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Welcome to the new Books Network. Welcome back to the new Books Network. I'm your host, Stephen Dozmann. The 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche stands among the canon's most cited figures, with aphorisms dotting texts on a variety of topics, and his name evokes a strong response from almost anyone who has ever heard of him.
His aphoristic and poetic writing style have made it difficult at times to understand what he meant, although the wealth of commentaries pulling him in a variety of different directions points to the fact that he did mean something. On the political right, he has been credited as an influence among any reactionary political movements, but even on the left, he has cited as an emancipatory figure, suspicious of the powers that be. Aside from these, his writings on art and psychology have remained influential for many. It would seem then that there are numerous niches one can pull from, and due to the loose nature of his writing, one would seem to be warranted in reading Nietzsche a bit more freely.
However, that freedom and flexibility misses that there may in fact be a unifying thread to Nietzsche's thought, and it may in fact be a much darker thread than many of his apologists have realized. This is the main argument of the book we'll be discussing today. Domenico Lacerto's Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel, intellectual biography and balance sheet. Originally published about 20 years ago in Italian, it has recently been delivered to English audiences by Gregor Benton, and with an introduction by Harrison Flus as part of the historical materialism book series.
Clocking in at just over a thousand pages, it is both a literal and figurative bombshell, delivering a rigorous and systematic account of Nietzsche's thought. A major part of the book's length comes from the fact that Lacerto refuses to treat Nietzsche in isolation, and instead spends a large amount of time recreating Nietzsche's various contexts, 19th century Germany and Europe more broadly, as a way of making the political orientation of Nietzsche's thought all the more explicit. There is investigation Lacerto reveals in Nietzsche who is committed to fighting against the democratic movements happening all around him, and being an advocate for a superior elite at the expense of everyone else, whose main purpose in life is to serve them. Context is important to any biography, including intellectuals often assumed to be above the fray of their own times.
Lacerto's work goes above and beyond in placing Nietzsche in context, although what sets this book apart from other commentaries is how and why he uses this context. Usually placing a thinker back into their time as the effect of toning down remarks and ideas that of age poorly. Comments that of age poorly are shown to have been commonplace in the time they were originally made, and may have even been progressive by older standards. That does not happen here.
Instead, placing Nietzsche in context allows Lacerto to show that Nietzsche was not simply a product of reactionary times, but was instead a committed reactionary fighting the progress happening all around him. Lacerto also shows that there is a particular genius to Nietzsche not shared by many of his contemporaries. He had a keen awareness of what was going on around him, and understood what would be required to combat the emancipatory movements he saw. It was this understanding that sets Nietzsche apart from various other thinkers, who have certain reactionary elements, but do not have the level of consistency or depth that Nietzsche had, where other thinkers fall short, Nietzsche holds fast and stands as one committed to a deeply anti-democratic society for a few, unapologetic in his intensity and worth studying for saying the quiet part loud.
Many books have come out on reactionary politics in the last few years. Few manage to be a systematic, rigorous, and thorough as Lacerto's. It's a work of scholarship that absolutely deserves to be read and wrestled with, but those interested in the biggest social and political problems of our time. It will be of interest not just those interested in Nietzsche's studies, but German and European historians, political and cultural theorists, and all those committed to better understanding some intellectual trends of our times.
Currently, the book is only available in a very expensive hardcover from Briel, but a paperback edition from Haymarket is on the way, and will be deeply rewarding to all those who decide to take the challenge to get through it. Lacerto was a scholar of the highest caliber, and this book is a testament to both his scholarly commitment to depth and rigor, as well as his political commitment to the emancipation of all those suffering under our present situation. Domenico Lacerto was an Italian Marxist historian and philosopher. He spent much of his life as a professor at the University of Urbino in Italy, and was active in both a number of academic and political groups in the Italian and international left.
Highly prolific in his lifetime, a number of his books have been translated into English, including Class Struggle of Political and Philosophical History, Liberalism, Accounter History, War and Revolution, Rethinking the 20th Century, Hegel and the Freedom of the Moderns, and Heidegger in the Ideology of War, Community, Death in the West. He died in 2018. Given the absence of the author, we found a few others to speak in his place on the text. Harrison Flus received his PhD in philosophy at Stony Brook University.
He is professor at Manhattan College, New York City, and wrote the introduction to the English edition of the Aristocratic Rebel. Daniel Tutt studied at American University and the European Graduate School. He teaches in the philosophy department at George Washington University. He reviewed the Aristocratic Rebel for Historical Materialism.
Ronald Beener studied political theory at McGill University and Ballywell College, and has been a professor of political science at the University of Toronto since 1984. He is the editor of Han Aaron's Lectures on Consolitical Philosophy, and is the author of a number of books, most recently Dangerous Minds, Nietzsche, Heidegger and the Return of the Far Right. Daniel Tutt, Harrison Flus and Ronald Beener, welcome to the new book's network. Thank you, good to be here.
Be here. Hi, Stephen. Thank you. So to kind of kick things off, I'm wondering if someone could maybe introduce listeners to Dominico Lisserto particularly what were some of the key themes that showed up throughout his work, and what is the place of this book on Nietzsche within his larger collected works?
So I think I can help with that. Dominico Lisserto was an Italian Marxist. He was born in 1941, and he died tragically in 2018 of a brain tumor. He was a emeritus professor at the University of Vergino, and President of Marks and Hagle Societies in Italy.
And I recommend David Broder's obituary piece in Jacobin for an overview of Lisserto's Life and Times, and it's really unfortunate that he died because he was really at the height of his intellectual powers. He just came out with this critique of West Marxism, and his death is really a loss to Marxist theory and scholarship. He was a pioneering scholar of the history of philosophy, particularly German idealism, liberalism and imperialism in class struggle, and publishers like Verso and historical materialism are committed to translating more of his work into English, including this massive Hagle study that we really want to see come out. Many scholars agree that it's really his Nietzsche, the aristocratic rebel that constitutes his magnum opus, and it's probably his most important work that we're really going to talk about today.
One more thing that I want to talk about regarding Lisserto's legacy is that there's a recent initiative called the Lisserto Prize from the University of Vergino and Lisserto's family estate. It's calling for papers ranging from the history of philosophy to issues of colonialism, liberalism, imperialism, and I want to just encourage students, professors, anyone to submit to it. First prize is a thousand euro, so that can buy you a lot of Marks books. Yeah, so diving into this text in particular, it is not a standard commentary on Nietzsche.
