Critical Horizons

A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory

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Unifying, Comparative, Critical and Metacritical:

Domenico Losurdo’s Nietzsche as Aristocratic
Rebel

Matthew Sharpe

To cite this article: Matthew Sharpe (2022) Unifying, Comparative, Critical and Metacritical:
Domenico Losurdo’s Nietzsche as Aristocratic Rebel, Critical Horizons, 23:3, 284-304, DOI:
10.1080/14409917.2022.2100978

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14409917.2022.2100978

Published online: 19 Jul 2022.

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CRITICAL HORIZONS
2022, VOL. 23, NO. 3, 284–304
https://doi.org/10.1080/14409917.2022.2100978

Unifying, Comparative, Critical and Metacritical: Domenico

Losurdo’s Nietzsche as Aristocratic Rebel
Matthew Sharpe
Department of Philosophy, Deakin University, Australia

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This review essay responds critically to the English translation of Nietzsche; Losurdo;
Domenico Losurdo’s monumental Friedrich Nietzsche: Aristocratic metapolitics; radical
Rebel. It sets out to clearly identify and examine Losurdo’s two aristocratism; far right;
hermeneutics
tasks in Nietzsche: firstly, his reconstruction of Nietzsche’s
intellectual itinerary, from his earliest works until his descent into
madness, in the context of later nineteenth-century social,
political, philosophical, and eugenic sources; and secondly, to
“interpret the interpretations”, and understand how Nietzsche’s
avowed “aristocratic radicalism” could have informed thinkers
from across the political spectrum, at the same time as Losurdo
contests the cogency of “progressive” readings of Nietzsche as
based upon a selective “hermeneutics of innocence” which
involves suppressing the recurrent, darker registers of his texts.
The essay also unpacks Losurdo’s two hermeneutic strategies in
this magnum opus. Firstly, we examine his “unifying” claim that
Nietzsche, as a great thinker, had a coherent but evolving vision,
from Birth of Tragedy through to his final works, unified by his
metapolitical intention to overcome democratic, liberal and
socialist modern egalitarianisms, by tracking them back to their
roots in the Old Testament and classical antiquity. Secondly, we
critique his contextualizing methodology which resituates the
author of the “untimely meditations” within the debates of his
day concerning modernity, slavery, liberalism, socialism,
massification, Darwinism, and eugenics. To close, I proffer some
brief comments concerning the significance of Losurdo’s work in
the present moment, as the Far Right globally reasserts itself.

I call on the God to provide us with the most effective medicine, that best of all medicines:
knowledge. (Plato, Critias, 106a)

Who should be master of the earth? This is the refrain of my practical philosophy. (Friedrich
Nietzsche, KSA, XI, 76)1

Having undertaken in the fateful year of 2020 a week-by-week reading group on Dome-
nico Losurdo’s Friedrich Nietzsche: Aristocratic Rebel [hereafter Nietzsche], which ran for
about 8 months, the author can attest firsthand that it is easy to lose the forest amongst
the extraordinary density of historical, philosophical, and political trees that thicken this
book’s 1000 pages. To the extent of a reviewer’s capacity, it may be helpful for readers

CONTACT Matthew Sharpe msharpe@deakin.edu.au Department of Philosophy, Deakin University, Australia

© Critical Horizons Pty Ltd 2022
 CRITICAL HORIZONS: A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY 285

from the start to try here to clearly identify and examine Losurdo’s two evident tasks in
Nietzsche, then the two complementary hermeneutic methodologies with which he
pursues them.2
Firstly, the text offers a detailed interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophical thought
and works, spanning his entire publishing career. This reading is an intellectual biogra-
phy, not a psychobiography. Nietzsche, for Losurdo (and contra Lou Salomé), is a thinker
whose claims deserve assessment according to their larger claims to validity, whatever
their psychological bases. Secondly, Losurdo is concerned to “interpret the interpret-
ations”: that is, to challenge predominant post-war Nietzsche interpretations as an apo-
litical, ludic individualist artist-philosopher or critic of power, but also (importantly) to
understand the textual bases in Nietzsche for these mistaken interpretations which
deeply misrepresent his “terrible ‘antidemocratism’”,3 and the full dimensions of his
overcoming of JudaeoChristian morality.4
Losurdo’s pursuit of these two tasks shapes the structure of Nietzsche’s seven parts.
Parts 1–3 examine Nietzsche “in his times”; after a central Part on Nietzsche in compara-
tive perspective (see below), Part 5 addresses Nietzsche “in two historical periods”
(namely his own, and that of pre-1945 Europe); whilst Part 7 returns (after Part 6
explores Nietzsche’s “Philosophical Laboratory”) to Nietzsche and “us”. The book
closes by addressing the individualist and postmodernist interpretations of the
German nineteenth-century philosopher which continue to attract students and adher-
ents. This broadly chronological structure, and this double intentionality, reflect
Losurdo’s larger sense that Nietzsche remains a philosopher of significance, someone
who is in the French expression actuel. This is a claim that Nietzsche’s reclaiming
by “thought-leaders” on the populist and neofascist Right today (which I’ll return to
below) underscores.
Losurdo pursues these two aims by way of two intersecting hermeneutic method-
ologies. These are proposed as counters to what Losurdo terms the “hermeneutics of
innocence”5: those readings of Nietzsche which, despite the master’s own status as a
“master of suspicion”, avoid or deny the importance of the myriad darker passages in
the German philosopher’s oeuvre on subjects ranging from slavery and gender, the deca-
dence of liberalism and parliamentary democracy, to the need for a programmatic
eugenics to “annihilate” “the malformed”6 in the name of breeding a new aristocratic
order, reawakened to the lost meaning of “what is noble”.7
The first hermeneutic methodology is “unifying”.8 In line with many more traditional
accounts of interpretation, Losurdo argues that to read Nietzsche as the philosopher that
he was, must be to read his texts steadily and to read them as a single, evolving whole.
This means: not excluding important changes of orientation across different works;
not excluding the different timely, political and social concerns to which
the philosopher frequently recurs; and not excising the harder passages which “herme-
neuts of innocence” suppress or disqualify, despite Nietzsche’s inclusion of them in his
published works and the Nachlass.
Losurdo’s second “contextualizing” method sees him reading Nietzsche’s philosophi-
cal texts in light of a recovery of the texts Nietzsche himself was reading from his times, as
well as compendious documentation from Nietzsche’s Notebooks and correspondence.
As for William H. F. Altman and Robert Holub,9 Nietzsche is first of all a thinker of
the Second Reich; and, as for Gyorgy Lukàcs, he is a thinker of the fading age of European
286 M. SHARPE

world domination, colonialism, and imperialism.10 To understand Nietzsche’s intentions

