake.

2  How Would Nietzschean Socialism Be Different from Agonism, Marxism, or Anarchism? Revolution is not an action; it is a process. —Huey Newton, Revolutionary Suicide The great mistake of the Marxists and of the whole of the nineteenth century was to think that by walking straight on one mounted upwards into the air. —Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace The person who lives in the class struggle is a person whose being is characterized better by Nietzsche’s doctrine of power…. The question, “How is it possible for the will to power ever to lead to the renunciation of power?” remains unanswered. For this reason, Marxism, in spite of its hostility to utopianism, has never been able to defend itself against the suspicion that it has a hidden faith in utopia. —Paul Tillich, The Socialist Decision

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What is wealth other than the universality of the needs, abilities, forms of enjoyment, productive powers, etc., of the individuals generated in universal exchange? The full development of human domination over natural powers, both of so-called nature and of his own nature? —Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy

Nietzschean egalitarianism is not only incompatible with welfare state capitalism, but also with agonistic “radical democracy,” Marx’s theory of communism, and anarchism. Consider, first, the Nietzschean-inspired theories of radical democracy found in thinkers like William E. Connolly (2005) and Bonnie Honig (1993). While there are many versions, most preserve a radical version of liberalism at the expense of a robust version of egalitarianism, valuing contest over free play and political agonism over a deep power equilibrium. In this way, agonistic democracy shares a characteristic we saw in welfare state capitalism: it treats politics as a game of more pleasant, less destructive forms of winning and losing, to be protected by democratic constraints that keep social domination within humane boundaries. The hidden presupposition of both welfare capitalism and radical democracy is that of virtue ethics or moral perfectionism: the belief that the value of life is in game-playing and point-scoring—in short, in social recognition, the justification of labor through meaning. For the welfare capitalist, equality is merely a means to protect an economic game in which happiness is to be won through professional accomplishment, while our material wellbeing is protected in case of failure. For the radical democrat, equality is merely a means to protect a cultural game in which happiness is won through moral, social, and political participation, the miserable intellectual football of discourse and debate, of theory, party, or policy wins and losses. In both cases, life is trapped in the contest for social recognition. Welfare capitalism and agonist democracy merely protect the sphere in which we seek to win meaning for our labor. Nietzschean egalitarianism, in contrast, requires socialism because its goal is not to protect the sphere of labor for the sake of meaning, but to reduce the need for meaning: to protect a sphere of life from labor for the sake of play, the free development of human faculties for their own sake. The goal, then, of Nietzschean socialism would not be a democracy that protects an agonistic politics but a non-agonistic politics that protects a non-political agon: a social field in which we can play with, rather than against, one another because our labor is no longer so miserable that it requires the compensatory meaning of endless varieties and degrees of

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social recognition. It would be a politics that lifts life out of the realm of dependence on others for agonistic respect, establishing a sphere of play in which respect follows from rather than grounds self-affirmation, in which other identities, forms of life, and values serve not as opposition but as a pleasantly “pale, contrasting shade” (GM I.10). But this is not simply a difference in aim. Radical democracy’s idealistic psychology of recognition dooms it to failure. The agonistic sphere cannot maintain power equilibrium through the rational recognition of our equality as agonistic competitors, the good will of agonistic respect. Tragic realism tells us that an agonistic sphere, a play of forces protected from violence, can be preserved only by continually restoring equilibrium, by the material force of a continually maintained, radical material equality. Chantal Mouffe is right, then, in her demand for an agonistic politics that includes hegemony and closure. We cannot preserve an agonistic sphere if that sphere is itself up for debate. The conditions that preserve the agon— power egalitarianism—and the politics that maintains them—a non-­liberal, democratic socialism—must be kept outside of the agonistic contest.2 Traditional egalitarianism is not enough, then, because Nietzsche, like Marx at his best, seeks to emancipate play from games, activity from labor, joy from meaning. They seek to create not a level playing field but an off-­ ramp, an escape from societies that reduce life to games. They seek justice not as fairness but as the creation of a world in which fairness is not a central concern because winning and losing, scorekeeping and merit-­ measuring, are no longer life’s central aim. So, although Nozick is right that justice upsets patterns, requiring their constant reestablishment, he is wrong to think socialism must define justice as patterned. Justice is a power relation, not a pattern. The manifold soul and a manifold society are relations, not relata; they are not reducible to, and justice is not defined as, any particular configuration of drives or any particular distribution of recognition, resource, or ability. Justice is the use of patterns—the creation and recreation of temporary relationships of variable relata, of changing powers, abilities, resources, agents, and communities—to create and preserve equal power relations, the ability to act 2  See Mouffe: “The main shortcoming of the agonistic approaches influenced by Arendt and Nietzsche is that, because their main focus is on the fight against closure, they are unable to grasp the nature of the hegemonic struggle. Their celebration of a politics of disturbance ignores the other side of such struggle: the establishment of a chain of equivalence among democratic demands and the construction of an alternative hegemony” (2013, 14).

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against domination and in non-dominating ways. Patterns are the means, not the end. Socialism is not the violation of just patterns because justice is not a pattern. It is the constant alteration and reproduction of patterns toward the end of justice as power equality. To be sure, this difference in aims does not mean a complete difference in means. A Nietzschean power egalitarianism would likely include all traditional forms of egalitarianism. The principal obstacle is the inevitable fluctuation of the powers of our various drives in relation to each other and of our abilities in relation to other people—the tendency of power inequalities to accumulate and accelerate. Given the instability of individual interests and abilities, the only way to maintain power equilibrium is by maximizing the variety of possible kinds of abilities we can at any time develop or restore and of possible means and opportunities for that development and restoration. When the agonist play of our drives produces new orders, threatening to create a tyranny, a one-dimensionality of soul, and when changes in the manifold soul threaten the balance of a manifold society, upsetting the equilibrium of the games we play with others, we must have concrete access to a wide array of resources and opportunities to restore our passions, pleasures, and abilities, to find new powers to replace them, or to join new social games that restore our equilibrium with ourselves and one another. Such a capacity to alter, improve, or replace our interests, abilities, and social relationships is one that can only be secured through the combined impact of every form of egalitarianism. But despite the use of traditional egalitarian methods, power egalitarianism remains fundamentally different in aim: equal recognition and equal distribution are means to the end of power equilibrium or non-domination, so they are used only insofar as they serve that end. Contrast, for example, Rawls’s (1971) political philosophy, in which the criterion of distribution is whether it benefits the least well-off. Benefit in this abstract sense—more of some kind of good, whether material or psychological—is not the goal of Nietzschean egalitarianism. We want a greater distribution or recognition not for their own sake but to maintain a life free of domination. Notice that when we imagine a life without domination, we often describe a quiet, simple life, far from “the rat race”—drawn precisely against a life of achievement, recognition, or wealth. Indeed, there is no better picture of the most common conception of an ideal retirement after a lifetime of labor than Marx and Engels’s description of a society where “each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus

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makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic” (1846, 47). The agonists among us may worry about how many fishing trophies our imagined communist has won or whether their criticism would even be published (much less in a top-tier journal). What an unvirtuous existence! But how happily so! It may not seem an ideal life to Nietzsche’s higher types and his readers who pretend to be them, but even a modest version of it would be paradise for the vast majority of us, particularly the working people that socialists claim to serve—when not busy swinging wildly between visions of ascetic and luxury communism. A Nietzschean socialism would not be one of pale saints or dashing revolutionaries, but a world made safe for freer versions of the simple pleasures of nobler versions of ordinary people. Nevertheless, even a free life of simple, quiet pleasures requires the protection of power, and power is material, grounded in proportionately equal social recognition and resources. So, a Nietzschean egalitarianism, although decidedly not aimed at status or wealth, must still be, in some sense, greedier than traditional kinds. If traditional egalitarianisms fail to maintain power equality and non-domination, it is because they are too narrow, excluding one another out of devotion to a single concept of fairness, attuned to only one kind of social game they would have us be prepared to play. But if our goal is to lift the sphere of life out of the sphere of games, if our goal is the freedom of play beyond labor and necessity, then the right answer to the question “equality of what?” is, again, Marlon Brando’s “Waddaya got?” The egalitarian toolbox should include any and every form of equality that can preserve flexibility in our ability to find, maintain, restore, or replace relationships of power equality. Indeed, this greediness for any strategy that protects the sphere of play from the sphere of labor might be the defining feature of the kind of socialism that amor fati requires—and its most striking difference from the dominant historical and contemporary varieties. To determine how close the rhetoric, policies, and strategies of the contemporary left are to a Nietzschean socialism, we might ask: does it mostly give or take? add or subtract? affirm or condemn? laugh or lecture? praise or blame? protect or

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punish? play or work? Does it resemble recess or school—or worse, Sunday school? Does it expand the field of play or of  labor—whether material, cultural, moral, or political? As the protection of a noble rather than slavish egalitarianism, a Nietzschean socialism would be a noble rather than vulgar socialism, rejecting all forms of leveling, building equality of power through the maximization of everyone’s drives, abilities, and opportunities, using distributive means to raise everyone’s resources, opportunities, and abilities to the level of the strongest (Miyasaki 2014). Marx, by the way, agrees with Nietzsche’s condemnation of leveling, for it is characteristic of the capitalist as much as the slave: “The thoughts of every piece of private property as such are at least turned against richer private property in the form of envy and the desire to level everything down; hence these feelings in fact constitute the essence of competition. The crude communist is merely the culmination of this envy and desire to level down on the basis of a preconceived minimum” (1844, 295). All of this leads us to an important consequence for our understanding of contemporary politics: Nietzsche’s metapolitics implies that the most important division in political theory cuts across the grain of our dominant political categories of conservative and progressive, reactionary and radical, right and left. The more important dividing line—one that no longer conveniently serves as shorthand for “bad” and “good” politics—is between a moralist, conservative politics that grounds the political order in a foundational normative authority and an immoralist, radical politics that begins in the recognition of the absence of any foundational normative authority. On this view, the dichotomies of conservative and progressive, right and left, collapse, since both are predominantly moralist in principle and conservative in practice. On the one hand, any progressive or left politics that presupposes a foundational normative authority should count as conservative, since its goal is to conform the organization of social life to fixed, a priori moral principles that can be known with certainty, preserving a form of life that corresponds to true justice or goodness. On the other hand, any reactionary or right politics that demands a return to an alternative social order based in the rejection rather than embrace of normative authority—for, example, Nietzsche’s own aristocratic radicalism—is mischaracterized as conservative, since it wishes to demolish and replace rather than to preserve, and without appeal to knowable, final, or a priori moral principles, acknowledging its ultimately arbitrariness and contingency as

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an effect of power, the imposition of an order rather than conformity to a natural one. Notice another interesting implication: the rejection of political realism is revealed to be a conservative position. So, what is the difference between a Nietzschean socialism and historical and contemporary versions? The principal difference is whether we are radical socialists or conservative ones, whether we erect a society in the service of some certainly known, finally established good—a god: human, social, scientific, or otherwise—or whether we instead strive for a society where we can just play like gods, because there are no higher gods to put us back to work. Conservatism seeks to create societies that successfully sort good and evil, societies grounded in meritorious, moralized labor. Anti-conservatism seeks to create societies beyond good and evil, societies that replace morality with balance, merit with joy, and labor with play—or at least replace laboriousness with a more playful form of labor. We can now more directly contrast Nietzschean socialism to its principal historical competitors, Marxist communism and anarchism. We have already seen that Nietzschean socialism is anti-dialectical. The world is at bottom material activity, and material activity is at bottom a tendency toward neither true equilibrium nor true disequilibrium but toward tension equilibrium: power inequalities tend to produce equalities that accidentally produce new inequalities. Slaves tend to overthrow masters in ways that tend to create new masters. No social order can change that. No final state can be reached in which the power equilibrium achieved by socialism becomes a true equilibrium maintained without the intervention of the state. The end of history can be achieved by neither anarchism’s moralized evolutionary theory of freely organized labor nor through the elimination of privately owned means of production or economic classes. The failure of anarchism and communism is ultimately identical to the failure of Nietzsche’s radical aristocratism. Reactionary politics, like slave morality, is not a product of mind but matter. It is not a mistake, a false consciousness created by priest, capitalist, or the state, that can be remedied by creating new values and a new consciousness. It is a necessary material effect of human social activity: where there is society, there will be inequality, and where there is inequality, there will be resentment, slave morality, and the non-dialectical return of Hegel’s master and servant. On the one hand, anti-egalitarian societies, whether the ancien régime, radical aristocracy, or capitalism, will always end in revolution. On the other hand, dialectical idealists, whether Hegel, Marx, Bakunin, Kropotkin, or Fukuyama, will always lead us right back to anti-egalitarian societies.

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Communism’s distinctive failure is exactly Nietzsche’s: any dictatorship, whether aristocratic, capitalist, or proletarian, is an engine of ressentiment that regenerates class systems and slave morality. At their worst, Nietzsche and Marx are symbiotic opponents, both trapped together forever in Hegelian saṃsāra—even if, at their best, both point us toward the exit. This, too, is a problem rooted in Marx’s idealist psychology: he does not recognize, as Nietzsche does, that resentment depends not primarily on the frustration of material or spiritual need but of the feeling of power, not on the quantitative facts of exploitation and unfreedom or even their qualitative effect of alienation but the qualitative feeling of domination: our  thwarted  desire for equal  resistance rather than for  reconciliation. Consequently, socialism can never make the leap to communism. And it is truly a leap in Kierkegaard’s (1843) religious sense: a teleological suspension of the political, grounded in faith in the absolute nature of goodness, in the rationality of the real. A dictatorship of the proletariat really is, exactly as Marx insists, nothing more than the inverse of the dictatorship of capital—bound to reproduce, in inverted form, the same resentment and revolt. Nietzsche fails because aristocracy is a machine for manufacturing slaves and revolutions. Marx fails because revolutions are machines for manufacturing counterrevolutions and new masters. So, socialism cannot be exchanged for anarchism and communism. It can free us from the unfreedom of labor only by no longer pretending to free us from the unfreedom of force: the continual political reintroduction of power equilibrium against power’s continual reintroduction of disequilibrium. Tragic realism is also this conclusion: the state you will have with you always, so be sure your politics, no matter how well-meaning, does not protect a miserable one.3 But this leads to a counterintuitive conclusion. Even if Nietzschean socialism is more radical in its foundations than many moralist varieties of left politics, it cannot be “revolutionary” in the usual sense. The idea of the revolution as a singular historical event, a process that begins with the decisive overthrow of capitalism and ends in the 3  Compare Nancy S. Love, who says Nietzsche “agrees with Marx that the social whole cannot exist without cooperation. However, …domination creates and preserves that cooperation” (1986, 175). This is misleading, since it falsely equates the state and force with domination when, for Nietzsche, the only kind of freedom that exists is inseparable from resistance, constraint, and the feeling of force. A Nietzschean socialism implies a permanent contradiction contained by the force of a permanent democratic-socialist state: a state that uses democratic force against violence or domination, just as in the manifold soul a modest hierarchy of the drives preserved by the mutual counterforce of the drives to one another makes possible the tension equilibrium of the manifold soul.