It really focuses a lot on historical and intellectual and political context as a way of really unpacking some of Nietzsche's thoughts. So I'm wondering if someone can maybe talk about Lisserto's method of using context to this extent beyond a typical biography or what a typical biography would to make sense of Nietzsche's thought. Yeah, go ahead, Harrison. Sure.
I can. I just said for some more introductory remarks. Lisserto's method is grounded in historical materialism. So it's a method that doesn't want to leak beyond the epoch of the thinker, in this case, Frederick Nietzsche.
Such leaps can risk a kind of what Lisserto would call a postmodern reductionism, which treats Nietzsche as merely a metaphoric thinker or another kind of reductionism that just directly relates him to the 20th century without considering the 19th century context. So Lisserto really wants to clarify the historical epoch of someone like Immanuel Kant or Hegel or Nietzsche and what motivated them to philosophize, and how many of those ideas are shaped by material relations. This doesn't mean for Lisserto that ideas are reducible to those relations. For instance, Plato or most of the craft can still speak to us today, and their ideas can carry a kind of theoretical surplus, as Lisserto calls it, that goes past their points of origin.
But we need to relate philosophy to the culture and ideology of the times, and from there we can start to relate, let's say, the culture of the 19th century to, let's say, what influence something like European fascism in the case of Nietzsche? I might add, I totally appreciate that laying out of the general methodology of Lisserto's aristocratic rumble. I think readers are going to come to this text, expecting a biography, they're going to get something much more than that. What we have here is a placing into context of the political and cultural and social dynamics following 1848 in Europe, and we have an introduction to not only the primary ideas, the currents of thought that influence Nietzsche, not only that, but we also are flung into a world of Nietzsche's world.
What were the newspapers saying at the time? What were the prominent journalists saying at the time? What were the currents of thought that Nietzsche was not invested in per se, but which were running parallel to him? How does Nietzsche speak to his own time?
How is he situated in his own time? It's a very interesting thing precisely because Nietzsche sought to make himself very untimely. So in that sense, aristocratic rubble provides a kind of missing context, and so one of the big themes in Nietzsche's scholarship is the notion of untimeliness, and the notion that Nietzsche is can be read almost in an eternal or context-less way. So what aristocratic rubble does is radically situate Nietzsche, and in a way what you learn as a reader is an in-depth portrait of late 19th century political life.
Ronald, anything to add? Yeah, I have a few things to add. I think the observations by Harrison and Daniel were extremely helpful. One thing I'd like to add is that a kind of contextualist approach to Nietzsche can sometimes have a kind of apologetic dimension.
So I don't know if you look for instance, Robert Holab's chapter on eugenics in his recent book, Nietzsche and the 19th century. So he's contextualizing Nietzsche. There was this whole elaborate discourse of eugenics. Nietzsche embraced eugenics, but Nietzsche sort of gets lost in his context, and his embrace of eugenics doesn't have quite the shock of fact or doesn't seem as radical when you contextualize him.
Well, that's, I think, very much to his credit, that can never be said of Lucerto. His way of contextualizing Nietzsche doesn't have any apologetic dimension whatsoever, and thanks as thankful that he doesn't. Yes, Nietzsche was, I think, of his own time and was immersed in the thought of the 19th century, but Nietzsche was looking ahead to try and shape the world of the future, and he had his mind not just on the 19th century, but very much on the 20th century, in the 21st century, in the 22nd century. And there was a project here that was intended to stretch centuries into the future.
And again, I think there's a way of doing contextualism that mutes the force of Nietzsche or de-radicalism or does apologetics on his behalf. And Lucerto never does that. I think his kind of contextualism is trying to insert Nietzsche in the whole history of European reaction stretching from centuries from before the 19th century and stretching forth to the 20th century and beyond. And I think he's very alive to Nietzsche's wanting to shape thought and shape culture well beyond his own time.
So yeah, the contextualism is crucial for understanding where Nietzsche was coming from and who influenced him and what his intellectual milieu was and all those in their essential for understanding of Sinker. But there was much more at stake here than just responding to the 19th century debates. And I don't think that one can fault Lucerto at all for over-contextualizing Nietzsche, but some of the other commentators I think can be so faulted. I mean Hugo Druschon would be another example of someone who's, you know, is conservatively contextualizing approached in Nietzsche, but with a kind of sometimes apologetics spin.
And I think it's of of of of of of of of of Lizzerto that he's been touching away that avoids any kind of possible apologetics on behalf of Nietzsche. Yeah, absolutely. To dive into the text a little bit more, one of the first things Lizzerto explores is Nietzsche's struggle against Socrates, particularly in his early text on tragedy. And here Lizzerto argues that recent political events in France like the Paris Commune are a key for understanding this text.
So given Nietzsche is more prone at this point to raw historical survey, why are recent events in France so important for understanding this text in Lizzerto's view? I can take a stab at that one. So the Paris Commune, Lizzerto, emphasizes and really shows was a very transformative event. I mean, but that has to also be given proper context.
Why was it transformative? Well, in part the comminards that took to the streets of Paris and over through the government, represented a legacy of Socrates in so far as they represented an impulse of egalitarianism, which as a philologist, Nietzsche was going to locate in the Socratic moment. So Socrates becomes a kind of world historical figure that is also imminently present within the socialist and communist movements of his time. And I think that that emphasis is revealed in many of the letters that Nietzsche exchanges with some of his early friends and colleagues as a young student.
So we get a reaction to the Paris Commune, for example, where Nietzsche says this is the saddest day of my life, because there was a rumor that all of the comminards had burned down the art in the Louvre and the Nietzsche was tragically responding to this moment. So what I think is very nice about situating this is also, of course, that Nietzsche was involved in the Franco-Prussian War, which was related to this uprising. And that in the post-1848 million of Germany, the social democracy government and the workers movements around it were creating a dynamic of a kind of dichotomy within the human being. And so very early on, Nietzsche diagnosed a specific type of human being, what he called the theoretical human being, that was posing a threat to take over Europe.
So in the same way that Marx and Engels saw the division between bourgeoisie and proletariat almost in Manatee in terms at times, Nietzsche was going to provide an alternative form of Manatee in division within humanity. And Socrates became the locus of this egalitarian, rationalist spirit against what Nietzsche would eventually develop as a party of life. So in that way, you already see a kind of interesting parallel with Marx and Nietzsche already early on. I think you have something to add?
Well, that's very short, and it was partly already covered by Stephen. So clearly, the Paris Commune was tremendously traumatizing for Nietzsche. So I believe in that letter in which you referred to the rumor about the burning of the Louvre. Nietzsche, I think, said something like I cried for days.
