The transformation of Nietzsche's große Politik in the epoch of Bismarck (original) (raw)

The transformation of Nietzsche’s große Politik in the epoch of Bismarck

I

Most readers of Nietzsche can be forgiven for being entirely unaware of the term große Politik, ‘great politics’. The concept appears only infrequently in his published writings, and has been rendered remarkably inconsistently in English: ‘great politics’, ‘grand politics’, ‘power politics’, ‘large-scale politics’ have all been offered as potential translations. 1{ }^{1} In its conventional meaning it indicates foreign policy and grand strategy, and in many instances this is what Nietzsche is straightforwardly referring to. Hence it is perhaps unsurprising that Tom Stern has recently taken issue with the suggestion that Nietzsche had any such concept ‘at all, at least if this is taken to mean an independent idea which is connected with his philosophy.’. 2{ }^{2} But a close reading of Nietzsche’s notes, letters and publications reveals that great politics comprises a prominent theme in his later work, appearing with increasing frequency towards the end of his productive period in the late 1880 s. What is more, far from being an occasional usage of an extraneous

All translations of Nietzsche are my own and all emphasis Nietzsche’s except where explicitly noted. Nietzsche citations are given as letter date, abbreviated work title and section, or fragment number followed by the relevant volume and page number of the KSA (Giorgio Colli and Mario Montinari (eds.), Friedrich Nietzsche: Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbänden (15 vols. 2nd edn, Berlin, 1988)) or the KSB (Giorgio Colli and Mario Montinari (eds.), Friedrich Nietzsche: Sämtliche Briefe. Kritische Studienausgabe (8 vols. Berlin, 1975-84)). A list of the title abbreviations used is provided in the bibliography.
1{ }^{1} I use ‘great politics’ here exclusively, being the most direct translation of the German.
2{ }^{2} Tom Stern, Review of Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, The Three Stigmata of Friedrich Nietzsche: Political Physiology in the Age of Nibilism, in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (16 October 2011), http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/ 26960, last accessed 20 November 2013. My emphasis.

concept that would be obvious to his readers, as Stern suggests, it is deeply problematic to understand. This is not only because of the fragmentary nature of the references-despite ‘great politics’ appearing as a heading in some of the outlines for his projected magnum opus, Nietzsche never ultimately wrote a thorough description of the concept-but also because of the way in which these references often seem to contradict each other. 3{ }^{3}

It is difficult to tell, at first sight, what position Nietzsche even aims to assume with respect to great politics. In his first references to the term in Human, All Too Human (1878) and Daybreak (1881), he is unambiguously negative. Great politics may appear to have ‘splendour and magnificence’, Nietzsche observes, but its real result is the regular and unnecessary sacrifice of the ‘most outstanding talents’ of the nation. 4{ }^{4} It is a means of provoking the masses into supporting an ‘arbitrary, tyrannical nation’ to ‘rule over other nations’ - ‘or think it rules’, he adds sardonically. 5{ }^{5} But by the time of his 1888 Ecce Homo, he appears to have embraced it as a novel and integral part of his philosophy: 'it is first with me that there is great politics on earth. 6{ }^{6}

How is this contradiction to be explained? An obvious answer would be that between the two sets of writings, Nietzsche simply changes his mind, and that the conventional meaning of great politics is preserved. But this is insufficient. In his later writings, Nietzsche often decries great politics in one place while declaring it to be part of his own project in another, sometimes in the very same work. In Twilight of the Idols, November 1888, we find that ‘great politics deceives nobody’; in a note from the next month, Nietzsche declares the need for his ‘party of life’ to be ‘strong enough for great politics.’ In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Nietzsche prophesies a desirable ‘compulsion to great politics’ in one section while charging it with triggering ‘restlessness, emptiness and devilish bickering’ in another. 8{ }^{8}

At this point, the interpreter might be inclined to surrender to the popular image of Ni-

[1]

3{ }^{3} For appearances in outlines, see Fragment 34[188], KSA 11: 484; Fragment 12[2], KSA 13: 211.
4HH$481,KSA{ }^{4} H H \$ 481, K S A 2: 315-16.
5D$189,KSA{ }^{5} D \$ 189, K S A 3: 162.
6EH{ }^{6} E H, ‘Why I am a destiny’, $1, KSA 6: 366.
7{ }^{7} TI, ‘What the Germans lack’, $3, KSA 6: 105; Fragment 25[1], KSA 13: 658.
8{ }^{8} BGE 208\$ \$ 208, 241, KSA 5: 140, 181. ↩︎

etzsche as a dealer in impenetrable contradictions, but in fact there is good reason to suppose that Nietzsche is actually talking about two different things-that there are, in other words, two quite separate concepts, both of which he refers to as große Politik. A number of important clues suggest this conclusion. In many of the places where Nietzsche references great politics in a positive light, he chooses to emphasise ‘great politics’, or to describe it as ‘truly great politics’, while in Beyond Good and Evil, the sections where he attacks great politics have that term placed in quotation marks. 9{ }^{9} A letter of December 1888 more explicitly bemoans the fact that 'incitement to popular selfishness is taught and perceived as great politics! 10{ }^{10} The clear implication is that there is a radical distinction between what is conventionally called ‘great politics’, and what true great politics really means: in the very first instance in which große Politik is mentioned positively, a letter to his confidant Franz Overbeck in April 1884, Nietzsche is at pains to describe it as ‘what II call great politics’, underlining ’ ichi c h ’ twice. 11{ }^{11}

This letter to Overbeck reflects a transformative moment in Nietzsche’s idea of great politics, something that he himself seems to recognise: now, he says in the letter, ‘I am, in all likelihood, the most independent man in Europe’; 'I want to use and exploit well the situation I have attained. 12{ }^{12} We can speak, then, of the transformation of Nietzsche’s great politics, his appropriation of the term and provision of a new meaning, and the time of the letter offers a good historical starting point for understanding the roots and implications of this change in the context of relevant features of the politics of the time and of other tectonic changes within Nietzsche’s philosophy.

