‘An Old Carriage with New Horses’: Nietzsche’s Critique of Democracy
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Authors
Drochon, Hugo Halferty
Publication Date
2016-06-16Journal Title
History of European Ideas
ISSN
0191-6599
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Volume
42
Pages
1055-1068
Language
English
Type
Article
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Drochon, H. H. (2016). ‘An Old Carriage with New Horses’: Nietzsche’s Critique of Democracy. History of European Ideas, 42 1055-1068. https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2016.1176313
Abstract
Debates about Nietzsche's political thought today revolve around his role in contemporary democratic theory: is he a thinker to be mined for stimulating resources in view of refounding democratic legitimacy on a radicalised, postmodern and agonistic footing, or is he the modern arch-critic of democracy budding democrats must hone their arguments against? Moving away from this dichotomy, this article asks first and foremost what democracy meant for Nietzsche in late nineteenth-century Germany, and on that basis what we might learn from him now. To do so, it will pay particular attention to the political, intellectual and cultural contexts within which Nietzsche's thought evolved, namely Bismarck's relationship to the new German Reichstag, the philological discovery of an original Aryan race, and Nietzsche's encounter with Gobineau's racist thought through his frequentation of the Wagner circle. It argues that Nietzsche's most lasting contribution to democratic thinking is not to be found in the different ways he may or may not be used to buttress certain contemporary ideological positions, but rather how his notions of ‘herd morality’, ‘misarchism’ and the genealogical method still provides us with the conceptual tools to better understand the political world we inhabit.
Keywords
Nietzsche, democracy, the agon, herd morality, misarchism, genealogy
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2016.1176313
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/254499
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