Sources of Nietzsche’s Knowledge and Critique of Anarchism

General Sources of Nietzsche’s Knowledge of Anarchism

Nietzsche seems to never have read any of the more influential of the anarchists, such as Charles Fourier, Max Stirner, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, William Godwin, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin. Nor does he explicitly discuss any of them, except very briefly mentioning Proudhon and Bakunin in the early 1870s (see below). This lack of direct knowledge of the main anarchists should perhaps not surprise us, for Nietzsche’s use and critique of anarchism almost always proceeds along polemical and general lines, not by means of an analysis of specific claims (which at least sometimes is the case for pessimism and Christianity, and perhaps also for socialism and nihilism). His critique of, and comments about, anarchism, which only began in 1885, are usually more psychologically and axiologically oriented than academically or philosophically.

Anarchism is a vague and ill-defined movement, and Nietzsche reinforces this aspect of it by associating it closely with many other movements and tendencies, especially with decadence, socialism, nihilism, pessimism, Christianity, and anti-Semitism. Thus, a full treatment of Nietzsche’s relation to anarchism would have to also treat his relation to these other movements of thought, most of which Nietzsche was much better informed about.

Most of Nietzsche’s knowledge of anarchist thought probably came from one of these three sources:

1. Personal discussions: probably especially Wagner (who at least earlier had sympathised with and knew several important anarchists), but surely also with others. However, most of this would have been significantly before 1879, when he resigned his professorship and thereafter lived much more isolated. We see very little of this in Nietzsche’s writings from either before or after 1879.

2. From newspapers and contemporary journals: Nietzsche read such material in the 1870s and continued to read it in the 1880s, but less than earlier. Although we can name some of the newspapers and journals he occasionally read, we have no certain information about if and what he read in relation to anarchism in these sources.

3. Discussions of anarchism and anarchists in books he read: this is likely to be the most important source of information and stimulus for his comments, at least in the 1880s, as I will show below, and it is the only source about which we have definitive knowledge.

Nietzsche referred to three specific thinkers as anarchists, in the sense of being thinkers and writers in this tradition; primarily Eugen Dühring,^[11] and much more vaguely Shelley^[12] and Tolstoy, and even more vaguely, early Christians and Jesus.^[13]

No single work of great importance for Nietzsche’s view of anarchism has until now been identified. Likely candidates that have been discussed are Philipp Mainländer, Dühring, Eduard von Hartmann, Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Tolstoy, but for none of them has it been shown that they have been of great importance for Nietzsche.^[14] Other likely sources that need to be confirmed are the many books Nietzsche read discussing radical politics and political economy, which I have discussed elsewhere.^[15]

Nietzsche read Wagner and Hartmann mainly in the 1870s, and Tolstoy is too late (1887/88), so they are unlikely to explain Nietzsche’s increasing criticism and concern with anarchism in 1885 and thereafter. In the 1870s, in spite of Wagner’s positive interest and at least earlier sympathy, Nietzsche makes very few references to this tradition, and these are mostly descriptive or conventional. The early 1870s is also the only time Nietzsche refers to any of the more famous anarchists, such as Bakunin and Proudhon.^[16] Much later, Georg Brandes, in a letter to Nietzsche (December 15–17, 1887, no. 505, KGB III 6.131), says he feels somewhat wounded by Nietzsche’s comments about radical politics and defends anarchism, claiming that “the anarchism of Prince Kropotkin, e. g., is not stupid.” Nietzsche, however, does not respond to this in his reply to Brandes from January 8, 1888 (no. 974, KSB 8.227), nor does he ever mention Kropotkin. There is no discussion or treatment at all of the ideology of anarchism by Nietzsche in the 1870s, and therefore no obvious sources to be identified.

However, his reading of Dühring can explain this as we will see below. As we have seen above, Nietzsche really began to discuss anarchism only in his notes from 1885, and then in the published works Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morality and later ones. Is it possible to identify what caused Nietzsche to begin discussing anarchism in 1885? The answer is yes, and it turns out that it is Nietzsche’s reading of Dühring’s Cursus der Philosophie (1875), together with developments in Nietzsche’s own thought, that lie behind all, or almost all, of his discussions of anarchism in 1885 and thereafter, although in 1887 and 1888 a new emphasis on Jesus and Christianity was added.