I aim here to piece together an account of this transformation by answering three related questions: why does the transformation take place; what is its result; and what is its place within Nietzsche’s wider thought? In the first case, I hope to demonstrate that the turn to great politics was not, as is often supposed, simply a product of Nietzsche’s immediate political context, but

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9{ }^{9} Cf. Letter to Georg Brandes, December 1888, KSB 8: 502; GM, §1:8, KSA 5: 269. In BGE, compare §§241, 254 and §208\S 208.
10{ }^{10} Letter to Ruggiero Bonghi, December 1888, KSB 8: 569.
11{ }^{11} Letter to Franz Overbeck, 30 April 1884, KSB 6: 498.
12{ }^{12} Ibid. ↩︎

is rooted firmly in his own intellectual development, with significant potential implications. By analysing what, precisely, great politics implies, it will then be possible to show how it connects with other features of Nietzsche’s philosophy at this time and enables him to put forward a positive project for the reconstruction of human society. In this way it becomes feasible to grasp the wider significance of the transformation of great politics in understanding Nietzsche as a political thinker.

II

One of the most obvious features of Nietzsche’s immediate context in 1884 was the turn towards an official German colonial policy, and Peter Bergmann has argued that it is not coincidental that a new great politics appears ‘precisely at the moment when Germany was suddenly creating her own colonial empire’ - an interpretation that has been well received in more recent scholarship. 13{ }^{13} Prior to 1884 , Bismarck had viewed the pursuit of colonies as geopolitically disruptive and an overly expensive investment for little tangible gain: the very previous year, in fact, he had forthrightly professed his opposition to colonialism to his freshly appointed chief of the imperial navy and future successor Leo von Caprivi:

Bismarck: ‘I hear you are against colonies?’
Caprivi: ‘Yes.’
Bismarck: 'As am I. 14{ }^{14}
Beginning in April I884, however, Bismarck oversaw the rapid acquisition of a colonial empire stretching from Africa to Southeast Asia, and with the advent of the Berlin Conference of 1884-5 the German Empire involved itself in the international struggle for colonies in force.
13{ }^{13} Peter Bergmann, Nietzsche, ‘The Last Antipolitical German’ (Bloomington, 1987), p. 163. Examples of more recent scholarship include Frank Cameron and Don Dombowsky (eds.), Political Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche: An Edited Anthology (Basingstoke, 2008), pp. 16-18; Robert Holub, ‘Nietzsche’s Colonialist Imagination: Nueva Germania, Good Europeanism, and Great Politics’, in Sara Friedrichsmayer et al. (eds.), The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and its Legacy (Ann Arbor, 1998), pp. 33-50, passim.
14{ }^{14} Quoted in Werner Martin, Deutsche Kolonialpolitik unter Bismarck: Das Für und Wider eines staatlich-formellen Kolonialismus (Norderstedt, 2006), p. 29. My translation.

Nietzsche himself became indirectly involved in the public push for German colonies via the activities of his brother-in-law Bernhard Förster, who by 1883 was visiting Paraguay with a view to establishing what would become the settlement of Nueva Germania. In April of that year the British chargé d’affaires in Buenos Aires reported the ‘canvass[ing] in various portions of the German press’ of Förster’s idea of a 'new Germany on this continent, to the absolute exclusion of all Jewish elements. 15{ }^{15} By 1884, Nietzsche would have been acutely aware of the growing German colonialist movement, and it has been possible to suggest on this basis that the turn to great politics was Nietzsche’s own idiosyncratic embracement of this campaign.

While it presents an appealingly simple explanation, there are two problems with binding Nietzsche’s new great politics to the new German colonial policy. Firstly, to the extent that he himself was involved in German colonialism, he proved either indifferent or hostile to it. Nietzsche does allude to Bernhard Förster’s Paraguayan endeavour in the pivotal letter to Overbeck, but in a strictly negative context: he describes his sister, Förster’s wife, as having become ‘a very malicious person’ who has busied herself with casting the ‘most poisonous aspersions on my character’, and hopes that she will leave 'at once for Paraguay. 16{ }^{16} A subsequent letter to his mother in 1885 , indeed, expresses his opposition to Förster’s plans directly; as he confesses, 'I have certainly carried little enthusiasm for “German nature”, but even less of the wish to conserve the purity of this “magnificent” [“herrliche”] race. On the contrary, on the contrary-… In a remark that seems to indicate an underlying discomfort towards this kind of colonialism in general, he counsels that 'Europe is really not so small… 17{ }^{17} and while his proposal in Daybreak (1881) that a quarter of the European population be transplanted abroad may suggest that Nietzsche was not averse to expounding colonies as such, his remark in the same place that Chinese workers should likewise be transplanted into Europe intimates that he was not, in any case, talking about the recognisable colonialism of his time. 18{ }^{18}

