On Left and Right Nietzschean Politics

Introduction

My philosophy aims at an ordering of rank: not at an individualistic morality. The ideas of the herd should rule in the herd—but not reach out beyond it.[1] Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Alongside Marx, Nietzsche was one of the great 19th-century critics of modernity. Contra Marx, for some time the operative assumption was that Nietzsche was effectively an apolitical critic. Caustic and elitist perhaps, making the occasional bizarre aside on ‘blond beasts’ and warlike ‘great politics’. But in the end too rarefied, too individualistic, and too spiritual (in his own way) to have much to say about the distinctly social concerns that animate political theorists and commentators.

This interpretation owed much to efforts to push against crudely reading Nietzsche as a proto-Nazi thinker. It is easy to forget that no less a public intellectual and academic giant than Bertrand Russell described the Second World War as ‘Nietzsche’s war’.[2] This was an easy mistake to make, given that the Nazis themselves were eager to appeal to Nietzsche’s growing philosophical prestige to give their movement a veneer of intellectual respectability.[3] Against this, seminal interpreters like Walter Kaufmann read Nietzsche as an existential psychologist offering eschatological (to use a spiritual term in a non-spiritual sense) advice on how to navigate an increasingly nihilistic horizon.[4] 

These efforts were an understandable overcompensation for the climate of hostility that existed before. By the 1970s, however, things had shifted again, as a more distinctly political Nietzsche was discovered. This was the post-structuralist philosopher of difference and critic of normalisation and power, so effectively popularised by Foucault and Deleuze. In their hands, Nietzsche once more had a politics—but one that was quasi-egalitarian, anti-bourgeois, focused on pushing against all forms of conservative conformity and hierarchy in the name of an ethics of self-creation or rhizomatic community formation.[5] It was this Nietzsche which many of us who trudged through the academy were brought up in: a thinker so punk he made his way into memes about pissing off the squares.

In the 2000s, yet another turn occurred. More and more of us became aware of two unfortunate developments. The first was the global resurgence of the far right, both politically and intellectually. The second was that Nietzsche proved a major influence on a new generation of far-right thinkers, and that they seemed to think there were good reasons to be influenced by him. As Mark Sedgwick put it, Nietzsche belongs with Heidegger, Spengler, Jünger, Schmitt, and Evola as ‘required reading for today’s intellectual radical right’.[6] With the election of Trump in 2016 and the broader resurgence of far-right and right-wing populist movements around the globe, a sustained re-evaluation was probably inevitable, as the political stakes of what were once mostly cute academic questions suddenly seemed far higher.[7]

This little essay is a small contribution to this re-evaluation. I want to make clear that Nietzsche is a great thinker. Like his peers in the pantheon, there are many ways to respond to and be influenced by his work. While my paper will conclude with an argument that Nietzsche belongs very decidedly on the political right—indeed, that he is the greatest critic of the left to have ever emerged—none of that undermines the importance of his ideas to many liberal and progressive thinkers. Rorty, Foucault, Deleuze, Wendy Brown, and the rest may draw on many Nietzschean ideas. Their writings are more than rich enough to withstand resituating Nietzsche on the radical right. My paper will open with a discussion of how ‘left-Nietzschean’ takes on the master have been, and will continue to be, of interest.

Nevertheless, there is much to be said for taking Nietzsche at his word that a basic concern of his political philosophy is with achieving an ‘ordering of rank’ flowing from his emphatic rejection of the ‘lie of equality of souls’.[8] In the latter sections, I’ll examine how Nietzsche has influenced the radical right in the form of ‘right-Nietzschean’ politics. I will also conclude that, whatever one thinks about violent and creative ‘left-Nietzschean’ appropriations, they run counter to Nietzsche’s own political convictions. Nietzsche once declared that ‘the worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole’.[9] If we liberals and progressives are to be troops plundering the Nietzschean corpus, better that we know ourselves as what we are.