And so he clearly had a vision of the rise of the workers in Europe that this would put in him to a culture. And yes, I think Stephen's right, it's Manatee. There are these two grand alternatives. There's the the the reign of their herd on the one side, as he saw it.
That's what socialism was for him in liberalism too, for that matter. And on the other side, a culture, a writ large, and he was on the side of culture. And in order for culture to be defended, the Rosamund socialism and the whole egalitarian dispensation of the 1960s had to be defeated. And the stakes were super high.
And this was the ultimate, you know, a cultural battle. And so that the Paris Commune are really focused or encapsulated cultural struggle. And Liz Zirdo is absolutely right that this reoccupation runs through the whole nature's work, and you can't begin to understand Nietzsche by abstracting from that or de-politicizing him. And it was political through and through because the fight for culture was a political battle.
And I think, you know, Liz Zirdo is 100% the right to give that the focus that he does and vote a thousand pages to it. Paris, did you have something to add? I think it's worth mentioning that this year is the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune and that when Nietzsche was freaking out about these rumors given to him by Jacob Burkhardt, he wasn't the only one freaking out. Renan, Hippolytane, Strapesan, Flaubert, you had an entire constellation of so-called liberal intellectuals that were scared to death.
And they started to become much more upfront and authoritarian in their thinking, dealing with this new phase of class struggle. And it's interesting, Liz Zirdo says that a different title for the birth of tragedy could be the crisis of culture from Socrates to the Paris Commune because Socrates' theoretical optimism focuses on worldly happiness for Nietzsche at the expense of true culture, that it's this idea that we can know the world and has changed the world for the better. And that kind of shallow optimism for Nietzsche is totally incompatible with culture, which rests in a Dionysian mystery, and that with this abolition of culture for Nietzsche also comes with the abolition of slavery. We can talk more about that soon, I think.
Yeah, moving right along. So from here, Lizirdo traces a steady development of Nietzsche's towards what we might call the mature aristocratic radicalism that Lizirdo is trying to track down and develop. So what were the key stages in this development? And more importantly, what was the underlying arc that unifies this trajectory for Lizirdo and for Nietzsche?
Parisian? Sure. So in terms of the unifying arc, it's an opposition to socialism. That is the red thread for the Certo that connects the various phases of Nietzsche's thinking.
So to go into the four stages that Lizirdo talks about, the first stage is what we would call his young Bognorite, Schopenhauerian phase. This is the so-called metaphysical stage. Here, we can consider the birth of tragedy, our main text. And this is where Nietzsche denounces the hubris of reason and mass society.
This is also the period where Nietzsche writes that the international hydra of Franco-Jewish leveling and the cultural challenges of Latin civilization is very uniophobic in this phase. There's a second stage, which Lizirdo calls the solitary rebel stage where Nietzsche is criticizing a kind of European conservatism, a kind of populism that's stuck in the traditionalism of the past and has too many hopes in the people as being a source for cultural regeneration. This is an individualistic model of counter-revolution needed to fight the herd. You see this primarily in untimely meditations.
The third stage is the so-called Enlightenment Middle Period. And I think it's important to know for the Certo, this really isn't an authentic kind of Enlightenment philosophy. It's a kind of fake, positivistic Enlightenment. And Nietzsche uses this idea of skepticism and reason to debunk revolutionary movements and ideas of the Enlightenment's center around equality and justice.
He wants to debunk these as unsightly tific to make the Enlightenment safe from democracy and radicalism. So this is why Nietzsche dedicates his books to Voltaire, like human, all to human, while he attacks herself in socialism. And then in the last phase, after his break with Paul Ray, Nietzsche turns against enlightenment itself as a species of slave morality, that even something as abstract as causality can be a force for radicalism, jack-of-and-ism socialism. So it's not only Rousseau's general will, but something like Descartes's Coguiton is responsible for socialism, this idea that we are all thinking human beings.
And Nietzsche thinks this idea of the human, or even the idea of the concept harbors, these ideas of equality that must be destroyed. That future socialist revolutions cannot be fought with mere positivistic skepticism. You need a new kind of knowledge, a new kind of gospel, proclaimed by Nietzsche's Arthuristro. So this is the final phase of mature aristocratic radicalism, which has broken from any form of slave morality from the Serum.
So there's a trajectory, there's an evolution, there's a momentum, and it heads towards what we know really as Nietzsche proper, that the text of the Arthuristro anti-Christ twilighting the idols at the home. Yeah, Ronald, do you have something you want to add? Yeah, just a few words. So first of all, the label aristocratic radicalism, this then come from Luserto, then even come from Nietzsche.
It was coined by the Danish literary critic, Yorg Brandes, and who had some relations with Nietzsche and he put this to Nietzsche and embraced it, embraced it quite warmly. Thought it was an appropriate label, and does indeed capture you could argue the core of Nietzsche, which is a rebirth of aristocracy. And I think it's important to reflect on why so much changed on the French Revolution. Well, the French Revolution was a kind of delegitimization of the Aristarcharicean Europe, and Nietzsche was very clear-sightedly saw that that's what was at stake.
He said he referred to it as the kind of clovient, lubien revolt against the last Aristarcharicean Europe. And without Aristarcharicean, from Nietzsche's point of view, there is no culture. And he was determined to not just accept it as a federalist, for most people in Europe, I mean, they were critics of the French Revolution like Berc, but for most Europeans, that the French Revolution, you know, leaving inside the bloodshed and the guillotine, but in terms of its principles, represented a higher justice, and there was no going back. And once one had established the pillars of the egalitarian culture that this was a definitive outcome, well, it wasn't a definitive outcome for Nietzsche.
I mean, again, there are others for whom, you know, still kind of an open struggle, whether, you know, Pre-French Revolution, post-French Revolution, Maester, for instance, was not saying, well, you know, Aristarcharice is dead in perpetuity. But Nietzsche, I think there was a willingness to do whatever is required to undo the French Revolution. And, you know, we need a kind of counter-revolution. And we need, you know, Nietzsche's looked at Europe and saw a civilizational crisis, and welcomed that because he thought only an epochal struggle would be able to get us back to 1789.
And so I think Nietzsche understood those stakes very clearly, and that's the meaning of aristocratic radicalism. I mean, the 20th century came to be called conservative revolution, because it would take a bona fide cultural revolution to dismantle the egalitarian dispensation that the French Revolution had established. Yeah, moving right along. One thing that comes up throughout the text in a number of different ways is anti-Semitism, which was, of course, a major element of Nietzsche's cultural and intellectual milieu.