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15{ }^{15} Quoted in Harris Warren, Rebirth of the Paraguayan Republic: The First Colorado Era, 1878-1904 (Pittsburgh, 1985), p. 257.
16{ }^{16} Letter to Franz Overbeck, 30 April 1884, KSB 6: 498.
17{ }^{17} Letter to Franziska and Elisabeth Nietzsche, 14 March 1885, KSB 7: 23.
18D$206,KSA5:185{ }^{18} D \$ 206, K S A 5: 185. ↩︎

Secondly, Nietzsche’s development of a new approach to great politics substantially precedes the implementation of the new German colonial policy. South West Africa was incorporated as a German colony in August 1884; the Berlin Conference took place from Novem-ber-months after Nietzsche began his revisitation of great politics. If, as Werner Martin suggests, Bismarck’s change of mind on the issue of a colonial policy occurred definitively on April 24, and only began to be implemented from that point on, then it seems unlikely that Nietzsche would have already been taking this into account six days later, particularly when, as we shall see, there are clear indications that the new ‘great politics’ had been some time in the making. 19{ }^{19} At the same time, while popular colonialism was on the rise, there is no convenient break that would be able to account historically for the emergence of the new great politics-to answer the question, why now and not before? There is nothing in his letter to Overbeck to indicate that Nietzsche had any sort of official or unofficial colonial policy in mind.

The renewal of Anglo-Russian rivalry in Asia forms a second critical element of the political context of Nietzsche’s turn towards great politics. By the middle of the 1870 s, Russia’s advance through Central Asia had begun to impinge perilously upon British interests in the region while enhancing the Tsarist empire’s international prestige. A British commander in India commented in 1875 that ‘the general idea [here] is that Russia is the rising power, that she is destined to advance still further, that England is afraid of her, and will do nothing to oppose her progress’; 20{ }^{20} a feeling of urgency began to prevail among British diplomats and officials as opponents of the extension of Britain’s position in the region were marginalised and supporters of a ‘forward policy’ came to the fore. Though the forward policy fell into disfavour in the wake of the second Afghan war of 1878−801878-80, it saw a resurgence under the guidance of Lord Dufferin, who assumed the viceroyalty of India in December 1884. In March 1885, a Russian incursion by the small Afghan town of Panjdeh brought tensions between the two powers to the brink of war in a crisis that reverberated across the ministries of Europe-not least in Germany, as

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19{ }^{19} Werner Martin, Deutsche Kolonialpolitik unter Bismarck, p. 45.
20{ }^{20} Quoted in Robert A. Huttenback, "The “Great Game” in the Pamirs and the Hindu-Kush: The British Conquest of Hunza and Nagar’, in Modern Asian Studies, 9:I (1975), pp. 1-29, here p. 4. ↩︎

Bismarck intervened to deter his Russian ally from conflict. 21{ }^{21}
It is unclear just how far Nietzsche was aware of this complex geopolitical manoeuvring, but it certainly did not escape his attention. In a passage of his 1886 Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche describes Russia as ‘Europe’s greatest danger’, and notes obliquely that it will require ‘more than Indian wars and entanglements in Asia’ to dislodge it from its threatening position. Rather than leaving the matter here, however, Nietzsche concludes the discussion by expressing his hope that Russia will precisely not be dislodged, that Europe will match its menace and turn to face a new century which 'is already bringing on the stuggle for mastery of the earth-the compulsion to great politics. 22{ }^{22} Here, at least, great politics is connected intimately to Nietzsche’s geopolitical context, and while this may be his most explicit reference to what would later be called the ‘Great Game’, he already observes in the spring of 1884 that ‘coercive power [Gewalt] is at once divided between Slavs and Anglo-Saxons’, and that 'Russia must become master of Europe and Asia-it must colonise, and obtain China and India. 23{ }^{23}

Understanding great politics solely through the prism of developments in Nietzsche’s immediate political context, however, fails to account for the fact that Nietzsche’s appropriation of the concept takes place at the same time as a much wider reconstruction of his thought. It was this period that saw the introduction of a variety of important, quintessentially Nietzschean concepts, including those of eternal return, the overman (Übermensch), and the Umwerthung aller Werthe, the re- or transvaluation of all values. 24{ }^{24} This last idea, the concept of a thoroughgoing transformation of human values, is particularly important for our present purposes. It first appears, without explanation, as the subtitle of a projected future work in a notebook of the summer and autumn of 1884 , very soon after the pivotal letter to Overbeck; in a letter to

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21{ }^{21} Ibid., p. 9. For Bismarck’s intervention in the Panjdeh scare, see William Fuller, Strategy and Power in Russia, 1800-1914 (New York, 1992), p. 332. The relevance of the Panjdeh incident for Nietzsche is noted in William Altman, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: The Philosopher of the Second Reich (Plymouth, 2013), p. 14.
22{ }^{22} BGE §208,KSA\S 208, K S A 5: 140.
23{ }^{23} Fragment 25[II2], KSA II: 42.
24{ }^{24} On the difficulties in translating this term, see Duncan Large, ‘A Note on the Term “Umwerthung”’, in Journal of Nietzsche Studies 39 (2010), pp. 5-II. Lacking a definite convention I have chosen to render it exclusively as ‘transvaluation’. ↩︎

Georg Brandes in December 1888, Nietzsche explicitly links it to the question of great politics, describing the advent of the Umwerthung aller Werthe as 'great politics par excellence. 25{ }^{25} In light of this connection, it seems evident that to understand the change in the meaning of great politics we must take account of the broader changes in Nietzsche’s own intellectual position at this time.