On Left Nietzscheanism

Left Nietzscheanism has a long pedigree, dating back to the socialist appropriation of his work in the late 19th century. Notwithstanding Nietzsche’s resolute anti-socialism, anti-feminism, and eventual anti-liberalism, there has been a longstanding effort to mobilise his writings for progressive projects, or even to systematically rework him into a left-radical. As Ansell-Pearson puts it, Nietzsche’s work did not ‘immediately appeal to the right, as one might expect given its aristocratic pretensions and distaste for socialism. On the contrary, in the two decades following his breakdown, it was taken up with interest and imagination by socialists, anarchists, and feminists, all of whom saw Nietzsche’s work as preoccupied with the quest for individual self-realisation’.[10] There are a handful of primary reasons for this.

Firstly, many on the left find Nietzsche’s emphasis on authentic or expressive ‘individualism’—his injunction to ‘become who you are’—decidedly appealing.[11] To put it in modern parlance, for many left commentators, chief amongst them Deleuze, Nietzsche is fundamentally a philosopher of self-creation and individuated social difference. He offers a guide on how to resist both bourgeois moralism and conservative traditionalism and create a more interesting, non-conforming and potentially radical selfhood. And, just as importantly, how to create such a self-hood without becoming pathologically sickened by ressentiment and a permanent sense of victimhood. For instance, in her seminal States of Injury Wendy Brown draws on Nietzsche to discuss how victims of oppression often form a ‘wounded attachment’ to their own identity as victims. Understandable as this may be, the end result is that the victim’s identity remains determined by their oppressors. Fuller emancipation requires victims to give up their ‘wounded attachment’ to identifying as victims and create a new kind of identity for themselves which owes nothing to the oppressor.[12] In this mission, Nietzsche offers an inspiring model.

Secondly, many on the left have found ample resources in Nietzsche to develop highly novel conceptions and critiques of power and reactionary politics. The gold standard in this respect is of course Michel Foucault, whose ‘genealogical’ period of the 1970s saw him analyse the way different forms of knowledge and power instantiate themselves. This includes the application of institutional discipline, engendering the formation of normalised subjects who have so internalised the imperatives of power they no longer need to be physically coerced. The soul becomes a prison for the possibilities of the body.[13] More recently, Brown has continued her pioneering revaluation of Nietzsche to describe how right-populist and right-authoritarian movements are very much motivated by forms of ressentiment. These are often forms of ressentiment which Nietzsche himself did not predict, given his frequent blind-spots about the kinds of pathologies that can emerge in the social elite. Rather than ressentiment originating in the herd and being directed upwards at the nobility, Brown contends that neoliberal economic conditions engender a culture where elites come to resent any and all progressive efforts at challenging their affluence, power, and status.[14] This ressentiment becomes a powerful mobilising force for the contemporary right along a variety of axes.

Thirdly, Nietzsche’s middle-period perspectivism and historicist approach to knowledge and morality have proven vastly influential for a host of left-sceptics. They have been inspired by Nietzschean discussions of epistemology and meta-ethics, developing novel critiques which deflate the totalising ideologies proffered by the right. This deflationary effort is intended to reduce the impulse to impose totalising ideologies on resistant individuals in the name of objective ‘truth’, and in so doing create political space for a more pluralistic and less cruel society. A lucid exposition of this position was given by Richard Rorty in Philosophy and Social Hope. As Rorty summarises, ‘rightist thinkers don’t think that it is enough just to prefer democratic societies. One also has to believe that they are Objectively Good, that the institutions of such societies are grounded in Rational First Principles […] My own philosophical views—views I share with Nietzsche and Dewey—forbid me to say this kind of thing’.[15] In this respect, Nietzsche can be seen as the forefather of a whole host of sceptical post-modern critics, including Foucault and Rorty of course, but also Derrida, Said, and Lyotard.

