4
Robert Guay
1 Introduction
Nietzsche expressed anti-democratic views, especially in his later writings, but, strangely, expressed no interest at all in institutional forms or government policies. On the rare occasion when the topic of democratic institutions did arise, Nietzsche commented that they are ‘very useful and very boring’ (WS 289), mere ‘foregrounds’ (BGE 242) or only the ‘consequences’ (TI ‘Skirmishes’ 37) of decline, but took no interest in their operation or justification. He proposed no alternative institutional scheme.1 There is no discussion of legitimacy, obligation, authority, principles of justice, sovereignty or any of the familiar topics of modern political philosophy. This seems, furthermore, to have been a studious neglect: Nietzsche alternately affiliates himself with positions that are ‘unpolitical’ (TI ‘Germans’ 4), ‘indifferent toward politics’ (EH BT 1; cf. A pref), or, most famously, ‘antipolitical’ (TI ‘Germans’ 4, EH ‘Wise’ 3).2 Nietzsche offers few hints as to the nature of his commitments here, but they seem to be both deeply held and antipathetic to the substantive political questions.
This presents something of a mystery: Nietzsche seems to touch upon political questions – not merely about democracy, but about a wide range of topics, and often with forceful judgements – at the same time as he refuses to engage with them. Some have responded to this mystery by employing Nietzsche’s thought in the service of democratic theory, separating Nietzsche’s own personal views from the positions that are suggested or perhaps entailed by his deeper theoretical commitments.3 I, too, wish to separate any question of Nietzsche’s idiosyncratic personal views from his philosophical commitments, but I am nevertheless interested in the interpretative project of identifying Nietzsche’s views rather than the constructive one of making use of those views in previously unanticipated ways. My aim in this paper is to explain Nietzsche’s own philosophical position with respect to democracy, including his lack of interest in any institutional features. What I argue is that Nietzsche’s interest and hence his criticisms are not primarily directed at democracy per se, but at the ‘democratic movement,’ which is to be understood as a psychological phenomenon and may not correspond to any institutional form.
When Nietzsche discusses democracy, he does not discuss it as a kind of institutional arrangement but as a cultural phenomenon, ‘idea’ (WS 275), ‘conception’ (HH 472), ‘symptom’ (GM III: 20, BT AS 4), or, prominently, as a ‘movement’ (BGE 202, BGE 203). Nietzsche is accordingly, I argue, engaging in neither the ancient nor modern forms of political philosophy: his discussions betray neither a perfectionist interest in how human nature realizes itself in a community, nor an interest in distinguishing state organization from other social formations. Instead he refers to modern political formations in order to offer an analysis that is psychological in character. Democracy, that is, considered as a movement, is a psychological formation writ large: it evidences motivations, aims and needs. Consideration of its actual operation or its public discourses is only a means to discussing the underlying psychological phenomena. Nietzsche’s interest in democracy, as in other many other forms of social, political and economic arrangements,4 is to diagnose them as psychological phenomena and to argue that these ‘movements’ have become pathological: they are reactive, hypertrophic, disconnected from other psychological elements, and, most importantly, obstruct the possibility of their own satisfaction.
My discussion proceeds in the following three sections. In the next section, I discuss Nietzsche’s understanding of ‘movements’ and his historical analysis of them, which I argue provides an initial explanation of Nietzsche’s anti-democratic sentiments. A first approximation of his concern is that the democratic movement substitutes claim-making for direct action in a problematic way. This is, I argue, inadequate to explain Nietzsche’s antipathy for the democratic movement, however; a full explanation requires a consideration of Nietzsche’s political psychology.5 In the following section, I thus discuss the distinctiveness of Nietzsche’s treatment of movements in psychological terms, distinguishing it from both empirical inquiry and from Plato and Hegel’s organicism, and then argue that it provides the basis for Nietzsche’s negative assessment. In the final section, I discuss the limited implications that Nietzsche’s views have for the assessment of political institutions.
2 Movements as historical
This passage from Beyond Good and Evil is representative of Nietzsche’s remarks about democracy at the end of his career: ‘We, who are of a different faith – we, for whom the democratic movement holds not merely as a form of decline of political organization, but as a form of decline, namely a form of diminishment of the human, making it mediocre and lowering its value: where must we reach with our hopes? – Towards new philosophers . . .’ (BGE 203) This is a strange passage, and what is strange about it is that the target is not exactly democracy, and neither the criticism nor the remedy seem to be things that democracy is responsible for. His objection is not aimed at institutions, and he even distinguishes his concerns from ones that treat the ways in which political organization proceeds. He associates his criticism with a belief or faith about ‘the human,’ and suggests that the necessary remedy is ‘new philosophers,’ or at least a hope directed towards them, rather than some alternative institutional scheme. At the root of all these oddities, however, is that the object of criticism is ‘the democratic movement’ rather than democracy per se, and he does not explain what means by ‘the democratic movement’ or why it is a form of decline. One could try to identify a specific referent for ‘the democratic movement,’ but there are no obvious candidates: it does not seem likely that Nietzsche was referring to anyone in particular, and doing so would undermine the generality of his point. So one approach to understanding Nietzsche’s views is to figure out what he means by ‘movement,’ and then to determine how a movement, and the democratic movement in particular, would fit into the existential concerns that he raises.