In a letter to Overbeck of 7 April 1884, immediately preceding the missive that first mentions a new great politics, Nietzsche comments that 'for the last few months I have been practising “world history”, with delight, albeit with some frightening results. 26{ }^{26} As his inspiration for this interest, he refers to an 1882 letter from the historian Jacob Burckhardt wherein the latter wonders what could result if Nietzsche 'were to illuminate world history entirely ex professo [by profession] with your manner of lights and beneath the angles of lighting that you have measured. 27{ }^{27} Nietzsche was clearly influenced by this suggestion, and what the resultant turn to ‘world history’ might imply is adumbrated by some features of his notes from this period. There are twice as many references to ‘Europe’ in the notebooks of 1884−51884-5 than in all of those of the preceding years put together ( 54 against 25); his first reference to ‘Slavs’ comes in 1882; appearances by states such as ‘England’, ‘Russia’, ‘China’ are significantly more frequent from 1884 on. Not only do Nietzsche’s objectives become grander-beginning with Zarathustra’s pivotal proclamation that man is something to be overcome-but they are also given a concrete reality in terms of world politics. By the time of the 1888 letter to Brandes, Nietzsche is prepared to describe his missive as the ‘first world-historical document’ precisely because of its proclamation of the coming great politics. 28{ }^{28}

Sometime after 1882, moreover, Nietzsche came into possession of the first three volumes of a compilation of Bismarck’s speeches, a rare extraneous addition to a library otherwise made

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25{ }^{25} Fragment 26[259], KSA II: 218; Letter to Georg Brandes, December 1888, KSB 8: 502.
26{ }^{26} Letter to Franz Overbeck, 7 April 1884, KSB 6: 496.
27{ }^{27} Jacob Burckhardt to Nietzsche, is September 1882, in Giorgio Colli and Mario Montinari (eds.), Nietzsche: Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe (2I vols. Berlin, 1981), vol. 3/2, pp. 288-89, here p. 288.
28{ }^{28} Letter to Georg Brandes, December 1888, KSB 8: 502. ↩︎

up almost entirely of classical scholarship. 29{ }^{29} This is interesting inasmuch as it suggests that Nietzsche’s interest in contemporary politics—and specifically Bismarck—had been revitalised, and indeed in the first volume of this collection we find Bismarck referencing great politics in a way entirely inimical to Nietzsche: ‘At this point actual great politics, as it was dealt with in relation to the European powers, came also to the south German courts… 30{ }^{30} Bismarck’s usage of the term not only suggests its relative novelty in the German context, and thus its suitability as an object of analysis, but comprises precisely the kind of European ‘Kleinstaaterei’, a petty concern for the interests and relations of small states, that Nietzsche repeatedly observed and decried. 31{ }^{31} Duncan Large has argued that Nietzsche admired Bismarck as ‘non-German’ and “good”’ until his publication of The Case of Wagner in 1888, but other notes from the period around the introduction of the new great politics suggest the development of a more complicated picture already placing Bismarck in a less favourable light. 32{ }^{32} In a fragment from the winter of 1883−41883-4, for instance, Nietzsche writes elliptically: ‘Complacency and stupidity-centre (e.g. Bismarck)’, before going on to describe Bismarckian policy as 'Outwardly: An epoch of wars, collapses, explosions; Inwardly: ever greater weakness of men. 33{ }^{33} If in 1868 he had read Bismarck’s speeches ‘like strong wine’, he would now, presumably, revisit them with more critical eyes. 34{ }^{34}
‘Great politics’ was not simply a product of the times, then. Of course, as the example of Anglo-Russian rivalry in Asia demonstrates, the way in which Nietzsche articulated große Politik was shaped explicitly and inescapably by contemporary features of international pol-itics-but these did not and could not determine the origins and wider significance of the concept itself, which is not only substantially independently from, but also historically pre-

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29{ }^{29} See item description in Giuliano Campioni et al. (eds.) Nietzsches persönliche Bibliothek (Berlin, 2003), pp. 142−3142-3.
30{ }^{30} Otto de Grahl (ed.), Ausgewählte Reden des Fürsten von Bismarcks (6 vols., Berlin-Cöthen, 1877-1888), vol. I, p. 103. My translation.
31{ }^{31} Cf. GS 377377\377 377, KSA 3: 630 .
32{ }^{32} Duncan Large, ‘The Aristocratic Radical and the White Revolutionary: Nietzsche’s Bismarck’, in Jürgen Barkhoff (ed.), Das schwierige 19. Jahrhundert (Tübingen, 2000), pp. ioi-113, here p. iII.
33{ }^{33} Fragment 24[25], KSA 10: 659 .
34{ }^{34} Quoted in Tracy Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (Berkeley, 1988), p. 348, n. 33. ↩︎

cedes the contextual features that are often taken to explain it. The roots of the transformation of great politics run deeper into Nietzsche’s own intellectual development, and it must be understood in the context of a more general transformative moment in his philosophy, reflected starkly in his turn towards the analysis of world history and politics.