is for Losurdo to recover what the middle and later Nietzsches calls an “historical sense”
of the debates in which the author was participating.11
To this direct mode of contextualizing method, Losurdo however adds a second,
expanded or “comparative” mode of contextualizing, pursued most devotedly in the
central, fourth part of the book.12 Herein, Losurdo reads Nietzsche alongside a cast of
contemporary authors writing on the same issues as the philosopher, reflecting Losurdo’s
lifelong studies of the nineteenth century. In ways some intellectual historians of ideas
may bridle at, Nietzsche himself does not always cite these later 19th century figures
who span eugenicists, economists, musicians, playwrights, novelists, natural scientists
and political theorists. As we will return to, this methodology aims to not only enable
readers to understand Nietzsche’s direct, context-bound intentions in writing his
books. It aims at recovering a sense of how his nearer-contemporaries would have read
his philosophical writings, and thereby to enhance readers’ sense of these texts’, and
their ideas’, wider significance in the history of later modern European cultural and pol-
itical life.
In what follows, this essay will move through Losurdo’s two intentions in Nietzsche in
sequence. In the context of the second intention (“interpreting the interpreters”), I’ll try
to make clear the scope anddistinctly Socratic, disambiguating and dialectical power of
Losurdo’s contribution to Nietzsche reception. To close, I proffer some brief comments
concerning the significance of Losurdo’s work in the present moment, as the Far Right
globally reasserts itself, with many of its progenitors, like their predecessors, claiming
Nietzsche as their spiritual inspiration.

Losurdo Interpreting Nietzsche

What emerges in Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel from Losurdo’s application of these
methodologies to Nietzsche’s corpus is an image of Nietzsche which will rightly surprise,
and perhaps scandalize readers raised in the period of his post-structuralist gentrification
and canonization.
Losurdo’s Nietzsche is not Nietzsche the playful, experimental, fragmentary, anti-
foundationalist, aesthetic individualist or deconstructionist, critic of power and challen-
ger of grand narratives. He is instead a philosopher whose texts successively hone in upon
and develop a monumental narrative of occidental decline and possible rebirth, every bit
as grand as his own sometimes world-historical declarations, as “not a man, but dyna-
mite”.13 Losurdo presents his reading of Nietzsche as “defending the philosopher
against his defense advocates”, whom he charges with having gelded Nietzsche in
order to make him acceptable in the postwar liberal world he would have despised.14
Losurdo’s interpretation by contrast sets out to recapture Nietzsche’s dimensions as
what Straussians would call a “Platonic political philosopher”.15 This is a philosopher,
Nietzsche dixit, as would-be law-founder or “legislator”16: concerned to “determine
the future of humanity” (28.6), boldly taking on “responsibility for all millennia to
come”,17 and coming as such not only to teach students, but to “convert” recruits or fol-
lowers18 – whom he mostly names “free spirits”19 – to the banner of his trans-epochal
cause.20
 CRITICAL HORIZONS: A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY 287

In this grand sense, the sense of what Nietzsche called “great politics”,21 the latter is a
philosopher totus politicus, for Losurdo.22 As the German thinker wrote in correspon-
dence, and Losurdo reproduces it as an epigraph, “politics is now the organ of
thought in its totality” (cited at viii). Here as elsewhere, this claim is likely to provoke
misunderstandings and, even with the preceding noted, charges of political reductionism.
One way to approach Losurdo’s position is to say that, if he is right, we simply cannot
comprehend Nietzsche’s myriad political stances, down to those on sometimes nuts-
and-bolts contemporary issues like calls to limit the franchise,23 opposition to German
social insurance measures,24 or the inner movements of the Hohenzollern family,25 if
we start from his epistemology, metaphysics, or aesthetics.26 Especially as students
without deep knowledge of this historical period, we are required in these cases to
“read on”. Thereby, of course, we effectively black out many sections of the philosopher’s
writings (take for instance all of book VIII of Beyond Good and Evil on “Peoples and
Fatherlands”), knowing no reason why the philosopher would have written them. On
the contrary, we can understand Nietzsche’s philosophical contentions, like for instance
perspectivism,27 the eternal recurrence28 and will to power,29 bring them together and
win new insights into them, if we start with the hypothesis that the philosopher
capable of reading the politics of a millennial “slave revolt in morals” in the Socratic syl-
logism, Euripides’ tragedies, and Italian opera30 was not an unpolitical man.31 Nietzsche
was a thinker whose vision encompassed a metapolitics of wholesale epochal reckoning
and transformation, which is of course why he would call himself metaphorical and
metapolitical dynamite.
Losurdo’s Nietzsche, as more orthodox liberal Nietzscheans can agree, was never
static. Losurdo, following the philosopher’s own reflections in Ecce Homo, sees three
major Nietzschean phases, with a fourth, transitional phase marked by the second and
third Untimely Meditations.32 “Nietzsche 1” was the Germanomanic enthusiast of Bis-
marck and Wagner, convinced that the former’s victory in the Franco-Prussian war33
and the latter’s total art34 were ushering in a return to tragic antiquity on the soil of
German kultur,35 and casting down the shallow, rationalistic, mercantile, “Latin” “civili-
zation” of post-revolutionary modernity.36
Disillusionment after the early 1870s with the Second Reich’s massification of edu-
cation (or “popular enlightenment”37) and rapid modernization under Bismarck (plus
the young philosopher’s bitter break with Wagner and his circle38), soon followed.39
Nietzsche 2 (of the “middle period” of 1778–1782, Human-all-too-Human to The Gay
Science), subjects to acerbic critique his own earlier, broadly romantic-reactionary pos-
ition in ways his admirers often discard, but which Losurdo registers.40 Nietzsche now
conceives a selective “enlightenment from above”.41 Having embraced the revitalizing
powers of myth in his first works, Nietzsche now turns to science and the incisive
moral criticisms of enlighteners led by Voltaire42; seeing in the latter a veritable critical
arsenal to turn against the “moral sentiments” and post-Rousseauian “fanaticism” which
he contended drove the revolutionaries of 1789 and 1848,43 and which in his own time
informed the social democratic and socialist movements in Germany.44 It is this period
which sees Nietzsche’s most acerbic criticisms of his German homeland, so often apol-
ogetically and anachronisically cited as sufficient proof of his “anti-Nazi” credentials45
and a decisive change towards the celebration of a new Europe (and “good European”).46
As Losurdo shows, what is at issue in this pan-Europeanism is less a European Union-
288 M. SHARPE