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withering away of the state, is inseparable from the covert idealism, antirealism, and anti-materialism of communism and anarchism. It is the quintessentially theological myth of the end of history, in Kierkegaard’s (1846) description, the absolute paradox of the eternal entering time, that would require resolving the source of all material contradiction—for Nietzsche, the end of the will to power, of vitality as such, of life. The idea of revolution in that sense is the pinnacle of conservatism, the fable of a final, rapturous orgy of violence that precedes the establishment of heaven on earth, the invention of a “true world” based on “opposition to the actual world” and “moral-optical illusion” (TI III.6). A socialism of the revolution really is, as Nietzsche suspected, a new Platonism for the people, a utopian socialism. Of course, Marx is right that the unreason of capital cannot be overcome by reason but only by force. But domination can be overcome only through power equilibrium, continual counter-force, never through one final, redemptive force. Counterforces against domination are no more intrinsically reasonable, no less prone to disequilibrium or free from the danger of domination. We are the products, not the guides, of the play of natural forces, which just are the continual reintroduction of contradictions. What is forgotten in the conventional notion of “the revolution” is its moral theological function: the demand for the sacrifice of this-worldly happiness in exchange for a promised end to every contradiction (a euphemism for death, as every joke about the boredom of heaven confirms), an end to be achieved in a final act of cleansing violence (the homicidal suicidal solution to nihilism that defines contemporary life, as we are reminded weekly with each new mass shooting). The violence of the revolution, in contrast to the force of a revolutionary state, expresses the desire to use force to end force, once and for all, reflecting a weariness with life as force—as contradiction, resistance, opposition, will to power.4 A politics of the revolution—in effect, of revolution as the end of politics rather than a revolutionary politics—is not politics but morality, a marketing ploy and sales pitch that asks us to store up our treasures not in this 4  This is the true message of Samuel Beckett’s much used and always abused call to “fail better.” It is not an office motivational poster calling us to excellence, but a picture of the Dorian Grays who own and run the offices, a reflection of the deadly nihilism their culture of excellence inadvertently spreads. The command is to improve by the criteria of failure, to successfully destroy success. What counts as failing “better” is finality: “to throw up for good,” to vomit out every last contradiction and cause of vitality, to arrive, once and for all, “Where neither for good. Good and all” (1983, 90).

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world but in the next, sacrificing today’s happiness for an endlessly deferred tomorrow. But without the promise of eternal life, it’s a hard sell and one that punishes those who buy into the pyramid scheme more than those who run it. What every revolutionary theology denies and runs to grief upon is that humans are neither good nor evil but merely bad. We are operating systems distinguished only by hardware, location, and history— concrete living creatures finally and always driven by power, not morality, by play, not labor, by desire, not its sacrifice. There will always be a few suckers who buy what the missionaries of the revolution are selling, but only enough to keep the church going, never enough to build the kingdom. If, on the contrary, we conceive of revolution not as an event but an activity, then a Nietzschean socialism is revolutionary in a deeper sense: a revolutionary state’s continual political activity of maintaining and restoring a relative, imperfect, and never complete power equilibrium among individuals and groups. Revolution in this sense is not activity toward an end but an end in itself, not a precondition of politics but its substance. Rather than a moment of violence that would finally bring force to an end, a revolutionary politics affirms force and contradiction as the essence of life, using force against force to prevent and minimize violence, using non-­ liberal, anti-capitalist means to impose and maintain the material conditions of democracy, preserving a sphere of freedom and play from the domination of necessity and labor.

3  How Would Nietzschean Political Practice Be Different from the Contemporary Left’s? To study evil in order to produce good is not to study good itself. A good phenomenon being given, I shall seek out its cause. —Comte de Lautréamont, Poésies We should be indifferent to good and evil but, when we are indifferent, that is to say when we project the light of our attention equally on both, the good gains the day. —Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

The goal of this book has been to develop a left political theory from Nietzsche’s metapolitics, using his metapolitics to critically reconstruct traditional conceptions of rights, democracy, and equality in a way that

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might make them serve as a better foundation for socialist politics. As a theoretic foundation, it is meant only to point toward new ways of approaching socialist theory and practice. However, I’d like to conclude with an overview of some broader practical principles that underscore the distance between contemporary political practice and the novel directions a Nietzschean left politics might lead us. Many of the distinctions I will draw differentiate a Nietzschean politics from right as well as left politics, but my focus will be on its differences from the present-day left. But in what sense of “the left”? I will use “left” in the broadest sense that it is used in practice—particularly in American practice. One reason for this is that finer shades of the distinction presuppose the answer to a question in dispute: should left politics prioritize issues of class or identity, and should its egalitarianism prioritize equality in distribution or recognition? For example, the categories of the moderate, progressive, and socialist left are defined by their answers to those questions. Moderate leftists (for example, members of the American Democratic Party, equivalent European centrist parties, and most self-­ described liberals) overlap with the political center, holding right or right-­ leaning positions on class, economics, and foreign policy but leftist positions on issues of social justice. In contrast, progressives (e.g., proponents of twentieth-century European social democracy or US New Deal politics) rarely overlap with the center or right, but stop short of socialist views on economic issues. In practice, however, some moderate leftists call themselves progressive or far-left in virtue of their positions on social justice alone, while some socialists would, in contrast, define them as centrists or on the right in virtue of their positions on class issues alone. So, I will contrast Nietzsche’s leftism to other forms in a broad sense that includes all three of these narrower distinctions because, first, I believe Nietzsche can help us answer the question of how to prioritize the issues that distinguish them and, second, Nietzsche’s distinction between radical and conservative politics cuts across all three categories. Indeed, his conception of radical politics as one ungrounded in a priori sources of authority and accomplished through breeding rather than persuasion will help us identify the shared conservative element in all three narrower forms of leftism. That is why I will intentionally privilege the American usage of “the left” despite very good historical and theoretical reasons for thinking it inaccurately conflates center and left: because it isn’t entirely false. The American usage is false only to the degree that it treats the center as further left than it really is, but it is correct in its intuition that the left is closer

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to the center, and the center closer to the right, than we might like to believe. So, throughout, my characterization of contemporary left politics is intended to draw out troubling similarities between right, center, and left, and to raise the suspicion that their finely graded distinction is misleading, concealing conservative tendencies shared by the entire field of the left, broadly construed. Let’s take as our starting point the slogan so anathema to Nietzsche (as much for its descriptive truth as its normative implications): ni dieu ni maître.5 This slogan captures the three key features of his metapolitics and political theory as I have reconstructed it in both volumes of this project: tragic realism, immoralism, and anti-utopianism. It is a tragic realism because it recognizes we are at the mercy of natural powers, without even the gods of reason or artistic creativity to save us. It is immoralist because it tells us, first, that we are not gods even over ourselves and, second, that there is no a priori legitimacy for any political authority. Finally, it is anti-­ utopian in its acknowledgment that we will never cease to be at the mercy of natural powers; we can only, as natural powers among others, strive to maintain an equilibrium with them. So, a Nietzschean left politics can be negatively defined as a socialism that is distinctive in its realism, immoralism, and anti-utopianism—its refusal to act and pretend as if there were gods or masters. But to really underline the contrast between the historical and contemporary left, let’s make this more precise. It is not just they who are not gods or masters; I am not and we are not gods or masters. Any political practice that acts as if I or we occupy places of legitimate authority fails this central test—as, remember, Nietzsche’s own political program does. He shares a central mistake with many on the left: the belief that if gods do not exist, it is necessary to invent them, whether in the form of the cultural genius against the last man, the educated meritocrat over the dangerous yokel, or the enlightened vanguard over the ideologue. In short, the fundamental implication of a Nietzschean metapolitics for a socialist political theory is that socialism must become pessimist. I am intentionally using “pessimist” in the ordinary, misleading sense that demands we be either optimists or pessimists, because it demands we view human nature as intrinsically either good or evil. A philosophy that examines human nature and political possibility beneath and beyond good and evil will inevitably conform more to the ordinary sense of pessimism than 5

 On Nietzsche’s suspect ambivalence toward this phrase, see NI 8.

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optimism, and so as a very general characterization, it is the better, because slightly less misleading, of imperfect options. Let’s consider the implications of these three features of Nietzschean politics for contemporary political practice. Realism, immoralism, and anti-utopianism can be seen as rejections of three institutions—and corresponding psychologies or mindsets—that have historically characterized much of political practice, both right and left. Realism rejects the institution of the police and the politics of policing and surveillance; immoralism rejects the institution of the church and the politics of preaching and prescribing; and anti-utopianism rejects the institution of the state and the politics of punishing and proscribing. The negative aim of left political practice is, then: don’t act like police, priest, or prince, and don’t accept any politics in which the path to the future is controlled by police, priests, or princes. That includes, of course, revolutionaries, political parties, and proletarian as well as capitalist dictatorships. Or, in the spirit of Michel Foucault in his introduction to Gilles Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: “The strategic adversary is fascism…. And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini…but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us” (1972, Preface, xiii).6 In opposition to the politics and psychology of policing, preaching, and punishing, a Nietzschean left endorses in both method and final aim an absolute affirmation, the acceptance of structural power rather than personal discipline as the foundation of social change; an absolute absolution, the elimination of strong claims of praise and blame and strong practices of reward and punishment; and an absolute liberation from party, cultural, and national politics of exclusion, borders, and boundaries.7

6  With the caveat that this is not, as Foucault suggests, equivalent to the command, “Do not become enamored of power” (xiv). On the contrary, become more enamored of power in its true form as play, as pleasure in resistance for its own sake, without achievement, merit, or reward. Do not, on the other hand, become enamored of the states and distances that power produces as an after-effect and that bring the play of power to its end. Do not, in other words, become enamored of merit, virtue, or excellence, the standard forms of recognition, measure, and meaning that are offered as compensation for a world in which we are always as powerless in relation to one as we are powerful in relation to another. 7  For a broader, non-political treatment of the themes of affirmation, absolution, and liberation as the foundational commitments of Nietzsche’s final works, see NI 2-3.

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Nietzschean Socialism as a Tragic Realist Politics Plato’s utopian basic tune, continued on in our own day by the socialists, rests upon a defective knowledge of man: he lacked a history of the moral sensations, an insight into the origin of the good and useful qualities of the human soul. Like the whole of antiquity he believed in good and evil as in white and black: thus in a radical difference between good and evil men, good and bad qualities. —The Wanderer and His Shadow 285 The age is enlightened…. why is it that we still remain barbarians? There must be something present in the dispositions of men—since it does not lie in things—which obstructs the reception of truth, however brightly it may shine, and its acceptance, however actively it may convince. —Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Eighth Letter The wrong way of seeking. The attention fixed on a problem. Another phenomenon due to horror of the void. —Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

Now let’s compare each of these three characteristics of Nietzschean leftism to present-day political practice. Even the most sympathetic observer can hardly fail to notice that contemporary left discourse is permeated—often as much as right political discourse is—by the conservative moral language and categories of “evil” and “evil-doers” (to use the term of an American president whose reputation has recently been rehabilitated by the center-left). It is a discourse often preoccupied with questions about how to sort, isolate, and treat those infected by evil, asking which ones are evil, how much evil is too evil, what should we do about or to the evil, how we should approach them, if at all, how much distance to keep, and so on. Little wonder that this moral-political logic of evil-as-virus transformed so easily into the hyper-prophylactic politics of the COVID-19 pandemic (hyper not in their reasonable, even insufficiently stringent, safety measures, but in their hyper-moralistic framing and promotion, which likely reduced rather than increased cooperation with them). Tragic realism, in contrast, begins by affirming the absolute innocence of becoming, the total non-responsibility, in the deeper moral and philosophical sense, of every human being for what they are, think, and do. This does not, of course, mean denying “responsibility” in the everyday, practical, and metaphysically neutral sense of expecting people to act consistently

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with values they already deeply hold, a responsibility based in what they are rather than over what they are. Nor does it mean denying the existence of evil in the most useful and metaphysically neutral sense: actions that are extraordinarily bad and whose motives are either incomprehensible or seem to include harm for harm’s sake. In fact, in that sense, only realism can coherently claim that a person is rather than merely does evil. For only if there is a deep ground of responsibility—a capacity to freely will the good— can there be part of our humanity that cannot be assigned a fixed value. If we are free, then yesterday’s greatest villain might cease to be so today, and today’s greatest saint may surpass them in evil tomorrow. Tragic realism affirms that our deep character is fate and that our changes to ourselves are superficial ones that reflect who we are rather than fundamentally alter it. It is entirely possible, then, for a person to be deeply and incorrigibly evil— without, for all that, deserving blame or punishment. Being evil is, like everything else, a matter of good or bad moral luck. As a political practice, this has three troubling consequences. First, there are evil people in the world. Second, they are nonetheless innocent, undeserving of blame. Finally, they are necessary; they cannot be directly changed or even successfully resisted. All of this suggests that the contemporary left’s politics of viral evil as something we contract, spread, and can resist through containment and non-exposure—in other words, through policing—is misguided. In this respect, the contemporary left resembles Nietzsche’s early cultural politics. A cultural politics acknowledges that our character is shaped by involuntary discipline, not just by conscious, rational processes of education and enlightenment. However, although it recognizes our vulnerability to irrationality, cultural politics mistakenly believes irrationality can be defeated by the influence of good over bad culture. Tragic realism, in contrast, acknowledges that there is no person prior to or independent of the irrational process of the social-political production of subjects. We are the virus—or as Alfred Jarry says, “the soul is a tic.” For this reason, it rejects the core belief upon which the politics of policing depends: the belief in a deeper, truer, and purer self that can be protected from evil. It denies the comforting belief that good and evil are not what we are but merely what we do, something fundamentally distinct from us, like a virus that we contract, spread, or cure. In this way, the contemporary left often shares the same logic of purity found across the conservative spectrum from the outright racism and xenophobia of the right to the center’s proudly “tough” policies on law

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enforcement and immigration. Perhaps our political era is not so much one of polarization, of consolidation and repulsion, as one of quarantine, of contraction and recoil, a mutually enforcing paranoia about exposure to evil, rooted in our shared idealist and conservative moral prejudices about agency freedom. Our lack of democracy, of a people, is that of an atomization into fragments, a balkanization with merely apparent polarization as side effect. We are not so much a divided people as one united in a feeling of powerlessness that leads us to hand our power over to dualistic ruling factions that increasingly share, in legislation if not rhetoric, the same politics: the redistribution of all resources and all labor value to capital, the military, and the police. So, the contemporary left remains stuck in the tradition of enlightenment politics.8 On the enlightenment view—which is also, of course, the ancient Socratic view that “to know the good is to do the good”—because the virus of evil is rooted in ignorance, it dies in sunlight. So, we who are rational and knowledgeable remain free to expose or protect ourselves and each other by staying alert, keeping watch, being on guard, identifying the infected, and erecting barriers to transmission. In other words, the counterpart of the politics of policing is surveillance. It is our task as the enlightened, then, to stay pure of, distant from, and out of communication with the sleepy mob and to protect the currently uninfected by quarantining them. This is not, it should be emphasized, an entirely mistaken picture. It’s true that the political right is supported and strengthened by the promulgation of evil ideologies, and it’s true that culture, media, and entertainment expose us to dangerous ideologies in involuntary, unconscious, and subtle forms that are aptly compared to viral infection. But there is a practical problem: this framework requires a deep and reliable distinction between the unenlightened and the enlightened, between those who are asleep and those who have the ability and moral authority to wake them. The false implication is that we are largely either awake or asleep. Nietzsche’s hard incompatibilism suggests, to the contrary, that enlightenment is always perspectival, partial, and conditional—not something we are, but a position that we temporarily occupy. I see truth, recognize evidence, or am open to reasons only to a degree in keeping with the values and interests of my deeper character, while that character is the product of 8  On the link between Enlightenment rationalism and the morality of improvement that Nietzsche’s immoralism opposes, see NI 3.1.

