Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism (review)

An increasingly large portion of recent publications in Nietzsche studies concerns Nietzsche’s political thought. The main fault line in this scholarship runs between those who believe that Nietzsche provides a normative account of politics, including an account of the proper ends of government and of the institutional means for the attainment of these ends, and those who believe that no such positive account of politics can be found in Nietzsche’s thought. On this basic question, Shaw sides with the skeptics, but not because, as others have argued, Nietzsche’s intellectual commitments lie with metaphysics, or cultural and aesthetic philosophy, rather than with politics. On the contrary, Shaw insists that Nietzsche’s interest in politics is long-standing and substantive. She offers a brief but illuminating account of Nietzsche’s close identification with the political views of Burkhardt and the Basel school, which opposed Ranke’s nationalist historicism and the Bismarckian pursuit of the Kultuurstaat ideal. Such views, which remain influential on Nietzsche’s thought, are neither a- nor antipolitical but represent a thoughtful defense of the appropriate ends of culture and scholarship and the dangers of a political appropriation of intellectual and cultural independence by the state.

Hence, Shaw does not dispute the seriousness of Nietzsche’s interest in politics but, rather, shows that Nietzsche saw no way to square political realities with his philosophical and moral commitments. The core of her argument concerns the problem of normative political authority, and this is where her distinctive contribution to discussions of Nietzsche’s political thought lies. Shaw argues that with the decline of religious belief, which effectively connected normative values to social and political institutions and justified certain political arrangements, politics and philosophy diverge onto different paths. Following secularization, the modern state, which cannot rule by force alone, must pursue legitimacy through appealing to values endorsed by the general populace. Ideally, these values would be consistent with philosophical and scientific truth, and in upholding these values, the state would appeal to its citizens’ powers of reason, but this is rarely the case. For the most part, normative legitimacy and hence political authority are produced through forms of ideological persuasion that depend on appeals to emotion, tradition, and cultural and political prejudices. This is where politics fails for Nietzsche. Endorsing recent views concerning Nietzsche’s moral realism, Shaw argues that Nietzsche upholds the belief that reasoned thought, when freed from the blinders of religious or cultural prejudice, can distinguish between true and false moral judgments. The problem is that such truth is difficult to obtain, available at best to those few who have the requisite philosophical experience, and, above all, is difficult to convey to a general populace lacking the requisite personal qualities or training. Shaw’s characterization of Nietzsche as a political skeptic stems from this incompatibility between the modern state’s need for legitimacy, pursued by any means available, and Nietzsche’s own insistence that justified political power can only rest on moral truths arrived at by philosophical means. As Shaw writes, “Given Nietzsche’s reflections on the state and on the general unreliability of normative belief, he must assume that it is extremely unlikely that any independent source of normative authority will be able to compete with the state’s ideological control” (6).

Because Shaw’s argument centers on the problem of political norms, most of the book is occupied with an analysis of Nietzsche’s views on morality and the question of his moral realism or antirealism. As a result, the book engages only cursorily with the extensive secondary literature on Nietzsche’s politics and has little to say about the substantive arguments made in those works concerning the picture of political life and political institutions that may be constructed from Nietzsche’s thought. The argument that Shaw makes and the evidence on which she draws can hence be countered by arguments highlighting different passages from Nietzsche’s work that suggest his commitment to a higher unification of culture and politics, exemplified in a distinctive notion...