style federation like today’s liberal readers might imagine, than a conquering alliance of
European peoples who would be “mistress of the earth”47, unafraid to rule the colonies
with “barbarous” means. This is a vision of Europe far closer therefore to what elements
of the European far right still lament and dream of: one which “by means of a new caste
to rule over the Continent, [would acquire] a persistent, dreadful will …, that can set its
aims thousands of years ahead; so that the long spun-out comedy of its petty-statism, and
its dynastic as well as its democratic many-willed-ness, might finally be brought to a close
…”48
But this phase ended with The Gay Science, by 1882–1883. Nietzsche would soon come
in fact to see his middle period as one of indecision and “convalescence”, which his final
“visionary” thinking decisively overcame.49 Nietzsche 3 (1883–1888/1889) is the author,
in less than a decade, of Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of
Morals, The Anti-Christ, Twilight of the Idols, and Ecce Homo. This is the Nietzsche who
is mostly (albeit, as Losurdo argues, highly selectively) celebrated today: the prophetic
poet-philosopher of the Overman, the transvaluation of morals, the will to power, the cri-
ticism of “nihilism” and the “last man”, and the cynical psycho-physiological sounding
out of prior philosophical and religious idols.50
The contradictions between Nietzsche’s positions across these periods, for Losurdo,
explains commentators’ continuing claims that there is no unity to Nietzsche’s
thought. For Losurdo, however, there is such a unity. It is a two-sided unity,
befitting the later-modern reconjurer of Zarathustra, the Persian prophet of the
epochal conflict of Aharu-Mazda, God of Light, and Ahriman, the Prince of Darkness.
And, as we’ve anticipated, the unity is political or metapolitical.
On one side, there is Nietzsche’s continuing hostility to the modern bourgeois revolu-
tions, their orienting ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and their successors in the
contemporary socialist, abolitionist and feminist movements which were winning telling
successes in the philosopher’s lifetime, primarily (as Friedrich Engels celebrated) in the
philosopher’s native Second Reich.51 Nietzsche’s radicality and originality here lies in his
never-ceasing pursuit of the deep historical, psychological, then putatively “physiologi-
cal” causes of these lamentable modern phenomena, tracing them to the slave revolt in
morals in antiquity: in Greece, with the ascent of Socratic dialectic and ethics,52 and in
the wider Mediterranean world, via firstly the Jewish prophets who undermined the
“master morality” we can still find in the earliest books of the Old Testament53; and sec-
ondly, the Christian development of the egalitarian Judaic-prophetic morality as a “reli-
gion of love” addressed to all, but primarily appealing to the poorer castes.54
On the other side, there is Nietzsche’s continuing argument for the beleaguered rights
of (at different moments in his text) the genius,55 the exceptional individual, the free
spirit,56 or the Overman,57 increasingly reined in by the levelling egalitarian slave mor-
ality enshrined in Judeo-Christianity, modern liberalism, democracies, and socialism.58
Throughout his work, Losurdo documents how Nietzsche never wavered on the
“hard” argument (one which he tells us is like “the vulture that eats the liver of the Pro-
methean promoter of culture”59) that a slave caste is necessary in order for any advance-
ment in humankind to take place.60 For such advancement comes only from the few,
strong, creative, life-affirming types, set above and against the inertia of the bovine,
“herd-like” masses. In the third phase of his writing, Nietzsche adds further stipulations
to what he comes to call the “breeding and educational” work of the new Dionysian
 CRITICAL HORIZONS: A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY 289

philosopher-legislators or guardians of Kultur,61 including the political use of religion as

a means to maintain “rank ordering”62 and various eugenic measures, from castration of
criminals,63 to elite regulations on marriages,64 to measures for the “annihilation of
millions of the malformed”65 or even of entire “decadent races”66 in the name of what
the philosopher-anti-Christ sometimes mordantly calls a “true philanthropy”67 or anti-
Christian form of “charity”.68 “Annihilation of those that have turned out badly”,
Nietzsche reflects in the notes for the prospective Will to Power. He sees clearly the phi-
losophical and cultural implications: “for that, one must free oneself from contemporary
morality”.69 This, Losurdo argues, is the most radically anti-Christian aspect of
Nietzsche’s thought that is usually wholly obscured, ignored, denied, or treated as “meta-
phorical” by many of his celebrants, in ways which an awareness of the contemporary
debates surrounding forms of social Darwinism show to be anachronistic. In passages
usually sidelined by thinkers sympathetic with the German thinker, Nietzsche himself
is all-too-clear. The task of “Great Politics” in his metapolitical sense, and the anti-Chris-
tian, anti-modern revaluation of all values he aims at, is to:
Acquire that enormous energy of greatness in order, on the one hand by breeding and on the
other by annihilating millions of those that have turned out badly, to shape the future
human being and not to perish because of the pain that one creates and that is of a like
one has never seen before.70

At each stage of Nietzsche’s thought, Losurdo traces the changes in many of the cat-
egories in which this neo-dualistic philosophical vision is developed. (Notably, Nietzsche
alters his evaluations of Bismarck’s Germany, Luther, the reformation, Voltaire, whether
the Jews were oriental or occidental,71 and of the “historical sense”. (He only introduces
the Overman in Zarathustra, and the will to power, the eternal recurrence, radical
immoralism, and the diagnoses of nihilism in the later works; just as the key disciplines
his works draw upon change, from philology and aesthetics in the early works, through to
history, psychology, physiology in Nietzsche 3.) But these changes, like the criss-crossing
currents that skit across the surface of an ocean, are underlain by the far slower, deeper
current: that of Nietzsche’s radically aristocratic rebellion against egalitarian, post-Chris-
tian modernity, always seeking out its most adequate, powerful and seductive modes of
expression.

Interpreting the Interpretations

What does Losurdo’s metapolitical reconstruction of Nietzsche say concerning the strik-
ing issue of Nietzsche’s continually divided reception? Losurdo’s unifying approach to
Nietzsche’s corpus allows him, first of all, to run a line through the principal positions
upholding Nietzsche’s apolitical “innocence” relative to the ongoing Far Right receptions
of his works, from the time of their publication,72 through (infamously) to the Nazi elites
led by Hitler and Rosenberg.73
Take the apologetic claim that Nietzsche was “anti-anti-semitic”.74 For Losurdo, this is
right – exactly – in part. A unifying, contextualizing reading shows that it is true only of
the Nietzsche after his first period, not the Nietzsche of Birth of Tragedy, “The Greek
State”, and other early texts.75 It is accurate also only provided we distinguish firstly
between the kinds of anti-capitalist, feudal, Christian, and anti-Christian forms of
290 M. SHARPE

anti-semitism Nietzsche was surrounded by76; secondly, between four different “types” or
“figures” of the Jew in Nietzsche’s writings, the intellectual-journalist, the worker-mer-
chant, the financier-aristocrat (whose daughters Nietzsche proposed breeding with Prus-
sian officers77), and the “Priestly” schemer78; and thirdly, between the books of the Bible,
in particular not equating the Old Testament of the Kings, and the Old Testament of the
prophets, not to mention the rococo “New Testament”.79 In his first, romantic-Germa-
nomanic-Wagnerian period, Nietzsche 1 evinced clear anti-semitism, identifying Socrat-
ism with the “Jewish Press” (evenattracting concern from the Wagners for saying too
much80) and trading in anti-semitic stereotypes in letters and published texts (for
instance, concerning “those truly international, homeless, financial recluses” supporting
the international labour movement in “The Greek State”).81 Nietzsche 3 came to despise
Christian and socialist forms of anti-capitalist anti-semitism82 (a form of “Chandala”
anti-semitism which he reviled in Wagner, and which was championed by Stoecker
and Nietzsche’s brother-in-law83). At the same time, he maintained distrust towards
intellectual Jews, and contempt for the working class or mercantile, Eastern European
Jews.84 Nietzsche 3 admired the Jewish people and Kings of the early books of the
Bible, the conquerors of Canaan under the banner of the warlike Lord of Hosts.85 At
the same time, in his third period, he radicalized his claims against the post-exilic,
“Priestly” Jews, whom he came to accuse of effectively “planting” Christianity (in what
the philosopher calls a “subtle trick”86) amongst the gentiles as a means to undermine
aristocratic master morality amongst them: “Did Israel not reach the pinnacle of her
sublime vengefulness via this very ‘redeemer’, this apparent opponent of and disperser
of Israel?”.87 As the philosopher explains this extraordinary proposition, which would
be taken up directly by his National Socialist admirers:
It was the Jews who, in opposition to the aristocratic equation (good = aristocratic = beauti-
ful = happy = loved by the gods), dared with a terrifying logic to suggest the contrary
equation, and indeed to maintain with the teeth of the most profound hatred (the hatred
of weakness) this contrary equation, namely, “the wretched are alone the good; the poor,
the weak, the lowly, are alone the good; the suffering, the needy, the sick, the loathsome,
are the only ones who are pious, the only ones who are blessed, for them alone is salvation
– but you, on the other hand, you aristocrats, you men of power, you are to all eternity the
evil, the horrible, the covetous, the insatiate, the godless; eternally also shall you be the
unblessed, the cursed, the damned!” We know who it was who reaped the heritage of this
Jewish transvaluation.88