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the conditions of my feelings of power and happiness—of my place in the world and only for as long as I occupy it. This is Nietzsche’s early anticipation, by the way, of what will later be developed, partly through Marxist thought, as standpoint epistemology: what I can and cannot see depends on where I stand. But Nietzsche’s perspectivism emphasizes that every standpoint establishes a field of vision by excluding a field of possible vision: every enlightenment is a counter-enlightenment, and we are alert to one truth only by drawing attention away from others. There is, then, no globally enlightened self, no reliable division of the world into the waking and the sleeping and, more important, no standpoint outside of standpoints from which we could reliably compare the epistemic advantages and disadvantages of each.9 In Nietzsche’s metaphor, the soul is a social structure, one that is populated, as Plato and Freud warned, by an ever-changing cast of more dreamers than seers, devils than angels, irrationality than rationality. It is true that the sleep of reason produces monsters, but it is also true that it’s dangerous to wake sleepwalkers—not only because the abruptly awoken often resemble zombies but also because, as Nietzsche warned, the greatest danger of fighting monsters is becoming one. Nothing is more monstrous than sleepwalkers who believe they are awake.10 If, in recent years, common wisdom has increasingly accepted the Marxist notion that injustice is systemic, able to function independently of its individual participants, the full consequences of that view have not been sufficiently absorbed. If, as Nietzsche insists, “a person belongs to the 9  In this respect, the contemporary use of the language of “woke” (both positive and pejorative) to refer to critical attention by anyone to injustice in general and to the particular contents of political positions misses an important nuance in its original use in relation to racism: it is a positional awareness, available to and primarily for the protection of precisely those who are most vulnerable to a particular form of injustice. It is only in a situation, in respect to a specific form of oppression, that one can successfully attain this kind of alertness to injustice, not globally. And it is less a positive political position than a negative activity of strategic positioning: a clearer insight into how to effectively be on one’s guard against a particular kind of injustice—less a supply of political answers than a demand for them, less a call to account than a call to arms. 10  Compare Amy Allen’s call for critical theorists to “draw on psychoanalysis to understand the affective energies that fuel authoritarian movements” in her critique of an “overly moralizing or dismissive stance” towards right-wing populist movements: “should we ignore the fact that the awareness that ‘we’ think ‘they’ are backward and regressive is at least a part of what sustains the hatred of elites that fuels authoritarian politics?” (2021, 191). See also Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi (2018).

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whole, a person is only in context of the whole…. there is nothing outside the whole” (TI VI.8), then we are inseparable from the system. There is no reliable way to divide human beings into those who mostly enable it, those who mostly suffer from it, and those who mostly escape it and resist it. The tragic side of realism is the realization that a left politics cannot be led by the enlightened or consist primarily of the propagation of enlightenment, the definitive waking of the populace. Every politics is by and for the groggy and the sleepwalkers, who can only prepare the conditions for degrees of a greater but never absolute awakening. In other words, tragic realism entails anti-vanguardism.11 We are all a mix of true and false consciousness; we are all integral to the system. None of us is worthy of the kingdom, and there’s no individual, class, or population to lead us. Rather than policing, surveilling, and sorting words, works, individuals, and groups into categories of contagion and prophylactic, we would more effectively focus our attention and activity elsewhere. This is a largely negative distinguishing feature. If the characteristic activity of politics today is hate-watching, on the one hand, the obsessive policing and surveilling of evils, and protective incantation on the other, the compulsive pointing out and naming of evils, then a Nietzschean politics would take the form of an active non-policing, the cultivation of the discipline to look away from evil considered as separable, as something essentially distinct from the good. Recall, for example, the way he traces the beneficial and harmful aspects of both noble and slave morality to a common root—not just the will to power but the common political structure that simultaneously shapes each class. It is that common root, the material conditions that shape possible political orders—the pre-moral, uncategorizable, and deeper level from which both good and evil spring—that is the target of political change, rather than the level on which distinguishable goods and evils occur. To turn attention away from individuals and toward the material conditions that produce them is to affirm them as inseparable parts of the causal and temporal history of the whole, to focus on the potential beauty of that whole rather than the ugliness of its momentary parts. This is the first positive aim of a Nietzschean politics: to practice politics in a way that is in keeping with 11  As described by Lenin in What is To Be Done?, vanguardism requires the training of “political leaders able to guide all the manifestations of the universal struggle, able to at the right time ‘dictate a positive program of action’ for the discontented” (1902, 117). A Nietzschean politics might, to be sure, have something like an avant-garde, but not in the form of a party, whether literally or in spirit.

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absolute affirmation (Bejahung) of our existing world as a whole, even as we seek to deeply transform it. The individual who affirms absolutely does not deny or ignore evil but accepts it as partial and temporary in order to ensure that it is only partial and temporary, thus achieving “a cheerful and trusting fatalism in the belief that only the individual is reprehensible, that everything is redeemed and affirmed (Bejaht) in the whole—he does not negate any more…But a belief like this is the highest of all possible beliefs: I have christened it with the name Dionysus” (TI IX.49). Nietzschean Socialism as an Immoralist Politics “Enemy” you should say, but not “villain”; “sick man” you should say, but not “scoundrel”; “fool” you should say, but not “sinner.” And you, red judge, if you were to speak aloud all the things you have already done in your thoughts, then everyone would cry: “Away with this filth and poisonous worm!”… But this does not want to get to your ears: it harms your good people, you say to me. But what matter your good people to me! There is much about your good people that makes me disgusted, and verily not their evil. I wish they had a madness from which they would perish, like this pale criminal! Indeed, I wish their madness were called truth or loyalty or justice—but they have their virtue in order to live long and in pitiful contentment. —Thus Spoke Zarathustra I.6, “On the Pale Criminal” Your high-handed display of regulating words about humankindness and responsible conduct in the face of such a tyrant would just be a way of showing off your beauty at the expense of his ugliness. This is called plaguing others—and he who plagues others will surely be plagued in return. —Zhuangzi, “In the Human World” We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will. —Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace It is a matter of confession, and nothing more. In order to secure remission of its sins, mankind has only to declare them for what they actually are. —Karl Marx, Letter to Arnold Ruge, September 1843

This leads us to the second key feature of a Nietzschean left politics: immoralism. Realism follows Nietzsche’s call: “I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse the accusers. Let looking away be my only negation!” (GS 276). It is an affirmation, a “yes-saying,” that proceeds

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negatively by tearing its eyes away from preoccupation with and reactive subordination to ugliness and evil. But it does not reject the enlightenment politics of vanguardism for complacency. First, to look away from ugliness is not inattention or denial but a strategic attention that presupposes we have already spotted and remain alert to it. Second, to look away is also to turn our attention toward something else. Notice that this heightened attention toward something is paradoxically also a heightened form of attention to what we look away from: I must know where the ugly is in order not to dwell upon it or to focus only on those aspects of it that can be transformed. Finally, to not participate in the practice of policing is not passivity but an alternate form of production: “to learn more and more how to see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful in them—thus I will be one of those who make things beautiful” (italics mine).12 By averting our attention from the moral level of phenomena, the contingent choices of individuals and groups, and toward the pre-moral level of necessity, we are better able to actively produce beauty. Looking away is not an aesthetic covering up of evil but a constructive strategy for truly transforming it, a strategy that must first overcome the dyspeptic compulsion to wallow in it, mull it over, and condemn it to no avail. An immoralist politics must constantly resist the recurring collapse of politics into morality, the practice of the priest. The priest, you’ll remember from the Genealogy, is a member of the aristocratic class who does not cure suffering but invests it with meaning in order to manipulate the underclass into avenging the knightly class on its behalf. Similarly, the dominant voices and leaders in the contemporary left come from the aristocratic class, and they often seem more concerned with exchanging the existing political and economic elite for a more palatable one, giving the underclass the symbolic compensations of a more meaningful suffering, someone who 12  Again, in this way, an immoralist approach underlines an important aspect of the original usage of “woke” in the critique of racism. It was not a moral position the privileged took from a position outside of a system of injustice, but a strategic position taken by victims within systems of injustice. So, it was not a broad moral attitude but a situated attitude of self-preservation—a strategic form of attention intended to protect life, amor fati, and morale, in order to continue to politically fight injustice, rather than a moral substitute for that fight—as in Huddie William Ledbetter’s (Leadbelly’s) 1938 lyric to “Scottsboro Boys”: “I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there—best stay woke, keep their eyes open” (1965). Against enlightenment ethics, far from contrasting those who have and have not escaped the allegorical cave, it designated awareness of one’s state of oppression, an attunement to its dangers and constraints, allowing for more strategic organization within it and opposition to it.

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feels their pain and a team to root for, rather than giving them—to name only a few bones the left regularly gestures at throwing—effective climate policy, substantive police reform, decarceration, decriminalization of marijuana, universal healthcare, free college education, a living wage, loan cancellation, or pandemic relief. Their moralist form of politics has all of the aesthetic attributes of the church: the constant preaching of good against evil detached from any discussion of substantial material means to that end, the constant proselytizing, the call to join the party, donate, and do one’s duty at the polls, along with constant demands for confession and rituals of penance, celebrations of conversion when someone joins the fold, and recriminations against heretics who stray. A Nietzschean socialism would attempt to purge its politics entirely of substantive moral language of praise and blame and vigorously oppose the accompanying rituals of moral sorting: identifying which actions, persons, and groups are primarily or truly blameworthy or praiseworthy. In the search for political solutions, it would seek the primary causes of political problems not in people but in material conditions, in the social-political structures and spaces they inhabit, the standpoints where they stand, the ground of their perspectives and values—in Nietzsche’s horticultural version of the metaphor of Züchtung, the soil from which they grow and the social, cultural, and political greenhouses that shape and constrain them. From standpoint epistemology follows an incompatibilism about responsibility: if I am enlightened in virtue of my position, then enlightenment is not a virtue; it is moral luck rather than merit. But then unenlightenment is not a moral demerit, either. Note that this is not a moral or epistemic but practical objection to praise and blame. There is nothing normatively wrong with praising and blaming, nor is there anything factually wrong with finding evil repugnant and worthy of indignation. But it may be a practical error. To stare compulsively at evil is to look away from its source: the ground conditions that must be transformed and the foundations on which the good can be built. To preach is to try to convert precisely those who cannot be converted and to repel precisely those who can. If a tragic realist socialism works toward the goal of absolute affirmation, then an immoralist socialism works toward the goal of absolute absolution (Erlösung). And if a tragic realist politics is non-policing and non-surveilling because it looks away from evil, an immoralist politics is non-proselytizing, non-preaching, and non-prescriptive. Instead of taking rolls and administering tests, taking names and taking score, it gives away.

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It stops asking what people deserve, stops dividing them into good and evil camps, tailoring policies by moral assessment and means-tested need, in order to better maximize the opportunities, resources, and abilities of everyone. An easy test, once again, for this aspect of a socialist politics is to simply ask: does it add more than it subtracts, does it give more than it takes? The end goal of socialism is not, after all, to distribute according to our just deserts or even according to our labor value or our needs but to universally maximize amor fati by promoting universally greater social power in equilibrium. Given the self-undermining dialectic Nietzsche identifies between nobility and slavishness, inequality and resentment, this will often require giving undeserved rewards to the unjust in order to better protect and promote the power of their victims against resentment and backlash.13 The Marxist problem of exploitation, for example, is not that workers deserve more and capitalists deserve less, but that the inequality of their power ensures the misery of both. Socialism seeks to end capitalism’s universal distribution of misery, not distribute misery more efficiently or fairly. In its noblest form, it produces a power equilibrium through unequal but universal addition, not through differential subtraction. We must let evil go unpunished, even rewarded, whenever doing so may hasten its extinction. Of course, unpunished does not mean unresisted or unfought. It is, after all, a characteristically conservative maneuver to conflate resistance with punishment and justice with retaliation. Perhaps we should treat the political right and its supporters in roughly the same way that Scandinavia’s open prisons deal with many of its criminals, including many dangerous ones. We might sometimes take our—and the public’s—attention away from them, leaving them in peace, free to come and go from cultural island prisons of their own making, giving them more than they need or deserve, depriving them only of fodder for their political machines of resentment and reaction. Of course, this will not completely solve the problem of political injustice any more than more humane, open prisons 13  Compare Nussbaum’s suggestion that a society that follows the capabilities approach to justice—a much more modest kind of egalitarianism than a Nietzschean socialism would require—might more successfully reduce reactive emotions that are “impediments to compassion” such as envy, shame, and disgust (2001, 423). See also Connolly’s discussion of how “contemporary liberalism is an object of public resentment,” particularly in the case of differential rather than universal entitlements, “those points where its welfarism and its individualism intersect” (1991, 77).

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completely solve the problem of crime, but it might, as a deterrent to reactionism, be part of the solution, just as less punitive forms of incarceration might, as deterrents to recidivism, play an effective role in the broader task of decarceration and, ultimately, abolition. The left would do well to critically scrutinize the troubling resemblance between our attitudes toward political enemies and typical conservative attitudes toward criminality—including the conservative tendency to equate criminality with, and police it through the boundaries of, broadly drawn cultural, social, religious, economic, and geographic categories and stereotypes. We might even measure the strength of a socialist politics by how much its response to the moral crimes of the right, such as classism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, exemplify the same measured, less punitive, more humane approach the left has historically taken toward legal crimes—whether minor, as in the misnomer of “illegal” immigration, or grave, as in the case of international terrorism or foreign state crimes that might lead to military intervention.14 So, we should ask: in our opposition to the moral crimes of the political right, do we resemble conservatives in their standard approach to other forms of crime? Do our political practices focus on community protection and individual rehabilitation or on exclusion, boundary-making, policing, and retribution? Do we primarily give attention to and place blame on individual criminals or on the organizations that use them? Are we willing, when in the interest of long-term justice, to sometimes allow moral criminals to get away without consequences—to use a favorite word of conservatives—or at least with undeservedly mild ones? 14  It is tempting to dismiss leftist versions of the logic of policing, along with its essentializing categories of criminality, as aberrations of either the right-wing tendencies of the center-left or the revolutionary excesses of the Soviet experiment. However, the Marxist tradition has always betrayed a moral-aesthetic disgust with poverty and a tendency to conceptually police the boundaries of criminality, to distinguish the redeemable from the deplorable among the poor by their relation to labor and law, particularly in its portrayal of the lumpenproletariat: “alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème” (Marx 1852, 149). That final point—written by a bourgeois-bohemian rather than a proletarian—is another reason to suspect a better socialism would prefer a real avant-garde to a pretend vanguard.

