FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Friedrich Nietzsche



Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was a provocative thinker who, although largely neglected during his lifetime, now exercises a wide influence in many areas of the humanities. His legacy for the study of politics is, however, hotly contested. This entry reviews central concepts in Nietzsche's thought, as well as controversies concerning them, and then examines the significance of Nietzsche's work for political theory.

Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, to a Lutheran pastor and his wife in Röcken, Prussia; his father died when Nietzsche was 4 years old. Nietzsche's academic training was in the discipline of philology (classics) rather than philosophy, and he achieved considerable academic success at a young age. However, at the age of 34 he took early retirement from the University of Basel due to ill health. He spent the next decade moving around Europe in search of affordable accommodation in a climate conducive to his well-being. Despite proposing to (at least) two women, Nietzsche never married. In 1889, he suffered a mental breakdown while in Turin, Italy, from which he never fully recovered. The last decade of his life was spent in the care of his mother Franziska and sister Elisabeth. During those years he lapsed in and out of lucidity and was incapable of writing.

Apart from a brief stint in the Prussian army, which ended when Nietzsche injured himself while trying to mount a horse, and his friendship as a young man with the composer Richard Wagner, Nietzsche's life was relatively uneventful? However, if he is correct that “the greatest thoughts are the greatest events” (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 285, 1886/1973, p. 195), then by this standard, his life was full of events. Each of the works produced from The Birth of Tragedy (1872) to his last, including his quasi-autobiography Ecce Homo ([Behold the Man] 1908) is original, challenging, arresting, exacting, and unsettling.

There is no discrete work in which Nietzsche explicitly addresses political questions; instead, his observations about politics are scattered throughout his texts and interwoven with his views on all manner of topics. The nearest thing we have to an extended reflection on politics comes in book 8 of Human, All Too Human, “A Glance at the State.” This comprises 45 numbered sections whose length varies from one line (section 482) to three pages (section 472) and whose topics range across a wide diversity of political matters. From looking at the ...