"Was Nietzsche an Anarchist?"

Brian Morris

Nietzsche is now all the rage in academia. The man who
spent much of his solitary life wandering southern
Europe as an "eternal
fugitive" (his own words), looking for some place or
climate that
might ease or stay his deteriorating health, has now
become the academic
icon of those apocalyptic thinkers, the
postmodernists. As Bakunin,
Kropotkin and Malatesta have been declared obsolete,
Nietzsche has
replaced them as an icon for certain anarchists.
Indeed the question has
often been asked, was he an anarchist himself?The simple answer is no, and Nietzsche himself
explicitly repudiated
everything anarchism stands for. In Twilight of the
Idols, he wrote that
the Christian and the anarchist were "both decadents;
both incapable of
producing anything but dissolution, poisoning,
degeneration, both
blood-suckers, both with the instinct of deadly hatred
towards everything that stands erect, that towers
grandly up, that possesses duration, that promises
life a future".

He was equally critical and disparaging of socialists,
whom he called 'dolts', 'blockheads', 'decadents' and
'buffoons'. He insisted that they advocated "the
collective degeneration" of humanity into the "perfect
herd animal" (Beyond Good and Evil). Ordinary working
people were tarred with the same brush, and he spoke
of them with disdain — 'crowd', 'herd', 'rabble'.

Like his early mentor Schopenhauer, Nietzsche had a
very low regard for
ordinary people, though this "hermit of Sils-Maria"
(where he spent his
summers) knew precious little of their sufferings,
aspirations or social
life. As many have argued, his strident individualism
and aestheticism
left very little room for community, still less for
family life.

The reason for his disparagement of anarchism,
socialism and ordinary
people is that Nietzsche simplistically linked them to
the "slave
morality" which he contrasted with the "master
morality" of the nobility
and ruling elite. This "slave morality" (which he
associated with
Buddhism or Christianity as well as socialism,
democracy and anarchism)
he linked to humility, servility, pity, envy, secrecy,
reaction and
compassion, all motivated by "ressentiment" — what
British Tory Prime Minister
John Major called "the politics of envy", attributed
to anyone who
complained about the rampant inequalities of global
capitalism.

In contrast, the "master morality" of the rulers and
aristocratic elite
was charactised by courage, openness, strength, power,
nobility,
sensitivity, pride and self-control. The slaves and
ordinary people were
'rabble', the rulers 'good men' (though Nietzsche
never condoned the
elite's cruelty). Although he presented, in Thus Spake
Zarathustra, a
strident critique of the state, and is alleged by his
disciples to have
been 'anti-political' and concerned only with the
Dionysian aesthetics
of 'self-making', in fact throughout his writings he
supported and
expressed allegiance to those in power.

He sided with the 'strong', the 'rulers' and the
aristocrats — and directed his most venomous opinions
towards the lower classes, the slaves, the workers,
the 'rabble' — especially if they dared resent or
challenge the hierarchy. As Kropotkin said, "Nietzsche
did not understand anything about the economic
workers' revolt. The great Nietzsche, for he was great
in a certain revolt, remained a slave to bourgeois
prejudice". His "revaluation of all values" did not
extend to challenging aristocratic values of
hierarchy, class
structure and economic forms of exploitation.

He was akin to Aristotle in his defence of slavery
and, almost devoid of
sociological perspective, seems to have assumed that
there would always
be 'slaves' to provide the daily bread for the
aristocratic elite or
'overmen' in their solitary wanderings, and in their
Dionysian
affirmation of the "will to power".

So it's no surprise to find that Nietzsche heaped
praise on the Indian
caste system and its ranked hierarchy, or that he did
little but insult
and disparage the lower castes — the Chandalas, who he
thought had a
"feeling of contentment" in their servitude! The "law
of Manu"
upholding this system of social inequality certainly
met with his
approval.

The whole idea of a free society or of equal rights
was anathema to him. He simply equated them with the
diminution of
humanity, and saw them as conducive to the development
of the "perfect herd animal". He wilfully
misinterpreted both anarchism and socialism in
suggesting that they sought to reinstitute a system of
slavery (and of
course he found both guilty of forgetting the need for
an aristocratic
elite).