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Nietzsche’s word for this immoralist attitude and aim is Erlösung, usually translated as “salvation” or “redemption.” I prefer absolution. We absolve the world not through saviors but their rejection: “only this begins to restore the innocence of becoming… The concept of ‘God’ has been the biggest objection to existence so far… We reject God, we reject the responsibility in God: this is how we begin to redeem the world” (TI VI.8). Like Erlösung, “absolution” suggests the loosening of a knot or the solving of a problem, a disappearance of the illusion of evil rather than salvation’s suggestion of rescue by some god or vanguard or redemption’s presumption of a real debt that must be paid. Absolution is not debt repayment but a denial of, a canceling of all debts: “we immoralists in particular are trying as hard as we can to rid the world of the concepts of guilt and punishment and cleanse psychology, history, nature, and social institutions and sanctions of these concepts, the most radical opponents we face are the theologians who use the concept of the ‘moral world order’ to keep infecting the innocence of becoming with ‘punishment’ and ‘guilt’” (TI VI.7). An immoralist politics focuses the project of social change not on classes, groups, or persons, but on the ground that produces them—not on the plant but the soil, the garden, the greenhouse. It looks away from people and toward the material conditions that produce them, then gives away the resources necessary to construct alternative conditions that will shape a better people. Immoralism proceeds from the tragic realist view that the degree of change possible in present individuals is extremely slight. Even those slight changes can happen only within an individual’s existing moral framework rather than, as moralist politics requires, from one moral framework to another—through hypothetical rather than categorical persuasion (NI 3.1). Consequently, we have little choice but to construct our political projects from people as they are rather than as they ought to be—including working with, or at least around, the evil. We’ll see in a moment what this might entail, but first let’s think about what kinds of political projects this allows. In the previous volume, I described Nietzsche’s politics of breeding as a kind of industrialized politics because it acts upon factories rather than products, altering products en masse rather than individually. That is, it modifies the material social-­ political conditions that produce people not as individuals but as types of value agency, types whose core values and drive hierarchy correspond to environmental conditions and forms of life conducive to their feeling of power.

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So, an immoralist politics does not focus primarily on persuading individuals and groups to better values and values systems, morally correcting them toward better political positions. Instead, it focuses on changing the material conditions of life that shape individual and group values and their forms of happiness.15 Immoralist politics focuses on changes to the machinery rather than individually repairing defective products as they roll off the line. It focuses on the environmental conditions that breed political differences, using unchanged existing political agents to produce differences in future political agents. It does not respond to the evil by asking how we can persuade them to be good, focusing only on how we can reduce, contain, or neutralize their impact—although, of course, it does that, too. Nevertheless, its primary concern is one of historical materialist genealogy: where did the evil come from? How did they come about? How do we stop reproducing their type? Take the case of racism. In the short term, there is little chance of curing the majority of existing individuals of the disease, and even the attempt to contain it seems increasingly like a losing battle. To make substantial progress toward eliminating racism, we must look to the origins of the racist individual as a psychological type found in a characteristic ground of social psychology, such as populations, communities, and professions with higher rates of discrimination. But that means—against enlightenment politics—focusing less on learned behaviors than on the circumstances that motivate and reinforce them, the incentives and disincentives that makes racist forms of value agency a greater available source for the feeling of power. It is not enough to note that racism is taught from person to person and generation to generation. That is surely true, but it leads to an infinite regress: if evil originates in evil education, where does the evil educator come from? We must ask why this education succeeds in one instance and not another, why the same evil ideology takes a deeper root in one person, group, place, or time than another. There must be causal reasons why some regions of the country, cities, neighborhoods, professions, and

15  Compare Táíwò on the story of the emperor’s new clothes. We might approach it as a story about false beliefs, leading us to search for a primal falsehood or deficiency in the person: “Something is wrong with the townspeople themselves, these explanations seem to say…. we had better figure out what ails them psychologically or culturally” (2022, 44). However, if their environment systematically incentivizes them to behave as if the emperor is naked, then “the problem, it turns out, isn’t the emperor’s townspeople at all, or even the emperor. It’s the town. It’s the empire” (46).

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individuals exhibit the contagion to a higher degree and that reason cannot ultimately be… yet another person. Nor can the reason simply be the history of racism, for every history itself has a history. If, by analogy, the “virus” is racist ideology, then its cause cannot be the very ideology it causes. There must exist some unique combination of aggravating material circumstances, whether that be geography, climate, diet, resources, population diversity or density, inter-­ regional, national or international relationships, economic opportunities or their lack, constraints on behavior supported by unique material incentives, and so on. In short, racism must originate in something other than itself. Precisely because racism is a practice bound up with an ideology, a worldview that produces an identity or form of value agency—precisely because racism is a kind of personhood, its origin must be in something besides persons. And it is only by changing that origin—whatever set of conditions it turns out to be—that we successfully eliminate it.16 So, the problem of moralist politics, like that of enlightenment politics, is one of means rather than ends. The contemporary left’s attempt to eliminate and contain evil by identifying and quarantining the contaminated to prevent further spread is correct in spirit but ineffective in practice. Preaching, proselytizing, and penance don’t do much. We can neither cure nor protect from evil by shaming it in the shameless. Again, there’s nothing morally wrong with doing so: it’s perfectly appropriate to abhor not only the evil that people do but people who are deeply mired in it. But it is sometimes practically misguided, inadvertently aiding and abetting it. When we look too much at evil, drawing attention and celebrity to it, compulsively selecting, naming, and sorting its perpetrators, we sometimes do their work for them, telling them who their allies are and where

16  Not only does moralist politics fail to eliminate the evil it targets, it also aggravates additional evils that overlap with the targeted problem. For example, Touré Reed argues that the substitution of race-reductionism for class-reductionism has “obscured the political-economic roots of racial disparities, resulting in policy prescriptions that could have only limited value to poor and working-class blacks” (2020, 12). Another risk of moralist politics is that its focus on culpability downplays less intentional causes of structural injustice. As Tommie Shelby argues about “racism of the heart”: “a fundamental problem with a volitional conception of racism—and indeed with many overly moralized analyses of racism—is that it can blind us to the ways in which seemingly ‘innocent’ people can often be unwittingly complicitous in racial oppression” (2002, 418).

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to find them, further organizing, consolidating, and growing our opposition.17 Moreover, since we are among the groggy and the sleepwalking, we often get this sorting process wrong. To the degree we misidentify the good as bad, or the modestly evil as egregiously evil, we do evil’s recruiting work—sometimes by fighting monsters, we create greater monsters. A key implication of Nietzsche’s politics of breeding is that generations don’t deeply change; they only pass away. To breed the good in and breed the evil out is to indirectly fight evil by letting it go more gently into the good night. To directly fight the worst exemplars of our generation rather than disempower them by looking away and giving away—by strengthening everyone else—may be to wake them in all the wrong ways, to resuscitate the zombies of an undead past, best guided gently to sleep. Nietzschean Socialism as an Anti-utopian Politics This overcoming of obstacles is in itself a liberating activity—and that, further, the external aims become stripped of the semblance of merely external natural urgencies, and become posited as aims which the individual himself posits—hence as self-realization, objectification of the subject, hence real freedom, whose action is, precisely, labour. —Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy We differ with Nietzsche in much, but consider him a great joyful liberator. —Anatoly Lunacharsky, quoted in Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Nietzsche in Russia

I’ve suggested that an immoralist politics focuses primarily on changing the material conditions that produce future individuals rather than on changing the present generation of individuals. And I’ve suggested that the primary form this must take is a comprehensive egalitarianism aiming at the production of an equilibrium of social power, creating a pluralistic, manifold society composed of multi-dimensional, manifold individuals who possess sufficient opportunity and resources to develop all of their abilities and resist domination, having little incentive to dominate others. 17  Compare Fraser’s worry that responding to right populism with a combined politics of neoliberalism and the politics of recognition “will send many potential allies running in the opposite direction, validating Trump’s narrative and reinforcing his support”—“effectively join forces with him in suppressing alternatives to neoliberalism” (2019, 28).

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But this raises a dilemma. If evil is a symptom of decadent organizations of the soul, of weak forms of value agency that require negative, comparative superiority to others to compensate for their lack of the feeling of power, and if the production of well-balanced, manifold souls presupposes a well-­ balanced, manifold society, then how do we get from one to the other? We cannot directly cure existing, unhappily organized individuals, so we must change the conditions of their production, phasing out old models for new. But to do that, we need the assistance and cooperation of present individuals in producing the conditions for their replacement. How is that possible? This dilemma is a reflection of Nietzsche’s distinctive commitment to political anti-utopianism. There is no direct path from the unhappy present to a happier future; the only available path is so lengthy that we will not live to see substantial improvement; and any improvement we will make is only of degree and never secure. There’s a future kingdom; it’s a better one, and it’s of this world; but you and I can only pave the way, not enter. Even if we imagine future generations who have traveled impossibly far along that road, from their point of view, it will still seem far from enough. Like us, they will measure their progress by their horizon rather than their history, finding it falls short. This doesn’t make anti-utopianism dystopian. We aim for the impossible because there are infinitely many degrees of better and worse. But we still acknowledge its basic impossibility. The goal is a perfect equilibrium of personal and social power, but power is precisely the activity of accidentally producing disequilibrium. For that reason, a Nietzschean politics is inseparable from amor fati.18 We cannot let our hopes for our successors’ better fates ruin the pleasure we 18  A politics of fatalism as the love of the present is, as we will see, fundamentally opposed to a politics of faith as hope for the future. In contrast to the oxymoron of Hägglund’s “secular faith,” which is dedicated to “projects that can fail or breakdown,” amor fati is dedicated to projects despite certainty that they will fail and breakdown. It values the goals of projects and games only in their instrumental value to activity for its own sake, to play, because the value of the future—even a happier one—is meaningful only secondarily, defined in relation to the more primary, existing, non-instrumental value of the present. While some find Sartre’s (1960) attempt to merge existentialism with socialism an awkward marriage, as historically practiced, socialism often shares his fundamental error of establishing the value of the present indirectly upon the future, rather than the reverse. On this point, Beauvoir is both the better existentialist and the better socialist: “in order for the idea of liberation to have a concrete meaning, the joy of existence must be asserted in each one, at every instant; the movement toward freedom assumes its real, flesh and blood figure in the world by thickening into pleasure, into happiness” (1948, 135–136).

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take in our own, and we must practice politics in a way that makes its failure part of a lovable fate rather than an excuse for an unlovable one, yet another attempt to justify suffering by giving it meaning. This means we must practice politics in such a way that we can directly, rather than merely instrumentally, affirm the suffering that it inevitably involves—the suffering incurred not only by our political labor but by its necessary failure to achieve its impossible final goal, as well as its inevitable failure to achieve many possible, smaller goals along the way. We might compare this to a socialist variety of bodhisattvism. On the one hand, we work for the approach to a nirvana we will not enter; on the other hand, we practice compassion for ourselves and for others who will never see it, demanding our small degree of this-worldly paradise, here and now. In Nietzsche’s language, to the degree a world without decadence exists only on the horizon, our presently attainable amor fati requires a degree of decadence in our happiness. Realism demands we not pretend to be hardened warriors and tireless laborers for justice, but allow ourselves a small share of “anesthetic, rest, peace, ‘sabbath,’ relaxation of the mind and stretching of the limbs”—of pleasures suited to the “declining forms of life” we admit we are (GM I.10). Indeed, Nietzsche’s critical but respectful, almost admiring, portraits of the practices of Christ and Buddha might even serve as the basis for the development of such an unlikely pairing. So far, we still seem to have little reason to think progress is possible at all, much less great progress. We can only transform humanity slowly, from one generation to the next, and we can only persuade hypothetically, convincing one another to better accord with and realize values that already structure our deepest characters and drive organizations. Neither option seems to make possible, as politics seems to demand, changes against our deep character and values where they stand in the way of substantial political change. Nevertheless, an anti-utopian socialism need not wait for good people to build a good world. Recall our reconception of democracy not as rule by a people but the production of one. Likewise, an anti-utopian politics builds a world by building a people from a non-people, the fragments of a potential one. It builds political projects using people as they are rather than as they ought to be—including evil ones. Anti-utopian politics focuses, first, on organizing and motivating those who do not need to be persuaded, “persuading” in the superficial, hypothetical sense those who either already share a political goal or evaluative framework or those who

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are materially situated to have a strong incentive for adopting such goals or frameworks. This is already a deep difference with contemporary politics’ dominant form, which treats politics first and foremost as discourse and debate between opposing groups with opposed interests and values, to be resolved either by reason or the force of the majority. It is a dramatically different political strategy to reserve our time and energy for persuading only the persuadable or, more precisely, those who are in some sense already persuaded. Call this preaching effectively to the choir by preaching only to the potential choir, in contrast to the usual moralistic, self-satisfying version of preaching only to the actual one. But this is better described as a strategy of abandoning the churchly techniques of proselytization and conversion altogether. Power politics replaces persuasion politics. The strategy is to use the force of the persuadable against the force of the unpersuadable, to gather, focus, and channel the combined powers of those who don’t need conversion into a collective agency strong enough to apply effective political pressure against the inconvertible. It is in this more precise sense that we, as I suggested earlier, fight and resist evil by looking away from it, as well as build the ground of the future good by giving away: giving more resources and power to everyone else who, in the combined power of the persuadable, become the greater power. Against a utopian politics of persuasion, which seeks to persuade precisely the unpersuaded, this politics focuses on mobilizing only those forces it can persuade, in ways that draw them together in strength. This might seem implausible on its face: why think the already-­persuadable, even taken collectively, could be the greater power? We’ll return to this, but the tentative answer is that our conception of who is persuadable, and about what, has been deeply distorted by liberal-democratic proceduralism, by the illusory ideological unity its dual factions impose onto the populace. We are not a divided nation or world, but a fragmented one. We are not two peoples, but not yet a people—and not yet a humanity. This is in one sense less compromising, and in another sense more compromising, than present-day left politics. On the one hand, the dominant view among the moderate left has been that it can only make progress with the help of the center, so it has rarely taken an overtly antagonistic stance toward the center, trying to push it further left rather than square off against it. Recent years suggest a growing disillusionment with that approach and a more critical stance by the progressive left toward the center—as seen, for example, in the campaigns of Bernie Sanders, Jeremy

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Corbyn, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon. A Nietzschean politics would have more in common with that development, encouraging the left to take a more adversarial, less compromising position in relation to the center. On the other hand, to the degree that the left has taken a more adversarial position toward the center, it has become increasingly uncompromising in its own ranks, worried that it will lose its distinctively leftist aims, growing its support at the cost of watering down its politics. It is in this way that contemporary left politics tends toward the practices not just of police and priests but also of princes: it tries to establish its utopian kingdom within by purging from its ranks anyone who might dilute its perfection. But this is to pretend a future people can be forced to exist today, and that the possibility of a radically inclusive social order can be born out of a radically exclusive one. That is the logic of utopianism that drives the move from moralistic prescription to authoritarian proscription, from preaching, proselytizing, and converting to prohibiting, punishing, and excluding.19 So, if a realist politics is a politics of affirmation (Bejahung) that looks away rather than surveilles and polices, and if an immoralist politics is a politics of absolution (Erlösung) that gives away rather than takes names and keeps score, then an anti-utopian politics is a politics of liberation (Befreiung) that gives way, releases, and lets in rather than creates boundaries and spheres of exclusion. Realism rejects police; immoralism rejects churches; anti-utopianism rejects borders and prisons. Nietzsche defines the “great liberation (Befreiung)” as rejecting the way we have conceptually carved the world into the causal agent as “causa prima,” rejecting along with it the implication that we can control evil by establishing its boundaries, isolating, excluding, and quarantining it: “the fatality of human existence cannot be extricated from the fatality of everything that was and will be” (VI.8). Notice that these three characteristics of Nietzschean socialism complement the most substantive political policies championed by the most ambitious and least moralistic versions of contemporary identity politics. The anti-racist movements for decarceration and the defunding of the 19  Compare Rosa Luxemburg’s anti-Leninist interpretation of the dictatorship of the proletariat in The Russian Revolution as one “of the class, not of a party or of a clique—dictatorship of the class, that means in the broadest possible form on the basis of the most active, unlimited participation of the mass of the people, of unlimited democracy…this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination” (1918, 76–78).