That is my approach in this section. I show that Nietzsche’s idiosyncratic usage of ‘movement’ is only minimally helpful, but that a consideration of the origin and development of social movements makes it possible to relate the distinctive features of movements to Nietzsche’s historical understanding of modernity and some of the normative concerns that he does make explicit. In particular, I identify Nietzsche’s use of ‘movement’ with the semantic elements of agitation, historical progress and embodiment. I connect these elements to what Charles Tilly has called the ‘campaigns,’ the ‘repertoire,’ and the ‘WUNC displays’ of early social movements. I then argue that in light of this historical context, it becomes easier to see how democracy considered as a movement rather than as an institutional form fits into Nietzsche’s historical analysis and thus sheds light on the nature of Nietzsche’s main complaint, which is that movements advance normative claims in defective ways.
Although Nietzsche makes frequent use of the term ‘movement,’ he never indicates what he means by it. The term had abruptly come into contemporary parlance – the very idea of a ‘social movement’ seems to have emerged in 1850 after a few decades of vaguely metaphorical uses of ‘movement’ rapidly dying into something more concrete.6 But despite the widespread characterization of the social world in terms of a plurality of movements, there was little discussion, outside of specific contexts, of what this meant. Even those within self-described movements gave little thought to what that in general meant. Nietzsche’s own usage of the term only adds to the confusion here. Instead of identifying particular contemporary movements, he associates the term mostly frequently with Christianity (e.g. BGE 202, TI ‘Errors’ 7, TI ‘Improvers’ 3, A 27, A 51, A 58, A 59, EH GM) and with the Reformation (GS 149, GM I: 16, GM III: 19) in particular. So Nietzsche uses a non-standard meaning of an undefined term.
The origin and development of the relevant sense of ‘movement’ can, fortunately, contribute to an explanation of what Nietzsche means and why he treats Christianity and democracy as movements. There were three main semantic elements that got carried over from the everyday sense of movement to form the distinctive modern sense: agitation, historical progress and embodiment. The oldest one to be used in this way is that of agitation, upheaval or unrest: the sense of movement here is that of trouble being stirred up in an otherwise placid setting. Frese dates the usage to 1684, and others attempt to trace it back further.7 Regardless of when the metaphor was first employed and when it ceased to be a metaphor, the meaning seems to have been firmly established in Europe by the end of the eighteenth century.8 This meaning makes its first appearance in English no later than 1812, by which time it has started to blend with the other senses of movement.9 Agitation is initially understood as more akin to a natural disturbance of order, but this gradually began to be treated as a distinctively social phenomenon.
The second semantic element is that of historical progress. Here the background idea is that history has a determinate trajectory along which progress may be made or impeded, but that the trajectory itself cannot be altered. Movement, then, is that of the historical process in the direction of its destination.10 This is the sense of the single greatest influence in proliferating ‘movement’: the Movement Party of the July Revolution of 1830.11 The liberals referred to themselves as the ‘Movement Party’ in opposition to the ‘Party of Order,’ and the contrast between movement and reaction came to represent what was understood as a pan-European emancipatory struggle. Thus ‘the movement’ was commonly referred to as something singular. This singular reference to ‘the movement’ indicates that the modern sense has not yet developed. First, there is only one movement because there is only one historical trajectory; there is no possibility of plural and multidirectional movements. More basically, however, the movement in question is that of the historical process rather than a distinctive form of social-political engagement. There happens to be a party that identifies itself with this movement, but the party is not quite itself the movement.
The final component, then, is that movement is bodily movement: ‘persons are united in a social body, a corpus, which moves or acts as an entity’ (Nicholas 1973, p. 67). Actual circumstances had, to be sure, already implied this sense: unrest was always popular unrest, and the historical process always had its organizations rallying behind it. But part of what constituted a movement as such became that it is a single, unified entity lumbering around. It was always a strange sort of entity – as Frese writes, it was ‘experienced by the participants as a unity but remaining organizationally subjectless’ (Frese 1971, p. 882). This headlessness of the social body itself became a topic of contestation, provoking debate over what sort of leadership or elite might be required for a movement to sustain itself.12 This perceived possible lack indicates, however, what is already implicit in the notion of ‘movement’: that a movement lacks the deliberateness or directedness of an action, even when it is attributed to a body.
