Nietzsche and critique of the state? It's hopeless. Thank you very much. So it's pretty clear that Nietzsche did not have a real systematic political philosophy, but he did have quite a few things to say about the state, much of it highly critical.
So, this paper is me trying to make a little more sense of some of the scattered remarks
that I found about the state.
Particularly, I was inspired by one section from thus spoke Zarathustra, the section called
On the New Idol, The New Idol is the State, and it reminded me of something that Murray
Rothbard wrote in For a New Liberty.
He says, the libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational tasks is to
spread the demystification and desanctification of the state among its hapless subjects. His
task is to demonstrate repeatedly and in-depth that not only the emperor but even the democratic
state has no clothes.
Okay so now that I've made the connection to Murray Rothbard and got your attention,
I can move on with my findings. What I found was that it seems that Nietzsche's critique
of the state parallels his critique of morality and I found two components to each. The first
one I call demystification. The second one I will call the Nietzschean evaluation. I'm
going to discuss these and I hope I have time to make some comments about the relationship
between Nietzsche's critique and classical liberal thought in the end.
So what do I mean by demystification?
So X is demystified when, first of all, X is an entity that has a mystique, which means
that it tends to have a special kind of status in the minds of many, and that it is believed
to have a mysterious, supernatural, extra-pure or otherwise higher nature, or to have properties
So, Nietzsche's demystification of morality, what his aim is to reveal the harsh, ugly,
unpleasant, unchristian immoral truth about modern moral values.
By modern moral values, we mean the values such as altruism, humility, pacifism, and
so forth. That's the target of his attack, roughly. And there's two aspects of it. One
I call his naturalism, where he tries to show that on the micro level, the adoption and
The promotion of these moral values is a result of, he sees a weaker type of human being,
and it is a result of their psychological resentment against the higher classes. It's
their way of calling them evil because they're the opposite of these modern moral values.
It's also prudent for them to promote these values because it's in their best interest
to live in a society in which these values are promoted.
Okay, so the second aspect is in the first essay of his Genealogy of Morality, he kind
of shows how throughout history these values have become prominent as a result of a kind
of class warfare.
So basically, I'm not going to get into it, but he shows by showing that these moral values
Morality isn't really what we thought it was. It wasn't handed down from on high. So in doing so, he demystifies it.
So is demystification of the state? So I argue that Nietzsche demystifies the state in a similar fashion as he does with morality.
While the state perhaps does not have the same sort of mystique as morality, is nonetheless
an entity that has a very special status in the minds of many. This is evident in the
fact that states, or those acting in its name, often perform with impunity many actions that
would hardly be considered justified if performed by a private individual. Yet very few of us
question this asymmetry in moral standards. Not us, but everyone else. Further evidence
Further evidence of the state's mystique is that it is often believed to be the special
product of a voluntary agreement reached by the people in order to carry out their collective
will, and thus those constituting the state are said to have a special mandate.
So Nietzsche saw that the state had this mystique. We can see it in the skating treatment of
the state found in the section I just talked about, and thus spoke Zarathustra called On
on the New Idol.
As the section title suggests, Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Zarathustra is a character in
the book, sort of a mouthpiece for him, I'm not going to get into that, but I'll either
say Nietzsche says or his Zarathustra the character.
So Nietzsche's Zarathustra observes that the state has assumed a god-like status and seems
to have replaced the Judeo-Christian god in whom Europeans were banning belief at the
time.
Beniche is aware that the state's divine status, its mystique, is based on deception.
He says, whatever it tells you, it lies.
This lie crawls out of its mouth.
I, the state, am the people.
I think Obama said something like that recently.
It also declares, on earth, there is nothing greater than I, the ordaining finger of God
am I.
And it legitimizes these claims by surrounding itself with a facade of heroes and honorable
In the second treatise of Nietzsche's genealogy, he articulates a very important truth about
the state and describing its origin. He says, The oldest state, accordingly made its appearance
as a terrible tyranny, as a crushing and ruthless machinery. I use the word state. It goes without
saying who was meant by this, a race of conquerors and lords, which, organized in a warlike manner
and with the power to organize, unhesitatingly lays its terrible paws on a population. It
is in this manner then that the state begins on earth. So the state thus understood is
no creation of the people and as he also says further, it is not the product of any sort
of contract either. So just as he does with morality, Nietzsche is demystifying the state
What is the role and significance of Nietzsche's demystification?
Some might think that he's committing the genetic fallacy or arguing ad hominem.
You might think, oh, even if modern moral values, they are the product of these terrible
historical processes and these resentments and hatreds, that doesn't necessarily mean
that the values themselves are bad.
They might actually be the correct or right or good moral values nonetheless.
The same thing one might say about the state, yeah, it has terrible origins.
There's a lot of creepy people that work for it, but maybe it's a necessary and just
Invest Institution, anyways.
But one interpretation is that these things that he's saying, his demystification, is
actually not meant to be his argument at all.
It's rhetoric, and he's making all these comments to kind of prime his readers for the real
aspect of his critique, which I'll move on to.
So what he wants to do is, his readers, to get them to look at the state or to look at
morality with a more skeptical or realistic eye before moving on to these other aspects.
But one implication of this is that, I guess, in pointing out the deceptive and violent nature
of the State, then if that's not really central to his critique, and he doesn't quite have
anything, any problems with that in itself, then we should be careful before we start
interpreting Nietzsche's critique as something akin to a classical liberal critique. And
I'll, hopefully I can return to this at the end.
Okay, so on to the second part of the critique, Nietzschean evaluation. Okay, and the preface
To the genealogy, he explains that the whole point of his book is to discover the value
of morality.
And it seems that for Nietzsche, this question of the value of morality can be translated
into the following more specific questions.