As Nietzsche's own thought developed, so did his thinking on Jews and all the issues surrounding Jews, especially in 19th century Europe? So can we unpack some of what Lucerto finds here? Yeah, I think one of the most important concepts that Lucerto offers, Apropos, how Nietzsche saw racialization or racism as such, for which we could kind of include anti-Semitism into that, of course, is what he calls transversal racialization. So the idea here is a version of racialization in Nietzsche's champion, in which kind of going back to that dichotomization of humanity we mentioned before, the objective is to divide humanity along well-formed and the ill-formed.
So it's not the same type of essentialization of anti-Semitism that we see, for example, in Wagner. It's not a type of anti-Semitism that is taking Jewish capitalist class in total. Rather, it's trying to return to an Old Testament division of humanity and pulling a lot from kind of Schopenhauer's interest in the Indian caste system, what is called the Chandala class, which for those of us who know that Chandala is mentioned there and elsewhere. So the objective of society for Nietzsche should be one in which racial caste systems are imminently determined.
That doesn't necessarily mean that all Jews are X, or all Jews are R. It's two vulgar for Nietzsche to divide humanity like that. So what we have is kind of a division from which the Ubermensch emerges as well, right? So the notion from you that have chosen yourselves will grow the overman.
The idea is that antagonisms of society ought to provide a naturalization of the division of an underclass which should be willing to sacrifice for the ultimate goal of the preservation of leisure time for the elite, right? So society had to be transformed in order for those conditions of division to transpire. So I think that's the best way I understand Nietzsche's very complex sort of theory of how racialization should be determined. Ronald, do you have anything you want to add on this topic?
Yeah, I think it's an important part of the context here that Nietzsche's supposedly favorable attitude towards the Jews has been used as a crucial pillar of Nietzsche apologetics for a very long time. And it really abstracts from interesting and sometimes damning complexities in Nietzsche's stance towards the Jews. I mean, defenders of Nietzsche refer to him as a siloed semite, which is really going way too far. I mean, in one of his last books, the Antichrist, you first, as Jews as the most catastrophic people in history get it too.
Well, those are not the words of a siloed semite. And a crucial text, the ongoing evil section to 51, you know, there is a kind of very, he embraces the Jews as part of his eugenic project for the breeding of a European ruling caste as he puts it, but you know, on the basis of very crude, crude stereotypes. And there's some really important discoveries made by Lisserto. I mean, during this fragment, right years, he documented Nietzsche was an outright anti-Semite.
And this was, you know, covered up by generations of editors and commentators. And it's to the extent where the two voggers themselves were kind of shocked by how blatant Nietzsche was with respect to anti-Semitism. And it never completely went away. And, you know, again, the story's been twisted.
And I think Lisserto is really by ending more care, more carefully to the text than anyone had done previously, really set their record straight on the question of Nietzsche and the Jews and some of these ideas in Lisserto have been developed and turned into a whole book by Robert Paulop. So that there's kind of a lot there, and it's crucial precisely in relation to the apologetic function it served for people who were concerned to defend Nietzsche. Paris, and I see your hand up. Do you have something you want to add?
Just briefly, I want to touch on the elements of personal and intellectual biography that Lisserto talks about. And just to piggyback on what Ronny was saying, the young Nietzsche was violently anti-Semitic. There's evidence of this in his correspondence with Elizabeth. The correspondence that Elizabeth herself did publish at the turn of the century.
So this idea that Elizabeth is this recipe, like figure who was making her brother into this demonic anti-Semite business troupe, she didn't publish that correspondence. The other thing that wasn't published was this lecture called Socrates and Tragedy, where Nietzsche talks about the Socratic spirit of today as being carnated in the Jewish press. And this is what Richard and Cosima Wagner were concerned about, that they agreed with Nietzsche, that this is a problem, but they did want him to be explicit. So this starts to give Nietzsche's writings a bit more of an esoteric flavor.
And this is also why Lisserto is looking at not just what's published, but also what isn't published, and what isn't published in the notebooks tends to be much more explicitly anti-Semitic, especially got someone like David Strauss. The other thing that I think we should mention is that Nietzsche, even when he broke with Wagner, his praise of Jewish people is tinged with all kinds of elitists and racist elements. He prefers the Jewish kings to the prophets, or when Jews had a state capable of waging war. This is all before the Babylonian captivity.
But with the arrival of the prophets came slave moralism. And he kind of agrees with Ernst Renant, when Renant says that he's in the book of Isaiah that Christianity is born. And this is a key source of modern subversion. And it's not for nothing but Nietzsche and the genealogy of morals calls for a war Rome against Judea to be resumed.
So that's basically what I wanted to say about that. Yeah, moving right along. At a number of points Lisserto brings marks into the story to present a contrasting viewpoint, although interestingly the two have been shown historically to have some parallel ideas regarding what are often called the hermeneutics of suspicion. Although it's from these parallels and intersections that Lisserto is able to clarify both of their positions by seeing where and why they diverge, particularly regarding questions of political economy, as well as their studies of ideology and religion.
So can we unpack some of these parallels as well as the points at which they branch off from one another? Paris, can I see your hand up? Yeah, just quickly. The comparison to Marx is interesting for the Serdo since the substance of Nietzsche's philosophy for the Serdo.
We can call it the kind of identity within the difference as politics. The young Nietzsche put it in his correspondence that politics is now the organ of thought in its totality. And Lisserto even goes so far as to say that Nietzsche is even more the political secret of Marx. So how is this possible?
While Marx tried to establish the scientific and objective character of his critique of political economy, Nietzsche argued that scientific objectivity has something obeyed about it. And its optimistic drive to understand the world is revealed to be a subversive project for change in the world. And Marx says in the 11th thesis of Wojrabak that the theoretical insight to point is the premise and socialism to change the world is the conclusion. Nietzsche, according to Lisserto, reverses the syllogism, making politics the premise and objectivity only a rationalization of a particular form of life.
And there's also parallels in the fact that for Nietzsche, history is the history of this struggle between different estates, different castes and Marx and Engels in the manifesto. We'll talk about all written history as the history of class struggle. So there is that parallel as well. Anyone else have anything they want to add on this?
Or should we move on? All right, seeing nothing. So, perspectivism is often credited to Nietzsche. And it's often seen as being a subversive methodology in a way that is useful for those fighting for emancipation.
But interestingly, Lisserto argues that Nietzsche's perspectivism was developed with a very different political intention in mind. So what does Lisserto see in perspectivism and the kind of hidden political baggage that has often been ignored? Daniel? So I can discuss this.