Losurdo’s synoptic awareness of Nietzsche’s entire oeuvre, as well as his

historical knowledge of the philosophical, cultural and political debates in which
Nietzsche was participating, allows him to make similar clarifying,
disambiguating (and depolemicising) moves elsewhere. His book does similar Socratic
work concerning Nietzsche’s oft-celebrated “anti-Germanism” (which excludes
Nietzsche 1), his anti-Statism (which was always qualified, never anti-military89),
or even his famous anti-Christianity (not in the early period, especially concerning
Lutheranism, and never politically unconditional), as well as his celebrated, putative
“individualism”. In fact, Losurdo shows that Nietzsche criticized Christianity for intro-
ducing the idea that every human being is an individual, equal before God.90 He
would criticize socialism as “a means of agitation of the individualist”, to “make possible
many individuals”,91 when in fact not every human being is an “individual” in any real
 CRITICAL HORIZONS: A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY 291

sense: “culture and rule” presupposed a “need for slavery”, and “where there is slavery,
there are few individuals”.92 This was a point Nietzsche never tired of making: “One
must in no way suppose that many human beings are ‘persons’”.93 The great philosopher
is as always fairly blunt about things:
My philosophy is aimed at rank-ordering [Rangordnung]: not at an individualistic morality.
The sense of the herd must reign in the herd, but not extend beyond it: the leaders of the
herd require a radically different assessment of their own actions.94

Most [humans] are no [persons]. Wherever the average characteristics predominate that
determine whether a type survives, being a person would be a waste, a luxury; it would
make no sense to wish for a “person”. They are carriers, instruments of transmission.95

In fact, Losurdo argues, the red thread that enables us to navigate through Nietzsche’s
developing, complex positions on these subjects is his Manichean notion of rank-order-
ing.96 It is a matter of the distinction between the few master-types, and their modes of
will-to-power, and the many slave-types, with theirs.97 As Losurdo puts it, morality for
Nietzsche must be declined in the plural.98 For the aristocratic rebel, what is true for
everyone is worth little, and does damage to the higher types. To claim universal laws,
even in the natural sciences, is for him (at the outer limits of Nietzsche’s total politiciza-
tion) the expression of a plebeian value-stance!99 This distinction of master and slaves is
the basis of what Losurdo calls “transversal” or, as it were, “vertical” racialization,100 fol-
lowing the later Nietzsche’s idealizing of the Code of Manu, for distinguishing the
superior Aryan from subordinate “Chandala” castes.101 On such a view, “great men
like Caesar and Napoleon are living species … ”, sui generis, relative to the instruments
of transmission.102
It is in this light, not because of any comforting opposition to anti-liberal, anti-demo-
cratic forms of politics, that Nietzsches 2 and 3 opposed the Germany of universal com-
pulsory schooling, mass education,103 the softening of anti-socialist laws and
measures,104 and the burgeoning welfare state105; just as Nietzsche 1 by contrast had
loved Germany, when he imagined it the site of the potential, counterrevolutionary over-
throw of Latinate modernity, on the wings of Wagnerian music.106 Nietzsche was
consistently against the modern State, which tolerated progressive social movements
to support the “superfluous” “many too many” of Zarathustra,107 and which pampered
organized labour. But he was constantly enamoured of the discipline and hierarchy of
the military, and could raise an early paean to the “Doric state” of the pre-
democratic and Spartan Greeks. Likewise, whilst Jewish prophetic morality and Chris-
tianity could be described by Nietzsche as “poison” for any masterly class looking to
dominate and generate high culture,108 Nietzsche sometimes expresses admiration for
the hierarchy of the Church, and the power of the Christian notion of sin to redirect
slaves’ resentment and vengeance inwards, as against towards the elites.109
So much then on the value of Losurdo’s unifying hermeneutic, as a means to challenge
hegemonic contemporary academic Nietzsche interpretations. What, finally, of Losurdo’s
great stress on the comparative or indirect contextualizing of Nietzsche’s writings which
we have so far skirted? It is possible to question the utility of this methodology, which
occupies a good deal of Losurdo’s text, and marks it out most clearly from almost all
other commentaries on the German philosopher. But, once we recall Losurdo’s second
292 M. SHARPE

intention, that of interpreting other interpretations of Nietzsche, and showing why they
are mistaken, I believe its value, again two-fold, is clear.
First: one key apologetic strategy to avoid addressing Nietzsche’s arguments in favour
(for example) of a “new slavery”110 is to argue that these statements are somehow not
meant literally, but metaphorically111 – or perhaps as experimental thought-explosions.
They should not be read “out of” a context that the charitable interpreter, with the benefit
of hindsight (and an assumed, privileged insight), claims better to grasp than others.
Against such readings, Losurdo’s unifying hermeneutic shows how Nietzsche’s oeuvre
contains mutually confirming statements from all three periods in favour of the need
for a slave class to create the otium necessary for higher individuals to flourish, none
of which are in any way coded as analogical or metaphorical. Here is Nietzsche 1, in
“The Greek State”:
In modern times it is not the art-needing man but the slave who determines the general con-
ceptions, the slave who according to his nature must give deceptive names to all conditions
in order to be able to live. Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labour, are the
needy products of slavedom hiding itself from itself. Woeful time, in which the slave
requires such conceptions, in which he is incited to think about and beyond himself!
Cursed seducers, who have destroyed the slave’s state of innocence by the fruit of the tree
of knowledge! Now the slave must vainly scrape through from one day to another with
transparent lies recognisable to every one of deeper insight, such as the alleged “equal
rights of all” or the so-called “fundamental rights of man”, of man as such, or the
“dignity of labour” … .112

Or consider this from the late period, a confrontation with the political tradition of
liberalism:
[W]e are by no means “liberal”; we are not working for “progress” … we consider ourselves
conquerors; we contemplate the necessity for new orders as well as for a new slavery – for
every strengthening and enhancement of the human type also involves a new kind of ensla-
vement – doesn’t it?113