Fourthly, and less well known, has been Nietzsche’s important influence on many religious left-communitarians. Much of this influence has of course been negative, qua MacIntyre’s famously apocalyptic insistence that fallen modernity is thoroughly Nietzschean.[16] But Nietzsche’s rich and evocative account of secularism and the basis of egalitarian radicalism in Christianity has also had a constructive impact on figures like Charles Taylor (and, for that matter, myself).[17] Thinkers like Taylor suggest we should take seriously Nietzsche’s insistence that the basis of left-politics is in fact the Christian ethic that all are equal in the eyes of God and that Jesus is the deity of the ‘wretched of the earth’. And one should also put considerable stock in Nietzsche’s remarkable claim that secularism and nihilism are not external forces operating on Christianity, but instead emerged immanently from within Christianity itself. Nietzsche claims that the Christian will to truth is what ultimately destroyed Christianity, compulsively leading it to its most ‘striking inference’—the inference against itself.[18] There is, then, a poetic sense in which nihilism is the final kind of self-punishment Christianity inflicts upon us. In this case, our punishment is the felt absence of Christianity and God after their self-inflicted implosion, mirroring how the invention of guilt and conscience is felt as a sick constraint on the free moral will Christianity also invents.

All great things bring about their own destruction through an act of self-overcoming: thus the law of life will have it, the law of the necessity of ‘self-overcoming’ in the nature of life-the lawgiver himself eventually receives the call […] In this way Christianity as a dogma was destroyed by its own morality, in the same way Christianity as morality must now perish to: we stand on the threshold of this event. After Christian truthfulness has drawn one inference after another, it must end by drawing its most striking inference, its inference against itself; this will happen, however, when it poses the question ‘what is the meaning of all will to truth?[19]

Thought through, this observation has important things to teach us about the nature of modernity, postmodernity, and religion.

Finally, there are left-Nietzscheans who have more ambitious projects than simply appropriating certain useful Nietzschean arguments. They aspire to a more systematic left-Nietzschean politics, usually through synthesising his writings with other, complementary, and more transparently progressive figures. A popular pick is the ultimate anti-capitalist author: Marx.[20] A classic example of such efforts were Deleuze and Guattari’s joint works Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, which draw on Nietzschean ideas to critique the limitations of vulgar Marxism and Freudianism.[21] A more recent effort in this vein is Jonas Ceika’s How to Philosophize with A Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty First Century. Ceika claims that:

we can find in Nietzsche, however underdeveloped, a critique of capitalism. Modern life, as he saw it, was primarily divided between the toilsome and unfulfilling lives of wage workers, the meaninglessly calculated lives of businessmen and property owners, and the inhuman and hypocritical lives of state bureaucrats and politicians. All of these modes of existence for Nietzsche were equally contemptible, and he was unable to discover in any of them the potential for a future society.[22]

On this basis, Ceika tries to develop an explicitly ‘Nietzschean socialism’ for the new millennium. While I remain sceptical of the potential for such a systematic fusion, let alone the development of a comprehensive ‘Nietzschean socialism’, there is certainly much to be said about the ambition—even the audacity—of such attempts. And in the end these efforts should be evaluated on their own merits and demerits, rather than castigated for genetic impurity.

These left-Nietzschean efforts have all been rich and even profound intellectual contributions to the cause of securing liberty, equality, and solidarity for all. Their successes, or at least interesting failures, demonstrate why there is much value in creatively reworking Nietzsche for the left. But a creative reworking they must remain, since, as the next section will demonstrate, they run very much against Nietzsche’s political inclinations towards aristocratic radicalism—and his seething contempt for the political left.

Nietzsche, the Right Nietzschean

The great majority of men have no right to life, and serve only to disconcert the elect among our race; I do not yet grant the unfit that right. There are even unfit peoples.[23] Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Contrary to what was once the conventional wisdom, Nietzsche’s works are filled with political observations and prescriptions, a huge number of which lean towards the political right in their tone and connotations. This trucks with his own political development, expertly traced by Losurdo, from a Wagnerian German nationalist opposed to the French Revolution, to cautious flirtations with an elitist liberalism, to his own mature commitment to aristocratic radicalism. In his correspondence with Nietzsche, the Danish critic Georg Brandes described the former’s philosophy as a kind of ‘aristocratic radicalism’—an interpretation Nietzsche approved of. Losurdo has consequently applied the label as a shorthand definition of Nietzsche’s politics, and I see little reason to disagree.[24] While Nietzsche never produced a systematic work of political philosophy, he was willing to be startlingly programmatic about what he wanted and why. The clearest example of this is in Beyond Good and Evil, where Nietzsche describes his social aspirations, and makes very clear that this should be an ‘aristocratic society’, defined by clear differences of rank and caste.