So, you know, one of the really nice contextualizations that Lisserto makes here is, is it a debate around a political epistemology following the French Revolution and the way in which there was a kind of dispute amongst a lot of liberal philosophers about the status of the realism of Jacobin forms of equality, right, versus more nominalist, which so thinkers like Ditocco were very much opposed to the very definition of equality, having a kind of realist status. And in his early reading of Chopinauer, Nietzsche kind of fell back on this nominalist option. But what Lisserto shows is that Nietzsche, ultimately, and he's of course credited with inventing a form of thinking through perspectivism, which is actually a break from the realist nominalist debate, which was going on amongst political philosophers at the time. So perspectivism was a way in which, for Lisserto, which also of course has an entire consequence of the eventual development of the return of the same, right?
So there's a whole theory of time which is developed here. But what Lisserto shows, I think in a very nice way, is the way in which perspectivism was itself a refined epistemological approach that was seeking to retain a certain form of aristocratic individualism, right? Because the consequences of this debate had everything to do with the post-French revolutionary status of a certain form of egalitarian relationship to the status of real universals, right? And so perspectivism was a radical break.
And part of that we should also add, which I think Harris mentioned before, is that it's very, therefore, very necessary to also make a philosophical assault on the history of Cartesian rationalism in so doing. And so what you have for Nietzsche is the way in which the legacy of Cartesian rationalism, which we saw obviously through spinosism and also in Hegel, was a general support of the theoretical human being, of this kind of proposal of a form of equality which proposed the notion that thought holds the capacity for the modification of existence, right? So perspectivism was a way to fundamentally push back on the idea of consciousness thought of as a rationalist project. So what I liked about that was we often are engaged with these metaphysical notions of Nietzsche outside of that very specific post-French revolutionary context.
So that was very, very useful to me to sort of see it framed that way. Yeah, moving right along, it has, at times been suggested that Nietzsche was a sort of intellectual predecessor of the Nazis. The sort of doesn't quite go this far, but he does see certain thematic connections between the former and latter. So in what ways does he think we can fairly read certain ideas in Nazism back into Nietzsche or argue that there was some sort of vague but undeniable influence going on?
And Ronald, I see your hand up. So. Yeah, I can get us started. So we might as well go to the beginning of the story, so to speak.
So in 19th, I mean, it's very familiar with anyone who's acquainted with Nietzsche, but I don't know who will be watching this podcast. So I might as well assume nothing. In 1950, Princeton philosopher Walter Kaufman published an extremely influential book of Nietzsche philosopher's psychologist, Antichrist, in which offers a very ambitious rehabilitation of Nietzsche. Of course, in the first half of the 20th century, Nietzsche was associated with things that were turned out to be politically catastrophic.
And Kaufman really pioneered the kind of rehabilitation of Nietzsche in the face of any connections he might have had with Bachelson, very successful project on Kaufman's part. The dominant Nietzsche became a Nietzsche who was benign or even considered emancipatory in various ways. And then in the later decades of the 20th century, you could say the French Nietzscheans radicalized the kind of the picture of Nietzsche as belonging to the left as an emancipator. And most importantly, I guess we quote Derrida and Delus.
And this again, kind of further entrenched this picture of Nietzsche who had no connections with the right or the far right, who had no connections with fascism that supposedly this was totally unfair to Nietzsche. Well, I think Lizzerto's book is easily the most ambitious, you know, return to sanity, I think, that so much in Nietzsche's writings, and really the intellectual core of Nietzsche has to be cast aside because Nietzsche's shouting from the rooftops his hatred of equality, of liberalism, of democracy, of socialism, women's rights. So, you know, and it's it's particulates so clearly and unmistakably in Nietzsche, it requires a real real a couple willful determination to sanitize and domesticate and liberalize Nietzsche and whitewash Nietzsche. And it's very important to see what the fascists of the first couple of decades of 20th century saw very clearly that Nietzsche is their guy and he helped inspire the politics of the right in the 20s and 30s.
And every Lizzerto's absolutely right, every leading fascist understood Nietzsche to be the inspirer of their politics, including Hitler and Lizzerto very thoroughly documents affinities between Nietzsche, key themes in Nietzsche, central themes in Nietzsche and and themes in in Hitler and in the leading Nazis. And it's all spelled out and anyone who reads those pages, I think has to own up to it that that Nietzsche's Nietzsche had a political project, a political project was the overthrowing of the egalitarian dispensation that was ruling and the fascists were the executors of that project. I mean, it doesn't mean to say Nietzsche would have been happy with everything that the fascists of the Nazis did, but in some broad sense their political revolution wasn't Nietzsche in revolution, they understood it. And I think it's a major service politically and intellectually for Lizzerto to force Nietzsche's defenders to actually go back and look at the text and what's central to the text.
I guess I'll hand it over to Harrison now, I could go on much longer but I shouldn't. Thank you, Ronnie. That was great. I think Lizzerto is careful to situate Nietzsche in the context of the second Reich before he makes any connections to the third, but there are connections and he doesn't try away from making them.
It's true that if you want to criticize Nietzsche's reactionary, there's enough rope that the second Reich provides, you don't necessarily need the piano higher third, but the piano higher is there nonetheless. So Nietzsche's anti-nationalism was an appeal to empire. He found nationalism too democratic and it's not obvious that Hitler was simply a nationalist since he had megalomaniacal dreams of empire too and sometimes compared himself to a Roman Emperor, the Neo-Xies had pan-European aspirations and wanted to rule the planet, not just Germany and this would be the right scale of ambition for someone like Nietzsche, what he calls grand politics. And then to see Nietzsche, as we said, is simply philosophic, it's very one-dimensional and then Lizzerto shows why this is simplistic.
Lizzerto points out that our proto-Nazi like Houston, Stuart Chamberlain didn't condemn all Jewish people but that still doesn't make his thinking any less anti-Semitic and Nietzsche himself thought that only some wealthy German Jewish families should be selected to interbreed with the families of Prussian aristocrats in order to make these new racial casts. Indeed, Nietzsche condemns any further immigration of Jews to Germany and also has many nasty things to say about Eastern European Jews. He had no problem praising bizarre and looked forward to spotting on one of his vacations, the heir of Harry, Nicholas II. The Russian state was extremely anti-Semitic and encouraged programs against Jews, something Nietzsche never condemns.
And Lizzerto points out that Nietzsche supported the pretender Napoleon V to the French throne, known for being very militaristic and anti-Semitic. And we should also look at how revolutionary conservatives close to Nietzsche's ideas like Ernst Jülger or Julius Evola acted in the Bimer Republic in the Third Reich. Ron, what do I say? You got something else you want to add?