The point here is that Losurdo’s comparative contextualizing method, including dedi-
cated chapters on the slavery debates and colonialism in the period of Nietzsche’s
adult productivity,114 shows that for Nietzsche himself and his readers, propositions
which seem to us so outlandish that “no one could have seriously meant them” were
being widely discussed. The American Civil War had only recently been won by the
North. Slavery would only cease in the European colonies in the late 1880s, including
through decisions in Germany passed by Bismarck and the Kaiser with which Nietzsche
stridently disagreed, calling the latter for this “Christian” measure a “brown idiot” (and
the Pope, a “purple idiot”).115 To defend the cause of slavery in the 1880s was to defend a
much more timely possibility than we can presently appreciate.
Or take “breeding” or Züchtung. Through its felicitous softening translations as “dis-
ciplining” by Zimmern and (at times) Kaufman and others in English, or (as Losurdo
reports (Appendix 1)) as addestramento, “[military] training” in some Italian renderings,
post-1945 non-German readers have been shielded, in effect by translators’ white-
washing of the originals, from many passages wherein Nietzsche talks about the task
of eugenically breeding human beings.116 But, here as elsewhere, attempts to treat this
matter as metaphorical are deeply anachronistic, as Losurdo demonstrates.117 They
 CRITICAL HORIZONS: A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY 293

remove Nietzsche’s statements from his post-Darwinian context, amongst the cultural
elites of Europe, wrestling with anxieties surrounding massification and democratiza-
tion.118 Nietzsche is, as always, very clear that he means things quite literally, when he
asks:
why should we not do with human beings what the Chinese can do with trees – so they
produce roses on one side, pears on the other? These natural processes of breeding (Züch-
tung) of human beings, for example, which have hitherto been exercised infinitely slowly
and clumsily, could be taken in hand by human beings.119

There are passages of such brutality in Nietzsche 3, concerning the “annihilation” (Ver-
nichtung) of “millions” or entire “decadent” “races”,120 that an interpreter can wonder
what context could “save” these passages from their literal reading, as calls to civilian gen-
ocide,121 and what on earth such seemingly genocidal calls might stand as metaphorical
for.122 If apologetes would talk of “cherry picking” these dark passages, when anyone
cites them as concerning, we have nevertheless to credit that some “cherries” are, if
not poisonous, then testimony that the tree from which they have sprung can only
have had roots in very dark soil, deeply foreign to the Judaeochristian and humanistic
traditions. Losurdo’s indirect contextualizing of Nietzsche’s eugenic thoughts in the
context of the thinking of contemporary eugenicists like Gobineau, Galton, Chamberlain,
Tille, or LaPouge shows to what extent the philosopher’s interventions were “of their
time”.123 In ways which after 1945 and Auschwitz seem inconceivable, Nietzsche 3
tabled eugenic considerations which others were debating only-too-seriously. Losurdo
for instance reminds us that, in the decades after Nietzsche’s madness, thirteen American
states instrumented programmes to sterilize criminals, long before the Third Reich, T4
and the Shoah.124
What I’ve called Losurdo’s comparative or indirect contextualizing method in
Nietzsche is therefore firstly a critical means to show the implausible naivety of
claims that Nietzsche did not really mean what he said on troubling subjects like
eugenics – in itself, an unusual enough hermeneutic situation for reading a philoso-
pher, as against a poet. However, Losurdo’s indirect contextualizing of
Nietzsche (that is, reaing the philosopher in comparisons with thinkers Nietzsche
does not seem to have directly read, but who were engaging with the same subjects
as he does in his books) also has a second purpose. We see this purpose, when
Losurdo weighs the question of Nietzsche’s contribution to the intellectual morass
out of which National Socialist ideology was spawned. For his many liberal or
postmodernist apologetes, it is sufficient to point out Nietzsche’s qualified anti-Ger-
manism in the middle and later periods of his work (see above), or his growing hosti-
lity to vulgar-Christian-socialist-anti-semitism in these periods, to “clear him” of any
responsibility for his political interpretation by later thinkers and propagandists on
the anti-liberal Right, from Rosenberg downwards. In addition to the complications
Losurdo’s unifying hermeneutic brings for such positions, his comparative
purview in Nietzsche also allows him to apply the same standards as apologetes
apply to Nietzsche to other thinkers presently more uncontroversially recognized as
being deeply imbricated in Nazism’s intellectual prehistory, and see what results are
returned from this procedure of weighing apples with apples.
294 M. SHARPE

Losurdo first considers Richard Wagner, whom everyone agrees was a favorite of
Hitler and other Nazi leaders, in this comparative light. Far from accepting the later
Nietzsche’s claims about the Judaic, “oriental” basis of Christianity,125 Wagner
became more Christian, as time passed.126 This is a big part of Nietzsche’s growing
intellectual hostility to him. Far from calling for the annihilation of the malformed
and like measures, the later Wagner expressed pro-socialist and pro-feminist senti-
ments, whilst retaining a vulgar, Christian anti-semitism. So, is Wagner also to be
cleared of imbrication in the ideological antecedency of Nazism, despite Hitler’s
avowed admiration for the composer? If Nietzsche has no case to answer, neither (it
seems) should Wagner.
Gobineau is likewise usually adduced as a Nazi precursor, by Lukàcs amongst others.
Yet, like Nietzsche, Gobineau sang a hymn to the “ideal of the fraternity of the European
aristocracies”,127 and above all nations praised Britain, not Germany. He also questioned
Christianity in the light of a eugenic perspective, reflecting that
in a world of misery to prefer the poor to the rich, the poor in spirit to the wise, the sick to
the person of good health is to commit a mistake of which a Hindu would never have been
guilty.128

Gobineau was profoundly pessimistic about the decadence of the “superior white race” in
modern times, to the point of opposing imperialism (one should not spread such deca-
dence). This seems “anti-Nazi”, So, should Gobineau also be excluded from his standard
historical assessment as proto-Nazi, by the same standards we are asked to apply to
Nietzsche? If we accept that Nietzsche has nothing to do with Nazism, it would seem
that we would have to conclude the same for Gobineau, per absurdem.
Finally, there is Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Chamberlain was lauded by the
Führer and visited by Goebbels on his sickbed, where he was hymned by the future
Nazi Minister for Public Enlightenment as “father of our spirits. Precursor, pioneer!”
Yet, like Nietzsche, Chamberlain was preeminently concerned with homo europaeus,
not the Germans alone. The Slavs, whom the Nazis enslaved as Untermenschen, were
for Chamberlain included in the master race. He praised in Germans above all their
“proud Aryan individualism”, hostile to submission to any “monarchical absolutism”,
which doesn’t sit easily with the Nazi Führerprinip. Chamberlain distinguished, like
Nietzsche, between “Jews of noble and Jews of less noble origin”. He even insisted that
“the Jew is no enemy of Germanic culture”.129 So, again, if we feel that it is intellectually
accurate and responsible to exonerate Nietzsche from his use and abuse by the Nazis, are
there not greater grounds to exclude Chamberlain? Shouldn’t we scholars also be up in
arms to protest Chamberlain’s abuse and misunderstanding by Hitler and his co-con-
spirators? But where would that land us, in understanding the intellectual and ideologi-
cal antecedents of National Socialism?