This range of meanings captures fairly well the new form of social organization that developed in Nietzsche’s lifetime; at the same time, once this range of meanings coalesced into a familiar option for self-ascription, it affected how participants in movements thought of themselves.13 So these semantic elements manifested themselves in the emergence of social movements. Charles Tilly has summarized three basic features of early movements as the campaign, the repertoire and WUNC displays.14 That is, the three basic features of what developed into social movements were, first, the making of collective claims through sustained efforts, second, a shifting but conventional stock of activities, and third, a ‘concerted public representation of . . . worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment’ (Tilly 2004, p. 4). The fully integrated sense of ‘movement’ is realized when the progressive15 agitation carried out by a subjectless social body took the form of ‘solemn processions, vigils, rallies, demonstration, petition drives’ (Tilly 2004, p. 3), and so on, with the function of sustaining a public identity, validating themselves, and above all, publicly directing claims to targeted authorities.
Nietzsche occupied a privileged historical position to see this new form of organization as both strange and pervasive. The point of forming a group in response to dissatisfaction had previously been either to seize political power or to use coercive force to achieve desired ends. One would, for example, free a prisoner by storming a prison, chase a sheriff or a tax collector out of town, or assert a claim to public authority. These courses of action no longer seem available now, even when the same inciting grievances arise. This is, incidentally, what explains Nietzsche’s infamous admiration of Cesare Borgia. There were nothing intrinsically admirable about Borgia, but as Nietzsche indicates, he represents the lost possibility of social engagement taking the form of both direct action and at the same time the seeking of political power: Borgia represents a direct ‘form of attack’ (A 61) against the seat of power, one which we moderns have become too ‘sensitive’ (TI.9.37) to be capable of.
Nietzsche noticed that in his time social activity had abruptly shifted from direct interventions to holding rallies or petition drives to make claims on the wider social world. This matching of repertoire of activity to ultimate ends would have been unthinkable a few generations earlier, but by Nietzsche’s lifetime it had come to seem instinctive, so much so that movement politics had started to become one of the dominant forms of sociality in the modern world. Claims from almost any sphere – economic, political, cultural, ethical, religious – would be addressed by the formation of movements.
This pervasiveness contributes, I think, to an understanding of Nietzsche’s claim that ‘the democratic movement is the heir of the Christian movement’ (BGE 202; cf. A 43). Nietzsche treats the democratic movement as the realization, in secular form, of what had already been implicit in Christianity: moving towards the future indirectly, by mass participation rather than by taking authority. There are two main elements of this. One is that it works by the process that Nietzsche calls ‘imaginary revenge’ (GM I: 10; cf. A 17),16 that is, proceeding by the replacement or ‘inversion’ of ideals where direct action is impossible. The basic form, in other words, is organized agitation for the sake of demands grounded in novel claims of group worth. The other main element is another central component of Nietzsche’s historical understanding, theoretical ‘optimism’ (BT 15; cf. EH ‘Destiny’ 4). This optimism, or ‘faith in truth’ (GM III: 24), is the belief that ‘the nature of things can be fathomed’ and that knowing and cognition ‘have the power of a panacea’ (BT 15). Nietzsche associates ‘democratic taste’ with the ‘triumph of optimism’ (BT AS 4): the confidence of being on the right side of history, and that historical progress can be made. Social movements may not have deep theoretical commitments, but Nietzsche nevertheless sees their confidence in their own causes and methods as being the legacy of faith in convergence on a single right answer.17
Nietzsche thus sees only a single movement, with many masks, throughout history, without radical breaks, departures or revolutions. Socratic optimism adds metaphysics to become Platonism, Christianity is ‘Platonism for the people’ (BGE pref), and democracy sheds metaphysics but retains optimism and mass mobilization in the service of a universal, unconditional solving or dissolving of the ‘problem of existence’ (SE 4).
This gives us a very short answer to what Nietzsche thought was wrong with the democratic movement: it is continuous with Christianity, and Nietzsche does not like Christianity. This is, I think, a fairly good approximation of the correct answer, but lacks the details about what is generally problematic with organizing social life around movements, Christian or otherwise. Filling in the details requires considering the ‘subjectlessness’ of movements and the ways in which they make claims. Movements count as subjectless in part because what they want is always nebulous. To some extent this is a function of group dynamics: groups may aggregate individual wants, or fail to do so, in too many different ways. The more basic problem, however, is that what movements do is so disconnected from what they want: the repertoire of movements leaves few clues as to what they seek, and can even come to seem important for their own sake. So part of Nietzsche’s concern here is that movements can be expedients that mistakenly take themselves as ultimate ends and confuse the conditions that they are responding to with the limits of possible action. Nietzsche typically expresses his complaint here in terms of the ‘task,’ ‘goal,’ hopes or telos of desire that becomes confused or lost once social life is organized around movements.