Social life, Nietzsche argued, should simply form "the
foundation and
scaffolding upon which a select species of being is
able to raise itself
to its higher task and in general to a higher
existence" (Beyond Good
and Evil). The essential thing was to have a "good and
healthy aristocracy".

Small wonder he considered the idea of equal rights
for all a poisonous
doctrine. Even in his criticisms of modernity, which
he equated with
liberal democracy, he advocated as an alternative
ideal not anarchist
communism, nor any other form of libertarian
socialism, but the Roman
Empire and Russian Tsarist state. Both, he felt, would
uphold tradition
and authority.

His notion of freedom was linked to this kind of
reactionary ethos.
Freedom, he wrote, "means that the manly instincts
that delight in war .
. . have gained mastery over other instincts". Fearing
the reduction of
everyone to the status of 'herd animal' (he
erroneously assumed that
this was what socialists and anarchists were
plotting), Nietzsche arrived at a notion of freedom
which was one of heroic valour, strength and a rampant
and solitary individualism — high in the mountains, of
course, and dependent on the people of the valley, the
'rabble' who produced his subsistence.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment had had faith in
empirical knowledge
and a belief in progress. They may have been a little
naive in their
enthusiasm for the betterment of humankind, but to
blame them for the
atrocities of the twentieth century would be as
simplistic as blaming
Jesus for the Inquisition.

Nietzsche was thoroughly reactionary in counterposing
the Enlightenment
belief in progress with that of the aristocratic
belief in authority and tradition. As he cogently put
it (again in Beyond Good and Evil), "deep reverence
for age and the traditional . . . prejudice in favour
of the ancestors . . . is typical of the morality of
the powerful: and when, conversely, men of 'modern
ideas' believe almost instinctively in 'progress' and
'the future' . . . this reveals clearly enough the
ignoble origin of these ideas".

Nietzsche was not a postmodernist but a thoroughly
reactionary, 'pre-modern' thinker. He has long been
renowned as a thoroughly misogynist thinker too,
though some postmodernists (Derrida, for
example) seem to portray him as an out-and-out
feminist. One day some
postmodernist will 'deconstruct' Hitler's Mein Kampf
as well, to show
that its author was really a pacifist!

As we are told that all language is metaphorical, that
there are no
stable meanings, that Nietzsche's writing style is
consistently ironic,
perhaps there is no way of knowing whether or not he
was anti-feminist.
But if we take him at his word, he hated feminism and
considered it
(like socialism) thoroughly decadent. Read the
following and see if he
was a feminist or not (as for the racist stereotype —
don't even go there). "A man who has depth, in his
spirit as well as in his desires ... can think of
woman only in an oriental way — he must conceive of
woman as a possession, as property with lock and key,
as something
predestined for service".

In suggesting that marriage as an institution
shouldn't be based on love, he also wrote (in Twilight
of the Idols) that "one establishes it on the basis of
the sexual drive, the drive to own property (wife and
child conceived of as property), the drive to dominate
which continually organises the smallest type of
domain, the family". Some feminist!

In Nationalism and Culture, Rudolf Rocker said
Nietzsche's life showed a
"constant oscillation between outlived authoritarian
concepts and truly
libertarian ideas". There was undoubtedly a
libertarian aspect to his
philosophy — his solitary form of individualism with
its aesthetic
appeal to self-making, the radical critique implied in
his "revaluation
of all values", his strident attack on the state in
Thus Spake
Zarathustra and his impassioned celebration of
personal freedom and
power.

But this was more than offset by his thoroughly
reactionary mindset —
his elitist politics, his celebration of authority and
tradition, his complete lack of any progressive vision
apart from the notion of an isolated, asocial nomad,
the 'overman'. Perhaps a later philosopher, Bertrand
Russell, described him best when he called him an
"aristocratic anarchist".

[This article appeared in Freedom: The Anarchist
Fortnightly,
vol. 63, no. 4 (23rd February 2002).]