Concluding Meditations: Losurdo’s Nietzsche Today

Domenico Losurdo’s book appeared in Italian in 2002. At that time, it would have been
difficult for even the most far-sighted social scientist to anticipate the global political
context in which the English translation has appeared in 2020/2021. From figures
in the “alt-lite” like Jordan Peterson and Mike Cernovich, to figures in the openly
 CRITICAL HORIZONS: A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY 295

neo-Nazi Alt-Right like Richard Spencer, Jason Jorjani and Gregory Johnson, Connor
Cruise O’Brien’s dark prophecy is today being fulfilled:
The Nazis needed a fierce Nietzsche and found him without any difficulty. In the decades
after the defeat of Nazi Germany, that Nietzsche became unacceptable, and a gentle
Nietzsche was offered to the post-war public. But I suspect that we have not done with
Nietzsche … and that the fierce Nietzsche may be due for a revival.130

There is certainly a danger in reading a philosopher in view of his subsequent political

reception, either on the Left or the Right. This danger should be balanced, and surely
has been more than balanced, by the many commentaries on Nietzsche in the liberal
democratic nations which have denied the political dimensions of his thought altogether,
at the cost of tendentiously reinterpreting or effectively excising entire strata of his texts.
If Nietzsche had wanted to write solely on metaphysics or aesthetics, he would not have
also written about liberalism, democracy, socialism, feminism, social welfare, the state of
Europe, overpopulation, “the French”, “the Russians”, “the Germans”, “the Jews”,
“the British”, and many other worldly subjects. If he had wanted his metaphysical teach-
ings to be considered in serene isolation from his claims against slave morality, he would
not have told us that the eternal recurrence, as well as being a would-be scientific claim
and a formula of “affirmation”, was also “a hammer in the hand of the most powerful”.131
If “active nihilism” was a doctrine of individual ethics, Nietzsche would not have
confided that it too could serve as “a hammer with which to smash and eliminate the
degenerating and dying races, in order to make way for a new order of life”.132 If the
will to power was solely a naturalistic hypothesis, with no implications for the “social
question”, our philosopher would never have specified that it also spoke very clearly
against:
people everywhere [who] are lost in rapturous enthusiasms, even in scientific disguise, about
a future state of society where “the exploitative character” will fall away: – to my ears, that
sounds as if someone is promising to invent a life that dispenses with all organic functions.
“Exploitation” does not belong to a corrupted or imperfect, primitive society: it belongs to
the essence of being alive as a fundamental organic function; it is a result of genuine will to
power, which is just the will of life.133

And so on.
Even the most determined advocate of the hermeneutics of innocence will have to
admit that the return of a Far Right claiming Nietzsche is a troubling, infernal recurrence.
Even if we were improbably to uphold that all those on the Far Right are dull or poorly
educated (which is false), and have wholly misinterpreted Nietzsche (which is debatable),
we’d still need to wrestle with why it continues to be Nietzsche, not Voltaire or Montaigne
or Kant or almost any other philosopher, subject to this patterned misreading? Why is it, on
the other hand, in Lichtheim’s assessment, that “not a single Fascist – from Mussolini to
Oswald Mosley – escaped his pervasive influence”, even if we reject the same historian’s
darker assessment that the SS, who certainly had access to selected Nietzsche fragments
in their training, could not have committed their crimes against humanity in the
East without his inspiration?134
Losurdo’s Nietzsche provides an alternative, far more plausible set of responses to
these questions than any attempt to render Nietzsche an apolitical or liberal thinker.
Nietzsche’s transversal racialization of the master-slave divide, his hostility to the
296 M. SHARPE

modern nation-state and to plebeian anti-semites provide difficulties for Nazi and fascist
interpreters, who have to make selections of their own from the philosopher. They have
far easier pickings with his hostility to liberalism, socialism, women’s liberation, and
democracy, his frequent scorn for reason (and the dialectic as “Jewish”) and appeal to
the subrational forces of will, his celebration of strength and scorn for “humanitarianism”
in all its modalities,135 his Calliclean deconstruction of “justice” and “morality” as fictions
concocted by the weak,136 his frequent recourse to racial stereotypy (the term rasse fea-
tures over 200 times in our philosopher’s oeuvre), his narrative of the slave revolt which
positioned the Jews as “the most disastrous people in world history”,137 and the idea
(surely not least) of the absolute irresponsibility of human beings strong enough to
bear the “innocence of becoming”.138
Let me close with a reversal of the order of explanation here. This is partly inspired by
work by Julian Göppfarth on the embrace of Heidegger’s work by the AfD today in
Germany.139 Göppfarth shows that it is not only the case that Far Right leaders in
contemporary Germany conjure with Heideggerian categories. Heidegger’s post-war
exculpatory contentions that Nazism was “too modern”, an insufficiently radical break
with the age of technology,140 whilst his own thought never engaged with
specifically biological racism, Göppfarth shows have since 2000 become motifs used by
the AfD in their metapolitical struggle to at once propose a renascent
German ethnonationalism, whilst distancing themselves from the criminal legacy of
the Third Reich.
Just so, let me suggest that Losurdo’s monumental book would not only be (if its
length were not so prohibitive) the best Socratic countercharm for new
students, against the selective, unpolitical readings of Nietzsche which have multiplied
since Walter Kaufmann and Giles Deleuze. By presenting Nietzsche’s ongoing responses
to the modernization of the Second Reich, the mobilization of the trade unions, social
democratic and women’s movements, and the abolition of slavery in the colonies, Losur-
do’s Nietzsche could also easily serve as a primer for students interested in politics on
nearly all of the argumentative strategies of the Libertarian and Far Right, from the
1880s to today.141
Taken together, the Nietzschean arsenal of aristocratic rebellion amounts to what Max
Weber called a theodicy of happiness (aiming to justify the privileges of the privileged), as
against a theodicy of suffering (aimed to console the less fortunate142). It teaches all of
the following, each of which ideas have been repeated before and since Nietzsche by
many others that the poor and weak, like violence and exploitation, will always be
with us, and that there will always be need of a slave class143; that "herd animals"
(most human beings) want and profit from being ruled harshly, even by Napoleon-
like, Caesarian figures144; that the lower classes (and negroes)145 have less sensitivity to
the pain of labour than elites146; that educating the masses too much is unwise if one
wants a well-ordered society147; that political concessions to the lower castes do not
satisfy them, but only stimulate further demands, not alleviating misery but creating a
satisfied, lazy class of social parasites (and their well-fed “representatives”148) who feed
off a soppy, welfarist state; the naturalization of the division of labour, and as we’ve
seen, of “exploitation”, as “hard” facts of life; the cynical idea that demands for social
justice always and only express envy and resentment against “the strong”, as well as
the rationalization of “weakness”149; that “justice” (like “equality”) is indeed, really, a
 CRITICAL HORIZONS: A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY 297