III

In order to capture the significance of this transformation, it is necessary to focus more closely on the nature of the new concept of great politics itself—in particular what Nietzsche believes that great politics actually implies. Two divergent interpretations have tended to present themselves: either great politics is a politics of imperialism, we are told, or it is a politics of cultural transformation (and perhaps not even really a ‘politics’ at all). While great politics may not have actually emerged from the advent of colonialism, as I have argued, this does not diminish the feasibility of the first of these potential analyses: we may still ask, that is, whether great politics conceptually involves colonies and imperial domination. There is certainly some indication that it does. In a fragment from the summer of 1885 , Nietzsche speaks of Europe’s entry into a ‘struggle for rulership of the earth’, and adds that 'the colonies of England are needed for this struggle just as Germany … needs the colonies of Holland. 35{ }^{35} Elsewhere, as we have seen, Nietzsche argues that Russia ‘must colonise’, and in a later letter he follows Russia again in a call for Europe ‘to devise another Siberia’ where transvaluation can be put into practice. 36{ }^{36} These assertions lend some credence to Cameron and Dombowski’s suggestion that great politics is a ‘supra-nationalist’ European imperialism, that Nietzsche does not pour scorn on imperialism itself but specifically only on the imperial pretensions of small powers. 37{ }^{37}

This imperialist element forms only a single aspect of great politics, however, and not its central focus. This is suggested by the contents of an 1888 note, itself titled ‘Great politics’,

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35{ }^{35} Fragment 37[9], KSA II: 584 .
36{ }^{36} Fragment 25[II2], KSA II: 42; Letter to Georg Brandes, 13 September 1888, KSB 8: 420.
37{ }^{37} Frank Cameron and Don Dombowsky (eds.), Political Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 17. ↩︎

which provides the closest that Nietzsche ever comes to a systematic schema of what, in fact, great politics implies. Here, the only mention of Europe is in the context of the ‘interest-politics of European dynasties’ with which Nietzsche is making a break; the ultimate scope of great politics itself is explicitly global, it concerns the ‘breeding of mankind as a whole’, a war against all the ‘absurd happenstances of nation, class, race, career, upbringing, education. 38{ }^{38} Holub’s suggestion that in pressing for the “good European,” practicing “great politics”’ to ‘have the task of subjugating the entire earth’ Nietzsche is really arguing for the acquisition of a ‘vast colonial empire’ falls short inasmuch as the ends of great politics, on Nietzsche’s account, are not ‘colonialist’ in any simple or conventional sense. 39{ }^{39} Europe needs the colonies of England not as ends in themselves but because they are a necessary instrument in a geopolitical struggle, the struggle for rulership of the earth, and as Beyond Good and Evil suggests, this struggle is an objective necessity, a ‘compulsion’, quite apart from any normative considerations. The final end of great politics is, in Henning Ottmann’s words, a ‘greatness of culture, not of empires’—rulership of the world is also, as the statement on breeding mankind as a whole implies, rulership on behalf of the world. 40{ }^{40}

Walter Kaufmann’s claim that Nietzsche’s references to war are merely an ‘unfortunate simile’, echoed in Del Caro’s suggestion that they are an ‘unfortunate choice of words’, furnishes the framework for the alternative analysis of great politics, which rejects the idea that it has immediate political implications at all beyond a call for cultural change. 41{ }^{41} Lampert and Del Caro argue that great politics comprises a ‘global politics of loyalty to the earth’ which is set above and far beyond any question of 'international powers. 42{ }^{42} Having rejected the imagery of war, Lampert and Del Caro both go on to suggest that the modern Green movement is the final

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38{ }^{38} Fragment 25[2], KSA 13: 637.
39{ }^{39} Robert Holub, ‘Nietzsche’s Colonialist Imagination’, pp. 48, 49.
40{ }^{40} Henning Ottmann, Philosophie und Politik bei Nietzsche (Berlin, 1999), p. 240. My translation.
41{ }^{41} Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton, 1974), p. 388; Adrian Del Caro, Grounding the Nietzsche Rhetoric of Earth (Berlin, 2004), p. 285.
42{ }^{42} Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times: A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and Nietzsche (New Haven, 1993), p. 432; Adrian Del Caro, Grounding the Nietzsche Rhetoric of Earth, p. 286. ↩︎

fulfilment of Nietzschean great politics. 43{ }^{43} This conclusion is patently bizarre, but also points to the inherent problem with the underlying argument from an intellectual-historical perspective: by arguing that Nietzsche’s chosen imagery is purely coincidental and even misleading, they claim a position of hermeneutic superiority which allows them to substitute their own particular inclinations into the text in a way that Nietzsche himself could not have recognised as his own.

Nietzsche begins his note on great politics with the declaration ‘I bring war’, and it is reasonable to suppose that even if it is a war of a different type, he is nonetheless referring to a war. What is unusual about this war, here, is who it is between: ‘Not between people [Volk] and people’, but 'between the will to life and vengefulness against life. 44{ }^{44} These are not simply abstract ideas; the war against vice has a distinctly concrete quality. The ‘Law against Christianity’ appended to the contemporaneous Antichrist does not pull punches: having flatly declared ‘vice’ to be Christianity, Nietzsche decrees that ‘the priest is our Chandala [untouchable]-he should be despised, starved, driven into every sort of desert’; he should not be ‘reasoned with’ but ‘imprisoned. 45{ }^{45} The note on great politics is even broader in scope, declaring that all “higher classes”’ comprise a ‘party for lies’ in bitter antagonism to Nietzsche’s ‘party of life’. The conflict between them is nothing less than a 'war to the death [Todkrieg].46

This realisation of war in great politics is highlighted in an instructive passage of the Genealogy of Morals (1887) which describes the ‘arcane black art of a truly great politics of revenge’ - the great politics of the first transvaluation of all values, effected through Christianity’s ‘slave revolt in morality’ which transposed good and bad and created the concept of evil. The crowning moment of this great politics of revenge is nothing less than a single, incomparable annihilating blow, an ‘unthinkable, final, extreme cruelty’, the murder of God himself-not simply an image or a metaphor, but the amplification of the physical death of Jesus Christ.

