The Philosopher with a Thousand Eyes

In Nietzsche's Great Politics, Cambridge historian Hugo Drochon picks up a scholarly debate around saving Nietzsche from Nazism. By the 1950s, philosophers were restoring texts in order to prevent Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche. This was achieved by arguing that Nietzsche himself didn't have a politics; it is against this reading that Drochon pitches his book. Influential scholars like Walter Kaufmann and, more recently, Brian Leiter framed the thinker as uninterested in politics, dedicated instead to a philosophy of culture. This is not to say they stripped Nietzschean thought of political implication, or that they believed aesthetic questions to be free of political concern or social critique. But these readings denied formal political thought any primacy in Nietzsche's oeuvre.