fiction or empty name,150 and that its intellectual champions are “dyed-in-the-wool
idiots and clowns of ‘modern ideas’”151; that low voter turnout in representative elections
should lead to the limiting of the franchise (indeed, the “unpolitical” Nietzsche writes of
this), if not the suspension of the constitution152; that social conflict and instability
should sometimes be welcomed as a means to make the way straight for the emergence
of dictatorial leaders who can best advance society153; and that rather than holding onto
illusory “life-denying” post-Christian ideals, those strong enough should have the
honesty to confront these hard truths without guilt or remorse,154 which are in reality
the psychopolitical means that the slave-types use to undermine the ruling groups, as
happened within the ancien regime after the enlighteners had softened the ruling aristo-
cratic caste up to the demands of the third estate.
Above all, Losurdo’s Nietzsche’s importance lies in his radicality, his “going to the
root” of fundamental questions and oppositions. To read Nietzsche as Losurdo does is
to be confronted with the most extreme and uncompromising expressions and think-
ings-through of the stakes and conditions of the ongoing reactionary rebellion against
liberal-democratic modernity. Losurdo’s extraordinary book on the German philosophy
of the Second Reich thereby enables us to understand, and more ably to oppose, this post-
aristocratic rebellion, and its ongoing political marriage with forms of Caesarist
populism bringing together the elite with the mob155 – for those of us, that is, who do
not find ourselves already seduced by this rebellion’s greatest prophet. As Losurdo writes:
To highlight the thoroughly political and consistently reactionary character of Nietzsche’s
thought is not at all to engage in reductionism and lose sight of its theoretical surplus.
On the contrary, only with these in mind can it emerge in full force. To challenge two thou-
sand years of history is, at first sight, a hopeless undertaking. It can only be attempted if one
has the courage to question not only the apparent “evidence” of the dominant ideology but
also, and above all else, the political, epistemological, philosophical and scientific categories
on which it is based. Aristocratic radicalism cannot go onto the attack against an enemy so
deeply entrenched without arming itself in an appropriate manner at the theoretical level,
without readying a mighty war machine; it cannot refute two thousand years of the “lie”
without problematising and redefining the concept of “truth”, together with everything
else.156

Notes
1. Due to the frequency of reference to Nietzsche’s works in this text, we will refer to these, as
well as Losurdo’s Nietzsche (see Note 2), with abbreviations, then their standardized division
into numbered books (in some cases, denominated by Latin capitals), then sections/aphor-
isms, as follows: KSA = “Posthumous Fragments”; HAH = Human All Too Human, Parts 1 &
2; BGE = Beyond Good and Evil; GM = The Genealogy of Morals; GS = Gay Science; TI =
Twilight of the Idols; The Anti-Christ; EH = Ecce Homo; B = Briefwechsel. Kritische
Gesamtausgabe.
2. An abbreviated version of this research appears in Marx & Philosophy Review of Book,
March 2021, online at “Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel: Intellectual Biography and Critical
Balance-Sheet” by Domenico Losurdo reviewed by Matt Sharpe – Marx & Philosophy
Society (marxandphilosophy.org.uk).
3. B III, 3, 58.
4. This last question, implicating the category of “metacritique” (ch. 14, 16.4) we cannot
directly pursue in the space of this essay.
298 M. SHARPE

5. Losurdo, Friedrich Nietzsche, 20.1. Here as in what follows, quotes from this text will be
referenced according to chapter (20), then section numbers (4).
6. KSA XI, 75, 102.
7. BGE, IX. This section’s title is “What is Noble?”
8. One of the quotes of the epigraph, pointedly, is from Pascal: “Every author has a sense in
which all the contradictory passages are harmonized, otherwise that author has no sense
[…]. One must therefore find a sense in which all the contradictions are reconciled” (viii).
9. Altman, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche; Holub, Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century; cf. Dom-
bowsky, Nietzsche and Napoleon.
10. Lukàcs, “Chapter III: Nietzsche as Founder,”309–402.
11. Cf. BGE 204, 224.
12. 12.1–19.6.
13. 33.3. See this chiliastic fragment from the KSA (XI, 77) which is far from a solitary “cherry”
one can pick: “This is the hammer that vanquishes human beings /Has the human being
turned out badly? Well, let’s see if he can resist this hammer! /This is the great noontide
/Those destined to decline bless themselves / They predict the decline of countless individ-
uals and races /I am destiny/ I have vanquished compassion – the artist’s exulting at the
screaming of the marble”. Any discourse that can proclaim its identity with “destiny” and
pronounce upon the fate of “countless individuals and races”, “all millennia to come”,
etc., surely qualifies as a grand récit, Losurdo observes (33.3). But one must also cite the fol-
lowing from EH, which again points directly towards Nietzsche’s self-consciously political
self-interpretation, and sense of the meaning of his interventions: “Because when truth
comes into conflict with the lies of millennia there will be tremors, a ripple of earthquakes,
an upheaval of mountains and valleys such as no one has ever imagined. The concept of
politics will have then merged entirely into a war of spirits, all power structures from the
old society will have exploded – they are all based on lies: there will be wars such as the
earth has never seen. Starting with me, the earth will know great politics”. EH, “Why I
Am a Destiny,” 1 [144]. Here as in what follows, it is prudent to cite the original texts
directly, given that these passages are so often not considered in receptions of Nietzsche’s
texts.
14. 20.1. Compare GS, 377: “[W]e are delighted by all who love, as we do, danger, war, and
adventure; who refuse to compromise, to be captured, to reconcile, to be castrated; we con-
sider ourselves conquerors … ”. These are what we say in English are “fighting words”, and
see esp. 11.2, 17.5.
15. See “Less than ever may we see in Plato a mere artist. […] We err when we consider Plato to
be a representative of the Greek artistic type: while this ability was among the more
common, the specifically Platonic, i.e. dialectic-political, was something unique.” (KGA,
II, 4, p. 14), which Losurdo uses as an epigraph, at viii. I refer here to Strauss, Studies in Pla-
tonic Political Philosophy. The brilliant central chapter (chapter 8 of 15) of this book is
devoted to the hidden plan and unity of Beyond Good and Evil.
16. BGE, 211. Viz. “THE REAL PHILOSOPHERS, HOWEVER, ARE COMMANDERS AND
LAW-GIVERS; they say: ‘Thus SHALL it be!’ They determine first the Whither and the
Why of mankind, and thereby set aside the previous labour of all philosophical workers,
and all subjugators of the past – they grasp at the future with a creative hand, and whatever
is and was, becomes for them thereby a means, an instrument, and a hammer” (BGE 211,
Zimmern translation).
17. EH, “Why I am So Clever,” 10.
18. 1.17, 6.10, 11.1, 17.5.
19. Cf. 14.7. BGE, 24–44.
20. Cf. 1.17.
21. BGE 208, EH 2.
22. 28.1.
23. 9.1.
24. 10.3; 17.4.
 CRITICAL HORIZONS: A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY 299

25. 17.2–3; 17.6.