Yeah, I just want to emphasize that the task undertaken by Lizzerto and pushing back against the Nietzsche, the post-modernist, has become far more urgent actually in recent years. So, it should be noted that the book was written originally published in Italy in its original edition nearly 20 years ago. Well, a lot has happened in the last 20 years or even the last five years. And this is relevant to how Nietzsche's sands and political functions performed by Nietzsche.
So I have kind of next to my computer here a quote I'd like to read from Connor Cruz O'Brien. This was from lectures he delivered in the late 1960s to his very pressing. He wrote, the Nazis needed a fierce Nietzsche and found him without any difficulty. In the decades after the defeat of Nancy Germany, that Nietzsche became unacceptable.
And a gentle Nietzsche was offered to the post-war public, namely Kauffman's Nietzsche. But I suspect that we have not done with Nietzsche and that the fierce Nietzsche may be due for a revival. Well, with the rise of right populism, we've actually seen, you know, old Cruz O'Brien's prophecy get moved closer to realization as I tried sketch in my dangerous mind's book, leading figures within the far right intelligentsia are very open about their Nietzscheanism. Several of them, moving Richard Spencer, you know, both that they was reading Nietzsche that first inspired them to become fascist.
And so in so far as we're seeing the renewed neo-fascism in our own time, and again, this is like nearly 20 years after the publication of the Wizard of the Book, it's more important than ever that we have our eyes open to how Nietzsche is read by fascists or by potential fascists or people could become fascists because reading of Nietzsche sets off something in them. And so this isn't just the problem of the first two decades of the 20th century. It's also a major problem for us in the first two decades, in the coming decades of the 21st century. And so I think the importance of Loserto's book, setting the record straight with respect to the political, you know, valency of Nietzsche, this has become more important than ever.
You kind of just look around, have your eyes open to the rise of the rights and the far right in Europe, in the United States, and how Nietzsche inserts himself into that, and how he's received by people who see themselves as a kind of intellectual vanguard for a revived far right. Yeah, so moving right along, at several points, Loserto brings Nietzsche into dialogue with other thinkers to clarify Nietzsche's own position. So we've already discussed Marx to some degree, but at certain points, Loserto brings Nietzsche into dialogue with the conservative Edmund Burke, as well as the liberalism of John Locke. So at first glance, it might seem tempting to put them into similar categories.
Loserto argues that truly understanding Nietzsche means realizing that his aristocratic radicalism is a very unique and even at times insightful position in a way that these alternatives are not. So what does Loserto see as being unique to Nietzsche here, and how does it set them apart from other positions that might have reactionary elements, but not quite the same level of consistency or depth that Nietzsche brings to the table? I can say something briefly to start kicking off here. I mean, I think one of the nice contributions of aristocratic rubble is placing Nietzsche's theory of individualism into a certain contrast, and seeing, yes, you're Stephen, you're right.
You know, liberal philosophers like Eitokvil, Locke, or Mill, by no means are embracing this radical aristocratic project. Yet, Loserto, I think, does a service to studying the historical record, right, as it pertains to Locke, Mill, and Eitokvil, for example, support for things like imperialism, right? But support for imperialism as a specific way, although not as strong as Nietzsche's, right, for the preservation of exceptional individuals. So where they both agreed was that liberal society needs to be one in which we have reserved the space for exceptional geniuses and individuals, and of course, there's also a profound Eurocentrism there, because the places in which Europe was colonizing foreclosed the possibility for exceptional greatness, right?
That's number one, number two, where Nietzsche did align with a lot of liberals was also in seeing imperialism, although also looking at slavery with what we can talk about, but just to look at imperialism for a moment, where they aligned was that imperialism also offered the opportunity for an imminent racial determination of the status of uneducated workers. So if we send the young workers off to fight in Africa or Asia or far off lands, they might have opportunity to exert their greatness, right? So you see this with not as strong of a contrast in liberal philosophers, so that was a very eye-opening contrast for me. All right, Ronald, I see you have your hand up.
Yeah, I'll try and keep this short, so specifically on Nietzsche and Burke. So in the discussion early in the book in chapter two, I think, Besserto focuses on certain infinities between Nietzsche and Burke with respect to their critiques of abstract rationalism in the Enlightenment. And sure enough, Burke was a, too, was someone who was shocked and appalled by the French Revolution. And so I think that's fair enough that there is a kind of, you know, this is an important thing in Nietzsche that the dominance of rationality over instinct is, has bad cultural implications for Nietzsche and helps undermine nobility, where, and then again, it's straight back to Socrates, and everything is about rational argument and not about, you know, intuitions of higher and lower that are just inscribed in your being.
So there are, I think it's reasonable to say there are some affinities with Burke, but politically, there really, there's no, really, there's no comparison here at all, and I'm sure, you know, literally one suggests that there is. I mean, Burke was not even Tory, he was, he was awake, he was himself a product of the Enlightenment and part of the liberal tradition, and, and a critic of the British Empire. And, you know, I think the appropriate rubric under which the class of course, Aristocracy. And, you know, if that requires Caesarism, so much the better.
I mean, Nietzsche, you know, Burke was a constitutionalist and relative to, you know, there's conservative things in Burke, but relative to Nietzsche, he's, he's, he's a liberal, you know, and so I don't, I'm going to have to be careful, and I don't, I think, was sort of himself is careful that not to go overboard with comparisons between Nietzsche and, and, you know, conventional conservatives. I mean, Nietzsche, I think it's closer to Maestra, actually, you know, my, one, one, my formula is for capturing Nietzsche's, you know, Maestra, the Christianity. I'll, I'll hand it over to Harrison now. Yeah, Harrison, do you have something to add?
Well, I want to say that the sort of does a good job comparing Nietzsche in Burke in terms of Nietzsche's Wagner-Rite phase, so the more populist phase. And regarding Daniel's points about colonialism, what's interesting about Burke is that he's so concerned in the reflections on the French revolution that these ideas of the rights of man will get back to the colonies, and they're going to start to vote, revolting, and they're going to become Jacobus themselves. And when we talk about Nietzsche and imperialism and colonialism, you should keep in mind that he is in favor of the free spirit being an imperial spirit, when he talks about annihilating decadent races, exterminating decadent races, this has a colonial tinge to it. This is something that should have echoes of Joseph Conrad exterminate the Bruce in the book of Heart of Darkness.
So when he's talking about destroying decadent races, he's using the word vernictum, which has this element of physical eradication. It's not just destroying abstract ideas. Nietzsche wants to learn from how indigenous people were treated by imperialism, and he has the Congo in mind in the nochles. So there are affinities between Burke, I think, as a pro-colonizer in Nietzsche on this score, but of course Nietzsche takes it up a notch and becomes, I think, much more genocide.