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43{ }^{43} Ibid.
44{ }^{44} Fragment 23[1], KSA 13: 637 .
45{ }^{45} AC, ‘Law against Christianity’, KSA 6: 254 .
46{ }^{46} Fragment 23[1], KSA 13: 638. ↩︎

More than this, however, the ‘great politics of revenge’ is presented as a struggle between real political agents, between ‘Israel’ and the 'enemies of Israel. 47{ }^{47} The point is brought into sharper focus in Antichrist, which clarifies the all too concrete reality of Christianity’s ‘war to the death [Todkrieg] against every stronger type of person’: ‘epidemics of death-seeking’ and the sanctification of martyrdom, each martyr re-enacting the original, supreme death in the service of transvaluation, the crucifixion. 48{ }^{48} Though he does not seek to simply repeat this first transvaluation, Nietzsche himself repeatedly calls for a war to the death, an 'annihilating blow [Vernichtungsschlag], 49{ }^{49} a 'desperate struggle [Verzweiflungskampf], 50{ }^{50} and attempting to dilute the significance of the idea of war here is disingenuous. ‘The good war is that which sanctifies any cause’, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1882) makes clear, and Nietzsche’s ‘brothers in war’ must be prepared to face death: 'So live your life of obedience and war! What use is long life! What warrior wants to be spared! 51{ }^{51}

Yet the term Todkrieg deserves careful analysis: it does not necessarily seem to imply a call for bloodshed, even if its implications are as concrete and coercive as the ‘Law against Christianity’ suggests. Zarathustra’s instruction to embrace death as a possibility is, in the first place, not the same as an incitement to kill-Stephen Houlgate, for instance, has pointed out the sense in which a ‘heroic nobility of spirit’, for Nietzsche, 'confronts death and life without debilitating trepidation. 52{ }^{52} Nietzsche, indeed, cites Zarathustra in his discussion of martyrs in AnA n tichrist, inveighing that 'blood is the worst witness to truth; blood poisons the purest teaching … If one would go through fire for one’s doctrine,-what does that prove! 53{ }^{53} And while Nietzsche may, as Bruce Detwiler argues, appear to be demanding an enormous war of blood and iron, in a letter to Jean Bourdeau he explicitly expresses his confidence that 'it is possible to bring the whole absurd situation of Europe into order through a sort of world-historical laugh-

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47{ }^{47} GM I:8, KSA 5: 269 .
48AC$$5,53,KSA6:171,235{ }^{48} A C \$ \$ 5,53, K S A 6: 171,235.
49{ }^{49} Letter to Georg Brandes, December 1888, KSB 8: 502.
50{ }^{50} Fragment 25[13], KSA 13: 643.
51{ }^{51} Z-I, ‘On War and Warriors’, KSA 4: 59-60.
52{ }^{52} Stephen Houlgate, Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics (Cambridge, 1986), p. 194.
53{ }^{53} Z-II, ‘On Priests’, KSA 4: i19, quoted in AC,$53,KSA6:235A C, \$ 53, K S A 6: 235. ↩︎

ter, without having to spill a single drop of blood. 54{ }^{54}
In Ecce Homo, moreover, Nietzsche speaks of a ‘Geisterkrieg’, a war of minds or spirits unlike any other war before: ‘the concept of politics’ itself, we are told, 'will be entirely assimilated into Geisterkrieg, all the power structures of the old society will be blown into the air. 55{ }^{55} This might appear to present an intractable contradiction: there must be an ideological war to the death and a geopolitical struggle for rulership of the earth—yet it must also comprise an apparently entirely novel, spiritual form of war, the Geisterkrieg. Part of this apparent paradox can be explained through the ostensible difference between Nietzsche’s descriptive analysis and the contents of his ideal programme. His discussion of great politics in Beyond Good and Evil provides a striking example of this distinction: on the one hand, Nietzsche sees the looming possibility that Russia will succumb to ‘parliamentarian madness’ and every Russian will diligently ‘read his newspaper at breakfast’ - yet he makes it very explicit that ‘I say this not as one who wishes it’, that he would prefer Europe to match the menace of Russia instead. 56{ }^{56} Great politics, above all, is described as a compulsion; how it will be realised and what form the struggle for mastery of the earth will take depends inherently on the shape of the world to come. Nietzsche foresees not one, but many possible futures-a trait already obvious in Zarathustra’s two prophesies of the last man and the overman-and some are more desirable to him than others. 57{ }^{57} When he makes statements of the form ‘Russia must become lord of Europe and Asia’, ‘the colonies of England are needed’, it is reasonable to interpret him as making a descriptive claim, and not necessarily a normative one. The old society might be annihilated in the culmination of a world-political struggle in bloody catastrophe, as Detwiler suggests, or it might, as Nietzsche desires, die out in ‘mere’ laughter.

