Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History by Christian J. Emden (review)

In Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History, Christian Emden explores “Nietzsche’s response to the historical and political culture in Europe in the age of the modern nation state” (xi). The book is volume 88 of the Ideas in Context series (edited by Quentin Skinner and James Tully). Emden’s goal is to position Nietzsche firmly in the history of modern political thought, starting from the belief that “Nietzsche’s intellectual and political environment plays a prominent role in his historical thought and his understanding of the political” (xi). Emden argues that Nietzsche’s political philosophy is one of “political realism” in contrast to the ideological fault lines of modern political culture. What I would like to learn, then, is what Nietzsche’s political realism looks like––for example, with respect to his concern for Europe’s future, expressed in the figure of “the good European”; what Emden’s contextual approach adds to more philosophical interpretations of Nietzsche’s political thought; and what the present value of Nietzsche’s political realism (based on his view of life as will to power) might be, particularly for contemporary Europe.

Emden delineates in six chapters Nietzsche’s politico-philosophical development from his student years in Bonn and Leipzig during the 1860s to his genealogy of the late 1880s (chap. 5) and to his “good Europeanism” (chap. 6) as responses to the “failure of neo-humanism” (chap. 1), the “formation of Imperial Germany” (chap. 2), “the crisis of historical culture” (chap. 3), and the rise of cultural anthropology (chap. 4).

In the first chapter, Emden argues that in order to make a valid assessment of modernity, Nietzsche continuously emphasized the importance of historical knowledge and that he owed this insight to his philological studies, which he conducted under the direction of Jahn and Ritschl. Their classical studies were “embedded in a political program, largely due to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s role in the Prussian state: neo-humanist ideals of Bildung can only have an effect once they are part of an institutional setting” (29). Remarkably, Emden claims this without considering Nietzsche’s sharp criticism of the “historical sense,” which he addressed specifically in HL. He also claims that the striving for an “ideal humanity” by means of classical studies was a “political” ideal (rather than a purely aesthetic and cultural one) by stating that “the nostalgic vision of Greek antiquity […] contains a utopian dimension that, almost automatically, politicized any appreciation of antiquity” (30, emphasis mine) and by addressing Nietzsche’s main philosophical topic (“modernity”) as “a European political culture” (303). Emden does not problematize these statements in light of Nietzsche’s repeated claims that culture and state are opposites, that culture should remain as remote as possible from politics, and that he was the last “anti-political” German (see references below). Instead, Emden states that “the presumed centrality of the aesthetic that is invariably attributed to his writings is in need of much revision” (96) without clarifying why it is important that the presumed centrality of the aesthetic in Nietzsche’s philosophy be revised.

In chapter 2, Emden argues that Nietzsche’s historical method took an “anthropological turn” in the early 1870s, which continued to influence his genealogical work of the 1880s, suggesting (rather than proving on the basis of comparative and textual analysis) that this was under the direction of his Basel colleagues Burckhardt, Bachofen, and Overbeck. Interesting is Emden’s reference to the fact that Nietzsche submitted his lecture on Socrates and Tragedy to the Preussische Jahrbuch for publication. This magazine was edited by Von Treitschke, who was also a close friend of Overbeck (who was disturbed by Von Treitschke’s nationalism), and to whom Nietzsche also sent his Birth of Tragedy. Treitschke refused the publication, because “he simply did not understand what the manuscript was about” (93). Such a detail forces us to reconsider the extent to which Nietzsche’s cultural nationalism of BT was also political.

Chapter 3...