Every elevation of the type ‘man’, has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society-and so it will always be: a society which believes in a long scale of orders of rank and differences of worth between man and man and needs slavery in some sense or other. Without the pathos of distance such as develops from the incarnate differences of classes, from the ruling caste’s constant looking out and looking down on subjects and instruments and from its equally constant exercise of obedience and command, its holding down and holding at a distance, that other, more mysterious pathos could not have developed either…in short precisely the elevation of the type ‘man’, the continual ‘self-overcoming of man’, to take a moral formula in a supra-moral sense.[25]

The question then becomes: what kind of politics is engendered by ‘aristocratic radicalism’, defined by a ‘pathos of distance’ between castes? Here, Nietzsche offers a number of interrelated claims.

Firstly, Nietzschean politics would be a kind of ‘great politics’, operating at a far more elevated and edifying level than the crude calculus of national interests characterising Bismarckian Realpolitik or the vulgarities of international class struggle.[26] It would also be more violent, in no small part due to the twinned consequences of nihilism: that human life has no intrinsic worth, and that strength and will could nevertheless allow one to elevate life into something of worth. With the transvaluation of notions of absolute truth and morality enacted in part by Nietzsche’s own writings, ‘the concept “politics” then becomes elevated entirely to the sphere of spiritual warfare. All the mighty realms of the ancient order of society are blown into space—for they are all based on falsehood: there will be wars, the like of which have never been seen on earth before. Only from my time and after me will politics on a large scale exist on earth’.[27] In such a setting, the more noble kinds of personalities could be made stronger through struggle, and whole peoples commit themselves to higher kinds of spiritual enterprises.

Secondly, Nietzsche makes it very clear that his preferred form of social ordering will be rigidly hierarchical and characterised by mass subjugation and subordination. This point has been widely and understandably misunderstood, given Nietzsche’s emphasis on the creation of ‘free spirits’ who would be liberated from the desire for revenge. To be clear, Nietzsche would be contemptuous of those who found affirmation in the subordination of the lower orders as an end in itself. He would have undoubtedly found the philosophy of cruelty for its own sake, embodied by fascism, along with its nationalism and populism, both utterly reprehensible and of course yet another sign, if one was needed, of the incurable stupidity of the Germans.[28] 

However, this does not mean that a caste of aristocratic ‘free spirits’ would refrain from subordination. The kinds of subordination they imposed would be instrumental—both liberating the aristocracy from the need for mundane labour and engendering the ‘pathos of distance’ between classes and castes, necessary for higher forms of culture and personalities to develop. This would mean rejecting the poison of the doctrine ‘equal rights for all’, which has been ‘thoroughly sowed by Christianity than by anything else’ and militates against every ‘feeling of reverence and distance between man and man, against, that is, the precondition of every elevation, every increase in culture—it has forged out of the ressentiment of the masses its chief weapon against us’.[29] Nietzsche also makes very clear that preserving such a stratified order means refraining from educating the lower orders, to ensure they remain content with their status as ‘slaves’:

The stupidity, fundamentally the instinct degeneration which is the cause of every stupidity today, lies in the existence of a labour question at all […] There is absolutely no hope left that a modest and self-sufficient kind of human being, a type of Chinaman, should here form itself into a class: and this would have been sensible, this as actually a necessity. What has one ever done? Everything designed to nip in the bud even the prerequisites for it—through the most irresponsible thoughtlessness one has totally destroyed the instincts by virtues of which the worker becomes possible as a class, possible for himself […] If one wills an end, one must also will the means to it: if one wants slaves, one is a fool if one educates them to be masters.[30]