The more fundamental dissatisfaction with movements, however, is that their way of making claims seems to Nietzsche hopelessly compromised or even senseless. By ‘claims,’ I do not mean reports on how the world is, but assertions of some kind of normative standing: some status, right or entitlement. That this claim-making has replaced both seeking power and individual perfection is already perplexing to Nietzsche, but what he finds objectionable is that such claims are advanced by neither force nor persuasion. The main concern that the prevalence of social movements raises for Nietzsche is that social organization becomes enmeshed in such claims without having any intrinsic connection to their merit. Normative claims and the demands of mobilization each have their own requirements; movements inevitably mix up these two sets of requirements, compromising the very claims that they are rooted in. So the claims, which were originally important, were neglected, as in Nietzsche’s example of liberal movements that cease to be liberal once they have power (TI ‘Skirmishes’ 38; cf. WS 284).
More generally, movements generate a bad conscience about their own ideals. Christianity is Nietzsche’s paradigmatic example here. If it really possessed its own optimism, Nietzsche suggests, then it would not need a movement (A 36) or even a faith (A 33). It would sustain itself on the always-imminent expectation or the lived experience of a joyful existence available to all. Instead it needs to establish an enduring presence in the social world, with all of the practical compromises, popular appeals and institutional imperatives that entails. These worldly demands have been so thoroughly accommodated, Nietzsche insists, that ‘every practice at every moment . . . is anti-Christian’ (A 38) and ‘there have never been any Christians’ (A 39).
This is the root of Nietzsche’s complaint about movements: they involve a normative claiming that carries on in its own self-destruction. But even this still cannot explain the full nature of Nietzsche’s complaint because this understanding of movements is insufficiently distinct from his own position. Nietzsche, too, agitated against the status quo, so whatever the fault of movements, it cannot be the effort to organize change. Nietzsche even identifies himself among the ‘immoralists’ who are participating in an ‘opposition movement’ (TI ‘Errors’ 7). He does not seem averse to claims of group identity, given his identification with immoralists, ‘free spirits,’ ‘good Europeans’ and several other mostly imaginary associations. Political organization, furthermore, is not objectionable, since Nietzsche’s ‘critique of modernity’ is that we ‘lack the instinct out of which institutions grow’ (TI ‘Skirmishes’ 39). So if a movement is a sustained social mobilization in favour of new institutions, then either Nietzsche offers his own views as susceptible to his critique of movements, or there must be some additional explanation of the failings of non-immoralist movements.
In the following section, I offer my explanation of Nietzsche’s view of the failings of social movements and the democratic movement in particular. I argue that Nietzsche approaches movements as psychological entities, and assesses them as exceptional failures on that basis. The problem with the democratic movement in particular is that it appears as malformed, one-sided drives that frustrate their own satisfaction. These drives are not only unhealthy on their own, but they are also self-undermining even as they reinforce themselves in destructive ways.
3 Movements as psychological
Nietzsche’s treatment of movements would not be familiar either to a participant or to, say, a sociologist studying them: he is generally uninterested in the movements’ own terms of self-understanding, the observable characteristics of movements, and their structural roles in society. For Nietzsche movements, like much else, are psychological entities writ large, and are thus not typically about what they seem to be about. So the consideration of political formations is primarily a means to examining the psychological phenomena that underlie them: the drives, instincts and motivations that they manifest but which are not themselves distinctly political. This psychological understanding of movements furnishes the basis for assessing them. Nietzsche argues that the democratic movement in particular, seen as a psychological phenomenon, has become pathological: it is reactive, hypertrophic, disconnected from other psychological elements, and obstructs the possibility of its own satisfaction.
Nietzsche frequently characterizes social groups, and movements in particular, in the terms of individual psychology. Of course, it is not unusual to attribute beliefs, goals or values to groups – one can speak of class interests, or the outlook of a nation or an age. Nietzsche’s discussions are unusual, however, in just how explicit he is in theorizing his project in terms of such attributions. The crucial innovation of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche claims, is its ‘psychology’ of ‘the Dionysian phenomenon among the Greeks’ (EH BT 1) – in other words that it offers a drive psychology in the service of cultural explanation. Nietzsche’s paradigmatic movements each possess their own psychology, too: ressentiment is the primary factor in ‘the psychology of Christianity’ (EH GM), and Christianity in turn is treated in agentive terms in accounting for the revolutions of the nineteenth century (A 43). When specifically addressing the democratic movement, Nietzsche claims that its distinctive drives and instincts take on their character from their source in the physiology of ‘herd animals’ (BGE 202).18
In changing the terms of social analysis from the public character of events to their underlying psychological roots, Nietzsche manages to bring the language of diagnosis to bear on social phenomena. The point of Nietzsche’s political psychology, that is, seems to be that of understanding social phenomena in terms of ‘symptoms’ (BGE 202) and ‘illnesses’ (EH CW 2). To some extent, this is simply because Nietzsche sees these phenomena in psychological terms, so an adequate understanding of them requires analysing them in this way. Such analyses also permit Nietzsche to identify particular social formations as pathological, however, and thus gain some prescriptive leverage on how they might be altered. The language of diagnosis introduces the idea that our political psyche might be functioning well or poorly, and that remedies may be sought where it is not functioning well. Nietzsche most frequently characterizes the malfunctioning as a ‘decline’ (TI ‘Skirmishes’ 34, BGE 203): that is, that our functional capacity is steadily diminishing. There are a variety of other criticisms, too, and they generally turn on the social psyche not functioning in a sustainable way.