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police are—despite shallow critics’ claims to the contrary—rooted in tragic realism, the recognition that human fate is the product of forces uncontrollable by a self-appointed moral vanguard and that presupposing criminality manufactures rather than prevents it. The movement for reparations for slavery and systemic racism is, in turn, rooted in immoralism, the recognition that evil is not paid off by punishment but dissolved through material repair and construction. And the movements for prison abolition and open borders are rooted—again, against the claims of shallow critics—in anti-utopianism, the recognition that long-term solutions to social conflict must piece together national and international unity through coalition rather than through boundaries and exclusion. These are also the exceptions that prove the rule. The dominant, moralistic form of identity politics emphasizes recognition, representation, and deference over these more concrete and rigorous demands precisely because policing, punishment, and exclusion are deep features of their own political outlook and methods, which often seek merely to replace one police, church, or prince with another. Notice, too, that these characteristics also distinguish both Nietzschean politics and more substantive forms of identity politics from the historical left. The politics of policing, prescribing, and proscribing, with its strategies of surveillance, indoctrination, and punishment is, after all, a principal characteristic of the failed Soviet model of socialism. The root of these shared tendencies is surely complex, but we might suspect it has something to do with a shared dogmatic, technocratic, early-Enlightenment understanding of “science,” where “science” is another disguise for morality, for progress through the categorical persuasion of normative rationality, in contrast to the critical, skeptical, immoralist, and experimental conception of science that appears in Nietzsche’s late works—in other words, a truly modern rather than early modern science.20

4  Anti-utopian Socialism: A Populist Coalition of the Non-identical and Faithless They conceive of men not as they are, but as they wish them to be. That’s why for the most part they have written satire instead of ethics, and why they have never conceived a politics which can be put to any practical application. 20  On the Enlightenment conception of rational persuasion as a form of moralism, see NI 3.1.

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—Benedictus Spinoza, Political Treatise I walk among human beings as among the fragments of the future; that future that I see. And all my creating and striving amounts to this, that I create and piece together into one, what is now fragment and riddle and grisly accident. And how could I bear to be a human being if mankind were not also creator and solver of riddles and redeemer of accident? —Thus Spoke Zarathustra II.20, “On Redemption”

Finding an alternative solution to the either/or of a soft politics of compromise and an authoritarian politics of purity requires a resolutely anti-utopian approach. The kingdom is never at hand. There is no class, party, or vanguard adequately positioned to realize it and no one free of false consciousness because we are all pieces of the whole, the limbs and organs of the system, a messy mix of enlightenment and superstition, of wakefulness and sleep, of good and evil. If a revolutionary people does not exist, it will be necessary to invent them—to breed them by transforming the material conditions of our shared existence in ways that will create and preserve a tension equilibrium of our powers. Class politics begins from the false assumption that capitalism is a successful radical aristocracy that inadvertently breeds its own destruction in a stable, well-grounded and defined, increasingly expansive and powerful counter-class. But like the caste system of Manu, capitalism is a failed project of breeding betrayed primarily by its unbred remainder, a lumpenproletariat without a proletariat—or an ideologically hybrid, unstable, and weak one, at best. We do not have the luxury of opposing one type and one people to another, but must face the long and difficult task of breeding a people from the ruins of one. The politics of breeding is not a process that can be completed in the course of a revolutionary October or even decades of electoral cycles. It is likely a process on the scale of centuries and millennia. We must, consequently, form a revolutionary people from the materials at hand, mixing the good with the bad—in much the same way that we must decompose and recompose our philosophers as theoretical tools, denying attempts to preserve the purity of this or that thinker (for example, the good Marx or the bad Nietzsche), salvaging and combining what we can, discarding or looking away from what we cannot, giving away to them all of our intellectual charity, whenever it is useful to our ends. An anti-utopian socialism is a permanent revolution that does not abolish capitalism or class but chips away at it, looking away from the ever-present

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mixture of evil, giving away power, opportunity, ability, and happiness without regard for merit, slowly but surely diminishing the gaps in our power and better preventing their expansion, eventually building not democracy itself but the conditions from which something like a democratic people can arise. As a political strategy, such a patient anti-utopianism requires departing from two common features of present-day left politics. The first is our pathological unwillingness to voluntarily accept serious short-term loss, our tendency to measure progress by the negative utilitarian standard of the reduction of evil rather than the net production of the good. The politics of the abstract lesser-evil, our constant readiness to sacrifice the long future—the scale on which a politics of breeding can succeed—to the short one, must be constantly opposed by a politics of the concrete least-worst. When I ask, for example, which political action will do the most political harm in the next year, the next four, or the next ten, I treat the lesser evil as an abstract quantity over time—I pretend the time-frame I am considering is absolute or, at least, independent of the expanse of time that will follow it. I act as though, in a few years, history will end and we will have a final tally of happiness. Or I act as if any progress made in that short span is absolute. I assume that subsequent years will not erase that span’s progress, so it will at least add to the count in the final scorecard at the end of history. (Not coincidentally, I usually choose a time-frame for the end of history measured in relation to my lifetime—or at best, my children and grandchildren’s. Utopianism is inseparable from solipsism.) But there is no end of history, no final scorecard, in relation to which the greater or lesser evil in the present can be fixed. The lesser evil today may simultaneously be the greater in a decade and the lesser in a century— or the reverse. The problem with the logic of the lesser-evil’s focus on a projected—and on the long view of history, always absurdly short—time-­ span is that it evaluates means in abstraction from ends, it forgets the destination in its preoccupation with the way. In contrast, an anti-utopian politics of the concrete least-worst asks: which action will prevent the least-­ evil end or goal? Does it prevent the worst-case scenario by moving us toward the best possible case, or does it sacrifice the best-case in the long future for a better-case in the short one? It measures progress not by calculating happiness by the standard of an abstract, arbitrarily chosen time-frame but by the standard of concrete final goals that we have good reason to think possible. Once those concrete goals are determined, we may choose the

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short-term, lesser evil only if it moves us toward those concrete goals or, at best, does not move us away from them. The lesser evil may often be valuable as a minor setback, a period of recuperation, a regathering of strength to return to the goal, but only provided it remains on the path to the least-worst. More often, the politics of lesser evil chooses a better path at the cost of a worse destination. The second way in which an anti-utopian left politics departs from the present form is as a politics that understands and  mobilizes groups or collective agents as alliances among individuals and, more important, as alliances of disordered drives or fragments of individuality, rather than as well-composed, organized, or organizable masses. It uses the combined force of multiple, temporary, and often non-overlapping coalitions of individual and small group interests to force movement to the left on particular, independent policies rather than broad platforms or ideologies. In the United States, for example, consider how support for policies like universal healthcare, increasing the minimum wage, marijuana decriminalization, universal basic income, campaign-financing reform, anti-discrimination, and reduced militarism and interventionism, to name only a few examples, does not fall neatly across party lines or the standard ideologies of conservative, liberal, leftist, and libertarian, much less the center, progressive, and socialist left. If I try to organize a political coalition of people willing to sign on to every one of those policies, it will be weak and ineffective. But if I organize political action around individual policies or even smaller policy groupings, the number of already persuaded and persuadable individuals is vast. But that means working across divisions of both class and identity, as well as across divisions of good and evil. Much of left politics remains stuck in the remnant idealism of Marx’s theory of class: the belief that the contradictions of history take the form of clear and simple divisions between binary factions, resolved through mass organization: the mobilization of a single, collective political agent against another. This is idealism because it assumes that the divisions of history are products of economic relations of production as material, primary causes, when they are really ideal, secondary ones, ways in which people organize production in light of perceived ends. It is because the bourgeoisie sees a material interest in capitalist organization that it imposes a certain economic order onto the material world, and it is when the proletariat recognizes the immiseration and exploitation of that order that it will impose a new order. The division of class is, then, an ideological division that produces material economic ones when, in contrast, for Nietzsche it is the earth that produces the way in which we see our interests. It is the

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material world, our most basic material circumstances and situation, that imposes an economic organization onto peoples. There are stable, collective protagonists and antagonists of history, then, only to the degree and as long as the material earth is shaped, carved, and structured into two clearly defined, deeply distinct and opposed, spheres and forms of life—an earth that no longer exists, if it ever did. Recall in the Genealogy, for example, that it was wealth, health, and lack of competition for resources that created the conditions of the feeling of power of the early, historical nobility, which in turn led, as an after-effect, to their domination of others, their imposition of a hierarchical, dualistic economic and political order. Their relations of production, their economic conditions, reflected a deeper material cause, the already existing hierarchical, dualistic material conditions that produced them—the moral and political luck of a people that happened to develop in the right part of the earth at the right time and the moral and the political misfortune of peoples in other parts of the earth upon whom they would exercise their superfluous power and test their good fortune. Marx and Nietzsche both recognize that material power pushes cultural and political power beyond its own boundaries. The aristocrat conquers new lands, the capitalist conquers new markets. Both recognize that this expansion of economic and political power materially transforms the earth: it digs canals, lays highways, railways, and communication systems, constructs cities and farmlands, carving a new shape into the land that produces peoples, values, and cultures—in turn, carving those peoples, values, and cultures, into new shapes, creating what Nietzsche calls the democratic condition of hybridity. It is precisely this condition of hybridity, this contemporary form of “non-bred” agency, rooted in contradictory material foundations that transformed our moralities and identities in contradictory ways, that exposes the myth of the revolutionary class. We are all the master and we are all the slave, because we are neither a people nor a confrontation of peoples. We are a mix of the splinters and fragments of peoples. Anti-utopian Socialism as a Class-Expansionist Politics of Non-identity He belongs to a community that is still coming into being…. his ideal is not that of the greatest living philosophers: the “Übermensch”; it is the “Mitmensch.” —Hedwig Dohm, Become What You Are

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“Beyond good and evil” means beyond prosecution, beyond judging, beyond killing, etc. Beyond Good and Evil opens before our eyes a vista the background of which is individual assertion combined with the understanding of all others who are unlike ourselves, who are different. —Emma Goldman, “Jealousy: Causes and a Possible Cure”

We have seen that in a Nietzschean politics, democracy does not yet exist, it requires the production of a people. Democracy is not a means to socialism but the reverse: the overcoming of capitalism is necessary to produce the degree and kind of egalitarianism that could produce a true people. Socialism, in turn, requires not persuasion but force—humans are not free or rational enough to be widely persuaded to it and, even if they were, procedural democracies are aristocratic systems that prevent popular will from gaining effective power. So, the only means to socialism is through the sheer force of numbers. But if we are not peoples, indeed, if in our decadence we are barely persons, the force of numbers must ultimately be gathered at the level not of groups or even individuals, but drives. We cannot appeal to the unity of the working class, a people that does not yet exist. We cannot even appeal to the unity of the oppressed, of multiple oppressed identities that share the condition of systemic injustice, for these group identities overlap our splintered, modern democratic identities. The contemporary left has rightly recognized a central feature of identity politics, emphasizing the deep role that the domination and oppression of minorities and marginalized peoples plays in every other form of domination, including class and economic inequality. But to be effective, an identity politics needs to produce material and political power for the identities it seeks to free. Just as the power of a democratic people cannot be called upon, it must be produced, so the power of marginalized groups cannot be called upon to produce itself. To become effective, identity politics must become a politics of identity with the non-identical (of strategic alliances beyond groups) and with the non-­ identical in every identity (strategic alliances across groups). Such a nonidentity politics—which remains an identity politics in spirit and aim—would seek to empower and protect marginalized groups by drawing on the power of those outside those groups to impose political policies that target the production of their material and economic equality. To gain recognition, groups must be provided the real power necessary to

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demand recognition. Recognition is a goal that presupposes, rather than opposes, equality. But precisely because this is an anti-utopian politics, we cannot draw on the power of the non-identical by appeal to reason or virtue but to self-­ interest—and the self-interests of drives, of suppressed parts of conflicted or tyrannical souls against their own misconception of their overall identity. This is possible, remember, because objective interests—suppressed, weaker drives—are deeply and materially grounded, while subjective interests—our conflation of our entire person with a minority of stronger drives—are ideologically, weakly grounded. So, non-identity politics is grounded in alliances of partial selves and uncertain, conflicted identities. It does not try to create a permanent, fixed, or lasting revolutionary collective but creates temporary coalitions across class, race, gender, and even political lines, using the collective power of temporary solidarities to force political action on specific issues, focusing on those actions that will produce the grounds for the production of real and deeper solidarity.21 In contrast to both class reductionism and identity reductionism, call this class expansionism. Class expansionism doesn’t oppose class and economic oppression to ideological and identity-based forms but sees both as secondary, linked by more basic forms of material inequality: the inequality of the drives, of parts of the self. The concept of class is expanded to recognize that economic causes are not the only material causes and economic classes are not the only revolutionary agencies. As a result, our class analysis of oppression is also expanded,  tracing the ways in which more primary material causes, power inequalities of drives as well as persons and groups, can be seen to underlie, support, and make causally interdependent every form of domination of marginalized groups. In this way, power inequalities produce self-reinforcing supremacist ideologies. As Nietzsche suggests in the Genealogy and Fanon further develops in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) wherever one group exploits and dominates another, it 21  Examples of such an identity politics of the non-identical might include recent successes in union organization at Amazon, Starbucks, and among service workers more generally. These movements are notable for drawing on multiracial coalitions of workers whose class identities are less well-defined and whose forms of employment have not traditionally been a focus for organized labor—as well as for the leading role they have given to independent rather than professional organizers, a sign of a broader independence from narrow, traditional categories of class identity. On the often-ignored role marginalized groups have played in the labor movement, see Kim Kelly’s Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor (2022).

