Nietzsche's Great Politics QUOTES

1 " See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last man (London: Penguin, 1993). Note the often-overlooked second part where Fukuyama criticizes the end of history as leading to the last man. "

― , Nietzsche's Great Politics

2 " Note 54.
I have often pondered whether Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game painted, perhaps not fully consciously, a good picture of what this new world could look like: a small and poor cultural en intellectual elite living in a secluded 'Castalia,' but that performed the glass bead game - an abstract synthesis of the arts and science -to tie together and give meaning to existence as well as the world as a whole. Remember that Castalia has a diplomatic wing whose role is to negotiate with the outside world to keep its funding. Of course Knecht leaves in the end, but there is one way of reading his ultimate drowning as a sacrifice so that the overman - Tito - can live. "

― , Nietzsche's Great Politics

3 " There is no reason to believe that political agency must solely be located in the modern state, and Nietzsche does not hold such a view. He instead locates his political project in the transition away from the nation-state. Indeed, the decay of the state signals the superseding of the modern question of political philosophy as framed by Leiter: the theory of the state and its legitimacy. The new question for Nietzsche will revolve around determining which institutions can fullfill the Platonic mission of producing the new Platos that the culture-state failed to achieve. "

― , Nietzsche's Great Politics

4 " Shaw is absolutely correct in stating that for Nietzsche, the modern state in a secularized world can no longer claim the normative authority that religion once afforded it, and consequently its political authority is undermined. Nevertheless, the passage in question should not lead us to conclude that Nietzsche is a political skeptic in the sense that he cannot see how we can 'reconcile our need for normative authority with our need for political authority.' Simply put, Nietzsche does believe these two authorities can be married again, but that this will happen outside the modern state structure, which, as I have emphasized above, is in decline as well as in the process of being replaced by more 'innovative' and better-suited institutions.
Shaw downplays this latter point, writing that 'although Nietzsche speculates, in passing, about what a world without states would be like, he accepts that political agency in the modern world is concentrated in them,' noting that 'in Human, All Too Human he speculates that in the absence of religion the state as a form of political organization might die out. He warns against any rash political experiments that would hasten this process.' Yet the decay of the state is not something that Nietzsche speculates about in passing; it is the essential point of the aphorism. With the rise of modern democracy, the state will inevitably decay. If Nietzsche recommends that we put our faith in the 'prudence and self-interest of men' to 'preserve the existence of the state for some time yet,' this is to ensure that the process does not descend into chaos, and that the heightened senses of the prudential men that this evolution produces are fully able to create better-suited and more innovative institutions. He is in no way suggesting that the process of the dissolution of the state be halted, or that we return to a status quo ante, where the state was in league with the priestly class. Rather, he is looking forward to reading the 'strange tales' that will appear in the 'storybook of humanity' once the modern state has disappeared, hoping that there will be some 'good ones'. "

― , Nietzsche's Great Politics

5 " A final thought concerns the relationship that philosophy entertains with politics, especially Nietzsche's idea that while philosophy might be helpful in identifying what is wrong with the world, it is not the right place to start to try to change it. We must first begin by reeducating ourselves before moving, as Nietzsche came to see, to politics. In many ways Williams reached a similar conclusion in what possibly remains his best work, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), although perhaps without the politics: philosophy can help in trying to resolve questions of theory, but it is incapable, as the title suggests, of telling us how to live. As he puts it in that wonderfully liberating phrase : 'The only serious enterprise is living. "

― , Nietzsche's Great Politics

6 " Footnote 24
I can't help but hear an echo of Nietzsche's question of 'what type of man should be bred' in Weber's 1895 - the same year that The Antichrist was first published - inaugural lecture 'The Nation State and Economic Policy,' when he writes that 'the question which stirs us as we think beyond the grave of our own generation is not the well-being human beings will enjoy [that of the last man?] in the future but what kind of people they will be' (quoted in Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs, eds., Weber: Political Writings [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 15). "

― , Nietzsche's Great Politics

7 " André Malraux is known to have said that if the European Union had to be constructed anew, then he would start with culture. "

― , Nietzsche's Great Politics