Nietzsche was not the only philosopher to appeal to psychological subjects comprised of social groups, but his approach is distinctive in a number of respects. Most basically, his attributions of psychological features to social entities are not merely rhetorical: he was not merely anthropomorphizing social movements, or making use of analogy or synecdoche. Some of the aspects of mindedness that Nietzsche identifies cannot be attributed to the individuals that comprise groups, and then only derivatively to the groups themselves. Nietzsche’s ontological commitments are unclear, but he really seems to be invoking social minds; indeed, if anything, individual subjects seem to be modelled after social subjects. I think that Nietzsche’s commitment to social minds can be shown with respect to all the intentional states that Nietzsche invokes, but it is most clear when the social subject is considered as an agent. Consider this passage for example: ‘Several generations have performed the advance work for the emergence of the philosopher’ (BGE 213). In this brief passage, as in Nietzsche’s narratives about the development of the ascetic ideal, moral conscience, the sovereign individual, and many other things, the course of action can only be identified as extending past any individual’s lifetime and outside of any individual’s particular intentions. It is important to Nietzsche to treat these events as intentional activity, even though they belong to generations, nations, races, classes, types or movements rather than individual persons; the ascetic ideal, for example, is crucially self-inflicted rather than just a causal by-product of intentional activity.
One distinctive feature of Nietzsche’s approach is that the psychological elements attributed to movements and other groups include not only mundane elements, such as beliefs and desires, but deep, unconscious elements, too. This political-psychological depth is represented as a ‘labyrinth’ (BGE 214) that contains ‘secret entrances’ (BGE 224) and hidden ‘passages’ (BGE 244) in every direction. These labyrinths lie beneath and belong to ‘the German soul’ (BGE 244) or ‘the European soul’ (BGE 245) in particular; the depths of the Greeks (TI ‘Ancients’ 3) and Christianity (A 61), like those of other peoples and ages, are not nearly so convoluted. Filling this hidden metaphorical space are the ‘most basic’ (A 61) and ‘most fervent’ (BGE 214) ‘needs and desires’ (A 61), ‘inner tension’ and ‘drives’ (TI ‘Ancients’ 3), and above all else a variety of ‘instincts’ (A 55, EH D 2) that manifest themselves in a diversity of forms. Nietzsche identifies will to power as an example of such an instinct (EH ‘Ancients’ 3), and one that explains both the content of mental states and outward behaviour. Will to power as instinct itself functions as part of the psyche, albeit unconsciously, and at the same time grounds other, more readily apparent psychological phenomena.
Another distinctive feature of Nietzsche’s approach is that these deep, unconscious drives that operate in political psychology can be independent of what might be called complete minds. The drives that Nietzsche identifies are not merely elements contained in developed, reflective subjectivity; they seem to be capable of functioning without any connection to a full repertory of psychological capacities or centre of experience. Submerged ‘value feelings,’ for example, have lives of their own: they ‘live, grow, reproduce, and are destroyed’ (BGE 186) by their own dynamics. ‘Will’ seems to be even more independent, regardless of whatever persons it happens to subsist in. It operates in a sphere populated by other wills, which in turn belongs to affects: ‘the will to overcome an affect is, in the end, only the will of another or several other affects’ (BGE 117). Drives, too, compete primarily with each other: ‘they fight with each other and rarely leave each other in peace’ (BGE 200; cf. BGE 6, 36). Larger-scale processes aggregate these psychological forces. So behind the democratic movement, for example, are not the views and desire of individual actors, but ‘an immense physiological process’ (BGE 242) that comprises a host of competing forces.