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will always produce a morality that defends and promotes that condition by identifying, separating, and shaping groups into identities, forms of value agencies that internalize that morality. A materialist politics is not, then, a class politics, much less a class reductionist one, but a power politics. It locates the foundation of all forms of group domination in social power, making class politics just one identity politics among others. Class expansionism is expansive not only in its analysis of the causes of oppression but also in their treatment: just as the goal of justice is, broadly, to empower every tyrannized and weakened drive, the goal of class expansionism is to empower all positive forms of identity insofar as they are true types rather than resentful negations of other identities, to empower every weakened individual and group in the manifold structure of society. An anti-utopian socialism expands the power of the working class beyond the agency of that class alone and expands the power of oppressed identities by supplying their power from beyond the boundaries of their members alone. It does not oppose class to identity as material base to superstructural ideology but instead treats both as forms of a materially based identity politics: all identities, including class identity, are inseparable from the material conditions that produce moral systems and moral agents, and no oppressed group can be protected and empowered without political action on both the economic level of material power and the cultural level of recognition and discursive power.22 Class expansionism consequently expands the analysis of materialism into every aspect of personal and cultural life, not opposing the ideological to the material but revealing the way ideological and economic power cannot exist without one another and cannot be promoted or balanced without action in both spheres. Class, race, and gender reductionism approach every policy with an “or” because they believe group identities are roughly self-identical: solidarity must come from a stable, unified, and permanent class, consciousness, ideology, party, or politician who has the right positions on every issue, and we must inevitably side with one identity against another. Class expansionism does not reject either class or identity politics but interweaves them as both the identity of class (the fact that class is always interwoven with other identities) and the class of identity (the fact

22  On the false choice of class politics or identity politics as one of distribution or recognition, see Fraser (1997).

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that inequalities of identity are always interwoven with materially based power inequalities).23 Therefore, we promote equal recognition by both identifying false ideologies of supremacy and by economically empowering the oppressed with the material force necessary to require rather than request recognition.24 And we obtain sufficient power only by extending it beyond the power of individual marginalized groups and marginalized groups as a whole, drawing on our universal lack of purity, our non-identity to ourselves, the overlapping of our varied, often contradictory, social values, memberships, and interests. Particular identities can be protected and promoted only through the strategic use of every person and identity’s power in respect to this or that interest, at this or that moment, for this or that political initiative.25 Another name for this might be, as Chantal Mouffe (2018) suggests, a “left populism”—with the caveat that populism should not equate the “populace” with “the people,” since a people does not yet

23  Compare Reed: “Given that wages and wealth of the bottom 60 percent of American workers have been on a forty-year downward slide, a policy agenda that seeks only to redress disparities will be incapable of ending precarity for the masses of black and brown workers. If we hope to improve the material lives of poor and working-class brown people, we must demand a return to the public-good model of governance” (2020, 14). See also Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields: “racecraft transforms racism into race, disguising collective practice as inborn individual traits, so it entrenches racism in a category to itself, setting it apart from inequality in other guises… Indeed, the most consequential of the illusions racecraft underwrites is the concealing the affiliation between racism and inequality in general” (2012, 261). 24  Compare Huey Newton, founder of the Black Panthers: “never convinced that destroying capitalism would automatically destroy racism, I felt, however, that we could not destroy racism without wiping out its economic foundation” (1973, 70). 25  Contrast Lenin’s vanguardist aim to “stimulate in the minds of those who are dissatisfied” with only a limited aspect of their condition that “the whole political system is worthless” (1902, 117). In doing so, it excludes from its coalition everyone who is not materially positioned against the “whole political system”—anyone who is not already potentially in the Party choir—dramatically diminishing its political force. Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of Lenin’s version of the dictatorship of the proletariat should, then, also be applied to political movements that precede and work toward socialism: “Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party—however numerous they may be—is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of ‘justice’ but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ‘freedom’ becomes a special privilege” (1918, 69).

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exist. It is not strictly a politics for the populace, but a politics that uses as much of the populace as it can to produce a real people to replace them.26 Take, for example, the current debate in American politics over universal forms of egalitarian initiatives like universal healthcare, free college education, and loan cancellation. Some worry, in the spirit of a narrow identity politics, that these measures fail to appropriately target the groups most in need, benefitting already privileged individuals along with others. But that is why such measures hold out the hope of effectiveness: they mobilize on the basis of self-interest rather than duty, and of particular interests that undermine ideological conceptions of self-interest, thus drawing from a large enough population that they can create coalitions large enough to force politicians and parties that are, thanks to the structure of procedural democracy, subservient to some group interests at the expense of others. It is no accident, after all, that powerful populist coalitions form against or despite factions, the media, parties, and prominent politicians (police, priests, and princes) rather than out of them. Notice, too, that a class expansive politics of coalition across fragmented identities is “universal” only in a qualified sense. For precisely to the degree that identities are non-identical and different forms of privilege and oppression overlap, these polices are both additive and differential. Given a greater number of universal measures targeting a greater number of specific forms of power inequality, individuals subject to greater “intersections” of oppression will receive not only greater but better-targeted benefits. For example, universal healthcare or free college education does not benefit everyone in a way that preserves the same broader imbalance of social power: it improves the power of groups marginalized in multiple different ways to a greater degree, increasing their collective power against the privileged. The collective effect of targeted universal, egalitarian policies is to both additively and differentially rebalance social power: giving in more ways to those most in need, giving in fewer ways to those least in need. Consider, too, that most universal distribution programs are already differentially targeted. Universal healthcare isn’t equivalent to handing the rich and poor alike a check. It replaces insurance, a benefit provided when in need and needed primarily by those whose health is the most 26  Compare Táíwo on the possibility of an identity politics that, extricated from “elite capture,” would be “transformative, nonsectarian, coalitional” (2022, 6–9). See also Fraser (2019) on the difference between “reactionary populism” and “progressive populism.”

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vulnerable. So, it already differentially benefits the less privileged to a greater degree. The same is true of free college education or loan cancellation. The privileged do not need it, but even if they use it, it does not increase their privilege. However, when it is collectively used by everyone who needs it, they collectively reduce the comparative power of the privileged. Notice, as well, that some of the most important policies targeting racism are more universal than they are often taken to be. Justice reforms that target systemic racism in the police force and the justice system are part of a larger strategy that includes the decriminalization of some drugs, sentencing reform, the reduction of police funding, and the demilitarization of police methods and equipment. Like universal programs, these measures distribute benefits both universally across identities and differentially, according to need. Consequently, a politics that gathers coalitions across identities to promote targeted policies of power egalitarianism is ideally suited to the intersectional nature of oppression: we can only cure oppression if we independently diagnose and treat each and every specific variety of power inequality that collectively enables broader forms of oppression. And that is in keeping with the noble, unresentful nature of an immoralist egalitarianism. It is additive rather than subtractive: the question is not do we give to one, another, or all, but how do we give more, to ever more people, in ever more strategically targeted ways. A truly “great politics” avoids “pettiness” primarily in its generosity. Anti-utopian Socialism as a Socialism for the Faithless This disorder, which Art and learning began in the inner man, was rendered complete and universal by the new spirit of government…but instead of rising to a higher animal life it degenerated to a common and clumsy mechanism…an ingenious piece of machinery, in which out of the botching together of a vast number of lifeless parts a collective mechanical life results. State and Church, law and customs, were now torn asunder; enjoyment was separated from labour, means from ends, effort from reward. Eternally chained to only one single little fragment of the whole, Man himself grew to be only a fragment; with the monotonous noise of the wheel he drives everlastingly in his ears, he never develops the harmony of his being, and instead of imprinting humanity upon his nature he becomes merely the imprint of his occupation, of his science. —Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Sixth Letter

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The fact that the only world is a constructed world takes away hope and gives us certainty. —Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms 62 Everything should be expected, nothing feared, of time and man. —Comte de Lautréamont, Poésies We do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for. —Karl Marx, Letter to Arnold Ruge, September 1843

Equally important in a hybrid, deeply fractured moral and cultural world, such measures do not require political actors to abandon or adopt an identity, to feel—rightly or wrongly—that they must deny, conceal, or betray themselves, their families, or their communities. They help us complicate, loosen, and expand our identities rather than force us to replace one with another. We need not demand that people entirely recant identities that—although often reactionary or misguided—usually have a deeper, psychologically inflexible root in geography and genealogy than in beliefs, values, or ideology. For example, to take political action on behalf of universal healthcare, progressive taxation, or campaign finance reform does not require becoming a card-carrying Democrat or a socialist, identifying with this or that cultural, religious, or political group. Participants in cross-identity, class-expansive coalitions do not have to commit to an entire worldview or way of life. In keeping with our immoralist prohibition on proselytism, a coalitional, non-identity politics does not require conversion; it doesn’t ask anyone to join a cultural or political church. Political immoralism’s virtues of anti-utopianism, realism, and immoralism are, after all, simply the direct rejection of theological socialism’s distinctly Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity—but the greatest error of these is faith. Against the morality of sacrifice that grounds faith, hope, and charity, we have seen that an experimental, non-liberal, and democratic political science demands, on the contrary, verification, probability, and payment. Legitimacy is never given but only proven by social happiness—and only, in the final analysis, as measured by the feelings of the people. A Nietzschean socialism would, in other words, be a socialism for unbelievers and non-joiners, even as it draws on the strength of political believers and those who mistakenly believe they’re believers. For it is by

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gathering the fragmentary powers of the politically faithless who are increasingly inheriting the earth—a growing majority in dysfunctional democracies whose members no longer see themselves or their interests truly reflected in any major nation, party, class, or cultural identity—that we produce the conditions of a true people, a people no longer in need of conversion because the material conditions of their happiness and the source of their foundational values are the same. We are already largely societies of political unbelievers, ripe for re-­alliance and reorganization. The party faithful committed to preserving the dualistic aristocratism of liberal democracy are already an endangered breed. They will expire on their own, as long as we don’t reconstitute and remobilize them by prioritizing moral and cultural over political warfare. There are many indications throughout the world of this growing majority of the politically and culturally non-identical, as well as  their simultaneously destructive and constructive potential. In the United States, there is anger over the economic devastation of the Rust Belt, despair over the opioid and suicide epidemics, and small town and regional resentment against the local effects of global capitalism. In the United Kingdom, Europe, and smaller Western nations, there is similar dissatisfaction with the dominance of neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatization, and austerity, as well as with the standard liberal-democratic menu of politicians who push them, leading to sometimes destructive, sometimes constructive developments, like Brexit in the United Kingdom, the yellow vest movement in France, and the Podemos and SYRIZA parties in Spain and Greece. The rise of reactionary movements toward nationalism and fascism, once thought limited to central and eastern European countries like Austria, Poland, Hungary, and Turkey but now found throughout the European Union, is less an exception to this trend than a concurrent symptom. Given the contemporary lack of viable living political identities and values as sources of the feeling of personal and collective power, it is not surprising that many seek to resuscitate dead ones. The latter examples, especially, are a reminder that the democratic condition of moral hybridity is one of great danger as well as great opportunity. This global manifestation of the death of political gods and of the god of politics is, although potentially emancipatory, also deeply intermixed with many degrees and varieties of evil—above all, a racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and xenophobic paranoia provoked by the unmooring of identities rooted in gender, class, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and religion. Nevertheless, it is only by strategically drawing on, gathering, and redirecting the power of the splinters of goodness dispersed across every individual that we can fight the evils in their mix. To pretend that the oppressed have

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the material power to overcome domination without building temporary, targeted, and broader coalitions across hybrid, non-­identical selves is to pretend that domination is not primarily grounded in a real superiority of material power that must, in particular times and places, be met with greater numbers and greater combined force.27 And to pretend we can organize a true and virtuous proletariat against a clearly defined, opposed bad and lumpish one is not only to deny that the distinction was always a convenient and false abstraction, our picture of Dorian Gray, but to ignore that it is precisely the division of the non-bourgeoisie against itself that deepens and strengthens the production of a more reactionary proletariat.28 At the same time, a class-expansionist politics of non-identical coalitions avoids the central worry that drives purity politics. In temporarily aligning across boundaries of value and identity on particular initiatives, we do not commit to additional values or positions across those boundaries. Indeed, provided our focus is on attacking the material foundations of power disequilibrium, the very source of the politics of resentment, we are more likely to radicalize outsiders than soften the left. And even though temporary members of such coalitions will often return, on every other issue, to their previous reactionary political folds, we have nevertheless successfully stolen some part of their power, taking it over and diverting it 27  Compare such temporary coalitions across non-identity to Fraser’s “strategy of separation,” which aims to separate privileged women, immigrants, and people of color from neoliberal varieties of feminism and antiracism, as well as separate Rust Belt, southern, and working-class communities from “forces promoting militarism, xenophobia, and ethnonationalism” in order to realign their political energies into a progressive populism that would still center anti-racism, anti-sexism, and non-domination (2019, 33–34). Such separation can also take the form of the strategic use of one evil against another. For example, we might strategically separate the economic right from the cultural right, whose morality of the nuclear family, cultural isolation, homogeneous community, and rural and small-town life is a reactionary nostalgia for pre-capitalist feudalism—and so not a natural ally of neoliberalism. Contrast Wendy Brown (2019), whose characterization of neoliberalism as “markets and morality” ignores that it is the antagonism between moral traditionalism and market progressivism promotes right-wing politics. But to recognize this would undermine her attempt to interpret that rise as “anti-democratic”—as though there were a truly democratic politics to contrast it to, and as though that authoritarian politics were not precisely a perverse rightwing parody of the Marxist idea of “dictatorship of the proletariat,” motivated more against the pretenses of a false democracy than against democracy as such. 28  An example of this false pretense is the tendency on the left to treat Trumpism as a movement of the lumpenproletariat, even though it is ideologically controlled by the bourgeoisie, largely led by supporters among the petite bourgeoisie, and mostly supported by solidly middle-class and working-class voters. It is, in other words, mostly lacking in the two key characteristics of the lumpenproletariat: marginality in relation to law and employment.