Thirdly, Nietzsche insists that his new radical aristocracy will consist of individuals with noble forms of personalities. What exactly these types would look like is perhaps the most complex and incomplete element of Nietzsche’s politics. At points, especially in his early writings, Nietzsche demonstrates a clear nostalgia for the noble types of warrior aristocrats conceived in the Dionysian period of Greek thinking, before Socrates and then Christianity emerged and began mucking things up. He rhapsodises about the ‘Greek genius’ of ‘Homer, Pindar, and Aeschylus, as Phidias, as Pericles, as Pythia and Dionysus’ and laments its decline.[31] These kinds of warrior aristocrats were life affirming, courageous, violent, and revelled in their superior strength as a sign of health and vitality, rather than repudiating it as pride or malice.

At other points Nietzsche demonstrates a more multifaceted—dare I say dialectical? —disposition. He is disgusted at how the Christian creation of guilt and conscience turned human beings against their own instincts as a kind of self-inflicted punishment. But at the same time he acknowledges that, by doing so, Christianity engendered a level of depth and interiority in humankind which had been lacking before.[32] After all, Hamlet’s guilt and tragic indecisiveness may make him a less outwardly noble soul than ‘wise’ Achilles. But the gloomy Dane’s ruminations about the human condition and its possibilities constitute a clear psychological advancement on the kind of magnificent flatness of the Homeric hero. Ultimately, the kind of personality Nietzsche longed for in his aristocratic radicals was some highly unlikely fusion of the antiquarian and the Christian into a new secular ideal. His highest impossibility was a Roman Caesar with the soul of Christ.[33]

Fourthly, married to more programmatic statements about the kinds of politics Nietzsche endorsed were equally emphatic critiques of those he did not. Throughout his work, he tirelessly aims condemnations and barbs against an array of real and imagined political opponents. Overwhelmingly, his most venomous bullets are directed against forces on the left, who for Nietzsche embodied the herd morality of Christianity with all its ressentiment and envy of the nobility. This reflects Nietzsche’s startling claim that, notwithstanding the often militant secularism of these groups and their ideologies, it was liberals and socialists who constituted the clearest continuation of Christian morality in the present day. In his mature period, Nietzsche rejects liberal institutions because they ‘undermine the will to power, they are the levelling of mountain and valley exalted to moral principle, they make small, cowardly, and smug—it is the herd animal which triumphs with them every time’. He condemns liberalism as ‘in plain words: reduction to the herd animal’, describing it as a philosophy for ‘shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats’.[34] He is even more emphatic about the degenerate genealogy of socialism (Christianity with the residue of Rousseau, in the language of The Will to Power), for which he reserves his most special hatred:

Whom do I hate most heartily among the rabbles of today? The rabble of Socialists, the apostles to the Chandala, who undermine the workingman's instincts, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his petty existence—who make him envious and teach him revenge.... Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in the assertion of ‘equal’ rights.... What is bad? But I have already answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from revenge. — The anarchist and the Christian have the same ancestry.[35]

The striking conviction that it is liberals and socialists who carry on the legacy of Christian morality obviously orients Nietzsche against many on the political right, for whom the portrayal of progressivism as profane and godless is a near addiction. But this is also what makes Nietzsche the most penetrating critic of the left ever to emerge; one who has the intellectual ambition and audacity to go all the way in a totalising critique of Western civilisation and religion where more timid reactionaries will artificially halt. Reactionaries like De Maistre and Burke saw in Christianity the basis for a society stratified into hierarchically complementary ranks, mapping a transcendent pattern ordained by God. They saw the rejection of this ‘great chain of Being’ as one of the catalysts for the Satanic revolutionary epoch. For Nietzsche, this generic rightist position could not be more wrong-headed.[36] The herd morality of Christianity in classical form struck the first blow against the aristocracy. And Christianity remained the increasingly concealed basis of the revolutionary epoch, since ‘Christian value judgement […] translates every revolution into mere blood and crime! Christianity is a revolt of everything that crawls along the ground directed against that which is elevated: the Gospel of the lowly makes low’.[37] Secularised Christian morality in the form of liberalism and socialism had thus far survived its own immanent attack on itself, withstanding the deconstruction of Christian metaphysics driven by a self-destructive will to truth.