Nietzsche’s world seems to be populated with psychological forces primarily and psychological subjects only derivatively, rather than the other way around. This presentation of free-floating psychological forces is strange, but at least consistent with some of his other views. He does not sharply distinguish between the psychological and the physiological, and he does not give ontological priority to individual minds (or ‘souls’). He argues against a position that he calls ‘atomism of the soul’ (BGE 12), according to which minds have a single, unified centre, and traces this idea back to unreflective ‘grammatical habits’ (BGE 17; cf. TI ‘Errors’ 3).19 Since he does not think an ontological or phenomenological core is at the centre of psychological features, the sub-personal drives and instincts are primary. They can subsist even without belonging to anyone’s conscious experience, or, at the least, are available to serve in explanations without needing to be attributed to an individual agent.
With these elements of Nietzsche’s political philosophy in view, a clearer picture of his objections to the democratic movement becomes possible. There are three sets of considerations that Nietzsche advances to explain why the democratic movement, considered psychologically, is problematic: the democratic movement produces fragmentation, hypertrophy and frustration. The first, fragmentation, pertains primarily to the will, although for Nietzsche effects on the will have further implications. Nietzsche characterizes the ‘democratic fragmentation of the will’ (BGE 208) as an active tendency that produces the ‘disintegration’ (CW 7) of the capacity for action. Nietzsche’s basic idea is that the democratic movement provides an impetus towards the differentiation and separation of interests. By organizing legitimacy claims around the coincidence of individuals’ judgements, drives become increasingly particularized and detached from each other. On the macro level, this appears as, in Keith Ansell Pearson’s interpretation, ‘something fundamentally selfish in which society rests on an individualistic basis, and culture becomes reduced to the pursuit of private gains’ (Ansell Pearson 1991, p. 214): movement politics has the ironic result of atomizing the social world, so that claims of private interest come to cancel the possibility of collective action.20 Psychologically, Nietzsche thinks, this fragmentation produces a decentring that makes any unified ‘working, thinking, feeling’ (A 11) impossible.
The second consideration in terms of which Nietzsche criticizes the democratic movement is hypertrophy. Nietzsche sees the democratic movement as not only particularizing drives, but, once these drives are particularized, as exaggerating the development of some of them. He offers a general account of this phenomenon: ‘No one, in the end, can expend more than they have – that goes for individuals as well as peoples . . . if one expends the quantum of understanding, seriousness, will, self-overcoming, that one is, then it is lacking for other things’ (TI ‘Germans’ 4). As Nietzsche expresses it here, this is a problem specifically with goals: devoting oneself to certain ends precludes the opportunities for pursuing others. At the same time, however, he suggests that it is an existential problem. ‘One is’ a collection of wills and various other things, and so as these are reinforced or exhausted, what one is changes, too.
In the social manifestation of this problem, we can see why Nietzsche takes Christianity and democracy as especially objectionable movements. The very ‘democratic tendency’ (BGE 239) is to extend the application of its proper normative commitments from the operation of institutions to all domains. The dynamic of movements generally is for them to take on an independent importance, apart from the ends that they seek. But democracy, more so than temperance, suffrage, labour or agrarian reform, lends itself to be taken as an all-purpose moral or cultural ideal. This is of course true of religions, too; they tend to take on an all-encompassing importance. Nietzsche writes that they tend to ‘look after themselves and become sovereign, when they want to be ultimate ends and not means among other means’ (BGE 62). This is why Nietzsche refers to the movements that he opposes as ‘unconditional’ ones, in contrast with the countermovement that he supports.21 Movement hypertrophy manifests itself in the same form that Nietzsche finds objectionable in morality: the unconditional assertion of value commitments that crowd out any possible competition.
The third criticism that Nietzsche levels against the democratic movement, that it produces its own frustration, generalizes and explains the other two. Insofar as Nietzsche explains what is wrong with fragmentation and hypertrophy, he usually presents them simply as sicknesses or diseases. The nature of these kinds of unhealth, however, seems to be that they render activity a self-aggravating, internal failure. Activity fails on its own terms, that is, either because one is rendered less capable of action or because the connection between immediate circumstance and ultimate end becomes hopelessly muddled – reason is ‘crippled’ (AOM 132) or ‘subjugated’ (WS 48) – or simply because the pursuit of one’s ends becomes self-undermining. So Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the Germans is that ‘they have compromised themselves up to now’ and they will not do any better in the future because their ‘uncleanliness in psychologicis has become manifest’ (EH CW 3). In ‘compromising themselves,’ they act to make themselves less capable of activity and frustrate their own ends – or ‘take a great destiny and give birth to a mouse’ (EH CW 3), as Nietzsche puts it. Here social agency and movement politics fall under Nietzsche’s general diagnosis of modernity as a ‘physiological contradiction’ (CW 2nd postscript; cf. TI.9.41): that we have somehow become creatures who cannot act except against ourselves.