I totally agree with Harrison on Nietzsche. I'm, again, the softer on Burke, then either Harrison or Stephen. Again, Burke was a supporter of the American colonies, he's either their conflicts with Britain, and in his own culture was one of the strongest critics of abuses in British rule in India. So, I mean, if one contextualizes Burke, he actually comes up pretty well in relation to the whole question of the colonialism and empire.
Yeah, so moving right along, one of them made, sorry, I did someone else. It's all about Burke another time. I just wanted to emphasize that his position is on the American revolution, where consistent with his positions on the French revolution, people can look at the sardons, but I'm never listening to that. Yeah, I'm sure that's a whole other podcast we can do, but yeah.
One of the major reasons for Lucerto writing this book is that Nietzsche has been picked up by a number of thinkers, many without reactionary intentions, but who in a variety of ways have pursued what Lucerto calls the hermeneutics of innocence that has in various ways toned down Nietzsche's politics or removed them entirely. So how does Lucerto see this happening through various forms of mistranslation or editing or just kind of selective reading? And why is the various on political readings of Nietzsche that are out there totally untenable for him? I can start us off with this.
I think it's really important to understand that as a committed Marxist and Italian setting late 20th century, Lucerto was very much a critic of left-wing versions of Nietzscheanism, John Yvatomo and others, although Vatomo's primary opponent of Lucerto's view here. I think at the end of the text you get some really nice analyses of where the harmonetics of innocence goes wrong, and he blames a lot of translation issues, Elizabeth as one example but others, of even providing a very nice hermeneutic analysis of various passages. So I highly recommend that the concluding chapters of the book for analysis of left-nechanism, but it's not only in the Italian context that he discusses, he also talks about French left-nechanism, Foucault and Derrida, and where they go wrong in Lucerto's view, especially for Foucault, is that they make a diagnosis of the emergence of things like totalitarianism, vis-à-vis, and a critique of Nietzsche's critique of rationalism and kind of bureaucratic categorization, which for the case of Foucault, allows for Nietzsche to provide a very useful insight that it gives an account of power, where I think Lucerto wants to correct the focogian thesis of power, which Foucault's in part really influenced by Nietzsche, as we probably all know, is by contextualizing Nietzsche's critique of power in this very specific post-French revolutionary scene and reading Nietzsche as well as his philosophy, A, as a political thinker first and foremost, and B, as one who's trying to create a comprehensive philosophy in opposition to these trends post-French revolutions. So there's that, I will say at the conclusion in the appendix, there is a discussion of Derrida, but it's one we'd like to see more elaboration, because there's so much ground to cover, for example, the philosopher, Gil-Bollusson, of the most important, like 20th century philosophers, is not discussed, and so there's many invitations that Lucerto's text opens to other philosophers that might go back and do a reappraisal of this huge field of left-nechanism.
So a lot of that is not really fully developed by Lucerto. Harrison, I see your hand up. Yeah, I think that it's true. Wisserto doesn't directly address Foucault or Derrida or Delus, but it's interesting that recently, we see more studies inspired by the Certo coming out in essays that do address those particular thinkers.
So recently, it was announced that Jan Reimann's book on left-nechanism, which deals with Delus, Derrida and Foucault, that is in part inspired by Wisserto, that is coming into English, very excited to talk about that. And Matthew Sharp just wrote an essay about Delus's book, Nietzsche and Philosophy, directly inspired by Lucerto's book, Here's the Credit Rebel. But I also want to say that Nietzsche himself is involved in this process of infinite interpretation. He's not, he wasn't someone that wanted to hide from society or even left, but was explicit about infiltrating democratic movements and using them for his own end of aristocratic radicalism.
This is demonstrated in Lucerto, but also in, let's say, Geoffrey White's Nietzsche's course, the kind of irony and radicalism Nietzsche promotes seems attractive to people on the left. What the hermeneutics of innocence does is detach the political effects from certain ideas like eternal return or the over-metch. These concepts are not neutral, and they can make left-wing commitments to egalitarianism or democracy incoherent. And Nietzsche manages to place ideas of rebellion on a more ethereal plane where socializing the means of production seems itself seems bourgeois and pedestrian compared to a more total or hyperbolic kind of revolt that will ignore human needs and happiness.
Yeah, Ronald, I see you have your hand up too. I know you have thoughts on this. Yeah, yeah. Well, two things.
First of all, that they've ended your question, you say, why is the unpolitical Nietzsche an untenable one for him for Lucerto? Well, I'd say it's not that it's untenable for him. It's that the unpolitical Nietzsche just is untenable, full stop. And it's a kind of perversity of decades of Nietzsche's scholarship and not Nietzsche's reception that the un-political or apolitical or depolitic has been considered in any way untenable because that's just a it's just perverse.
I mean, and again, as I said beginning, it's a kind of return to sanity for which we all should be extremely grateful to Lucerto. I mean, for Nietzsche, I mean, Lucerto's basic thesis that these are the whole 1,000-page book is that Nietzsche is through and through political and that is just plain correct. It's just accurate. I mean, for Nietzsche, the core problem is that modern culture is not a real culture.
I mean, as Heidegger put it, modernity is a more of a pseudo-civilization. Well, that's exactly Nietzsche's view. And to correct that for Nietzsche requires a kind of not just a cultural revolution, but a cultural political revolution that we have to overturn a political dispensation in order to return to a culture that's a real culture, to return to the civilization that's a real civilization. And so the idea of abstracting from politics is just complete overization of Nietzsche and Lucerto's 100% on the target on this.
And again, I'd also, I guess, second one of Harrison's suggestions that it would be, I think a little misleading to suggest that Lucerto's fighting this fight single-handedly, that it's a kind of solo effort on his part to push back against unpolitical deep politicized readings of Nietzsche, Jeff Wade's book, Nietzsche's Corpse, very different kind of book from aristocratic rebel, but it is in its own way just as epic an effort on the on behalf of the good cause of restoring the politics of Nietzsche and pushing back against the left Nietzscheans. Wade refers to them as pseudo-leftists. If you're under the spell of Nietzsche, that's proof right there that you're a pseudo-leftist. I think there's a lot of force to that, but it's not just Wade.