One of Nietzsche’s great hopes and fears was that as the metaphysical implications of the ‘death of God’ set in this would lead to a ‘transvaluation of all values’ which recognised and rejected the foundation-less quality of secular Christian morality. While Nietzsche was himself no social Darwinian, there is a sense in which he thought that the transvaluation of Christian values would lead to a more naturalistic value system, one that affirmed the differences in strength and personality between persons rather than regarding human beings as all equal before the throne of God. A famous example is his insistence that the soaring eagles may be called frightening and evil by the lambs below. But in fact the eagles may well love the ‘tasty lambs’ on which they gorge themselves.

Conclusion: Right Nietzschean Politics Past and Present 

Nietzsche was very much a man of the right—though of course not in any conventional sense. This can be missed by those who conceive of the political right exclusively in conservative terms, à la the cautious and prudent management or change or transformation of what one must to conserve what one can. While a popular conception of the right, not least because it is promulgated by many conservatives themselves, this image has always been faulty in important respects.[38] When those on the right come to feel that the decadent and herd like movements of the left have been driving the culture for too long, they can very easily conclude that there is nothing left worth conserving. In such contexts transformative and great changes may be called for and even prophesised as inevitable, whether under the guise of ‘aristocratic radicalism’, ‘Conservative revolution’, or, in the most sinister moments, fascist populism. Nietzsche very much fits into this vein as its most remarkable contributor.

It should come as no surprise that Nietzsche’s influence on past and present rightist politics has been enormous—though whether he would be pleased with his disciples and imitators is another matter. Contemporaneously, he has had an impressive impact on a wide array of moderate and Trumpist conservative authors. Jordan Peterson frequently cites Nietzsche in his work, typically to describe contemporary leftism as motivated by destructive ressentiment.[39] Dinesh D’Souza makes a rather lazy stab at Nietzschean cultural commentary, upholding a kind of social conservative Christianity while simultaneously chastising Nordic social democracy as banal society of ‘last men’.[40] 

On the far right, Nietzsche has had an impressive impact. In early 20th-century Germany, Heidegger, Spengler, Schmitt, and many others were deeply moved by his gloomy denunciations of impending nihilism and cultural decay.[41] Julius Evola rhapsodises in a recognisably Nietzschean key when he describes ‘the advent of Christianity [as] representing a fall; its advent characterised a special form of that spiritual emasculation typical of the cycles of a lunar and priestly type’.[42] So too does the online radical rightist ‘Lom3z’ when he describes the progressive ‘longhouse’ as distrusting ‘overt ambition. It censures the drive to assert oneself on the world, to strike out for conquest and expansion. Male competition and the hierarchies that drive it are unwelcome. Even constructive expressions of these instincts are deemed toxic, patriarchal, or even racist’.[43] Such writings show that Nietzsche’s most depressing talent—his ability to inspire a host of milquetoast racist and misogynistic imitators—is very much alive in the 2020s.

Nietzsche is a foundational figure for many, including myself. There can be no serious thinking worthy of the name without him. But serious thinking requires his progressive and liberal readers to recognise that Nietzsche is not on side with their ambitions. Right Nietzscheans have known this for a long time. If there is to be an effective left-Nietzschean politics in the 21st century, it must learn this hard truth as well. Left-Nietzscheans can accept Nietzsche’s critical ruminations about mass ressentiment and recognize accordingly that a politics based on eating the rich or sticking it to the man is unlikely to produce much good in the long run. We can reappropriate his work in interesting ways to foreground the way right-wing ressentiment takes on its own distinctive forms, including the various forms of vitriolic right-Nietzscheanism on the march today. Christian socialists—a movement which saw a resurgence with the Presidential campaign of Cornel West—can appreciate Nietzsche’s profound reflection on the elective affinity between Christian egalitarianism and the emergence of the great secular progressive movements. But to the Nietzsche who megalomaniacally declared that there are ‘unfit peoples’ suitable only as slaves and cannon fodder in wars the world has never seen we can only offer the kiss of forgiveness.