Movement politics is for Nietzsche a symptom of this general malady rather than something to be analysed on its own terms. He considers movements’ actual operations and their public discourses at most as a means to discussing the underlying psychological phenomena. Of course, there were earlier approaches to understanding the political through the psychological, so it is worth distinguishing Nietzsche’s approach from the most prominent earlier understandings, the organicism of Plato and Hegel.22 On such an organicism, the social whole comprises a plurality of differentiated parts, each of which preserves the unity of the whole by working in organic harmony with all the other parts; the social whole is healthy when each part performs its proper function and the various functions harmonize appropriately. For Nietzsche, by contrast, there is no aim at achieving any kind of functional harmony; there is a plurality of drives and instincts that may be more or less coordinated and conflicted. Political agency stems from a diversity of independent psychological forces rather than the realization of a political soul. The justificatory appeal to organic unity is therefore not available to Nietzsche. Instead he appeals to internal failures in the activity of drives and instincts to make his psychological critique. They are defective when they enervate themselves, undermine their own pursuits, or aggravate their own excesses and shortcomings.
Nietzsche’s critique of democracy is not aimed at democracy per se, but at the ways in which democracy functions at the level of political psychology. Nietzsche’s claim is that the democratic movement exaggerates the cultivation of drives and instincts that lead neither towards the realization of their own ends nor to any other satisfaction. In general Nietzsche takes modern movement politics to be pathological in this way: it does not effectively serve the ends that it recognizes, and makes itself less effective in doing so. The democratic movement, as a result of the content of its norms and the character of its organization, is the paradigmatic modern movement for Nietzsche and, psychologically considered, the most destructive.
4 Conclusion
There is a passage in The Prince in which Machiavelli writes, ‘The principal foundations that all states have . . . are good laws and good arms. And because there cannot be good laws where there are not good arms, and where there are good arms there are bound to be good laws, I shall straightway leave aside reasoning about laws and speak instead of arms’ (Machiavelli 1969, p. 69). On the interpretation that I am offering, Nietzsche is making a parallel argument and offering a parallel discussion, about the psychology of political formations. There is little point in discussing political institutions and evaluating their features since we are bound to get the institutions that reflect what we are. Our political psychology is fundamentally important and causally primary.23 On Nietzsche’s account, a ‘political event’ (SE 4; cf. EH ‘clever’ 10) has little power to affect us, but our psychology determines the political order that we are suited for.
Nietzsche’s critique of democracy is accordingly not about democracy per se, but about the forms of social mobilization by which we relate to actual and possible democratic institutions. The democratic movement, according to Nietzsche, is the expression of an unhealthy psychology, and it is both ineffective at improving institutions and destructive of its own drives and instincts. Oddly, Nietzsche has nothing to say about how social arrangements might shape our psychological features, even as he worries that the new prevalence of movements might represent profound damage to our social possibilities. When a significant change occurs, we simply ‘become aware that the new evaluation has acquired predominance in us’ (D 534), and accommodate ourselves to this shift; but there is no role for institutions in this process. Nietzsche is deeply interested in the forms of sociality that we participate in, but sees political movements as useless at solving any problems about what forms our future sociality could take. Democracy purports to solve questions about how the social world should be arranged, but is at best anterior to answering psychological questions about what we are and want to be.
Nietzsche’s critique nevertheless leaves democracy and even movements largely untouched. If the point of movements is simply that they are instrumentally important in effecting valuable change, then Nietzsche has no objection to that. His claim is not that this is empirically impossible – movements might indeed serve valuable ends – but that the movement politics that emerged in his day was already self-important, self-compromising and psychologically destructive. The overriding importance that Nietzsche places on the psychological, furthermore, both leaves open the possibility of democratic institutions that do not reflect pathological motivations, and implies that undemocratic regimes that suffered from the same maladies would not represent any kind of improvement. All this suggests that there are three possible responses to Nietzsche’s concerns about the meaning of democratic movements. If we were to take Nietzsche’s concerns seriously, one appropriate response would be to give up on democracy. Another possibility would be to alter how we think about our relationship to our institutions, so that we can accommodate ourselves to them in a less self-destructive way. One final possibility would be to change who we are, becoming the sort of people for whom democratic mobilization was not pathological. This may be, as Nietzsche insists, impossible to accomplish through social arrangements, or it may not be.24
Notes
1 See, for example, Shaw (2007), p. 2: ‘Nietzsche indeed failed to articulate any positive, normative political theory.’ Note: all translations are from the KSA and my own.
2 In none of these passages does Nietzsche unequivocally represent his own views in these terms. The TI passage is about ‘what is culturally great’, and the EH passages involve a distanced reflection on the text of BT and a self-ascription qualified by ‘perhaps’ and ‘could possibly be’.