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toward their own obsolescence. As Nietzsche recognized, a philosophy of affirmation loves its enemies not only as contrast and resistance but also as useful means to their own replacement: “we are increasingly opening our eyes to that economy that both needs and knows how to make use of everything rejected by the holy insanity of the priests, the sick reason of the priests—to that economy in the law of life that that can take advantage of even the disgusting species of idiot, the priests, the virtuous,—what advantage?—But we ourselves, we immoralists, are the answer to this” (TI VI.6). In conclusion, a Nietzschean socialism—a socialism that is unapologetically “pessimist” in its realism, immoralism, and anti-utopianism—will insist on two primary positions that have been rejected by the broader contemporary left. Against the moderate left, that is, the progressive and radicalized but still liberal (including recent revivals of “democratic socialist”): a conscientious capitalism or radical liberal democracy is not enough. Socialism, broadly understood as social control of the economy sufficient to end capitalism’s power over the state, is the precondition for maintaining egalitarianism and achieving democracy. And against the socialist left: although we cannot exchange the aim of socialism for a socialism-lite, we must change the means. The possibility of socialism does not depend on ideology, information, or education but on power—in short, on numbers. And the power necessary for socialism cannot be located in a class or secured by revolution but only built through temporary coalitions that gradually establish a permanent equilibrium of social power—in short, a radically, materially egalitarian state. Precisely because socialism demands a substantively better world, it must build from the raw materials of a substantively worse one. The good will stand, if at all, on a foundation of evil that no cleansing moment of violence can magically dispel. If a left politics is to succeed in producing equality, it will only be with the assistance, the added material and economic power, of non-leftists. And if a socialist politics is to succeed at producing democracy from that of equality, it will only be with the added power of non-­socialists. A politics of breeding is not the work of a state, class, party, or vanguard but the work of the all too human: including many divided, unhappy, ambivalent, and confused individuals who only superficially identify with and casually participate in center and right politics, for mostly circumstantial reasons of moral luck. (Just as, of course, many on the left also only superficially identify with and casually participate in left politics for largely circumstantial reasons of moral luck.)

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The contemporary predicament is that the right and the left do not concretely exist: their material foundations are evaporating rapidly, even as the high priests of their fading ideologies grow louder. The present danger, our particular vulnerability to hatred and violence, comes not from our conviction in these ideologies but our indifference to and bitterness toward them, the ease with which we can exchange them and the vindictive pleasure we take in destroying them. True political believers are increasingly rare, no matter how virulent even the casual churchgoers become during our various political World Cups and Super Bowls. The overwhelming majority have been materially conditioned and bred (or unbred) into a single identity: the non-identical. Of course, most of the world’s “99 percent” never fit the categories of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. An increasing proportion of the North American, British, and European populations no longer fit them, while the categories of conservative, liberal, and progressive are ever more unconvincing substitutes. Increasingly, every bourgeois is a temporarily unembarrassed proletarian, and every proletarian a temporarily less embarrassed lumpenproletarian.29 Moreover, the few who still fit distinct categories of owner of production or worker no longer inhabit the same regions, cities, neighborhoods, and factories that once produced and solidified their types. Their material environments and forms of life have dramatically altered, becoming too intermixed to secure them inside a well-defined, accompanying cultural identity, ideology, or politics. The theater of procedural liberal-democratic politics may be theater for the people, but it is largely by and on behalf of two very small minorities: the knightly and priestly factions of our neoliberal aristocratic class. For most of the population, the political right and left are increasingly ill-fitting postures and masks. If our churches are really the “tombs and sepulchers of God,” then our political parties are the sepulchers of real peoples and substantial ideologies, while our political identities and convictions are increasingly superficial accidents of increasingly superficial differences in the material circumstances of our birth. 29  Marx hints at this hybridity: “the finance aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society” (1852, 51). But he draws precisely the wrong conclusion: that a true proletariat and savior can be distinguished from the irredeemables of the very top and very bottom of society. Ironically, Marx and Engels’ tendency to distinguish a “wrong kind” of rich as well as a “wrong kind” of poor often recalls the shallow conflict between cultural aristocracy and capitalism that is at the core of Nietzsche’s aristocratism, mere aesthetic nostalgia for the “good taste” of “old money.”

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Politics has almost become reducible to roundabout biography, indicating little more than circumstances of birth: on coast or mid-continent, in an urban, suburban, or rural zip code, into the statistical fortunes or misfortunes of this or that religious, ethnic, or racial identity, in a neighborhood with good schools or bad, to graduates of high school, college, or professional education, to first- or second-generation immigrants, into a family whose collar is blue, white, or pink. It is a truism that religious devotees, had they been born into a different religion, would be equally devout. It should be equally obvious that most of us would have either entirely different politics or none, given only modest changes to our birth or upbringing. The enemy is in all of us, but so is the possible solution. This does not mean that socialism should be replaced by a merely “progressive” populism. But it should become a populist socialism: one that draws on the potential power of the entire populace, a power that has been hidden because broken, dismembered, and strewn across a variety of increasingly unstable, ultimately imaginary, demographic, cultural, moral, and political identities. Socialism has no alternative but to build its possibility from a deeply unequal, divided, and failed people, organizing not identities, parties, or classes against each other but fragments of individuals—frustrated, forgotten, and lost demands that will find their true allies and complements only in pieces of each other.30 A populist socialism organizes the people not against each other but against the false democratic state. Its political relation to procedural democracy is unapologetically adversarial rather than partisan. It does not request but require recognition from its representatives, forcing democratic procedures, parties, and politicians—against their will and their inertia—to produce the deeper forms of material social equality that might ground a true people, and a true democracy, to come.

30  Compare Lugones’s contrast of her own politics of mestizaje as “curdled beings” that defy the “logic of impurity” (2003, chapter 6) to that of Iris Marion Young: “Social homogeneity, domination through unification, and hierarchical ordering of split social groups are connected tightly to fragmentation in the person. If the person is fragmented, it is because the society is itself fragmented into groups that are pure, homogeneous. Each group’s structure of affiliation to and through transparent members produces a society of persons who are fragmented as they are affiliated to separate groups. As the parts of individuals are separate, the groups are separate, in an insidious dialectic” (2003, 141).

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Index1

A Absolution, redemption, salvation (Erlösung), 287 as foundation for socialist politics, 269, 277, 280 Acampora, Christa Davis, 37n18, 62n16 Adorno, Theodor, 7, 27n9, 131, 138 Affirmation (Bejahung), 4, 5, 25, 54, 59n12, 60, 64, 68, 69, 71, 79, 87, 88, 120, 121, 146, 161n1, 202, 218, 221n8, 228n16, 232, 233, 251, 254n1, 259, 287 as foundation for socialist politics, 269, 302 Agonism radical democratic politics, 57n10, 168, 302 Alcoff, Linda Martin, 33n15, 215n2 Allen, Amy, 110n8, 273n10

Amor fati, 2–6, 20n4, 24, 30, 32, 34, 36, 37, 38n19, 45, 64, 65, 69, 78, 84, 85, 114, 126, 133, 155, 210, 218n7, 233, 249, 251, 261, 278, 284, 285 and decadence, 285 and determinism, incompatibilism, 3, 4 and egalitarianism, 233, 251, 278, 284 and the manifold soul, 6, 24, 114 as non-instrumental affirmation of suffering, 4, 5, 64, 65 and political legitimacy, 24, 30, 34, 36, 37, 251 Anarchism, 32n14, 263–265 Anderson, Elizabeth, 179n9, 236n26 Anderson, Lanier, 3n2 Animal rhetoric of herd morality, 135

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Miyasaki, Politics After Morality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12228-6

321

322 

INDEX

Ansell-Pearson, Keith, 18n3, 32n14, 59, 63n18, 107n5 Anti-realism, moral, 16, 17, 19, 21, 22, 25, 37, 48, 82, 83 subjectivism, 16–20, 33 Anti-utopianism as foundation for socialism, 268, 269, 284, 287, 288, 290, 302 Aristocracy, 28, 52, 58n11, 62, 63, 65, 69–71, 84, 88, 106, 107, 142, 159, 167, 182, 184, 187–190, 196, 208, 209, 231, 239, 263, 264 radical vs. conservative, 1, 27n10, 30–33, 31n11, 32n14, 33n15, 48–50, 102, 106, 108 Art Nietzsche’s reception by the avant-garde, 32n14 Aschheim, Steven E., 32n14 Authoritarianism, 28, 32n14, 34n16, 179n9, 197, 269, 273n10, 287, 289, 300, 301n27 B Babich, Babette, ix, 34n16, 85n5 Bakunin, Mikhail, 263 Bamford, Rebecca, 217n4 Barbara J. Fields, 215n2, 296n23 Beauvoir, Simone de, 109n7, 172n4, 198n12, 201n13, 284n18 Beckett, Samuel, 265n4 Bergoffen, Debra B., 172n4 Berkowitz, Roger, 31n12, 52n6 Berry, Jessica, 201n13 Blair, Tony, 167 Blanqui, Louis-Auguste, i Brecht, Bertolt, 172 Breeding, 1, 6, 7, 18n3, 27n10, 30, 34, 36–38, 43, 48, 50–52, 52n6,

55, 56, 69, 78, 85, 88, 92, 103, 104, 107–109, 108n6, 126, 135, 138, 139, 141–143, 142n9, 155, 162, 171, 201n13, 208–213, 216, 216n3, 217, 217n5, 218n7, 220, 240, 250, 280, 283, 289, 290, 302 as a distinct form of politics, 7, 52, 213 vs. taming or domestication, 52n6, 218n7 Bright, Liam Kofi, 175n5 Brobjer, Thomas H., 51n4, 223n11 Brod, Max, 104 Brown, Wendy, 202n14, 301n27 C Campaign finance reform, 291 Camus, Albert, 61n15 Capitalism, 32, 57n9, 58n11, 59n13, 80, 84, 107, 108n6, 124n15, 127n20, 149n15, 167, 193n11, 212, 255, 257, 258, 262–264, 266, 269, 278, 289, 291–293, 296n24, 300, 301n27, 302 Čeika, Jonas, 223n11 Cicerchia, Lillian, 222n9 Clark, Maudemarie, 56n8, 98n15, 142n9, 146n12, 216n3, 225n14, 226n15, 237n27 Clinton, Bill, 167 Coalitional politics, 288, 291, 294, 296n25, 297–299, 297n26, 301, 301n27, 302 Cohen, G. A., 127n20, 236n26 Comay, Rebecca, ix Combahee River Collective, 147n13 Connolly, William E., 258, 278n13 Conservatism/radicalism, 30–33, 48, 49, 60, 88, 108

 INDEX 

centrist politics as conservative, 167, 183, 270, 271, 286, 287 contemporary economic and cultural, 186 insufficiency of contemporary category, 32n14, 262, 263, 271, 291, 303 leftist forms of, 263, 265, 270, 271, 278 liberalism as, 125, 180 Nietzsche’s elitism as, 238–241 noble form of justice as, 102 Conway, Daniel, 20n4, 24n7, 33n15, 53n7, 61n14, 82n3, 112n9 Corbyn, Jeremy, 183, 286–287 Critical theory, 7, 27n9, 34n16, 105n3 D Davis, Angela Y., 124n15 Decarceration, abolition, and police reform, 272, 277, 279, 287, 288 Decriminalization of controlled substances, 291 Democracy, 38n19, 57n10, 96n13, 134–136, 140, 140n6, 142, 143, 145, 149, 150, 151n17, 154, 155, 159, 160, 164, 167, 168, 173, 174, 176n6, 179, 180, 182–184, 187–193, 193n11, 195, 196, 198n12, 202, 208, 209, 211, 217n5, 218, 221, 225n14, 230n21, 234n24, 251, 266, 272, 285, 287n19, 290, 297, 300, 301n27, 302, 304 against factional-dualism of, 185–187 against liberal forms, 184, 185, 185n10, 189, 225n14 agenst procedural form, 171, 172, 175, 179

323

as concrete vs. abstract liberty, 211 consequential vs. consequentialist, 172n4 egalitarian vs. radical agonistic, 258, 259 as feeling of popular will, 162, 163, 165, 166 and herd morality, 134–136, 140, 148 and incompatibilism, 159–161 as legitimacy, 173 as manifold society, 167–170 materialist form as experimental science, 198–201 materialist vs. idealist forms, 195–197 as means to aristocracy, 141 procedural forms as aristocratic, 173–179, 181, 183, 187, 188 as the production of a people, 160, 171 socialism as condition of, 293, 302 as value-hybridity, 181 as verification of legitimacy, 210 and the will to institutions, 135, 150, 152, 153 Descartes, René, 83 Detwiler, Bruce, 224n12, 231n23, 235n25 Dialectical vs. anti-dialectical theory, 6, 85n5, 87, 133, 218, 263 Diethe, Carol, 32n14 Discrimination, 281, 291 Dohm, Hedwig, 13, 292 Dombowsky, Don, 38n19, 51n4, 82n4 Drochon, Hugo, 6, 23n6, 49n3, 90n7, 96n13, 140n6, 142n8, 214n1, 217n5 Dudrick, David, 98n15, 146n12 DuFord, Rochelle, 147n13 Dworkin, Ronald, 236n26, 243

324 

INDEX

E Education policy, 277 Egalitarianism against the distribution and recognition model, 252 anti-egalitarian arguments, 106, 107, 113, 222, 226, 231, 232, 238 as complacency, 232 as condition of legitimacy, 250 “equality of what?,” 260, 261 as harm to pathos of distance vs. difference, 226, 228 inconsistency of “never make equal,” 108–110 as lack of enhancing constraint, 231 as more efficient enhancement, 243 noble, additive vs. levelling-down objections, 223, 262, 277, 297, 298 as non-domination, 253 as power-equilibrium, 252, 253 vs. progressive elitism, 238 quantitative vs. qualitative, 113 as similarity vs. multiplicity, 222 socialism as condition of, 257, 260 Emden, Christian J., 22n5 Engels, Friedrich, 212, 223n11, 256 Enhancement against cultural means of, 38, 71 amor fati as criterion of, 30, 78 aristocracy as means of, 69 as basis of legitimacy, 33 compatibility with egalitarianism, 106, 222 democratic hybridity as condition of, 215 Manu as example of, 43 as production not transformation of types, 18 Enlightenment politics as moralism, 271, 272, 274, 276, 277, 281, 282, 288, 289

Environmental politics, 104n2, 216n3 Equality merely symbolic form in noble justice, 96 as proportional equality or power-­ equilibrium, 5, 6, 64, 78, 106, 116–118, 122, 168, 169, 252, 257, 260 socialism as a condition of, 264 Existentialism, 61n15, 284n18 F Faith as the cause of a people in Nietzsche’s inconsistent account, 144 and philosophical interpretation, 81 and political legitimacy, 23, 25 and utopian politics, 61n15, 284n18, 288–304 Fanon, Frantz, 294 Fields, Karen E., 215n2, 296n23 Foucault, Michel, 202n14, 269, 269n6 Frankfurt, Harry, 7 Fraser, Nancy, 27n9, 104n2, 124n14, 273n10, 283n17, 295n22, 297n26, 301n27 Freedom and determinism compatibilism, 83 determinism, 3, 16, 17, 38, 255 fatalism vs. faith, 284n18 incompatibilism, 3, 4, 81, 85, 87, 88, 91, 95, 95n12, 96, 101, 103, 110, 118, 125, 127n18, 133, 134, 145, 160, 161n1, 163, 173, 250, 272, 277 Freud, Sigmund, 110n8, 138, 138n4, 168, 256, 273 Fukuyama, Francis, 263