And he says, I quote, have modern moral values inhibited or furthered human flourishing up
until now?
Are they a sign of distress, of impoverishment, of the degeneration of life?
Or conversely, do they betray the fullness, the power, the will of life, its courage,
It's confidence, it's future.
His main concern is whether the moral values and their prominence in society, is it conducive
or not to human flourishing.
But he's not worried about human flourishing of everyone.
He says later, some comments he makes later suggested he's only concerned with the higher
types of human being, which is a very small minority of elite human beings, and that is
This is his main concern about morality.
If my interpretation of this is correct, it seems that Nietzsche is a sort of utilitarian.
This Nietzschean brand of utilitarianism seems to be committed to the following principles.
First, the development and flourishing of higher types of human beings is the highest value.
Secondly, the value of X is determined by its conduciveness to the development and flourishing
of higher types of human beings. And I think that X can range over codes of values, such
as morality or institutions, such as the state, and perhaps even individual actions and persons,
but we'll be talking about the state mostly today.
So Nietzsche's evaluation of morality real quick. Basically, in the genealogy, what he
What he tries to show is that as moral values become prevalent in society, they become dangerously enticing to the potential higher types,
and the result is that they end up devoting their energies and abilities to more compassionate and altruistic endeavors.
They lose focus on the self-discipline and individualism and creativity that are essential to fully developed higher types as he envisions them.
So, my suggestion is that if Nietzsche bases his negative evaluation of modern moral values
on the fact that they inhibit the development and flourishing of higher types as described
above, then he's also committed to making a similar negative evaluation of the state.
And on the New Idol, Zarathustra describes the state as a great enticer of those with
the potential to flourish as higher men. He says, Oh, even to you, you great souls, it
whispers its dark lies. Unfortunately it detects the rich hearts who gladly squander themselves.
It wants to gather heroes and honorable men around itself, this new idol. Gladly it suns
itself in the sunshine of your good consciences, the cold monster." So it's trying to suck
in these higher types to use for its own good, similarly as we saw morality did.
So what the state does is, I quote, steal the works of the inventors and the treasurers
of the Wise. It needs them and their energies as suggested earlier for its own legitimacy
and perhaps also in order to survive and function. The state redirects these great souls and
heroes from their own individualistic creative pursuits and recruits them for its own stately
collectivist endeavors, which might be nationalistic, totalitarian or egalitarian in nature. A more
specific danger the state needs to suggest is that it can turn great men into politicians.
I quote, watch them scramble, these swift monkeys, they scramble all over each other
and thus drag one another down into the mud and depths.
They all want to get to the throne, it is their madness.
As if happiness sat on the throne, often mud sits on the throne, and often too the throne
on mud.
So the state and the politics associated with it provide great men with an arena for competition,
But unlike other types of competition in which competitors push each other to new excellences,
political competition is a race to the bottom. It is a dirty business and so sitting in a
political office is akin to sitting in mud, or in other words, politics is monkey business,
a degrading, less than human activity. In addition to sucking the higher types and their energies
and abilities into its own service, the state also undermines the development of those who
You do not become part of its apparatus. It does this by imposing values from above, which
is directly in contradiction to what Nietzsche thinks is one of the most important activities
for human beings. He thinks it's almost essential. In Zarathustra, it says, no greater marketplace
Based on Earth, did Zarathustra find, then good and evil? No people could live that did
not first esteem, and esteem is a kind of value creation. Humans first place value into
things in order to preserve themselves, that is why they call themselves human, that is
esteemer. Esteeming is creating, he's kind of equating this with, it's in our nature
to create values, and he sees this happening in individuals, we create our own values,
and Communities as well. And he sees the state as imposing values from above and kind of undermining
this very important human activity. And so he sees this as a danger. For one, the state
relieves them of their need to create their own values and thus enables them to evade
this important activity. As a philosopher Lester Hunt describes it, the state provides us with
are the very attractive opportunity to commit this fatal evasion.
In doing so, the state becomes a source of self-alienation, of estrangement from our
true nature.
Secondly, the state is very unlikely to promote such values which are conducive to the flourishing
of higher types.
Rather, it's more likely to promote values that are democratic, egalitarian in nature,
or socialist, or nationalist collectivist.
So the types meant to redirect these, so these values are meant to redirect the energies
of great men to the goals of the collective and reduce them to the level of the herd.
And so basically the concluding words of this section, Nietzsche says, my brothers do you
want to choke in the reek of their snouts and cravings, smash the windows and leap out
into the open, get out of the way of the bad smell, there where the state ends, only there
begins the human being who is not superfluous, there where the state ends, the rainbow and
bridges of the overman, and the overman is kind of ideal, which we're not going to discuss
here.
So basically, when we hold the state to Nietzsche's standard of value, namely his brand of consequentialism
that I described a bit ago, we see that the state is a great danger, much like morality,
of the State is a danger in that it entices potential higher types of men, puts them into
the service of its own ideals, and thus undermines their flourishing and their pursuit of higher,
more creative endeavors.
So in conclusion, in presenting this Nietzschean critique of the state, I hope to have achieved
a few modest goals.
First, I hope to have shed a little light on an area of Nietzsche's work that gets
less attention than, say, his critique of morality.
I hope to have made a bit more sense of the relatively small amount that Nietzsche did
say about the state by considering it in light of the method he uses in his critique of morality.
In doing so, I have perhaps shown that Nietzsche's critical attitude toward the state actually
does fit coherently with another important aspect of his thought, namely his critique
of morality.
I'm about to get the shaft, so I hope in Q&A someone can ask me about the connection between
and Nietzsche's critique and classical liberal values. So thank you very much and if you'd
like a draft or want to send me some comments or praise, that's my email address. Thank
you very much.