3 See, for example, Hatab (1995), Warren (1988) and Connolly (1991).
4 Although I will focus on democracy as my main example in this paper, my claims could just as well apply, mutatis mutandis, to other ‘movements’ that Nietzsche identifies, in particular socialism. Nietzsche’s discussion of the feminist movement is importantly different – for one thing, Nietzsche doesn’t evince the same complete lack of interest in gender relations as he does in political and economic arrangements – but that is a topic for another paper.
5 I am not claiming that Nietzsche’s approach resembles the contemporary interdisciplinary field called ‘political psychology’; I hope to make some of the reasons for this clear in Section 3. The most basic difference, however, is that instead of using the results of psychology to explain political science, and vice versa, Nietzsche’s approach is to treat politics as psychology. On political psychology see, for example, Sears et al. (1993).
6 See Tilly (2004), p. 5: ‘German sociologist Lorenz von Stein introduced the term “social movement” into scholarly discussions of popular political striving.’
7 See Frese (1971), p. 880. Spalding and Brooke (1956), p. 303, trace this metaphor back to Acts 19:23, but this seems strained since the word there is tarachos rather than kinesis – it’s a different metaphor.
8 See Spalding and Brooke (1956), p. 304.
9 See the listing for ‘movement’, entry 8a, in the Oxford English Dictionary (2003). Williams (1983), p. 16, discusses the same example. Note that the issue in that context is whether there are outside agitators, or whether the source of the unrest is endogenous.
10 See Frese (1971), p. 881. Tilly (2004), p. 66, notes that this view of historical progress endured: ‘It expresses a common inside view of social movement activity in the twentieth century: we are fulfilling history, and we will prevail.’
11 See Frese (1971), p. 881. Note that the influence of the French example extends to J. S. Mill’s spelling of the word ‘mouvement’ as cited in the Oxford English Dictionary (2003).
12 This issue is prominent in the Communist Manifesto, with respect to the ‘Proletarian movement’; see, for example, Marx (2000), p. 130. See also Wilkinson (1971), ch. 2.
13 Tilly (2004), p. 47, points out that the Chartists saw themselves, or at least their activities, as belonging to a movement. I have not been able to find any earlier examples of such self-ascription.
14 See Tilly (2004), p. 3f.
15 Of course, not all movements are progressive or even share a view of history in which that characterization would make sense. The point that Tilly makes, and which is particularly relevant to Nietzsche’s views, is about the elements out of which social movements emerged, however.
16 For additional discussion of ‘imaginary revenge’, see Guay (2006a), p. 359f.
17 This optimism, for Nietzsche, manifests itself in a kind of moral monism: Nietzsche reports late modern European political morality declaring, ‘I am morality itself, and nothing besides me is morality’ (BGE 202).
18 Nietzsche frequently blurs the ‘physiological’ and the psychological, so that, for example, cognition is a function of metabolism, or value judgements are the rooted in one’s natural constitution. On the blurring, see Owen (1995), p. 49f.
19 I discuss this argument and related issues at greater length in Guay (2006b).
20 Nietzsche makes the parallel point with respect to Christianity: a ‘private and cosmopolitan God’ is the result of this kind of fragmentation in the religious sphere.
21 KSA X.7[21], p. 244, cited in Ansell Pearson (1991), p. 211.
22 I am not claiming that Hegel and Plato have the same position or that espouse organicism in every possible sense of the term. On Hegel’s organicism, see Hegel (1999), in particular §271 and the remarks to §286. For Plato’s organicism, see especially Republic 462c. On the differences, see Allen Wood’s notes in Hegel (1999), p. 442. For a further discussion of Hegel’s organicism, see Cheah (2003), ch. 3. For an anti-organicist reading of Plato, see Provencal (1997).
23 Apart from some stark terminological differences, there is some overlap between the interpretative conclusion that I am offering that the ‘aestheticization of political action’ attributed to Nietzsche in Villa (1992). My reading, too, understands Nietzsche as taking social action as ‘self-contained, as immanently valuable’ (p. 276) rather than as deriving its value claims from an independent, juridical-normative order, and as rooting his claims in a ‘fierce commitment to plurality and difference’ (p. 275). On my reading, however, the immanent sphere of value is not properly called ‘political’ – it is better called the ‘psychological’ – since Nietzsche’s point is that we should understand the familiar realm of laws and institutions in terms of it. And it seems a misnomer to call Nietzsche’s position an aestheticization, since he is not appealing to distinctively aesthetic values, but simply denying that moral or economic values are overriding. Of course there are other, non-terminological differences between my reading and Villa’s, such as his attribution of ‘reductionism’ (p. 276) to Nietzsche.
24 I wish to thank Melissa Zinkin for discussions of this topic with me, and Anna Gebbie and Keith Ansell Pearson for their comments on an earlier draft (and an early abstract, and some inchoate ideas, and so on).
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