The implications of Todkrieg in themselves are not as obvious as they might seem. War to the death could be interpreted as a call for slaughter, but it may also, as I have suggested,

[1]

54{ }^{54} Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago, 1990), pp. 56-7; Letter to Jean Bourdeau, I January 1889, KSB 8: 570 .
55EH{ }^{55} E H, ‘Why I am a destiny’, §1, KSA 6: 366 .
56{ }^{56} BGE §208, KSA 5: 139-40.
57{ }^{57} In particular see Z−IZ-I, ‘Prologue’, 4−5,KSA\$ \$ 4-5, K S A 4: 16-21. ↩︎

involve a more passive embracement of the possibility of death—certainly the opposition, the ‘party of lies’ in its Christian roots, is not opposed to martyrdom and killing-or the dwindling and eventual elimination of the base of the opposing party over time, an alternative suggested by Nietzsche himself. 58{ }^{58} In this sense, great politics can ultimately imply, simultaneously and without contradiction, both a war of spirits and a war to the death, a Geisterkrieg and a Todkrieg. In Nick Land’s words, Nietzsche expounds war as a conventional ‘antagonistic juxtaposition of constellated forces’ but also their concurrent ‘metamorphosis’, war 'in its uninhibited and extravagant root … [which] does not serve the state. 59{ }^{59}

The result is that great politics is the militant practice of the transvaluation of all values. It should not be understood as simply being a disingenuous justification of some variant of New Imperialism, or as a free-standing idea with little connection to politics in general. It is, explicitly, radically different from the old conception of a great politics in service of the state, a charade which now ‘deceives nobody’; as Nietzsche states, ‘the time is coming when we shall relearn politics’, politics itself is imbued with new meaning and transvalued. 60{ }^{60} Great politics demands war between parties of real people united by particular perspectives, and by means of a transformation of Europe and the struggle for rulership of the earth it aims at achieving the advent of a new kind of human society and ultimately the fulfilment of Zarathustran prophesy.

IV

If great politics is the practice of transvaluation, dealing with both war and cultural transformation, it remains to be shown how precisely this concept is tied to other aspects of Nietzsche’s thought, and in this way what its ultimate implications are. When Nietzsche discusses great politics in Daybreak (188I)—before he introduces its new meaning-he already sheds light on an intimate connection between power and morality that seems to offer a simplistic first

[1]

58{ }^{58} Cf. Fragment 25[290], KSA II: 85 .
59{ }^{59} Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Batailles and Virulent Nibilism (New York, 1992), p. 105.
60{ }^{60} TI, ‘What the Germans lack’, §3, KSA 6: 366; Fragment 2[57], KSA 12: 87. ↩︎

foundation for the later narrative of the Genealogy of Morals:

When man has the feeling of power, he feels and calls himself good: and it is precisely then that others, who must lack his power, feel and call him bad! 61{ }^{61}

The fact that this analysis of morality is already brought up in the context of a discussion on great politics indicates the foundational relationship of great politics to the emergent project of the transvaluation of all values; it is also suggestive of the close relationship between great politics and cultural and intellectual questions in general. It is for this reason that great politics represents a war of ideas, with the articulation of a party of life and a party of lies which are divided by questions of value-a struggle represented powerfully by the time of Ecce Homo with the image of politics itself becoming a Geisterkrieg.

At one and the same time as being a struggle over ideas, however, great politics is also a struggle on the plane of global politics. This is demonstrated in a note of autumn 1884 which references the increasing preponderance of ‘great interests’ beyond mere peoples. Here, Nietzsche demands European cooperation with Russia in order to break with both ‘Christian’ and ‘American perspectives’: 'no American future!'62 A conflict of cultures is transposed into the terminology of geopolitics. This point, the unity of the political and the cultural in great politics, is highlighted further by Nietzsche’s repeated references to Napoleon, on the one hand as an eminently political and world-historical figure who desired to bring Europe into a unified ‘association of states’, but also as an agent of cultural change, the progenitor of a ‘Napoleonic movement’ encompassing the figure of the 'ideal artist. 63{ }^{63} Similarly, we find the suggestion that democratic Europe will ultimately give rise to an aristocracy of ‘philosophical men of force and artist-tyrants’, men who combine both political rulership and the primacy of cultural ideals. 64{ }^{64} Europe, in sum, must attain a geopolitically concrete ‘political and economic unity’—precisely

[1]

61D$189,KSA{ }^{61} D \$ 189, K S A 3: 162.
62{ }^{62} Fragment 26[336], KSA 11: 239.
63{ }^{63} Fragment 25[115], KSA 11: 43; Fragment 35[45], KSA 11: 532.
64{ }^{64} Fragment 2[57], KSA 12: 87. ↩︎

so that it can effect an intellectual and cultural transformation. 65{ }^{65}
Great politics is also, finally, directed towards an end. The attainment of lordship over the earth is not an end in itself, and neither, even, is the emergence of a new ruling caste in Eu-rope-they are rather a means to accomplish the transvaluation of all values on a global scale, and this in turn connects to an ultimate objective which is already clear in Zarathustra’s repeated dictum that man is something to be overcome. The idea of establishing a ‘hierarchy [Rangordnung] between person and person’, first appearing under that name in a notebook of 1885−61885-6, becomes the fixed goal of great politics by the time of the 1888 letter to Brandes. 66{ }^{66} Again, this hierarchy is both intellectual and concrete-it has its counterpart in a hierarchy ‘between moral and moral’, but at the same time the objective of great politics is also described as being the coronation of ‘physiology’ as 'mistress of all questions. 67{ }^{67}