 INDEX 

G Gardner, Sebastian, 3n2 Gemes, Ken, 3n2 Gender, sex, and sexuality, philosophy and politics of, 32n14, 33n15, 124n15, 222n9, 279, 294, 295, 300, 301n27 Geuss, Raymond, 22n5, 123n13, 128n21 Gilens, Martin, 178n8 Glatzer Rosenthal, Bernice, 32n14, 34n16, 283 Global politics, contemporary Canada, 165, 183 Central and Eastern Europe, 300 Europe, 149n16, 165, 167, 183, 278, 300, 303 France, yellow vest movement, 300 Greece, SYRIZA Party, 300 Palestine and Israel, 149n16 Spain, Podemos Party, 300 United Kingdom, 149n16, 165, 176n6, 183, 300, 303 United States, 31n12, 149n16, 163–165, 176n6, 196, 270, 291, 296n23, 297, 303 Goldberg, David Theo, 215n2 Goldman, Emma, 293 Gombay, André, ix Gooding-Williams, Robert, 107n5, 216n3 Guay, Robert, 140n7 H Habermas, Jürgen, 27n9 Hägglund, Martin, 61n15, 284n18 Happiness as equal resistance, feeling of power, 230n20 meaningful suffering as false form of, 61, 65, 66, 70

325

noble form as external domination, 56, 58 sovereign individual form as internal tension, 57 Hatab, Lawrence, ix, 93n11, 176n6, 224n12, 225n14 Health human in contrast to animal, 5 as tension of drives, 36, 38 Healthcare, 277 Hegel, G. W. F., 27, 27n9, 59n12, 66n21, 89, 255, 263 Herrera, Dawn, 57n10 Hobbes, Thomas, 90, 90n8, 91n9, 138n4 Honig, Bonnie, 82n4, 258 Honneth, Axel, 27n9 Horkheimer, Max, 7, 27n9 Hurka, Thomas, 5, 237n27 Hussain, Nadeem J. Z., 5n4, 69n22, 146n11 I Identity politics class and identity reductionism, 222n9, 282n16, 294, 295 class-expansionism, 294, 295 non-identity politics as form of, 293, 294, 296, 299, 301n27 Ideology critique, 66, 149n16, 174, 180, 182, 192, 194, 197, 200, 282, 295, 302, 303 Immigration, 269, 272, 287, 288 Immoralism, 2, 4, 7, 48, 79–81, 85, 87, 88, 96, 101, 104, 125, 233, 234n24, 236n26, 250, 251, 272n8 as foundation for socialism, 268, 269, 275, 280, 287, 288, 302

326 

INDEX

J Janaway, Christopher, 3n2 Justice drives as the object of, 112, 114 early theory of justice as contract, 91 early theory of justice as exchange, 90, 91 early theory of justice as interest of weak, 91 as equality for equals, 106, 108, 109 foundation in injustice, 44, 45 late theory of justice as class-­ based, 92 late theory of justice as interest of the strong, 92, 93 late theory of justice as moralistic, 96, 98 late theory of justice as symbolic equality, 94, 95 late theory of justice vs. incompatibilism, 96 as non-domination, 253 as owed to higher type, 104 as power-relation not pattern, 259 as protection of qualitative difference, 113 revised theory of justice as interest of social order, 103 as tension or power-­ equilibrium, 116 K Kadarkay, Arpad, 34n16 Kafka, Franz, 53, 104, 299 Kandiyali, Jan, 65n19 Katsafanas, Paul, 5, 16n1 Kierkegaard, Søren, 61n15, 264, 265 Kinney, David, 175n5 Kline, George, 34n16 Knoll, Manuel, ix, 27n10 Kropotkin, Peter, 263

L Laclau, Ernesto, 38n19 Landa, Ishay, 31n11 Lautréamont, Comte de, 15, 105, 119, 266, 299 Lawler, Kristin, 32n14, 57n10 Le Bon, Gustave, 138 Leadbelly, 276n12 Legitimacy, 15–29, 53–63, 119 drive organization as foundation of, 19, 25–27, 30 Leiteizen, Moris, 132, 249 Leiter, Brian, 3n2, 17n2, 146n12, 201n13, 222n10, 224n12 Lemm, Vanessa, ix, 145n10, 202n14 Lenin, Vladimir, 193n11, 274n11, 296n25 Liberation (Befreiung), 283 as foundation for socialist politics, 269, 287 Libertarianism, 217n5, 236n26, 291 Liberty vs. feeling of freedom, 127 negative vs. positive, 127 political concept of, 83, 124 priority of equality over, 184, 194 right to activity vs. right to conditions, 124 Locke, John, 90, 90n7, 194 Losurdo, Domenico, 34n16 Love, Nancy S., 108n6, 145n10, 254n1, 264n3 Lugones, María, 147n13, 215n2, 304n30 Lukács, György, 34n16 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 283 Luxemburg, Rosa, 287n19, 296n25 M Machiavelli, Niccolò, 82n4 Macron, Emmanuel, 165 Manifold soul, 5, 6, 24, 27, 36, 38n19, 43, 54, 63, 78, 85, 86,

 INDEX 

106, 113, 133, 154, 155, 167–170, 184, 186, 189, 191, 202, 219, 221, 251, 252, 256, 259, 260, 264n3 breeding conditions of, 209, 215, 218, 220 and democracy, 169, 170, 184, 186, 189 and egalitarianism, 242, 249, 250, 256 and justice, 118, 155 and justice as pluralism, 113 and manifold form of society, 155, 167, 168 vs. noble and sovereign types, 6, 36, 43, 54, 63, 78, 85, 114, 115 and political legitimacy, 27, 86 and socialism, 259, 260 Manu, law of, 38, 43–53, 51n4, 52n6, 53n7, 55–57, 60, 78, 142n9 Marcuse, Herbert, 27n9, 105n3 Marx, Karl, ix, 10, 16n1, 27, 34n16, 57n9, 57n10, 59n13, 60, 65n19, 80, 82n4, 85n5, 105n3, 108n6, 124n15, 131, 145n10, 149n15, 153n18, 193n11, 212, 213, 222n9, 223n11, 233, 254n1, 255, 256, 258–260, 262–265, 264n3, 279n14, 283, 289, 291, 292, 303n29 McKenna, Michael, 3 Mearsheimer, John J., 22n5 Mélenchon, Jean-Luc, 183, 287 Merkel, Angela, 167 Merrick, Allison, 124n15 Militarism, 33n15, 93n11, 107, 142n9, 149n16, 182, 214, 272, 291, 301n27 Mills, Charles W., 93n11 Minimum wage, 291 Mitcheson, Katrina, 201n13 Miyasaki, Donovan, 52n6, 126n17, 127n18, 135n1, 138n4, 161n1, 201n13, 218n7, 262

327

Modernism, modernity, see Art, Nietzsche’s reception by the avant-garde Montinari, Mazzino, 223n11 Morality against the virtue-ethical reading, 5, 217n4, 227, 233, 253, 258, 259, 263, 269n6, 277, 290, 294 utilitarianism, 137, 172n4, 290 Morgenthau, Hans J, 22n5 Müller-Lauter, Wolfgang, 36n17 Mullin, Amy, ix, 217n6 Musil, Robert, 205 N Neoliberalism, 125n16, 149n16, 167, 183, 202n14, 283n17, 300, 301n27, 303 Newton, Huey P., 77, 296n24 Nguyen, C. Thi., 164n2 Nozick, Robert, 236n26, 253, 259 Nussbaum, Martha, 113n10, 243, 278n13 O O’Neill, Onora, 126n17 Owen, David, ix, 27n9, 82n4 P Page, Benjamin, 178n8 Partisan and factional politics, 164–167, 178, 183, 185–187 Pathos of distance vs. difference, 226 Patton, Paul, 161n1 Payne, Christine A., 27n9 Peoples collective agency, 289, 292, 294 foundation in the will to power, 144, 149 vs. masses, 138 originally noble form of, 145

328 

INDEX

Pereboom, Derk, 3 Plato, 27n10, 31n13, 89, 116n11, 117, 151n17, 270, 273 Play, 88, 225, 229, 234, 253–255, 257–259, 266, 269n6, 284n18 as anti-conservatism, 263 egalitarian politics as protecting the sphere of, 57n10, 258–261 vs. vulgar Marxist theories of labor, 65n19, 254n1, 261, 284n18 Pluralism, 113, 114, 119, 162, 164, 166, 167, 169, 170, 177, 186, 209, 223, 224, 228n16, 230n21 Poellner, Peter, 4n3 Populism, 149n16, 183, 283n17, 296, 297n26, 301n27, 304 Prideaux, Sue, 79n2 Psychology as foundation of legitimacy, 46 group psychology and herd morality, 138 group psychology and noble morality, 144 justice as prevention of slave psychology, 94 and majoritarian democracy, 176 materialist vs. idealist forms, 255, 256, 264 moral psychology vs. politics, 1, 6 of recognition and respect vs. power, 259 regeneration of slave form, 59, 60, 66, 67, 70 will to power as, 4, 54, 63 Pugliese, Joseph, 93n11 R Race, philosophy and politics of, 31, 33n15, 50, 93n11, 124n15, 149n16, 212, 215n2, 218, 222n9, 271, 277, 279, 281, 282,

282n16, 288, 291, 294, 295, 296n23, 296n24, 298, 300, 301n27 Raekstad, Paul, 185n10 Rawls, John, 102n1, 185n10, 194, 237n27, 260 Realism, political, 2, 22 as foundation for socialism, 268–271, 274, 275, 285, 287, 302 Nietzsche’s tragic realism, 22n5, 253–256, 264, 269–271, 274 Reed, Touré, 282n16, 296n23 Reginster, Bernard, 4n3, 217n4 Religion Buddhism, 285 Christianity, 44, 53, 61n15, 66, 67, 79, 80, 134, 135, 140n7, 147, 218n7, 285 Daoism, 233, 236, 275 Revolutionary politics, 263 French Revolution, 2, 106–108 Marxist revolution, 261, 264, 265, 269 Nietzschean revolutionary politics, 264, 266, 289 Richardson, John, 4n3, 237n27 Rights as concrete feeling of freedom vs. abstract liberty, 127 of higher type against present, 104, 105, 120 immoralist reconception of, 122 Nietzsche’s critique of equal rights, 113 as non-liberal, against individual, 123, 124, 184 as support for aristocratic form of democracy, 179, 189 of weaker drives against stronger, 112, 113, 117 Roberts, Michael J., 27n9

 INDEX 

Rossi, Enzo, 185n10 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 90, 106, 107n5, 205 S Sanders, Bernie, 183, 286 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 61n15, 284n18 Schiller, Friedrich, 29, 111, 131, 150, 225, 270, 298 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 22, 68, 79, 143 Schrift, Alan D., 27n9, 127n19, 128n21 Schutte, Ofelia, 60, 65n20 Science Enlightenement vs. contemporary conception, 288 Scott, Jacqueline, 215n2 Sedgwick, Peter R., 90n7, 95n12, 124n15 Sen, Amartya, 242, 243 Shapiro, Gary, 124n15, 138n4, 216n3 Shaw, George Bernard, 15, 189 Siemens, Herman, 78n1, 221n8, 224n12, 230n21, 230n22 Socialism communism, 34n16, 193n11, 222n9, 257, 261–265, 274n11, 296n25 Leninism, vanguard theory, 193n11, 268, 274, 274n11, 276, 280, 288, 289, 296n25, 302 Marxism, 32n14, 222n9, 223n11, 255–266, 273, 278, 301n27 Nietzschean egalitarianism as, 257 Nietzschean socialism vs. Marxism and anarchism, 263 Stalin, Joseph, 34n16 utopian socialism, 223n11, 265 vulgar Marxism, 222n9, 255, 256

329

Sovereign individual as condition of will to institutions, 152 vs. early noble type, 54, 63, 87 vs. manifold soul, 6, 54, 114 need in underclass as well as elite, 153 as support of subversion of democracy by aristocracy, 188, 192 as a tyrannical form of soul, 118 Spinoza, Benedictus, 289 Standpoint epistemology, 273, 277 Steinberg, Mark D., 34n16 Stocker, Barry, ix, 123n12 Strong, Tracy, ix T Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi O., 104n2, 125n16, 164n2, 177n7, 281n15 Taylor, Charles, 126n17 Taylor, Seth, 32n14 Temkin, Larry, 223n11 Thiele, Paul Leslie, 169n3 Thomas, Richard Hinton, 32n14 Tillich, Paul, 63, 257 Tyrannical form of soul, 6, 116–118, 124, 125, 193, 194 U Universal basic income, 236n26, 291 Urs Sommer, Andreas, 51n4, 201n13 V Vacano, Diego A. von, 82n4 Van Parijs, Philippe, 236n26 Violence vs. force, 193n11, 259, 264n3, 265, 266, 302, 303 and state legitimacy, 26, 28

330 

INDEX

W Wages, 277 Waltz, Kenneth N., 22n5 Walzer, Michael, 243 Weil, Simone, 111, 257 Welshon, Rex, ix Williams, Bernard, 23 Wills, Vanessa, 222n9 Will to power, 1, 4, 5, 33, 34, 38n19, 49, 54, 57n9, 57n10, 59, 63–66, 68, 71, 78, 80, 81, 84, 87, 96–98, 101, 115, 118, 119, 123, 136, 143, 144, 145n10, 147–149, 152, 155, 164, 166, 168, 169, 173, 176, 191, 195, 201n13, 209, 219, 221, 227, 229–231, 230n20, 239, 245, 251, 254–257, 265, 274 as basis of amor fati, 5 and conflict, 5 and the democratic feeling of popular power, 164, 166, 176 and democracy, 169, 170 and egalitarianism, 253 as feeling of power or Machtgefühl, 230n20 foundation in the will to power, 147 vs. the herd instinct, 136, 143, 148 incompatibility with perfectionism, 5 and legal justice, 96, 97

and the manifold soul, 115, 118, 167–168, 219 as non-instrumental affirmation of suffering, 63–65, 68 as play vs. contest or conquest, 57n10 and political legitimacy, 34 and political realism, 22n5 and production of inequality, 255, 256 qualitative vs. quantitative interpretation of, 229–231, 230n20 as resistance not domination, 4 vs. revolutionary nihilism, 265 and social hierarchy, 49 Wiredu, Kwasi, 176n6, 243 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 109n7 Y Yeritsian, Gary, 32n14 Young, Iris Marion, 236n26, 253, 304n30 Z Zack, Naomi, 215n2 Zhuangzi, 233, 236, 275 Zimmermann, Rolf, 224n12