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Matt McManus

Matt McManus is a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Political Right and Equality and The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, amongst other books.

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[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (Walter Kaufmann tr, Vintage Books 1968) 287.

[2] Hugo Drochon, ‘Why Nietzsche Has Once Again Become An Inspiration To The Far Right’ Australian Financial Review (Sydney, 20 September 2018) <https://www.afr.com/life-and-luxury/arts-and-culture/why-nietzsche-has-once-again-become-an-inspiration-to-the-farright-20180903-h14v90> accessed 2 August 2023.

[3] Richard Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (Penguin 2005) 39-40.

[4] Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ (Princeton University Press 2013).

[5] See Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader (Paul Rabinow ed, Pantheon Books 1984); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (Penguin 2009); Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (Hugh Tomlinson tr, Columbia University Press 1983).

[6] Mark Sedgwick, Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy (Oxford University Press 2018) xv.

[7] See Ronald Beiner, Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Alt Right (University of Pennsylvania Press 2018).

[8] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols and the Antichrist: or How to Philosophize with a Hammer (Penguin 1990) 168-9.

[9] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human Part II (Paul V Cohn tr, MacMillan 1913) 69.

[10] Keith Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker (Cambridge University Press 1994) 29.

[11] As the opening quote makes clear, this individualist reading of Nietzsche runs against his own self-conception.

[12] Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton University Press 1995).

[13] See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Alan Sheridan tr, Vintage Books 1975).

[14] See Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (Columbia University Press 2019).

[15] Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (Penguin 1999) 4-5.

[16] See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (3rd edn, University of Notre-Dame Press 2007).

[17] See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. (Belknap Press 2007); Matthew McManus, The Emergence of Postmodernity (Palgrave MacMillan 2022).

[18] Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘The Genealogy of Morals’ in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (Walter Kaufmann tr, The Modern Library 2000) 597.

[19] Ibid.

[20] These efforts have in turn provoked a response from scholars who insist on the impossibility of any such fusion, and even argue that attempting it may be politically misguided or dangerous. See Nancy S Love, Marx, Nietzsche, and Modernity (Columbia University Press 1986).

[21] See Deleuze and Guattari (n 5); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Brian Massumi tr, University of Minnesota Press 2011).

[22] See Jonas Ceika, How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty-First Century (Repeater Books 2021) 71.

[23] Nietzsche (n 1) 872.

[24] Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel (Gregor Benton tr, Haymarket 2020).

[25] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Walter Kaufmann tr, Penguin Books 1990) 192.

[26] See Hugo Drochon, Nietzsche’s Great Politics (Princeton University Press 2016).

[27] See Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Ecce Homo’ in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (Walter Kaufmann tr, The Modern Library 2000) 783.

[28] See Robert O Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (Vintage Books 2004).

[29] Nietzsche (n 8) 186.

[30] Nietzsche (n 8) 106 

[31] Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (Walter Kaufmann tr, The Modern Library 2000) 88.

[32] See Nietzsche (n 18).

[33] Nietzsche (n 1) 513.

[34] Nietzsche (n 8) 103-4.

[35] Nietzsche (n 8) 191.

[36] See Don Herzog. Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000)

[37] Nietzsche (n 8) 168-9.

[38] See Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump (Oxford University Press 2017).

[39] Jordan Peterson, Beyond Order: Twelve More Rules for Life (Random House Canada 2021) 162.

[40] Dinesh D’Souza, United States of Socialism: Who’s Behind It. Why It’s Evil. How to Stop It (All Points Books 2020) 137.

[41] See Sedgwick (n 6).

[42] Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World (Guido Stucco tr, Inner Traditions International 1995) 283.

[43] Lom3z, ‘What is the Longhouse?’ First Things (New York, 16 February 2023) <https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/02/what-is-the-longhouse> accessed 2 August 2023.