The project of which great politics is part can, then, be effectively summarised in terms of four broad themes: intellectual change, world politics, war, and the final realisation of a new society-what Twilight of the Idols terms the advent of 'midday. 68{ }^{68} The midday, the establishment of a ‘hierarchy between person and person’ purified of all extraneous racial, national, class boundaries, finally, perhaps, leading to the advent of the Übermensch, is the ultimate realisation of the intellectual and cultural process of the transvaluation of all values. 69{ }^{69} Great politics, in the two modalities described above, is precisely what mediates between these two stages; it is the movement from the purely intellectual realisation which Nietzsche himself has precipitated in his role as ‘Antichrist’, to its full assimilation in human social practice: hence the proclamation that 'great politics begins with me. 70{ }^{70} It is a movement in world politics in the form of a struggle for rulership of the earth, and in society more generally in the form of a ‘war to the death’ between ideological parties, a supreme conflict between 'Dionysus and the cruci-

[1]

65EH{ }^{65} E H, ‘The Case of Wagner’, §2, KSA 6: 360.
66{ }^{66} Fragment I[66], KSA 12: 27.
67{ }^{67} Fragment 25[1], KSA 13: 637.
68{ }^{68} TI, ‘The history of an error’, KSA 6: 81. Cf. also the ‘Great Midday’ in Fragment 13[2], KSA 13: 214.
69{ }^{69} Letter to Georg Brandes, December 1888, KSB 8: 502.
70EH{ }^{70} E H, ‘Why I am a destiny’, §I KSA 6: 366. ↩︎

fied one. 71{ }^{71} The transvaluation of global society can be accomplished only via the preliminary continental transvaluation of Europe: the vision in Beyond Good and Evil of the breeding and installation of a ‘ruling caste’ with its own ‘long terrible will that can set itself objectives millennia in advance’ is specifically directed towards transcending Europe’s preoccupation with ‘petty politics’ and preparing the continent for the era of the compulsion to great politics and to rulership of the earth. 72{ }^{72} Through attaining rulership of the earth, a global transvaluation becomes possible; this is how the new Rangordnung can be brought into being. 73{ }^{73}

V

This mediating role is what makes great politics integral to Nietzsche’s later thought, and it gives the transformation of great politics a status as a moment with far-reaching implications. In the period prior to 1884 , Nietzsche’s observations on politics had had a singularly critical character, retreating from his early involvement in nationalism. It is perhaps partly this character which made Nietzsche, in his own mind, the ‘most independent man in Europe’, allowing him to formulate objectives from a far more holistic perspective than any of his contemporaries. 74{ }^{74} Karl Jaspers noted that in the period in which the new great politics begins to assume an ever greater role, Nietzsche’s ‘thoughts are directed … energetically towards the future’, intertwining 'visions of destruction and visions of new creations. 75{ }^{75} It is precisely a practice of ‘great politics’ which enables these visions and grants them their concrete meaning, and a systematic reconstruction of its conceptual role seems necessary to comprehend how Nietzsche approaches his visions of future human society.

Such a systematic analysis of Nietzsche’s ‘great politics’ may seem ironic or even unfortunate in light of the usual interpretation of Nietzsche as the most quintessentially anti-systematic of

[1]

71EH{ }^{71} E H, ‘Why I am a destiny’, §9, KSA 6: 374 .
72{ }^{72} BGE §208,KSA\S 208, K S A 5: 140 .
73{ }^{73} Letter to Georg Brandes, December 1888, KSB 8: 502.
74{ }^{74} Letter to Franz Overbeck, 30 April 1884, KSB 6: 498.
75{ }^{75} Karl Jaspers, trans. Charles Wallraft and Frederick Schmitz, Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of his Philosophical Activity (Baltimore, 1997 [1965]), p. 262. ↩︎

philosophers. But this should come as no surprise, since as Ofelia Schutte suggests, the project of which great politics is part seems to represent Nietzsche precisely at his most uncritical, as 'Anti-Critic par excellence. 78{ }^{78} It is not that great politics does not perform any critical function, but rather that its main function is also powerfully and overwhelmingly positive; it heralds the coming destruction of the old world but also the advent of the new.

Far from being a marginal digression with little lasting significance, then, great politics was thoroughly central to Nietzsche’s final, overriding project, the transvaluation of all values. It performs the vital role of translating Nietzsche’s abstract insights into the origins of morality and the nature of mankind into a social and political programme for the future reordering of society; it is the Nietzschean practice of politics. If this throws into question received views of Nietzsche as an indiscriminate hammer against the ideologies with no positive thought of his own, then this can only be a good thing. Understanding the transformation of große Politik in its historical and intellectual dimensions is, in this sense, vital to understanding the development of Nietzsche’s philosophy as such, and it is a disservice to that task to reduce great politics to a mere function of its narrowly contemporary context. The advent of the new great politics, rather, demonstrates an underlying activism and positivity in Nietzsche’s political thought which is profoundly intertwined with his philosophy as a whole.

[1]

78{ }^{78} Ofelia Schutte, ‘Nietzsche’s Politics’, in Kelly Oliver and Marilyn Pearsall (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche (University Park, 1998), pp. 282-305, here p. 30 I. ↩︎

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Title abbreviations

AC The Antichrist
BGE Beyond Good and Evil
D Daybreak (or Dawn)
EH Ecce Homo
GM On the Genealogy of Morals
GS The Gay Science
HH Human, All Too Human
TI Twilight of the Idols
Z-I Thus Spake Zarathustra I
Z-II Thus Spake Zarathustra II

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