To fully appreciate Nietzsche’s view and criticism of anarchism it is necessary to see it as part of the whole set of similar movements and ways of thought he closely associates it with, such as decadence, socialism, nihilism, pessimism, Christianity, and anti-Semitism.

Dühring’s Importance for Nietzsche’s View of Anarchism

With the possible exception of Plato and Schopenhauer, the philosopher of whom Nietzsche has read the most books is the Schopenhauerian Eugen Dühring (1833–1921). He can reasonably be regarded as one of Nietzsche’s most important philosophical “teachers,” although when he began to read Dühring in 1875 – at a time when Nietzsche himself had already left Schopenhauerian views behind – he seems to have disagreed with Dühring more often than not. Nietzsche knew of, and spoke well of, Dühring, as a Schopenhauerian, already in 1868, and he may have read something by him at this time, but he only began to consider Dühring’s ideas more extensively only in 1875.^[17] That year he bought seven works by Dühring, and all but two contain annotations and were thus cleary read by him. Later, in 1884, he also purchased, read, and annotated Dühring’s autobiography Sache, Leben und Feinde: Als Hauptwerk und Schlüssel zu seinen sämmtlichen Schriften (1882), which stretched over 434 pages. The work does not contain much explicit discussion of anarchy and anarchism, but the latter are mentioned and briefly discussed on a few pages annotated by Nietzsche.^[18] He may also have read other works by Dühring. Without implying that he actually had read the book, he makes a brief allusion, for example, to Dühring’s Robert Mayer, der Galilei des XIX Jahrhunderts (1880), which was about to be published in 1879 by Nietzsche’s own publisher, Ernst Schmeitzner,^[19] and Dühring was often discussed in letters between Schmeitzner and Nietzsche.

Dühring was not only a philosopher but also a political economist with socialist affiliations, and strongly nationalist and anti-Semitic, but otherwise with wide interests, including the natural sciences. In his books he attempted to give a broad summary of present knowledge, seeking to develop a philosophy that suited the modern world. His philosophy was broadly speaking positivist in orientation with clear debts to Schopenhauer, Ludwig Feuerbach and Auguste Comte.^[20] Although he retained many metaphysical tenets, Dühring denounced metaphysics and argued that philosophy must construct a worldview in accordance with the results of the natural sciences. He called his philosophy Wirklichkeitsphilosophie, philosophy of reality or reality-philosophy.

Of the books by Dühring that Nietzsche owned, four are specifically philosophical, but most of the others also contain philosophically relevant texts. For example, Dühring’s Kritische Geschichte der Nationalökonomie und des Socialismus (2nd edn., 1875) contains extensive discussions of socialism, including a detailed and hostile account of Marx’ views in the chapter “Der neuere Socialismus: Zweites Capitel: Gestaltungen in Deutschland” and also some limited discussions of anarchists and of Bakunin in the third edition of 1879.^[21]

The first work by Dühring we know for certain that Nietzsche read, in great detail during the summer of 1875, was his Der Werth des Lebens: Eine philosophische Betrachtung (1865).^[22] Nietzsche wrote a commentary and summary of 50 printed pages of Dühring’s work for one of his notebooks^[23] – with the explicit intention of re-examining his own relation to Schopenhauer. Nietzsche’s copy of the book is sparingly annotated, mostly in places where Dühring discusses ressentiment and revenge. In a note outlining his intentions, which shows that his original interest in Dühring was engendered by his interest in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche wrote: “3) To study Dühring, as the attempt to sort out Schopenhauer and to see what I have in Schopenhauer, what not. Thereafter, yet again read Schopenhauer.” (Nachlass 1875, 8[4], KSA 8.129)^[24] At this time he also lists Dühring (together with Schopenhauer, Aristotle, Goethe, and Plato) under the somewhat enigmatic title “Books for 8 years,” possibly implying that he wanted to write books about these five authors (Nachlass 1875, 8[1], KSA 8.128).