There have been other important readings among political theorists, Bruce Dequeaux's book on Nietzsche, the Schitt-Sheldon Rowan in the chapter on Nietzsche added to the expanded edition of politics and vision, Richard Rowan's Destruction of Unreason. So there is more of a, it's not, Lucerto hasn't gone to war in a kind of solo effort. There are other books that one could appeal to and learn from, and it's not just, you know, Lucerto against the world, but the the majority of Nietzsche commentators have been on the other side, and as I said earlier, it's more important now than ever with the return of the far right that we open our eyes to the politics in not blind ourselves to it or delude ourselves and think that there's just no politics there. And it's shocking how many very intelligent, very learned people somehow have, you know, fooled themselves into thinking that there's no politics there.
Harrison, do you have something you want to add? Yeah, I just want to say independent of Lucerto, Ronnie has made, I think, a major contribution to this discussion, to the scholarship, in his book Dangerous Mind. I think everyone should get a copy and really take seriously the two middle chapters on Nietzsche and Heidegger, and I think Ronnie does an excellent job showing that Nietzsche is a political thinker, and that his ideas are incompatible with a leftist commitment to egalitarianism. Yeah, so that brings us through kind of some of the main ideas of the book.
So I want to ask a final question of all of you. Where do you think this book leaves us? So clocking it at just over a thousand pages, it is a pretty substantial contribution to a number of different fields, be it Nietzsche studies, continental philosophy, German history, political theory. So I'm wondering, what do you think the book does that ought to be perhaps developed in a little more depth in the future, or maybe something you think the book does incorrectly, you know, enclosing how do you think people ought to respond to this book?
I can kick us off real quick. I think personally speaking, I'd like to see collaboration in a couple of domains. The first is Nietzsche's Critic of Revolution. So the very proposal that the Frankfurt School kind of really initiated a fusing marks with Nietzsche, I think Lucerto shows that Nietzsche's theory of revolution was that revolution is incapable, but there's a kind of impossible cathartic moment at the core of any revolutionary uprising that it's so therefore Nietzsche's pessimism pushes Marxist-oriented practice to sort of really question whether it's even feasible to have a partner in political revolution within each other.
I think Lucerto makes the case that it's not even feasible. Yet, as we've kind of articulated, Nietzsche is also a thinker of praxist. In other words, he's a thinker of organization, of alternative communities. So I think there's a lot, and you see this in other works, I'm thinking here of the anti-Nichia text, where it's very, I think, important to look at the way in which categories like the proletariat must actually be thought in an explicitly anti-Nichian mode, given this profound pessimism.
So that's one area. I think the other area that I'd like to see more work is on the unifying theme of Otheum et Bellum, or the preservation of leisure time for the aristocratic elite, which Lucerto really, really emphasizes the significance of this concept for Nietzsche. And I'd like to see how that category of leisure time fits in with new proposals by socialist authors like Martin Hegland in his book This Life, which really centers the importance of rethinking of the importance of leisure time as a more universal, a good, and the way in which Nietzsche becomes a strong opponent to any form of egalitarian theory of leisure time for the masses. So those are two areas, but there's many more also, of course, the way in which we can go back and unearth the metaphysics of Nietzsche with this new centered perspective on the political commitments.
I think would be another really, really important task of scholarship. Harrison, you want to go next? Sure. I have a few things to say, but how the book will be received, I think, is an open question, especially the soft cover.
The likely answer is that there will be a kind of enforced ideological silence. If not some contempt for the book amongst Nietzsche, the circles are mainly shaped by deconstructionism and saving Nietzsche for liberal democracy. So I think Lucerto's claims are going to be quite a shock for them. I really do hope they take the book seriously, but I have my doubts.
I do have high hopes for the broader academic community and students, especially those who are concerned with the rise of authoritarianism and fascism. Nietzsche is unfortunately making a comeback in so-called and right circumstances. As Ronnie pointed out, it's very necessary to extend Lucerto's analysis of Nietzsche to make sure to make sense of this. And I think the main takeaway from Lucerto's book is that right-wing Nietzscheanism is a redundant phrase, but left-wing Nietzscheanism is an oxymoron.
That doesn't mean, and I've seen this on social media, that Lucerto's book wants to cancel Nietzsche. No one is saying, don't read Nietzsche. No one is saying, don't teach Nietzsche. I teach Nietzsche in my philosophy classes.
No one's saying, don't devote your scholarly time to Nietzsche. But what Lucerto is saying is that while we can learn from Nietzsche, when there is a theoretical surplus to the game from Nietzsche, what we can't become, and we shouldn't become Nietzsche. That's what he's saying. Ronald, you want to close this off here?
Yeah, briefly. So when you ask what would you like to see? Well, I'd like to see people read Lucerto's book. And here I'm very much in agreement with Harrison.
So I would hope that what it reading these thousand pages would lead to is people actually rethinking their reception of Nietzsche. But my fear, like Harrison's fear, is that the defenders of a liberal leftist and postmodernist Nietzsche are too entrenched in those images of Nietzsche to really, for Lucerto have the effect on them that he has. I hope I'm wrong about that. I hope Harrison's wrong.
But like him, I'm a little doubtful whether Lucerto will have the effect on the broader Nietzsche reception that all three of us I think very much would like to see. And just one glass quick thing about the theme of Nietzsche and revolution. And I think Daniel's assumption seems to be, well, revolution means egalitarian or less this revolution. Well, Nietzsche himself was a revolutionary.
And there are revolutions at the right. I mean, Nazism, 1933 was also a revolution. And that's what Nietzsche wanted. He wanted not revolutions that were bottom up, revolutions of people, but revolutions that were top down by ruthless rulers.
And in that sense, it's one revolutionary vision against another revolutionary vision. That's why it's not an accident that followers of Nietzsche in Bimar Germany called themselves their vision, their political vision, the conservative revolution. It was meant to be also revolutionary. So I think that's just a quick correction that Nietzsche's anti-revolutionary.
He's pro-revolutionary, but he wants a aristocratic revolution in an auto liberal or socialist revolution. That's absolutely true. Yeah, I think there's a nice discussion there also of the idea that in egalitarian revolution will always reproduce and intensify resentment. So it's in that way that the objectives of left oriented revolutionary projects must be fundamentally off the table.
So it's therefore beyond an irony to even fuse a revolutionary philosopher like Marx with Nietzsche. That was kind of my point, which is it's an odd couple. And I think that if we're lucky, this book will at least encourage Marx's thinkers that do find an ally in Nietzsche to at least reconsider that allyship. Yeah, so the book is Nietzsche the aristocratic rebel by Dominique Lucerto.
And so that brings us to the end of my question. So Daniel Harrison Flus and Ronald Boehner, thank you so much for all being with us. Thank you. Thank you.