Nietzsche read Cursus der Philosophie als streng wissenschaftlicher Weltanschauung und Lebensgestaltung (1875) in 1881, 1883 and 1885 (and perhaps also in 1875 and 1888).^[25] He has annotated the book fairly extensively with two different pens, and it is probably one of the most important philosophical works Nietzsche thoroughly examines and enters into dialogue with. In Dühring’s Cursus der Philosophie Nietzsche encountered a somewhat idiosyncratic account of many of the fields and aspects of philosophy. It is not impossible that reading the volume in 1881 was an important stimulus for his discovery of the idea of eternal recurrence,^[26] but there are also several other possible sources and none which is fully confirmed.

The late Nietzsche becomes increasingly hostile toward Dühring and frequently attacks him, including for his political and social views on socialism, anarchism, and anti-Semitism. Many, albeit certainly not all, of Nietzsche’s references to these political positions have Dühring as their primary stimulus.^[27]

Nietzsche begins to use the word anarchism in the summer of 1885, and in the autumn he makes his only more detailed discussion or description of anarchism in his notebooks (Nachlass 1885, 44[8], KSA 11.707).^[28] This note is based on his reading of Dühring’s Cursus der Philosophie – as are probably the few earlier notes from summer 1885 in which he mentions anarchism, even though these notes are too brief to pinpoint any specific source.

It turns out that Dühring is by far the most important single source for Nietzsche’s comments on and about anarchism, and this is also true, albeit less so, for socialism, for which there are more sources, even though Dühring remains the most important one. Dühring is not a well-known name in relation to anarchism, but he was a highly influential nineteenth-century German socialist and philosopher, and prolific writer, with sympathies for anarchism. In nineteenth-century Germany, he is usually regarded as one of the most read philosophers, at least outside the universities. In the twentieth century, he was probably best known because Friedrich Engels wrote a massive book against him called Anti-Dühring (1878), but with the actually ironic title Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft.

Nietzsche’s note from the autumn of 1885 (44[8], KSA 11.707), with the title “The New Japan,” begins with the unfinished sentence: “I read, with much malice in my mind, what a German anarchist [means] with the concept ‘free society’”, and the half-page note ends with Nietzsche claiming that he has seen all this, perhaps without love but also without spite, with the curiosity of a child that stands before the most colourful and fantastic peep box – presumably meaning that Dühring’s text is highly symptomatic and revealing about anarchist thought, values and psychology. In his comments and observations in the note, Nietzsche states that the description of a “free society” contains all the idealism “of a small species of herd animal.” He continues and refers to, paraphrases, quotes (the “quotes” being very loose), and comments:

“Justice” and the morality of equal rights – the Tartuffery of moral predicates

“the press,” the idealizing of it

“the abolition of the workers”

“the breakthrough of the pre-Aryan race”: and generally the oldest sorts of society

the decline of women [Dühring writes much about women and marriage, especially on forced marriages in this chapter, emphasizing equal rights for women – so the “decline” is due to Nietzsche’s evaluation; T. B.]

the Jews as the ruling race [this seems to be a response to Dühring’s explicit anti-Semitic views; T. B.]

noble and base culture [it is probably Nietzsche who makes this dichotomy, compare the whole last chapter of Beyond Good and Evil, “What is Noble?” – for Dühring has little to say about the noble and aristocratic; T. B.]

the scholar overvalued.

One remarkable thing about this is that Dühring never mentions anarchy, anarchists or anarchism in the book, nor does he refer to a single anarchist – but he has a full chapter concerned with “Free Society.” What we see is Nietzsche interpreting, responding to, and also diagnosing Dühring (and anarchists generally), and probably interpreting anarchist views, values and psychology through Dühring’s discussions of free society and through his relation to the connected movements and concepts of socialism, decadence, nihilism, anti-Semitism, and ressentiment (in GM II 11, Nietzsche writes that it “blooms most beautifully among anarchists and anti-Semites”).^[29]

Nietzsche’s general view of anarchism, and his reading of Dühring, much of it summarized and implied in note Nachlass 1885, 44[8], KSA 11.707, then stands behind Nietzsche’s discussions of anarchism and “free society” in BGE 202, quoted above, which is the only time Nietzsche discusses free society apart from the note on Dühring and two sections in the fifth book of The Gay Science from 1887 (GS 356 and 377). The note 44[8], KSA 11.707 also shapes Nietzsche’s discussions of anarchism in BGE 188, 202, 203, 204, 242 and 258 as well as almost all of his references to anarchism in On the Genealogy or Morality as well as in the notes from 1885 to 1887.