26. Cf. ch. 21.
27. 21.4–7.
28. 15.4–6.
29. See esp. 30.13.
30. 20.1; 21.1; 28.1.
31. 30.4.
32. 6.1–6.9.
33. 1.6.
34. Esp. 1.8.
35. 1.7–8.
36. 1.17–18.
37. 6.1.
38. It is striking how little attention Losurdo pays to this psychologically decisive event in
Nietzsche’s life, as well as the comparably decisive disappointment with Lou Salomé.
Losurdo wants to preserve Nietzsche’s importance as a philosopher, and feels that psycho-
biography hampers (by way of the genetic fallacy) the attempt to grasp and critique
Nietzsche’s philosophical and sociopolitical positions. One can sympathize with Losurdo,
but should note that this is not a grace Nietzsche allowed his opponents, cf. 16.7, 19.1,
19.4, 23.3, 29.4, 29.1–14, 32.4.
39. 7.1; 12.4.
40. Losurdo argues for a transitional second period, between the Third Untimely Meditation and
Human-all-too-Human, in chapter 6 (“The ‘Solitary Rebel’ Breaks with Tradition and the
‘Popular Community’”). As this is transitional, we will represent it as phase 1.2.
41. 7.8–9; 8.1–3; 28.4.
42. 7.8–7.9.
43. 7.8–7.9.
44. 10.2–10.3.
45. And lucid self-diagnosis of the youthfulness and irrational dimensions of his own youthful
enthusiasms in Birth of Tragedy, not shared by many of his admirers (see 7.2, 7.12).
46. 7.4; 7.6.
47. GS, 362.
48. BGE, 208. See KSA XII, 471: “By what means should one treat raw peoples, and one can
touch in praxis with one’s hands the fact that the ‘barbarity’ of means is nothing arbitrary
and random when, with all one’s European pampering, one finds it necessary to remain,
in the Congo or wherever, master over the barbarians”. It is impossible to pursue here
Losurdo’s key claims concerning Nietzsche’s Eurocentric positions with regards to non-Eur-
opeans. Some readers may find his attitude to the Chinese as a docile race of subordinate
workers, who might replace the volatile, increasingly more agitated and organized European
working class (esp. 9.5) prescient (in terms of later criticisms of neoliberal globalization).
But we should note also the racial stereotypy, which Nietzsche shared with the many in
his times. Nietzsche was concerned about such biopolitical matters as European overpopu-
lation, especially in the cities (where the social question was being contested). In several
texts, he speculates on the value of colonialism as a safety valve against this overpopulation.
See 11.7; with 18.7. See Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, 90: “in fact, the rise of labour movements
or more generally of democratic politics […] had a distinct bearing on the rise of the ‘new
imperialism’. Ever since the great imperialist Cecil Rhodes observed in 1895 that if one
wanted to avoid civil war one must become imperialist, most observers have been aware
of so-called ‘social imperialism’, i.e. of the attempt to use imperial expansion to diminish
domestic discontent by economic improvements or social reform or in other ways. There
is no doubt at all that politicians were perfectly aware of the potential benefits of imperial-
ism. In some cases – notably Germany – the rise of imperialism has been explained primar-
ily in terms of ‘the primacy of domestic politics’. Probably Cecil Rhodes’ version of social
imperialism, which thought primarily of the economic benefits that empire might bring,
300 M. SHARPE

directly or indirectly, to the discontented masses, was the least relevant. There is no good
evidence that colonial conquest as such had much bearing on the employment or real
incomes of most workers in the metropolitan countries, and the idea that emigration to
colonies would provide a safety-valve for overpopulated countries was little more than a
demagogic fantasy. (In fact, never was it easier to find somewhere to emigrate to than
between 1880 and 1914, and only a tiny minority of emigrants went to anyone’s colonies
– or needed to.)”
49. 10.8; cf. EH 4.
50. 10.8, 11.1–11.7.
51. 7.1–2; 9.1; 9.6; 10.3; 11.8; 17.1.
52. 15.2.
53. 15.2. Cf. BGE, 52; AC, 25.
54. 12.8. Cf. “ … the revaluation of all Aryan values, the victory of Chandala values, the gospel
preached to the poor and the base, the general revolt of the downtrodden, the miserable, the
malformed, the failures, against anyone with ‘breeding’, – the eternal vengeance of the
Chandala as a religion of love” (TI, 4).
55. 6.6; 28.3.
56. 28.3.
57. 27.3.
58. 6.6–7.
59. Nietzsche’s “Greek State,” as quoted at 1.12, 58.
60. GS, 377; cf. 2.5.
61. 14.5. BGE, 61.
62. 14.5. BGE, 61, 228.
63. 19.3. KSA XII, 479; XIII, 401–2.
64. 19.3; 20.1; TSZ, I “On Child and Marriage.”
65. KSA XIII, 156. Cf. 19.1; 20.1; 24.4.
66. KSA XI, 69.
67. KSA XIII, 471–2.
68. AC, 2.
69. KSA XI, 75.
70. KSA XI, 98.
71. 15.7; cf. 18.6.
72. See esp. 24.3, “The Nietzsche Interpretation before The Will to Power: Applause from the
‘Right’”.
73. 27.6.
74. Ch. 18.
75. Ch. 3, ch. 5.
76. 18.4.
77. 17.6. Cf. BGE 251, also KSA XI, 457: “The Germans must breed [züchten] a ruling class: I
confess that the Jews have inherent qualities that are essential ingredients for a race that
should conduct a global policy. The sense for money must be learned, inherited, and inher-
ited a thousand times: even now the Jew can still vie with the Americans”. The “problem of
the merging of the European aristocracy, or rather of the Prussian Junkers, with Jewesses”,
should be resolved once and for all (XI, 569). This “recipe” can be summarized as follows:
“Christian stallions, Jewish mares” (XIV, 370). If such is Nietzsche’s anti-anti-semitism, one
can imagine the response: with friends like these, the people of the galut would not have
needed as many enemies as they have had and still have.
78. 17.2, 18.4.
79. AC, 25. Cf. 15.2; 18.6; 27.8.
80. 3.4; Appendix 1.1.
81. 3.6; cf. Appendix 1.1.
82. 18.8.
83. Cf. 25.6; 24.7. Cf. AC 58, 60.
 CRITICAL HORIZONS: A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY 301

84. 18.4. Cf. BGE 252.

85. 25.7.
86. 7.4.
87. GM, I, 8. As Losurdo points out, if this passage and supporting claims in Anti-Christ
(esp. 24, 42, 44) is read literally, it posits a conspiratorial narrative, in which Christianity
is engendered from, and used by “Israel” to oppose the master-values of other nations. In
a way that stretches credulity, Nietzsche suggests that Christianity was engendered by
“Israel” intentionally, not as a counter-sect led by an executed renegade prophet, but an
inside job, to use the internautic phrase. See 3.6; 27.4–5.
88. GM I, 8.
89. 17.5.
90. 33.1.
91. 33.1; KSA XII, 503.
92. GS, 149 [131].
93. KSA XII, 491. Cf. 33.1.
94. KSA XII, 280; cf. BGE 208, 228; EH 2, etc. Cf. 33.1.
95. KSA XII, 492. C.f. 33.1
96. E.g. BGE 228. Cf. 33.1.
97. 29.9–11.
98. 22.1–2.
99. 29.2, 33.6; cf. 28.1.
100. 25.5–6.
101. 25.6–7. Cf. AC 57.
102. KSA X, 282. Cf. 11.5.
103. 6.1; 12.4.
104. 10.2; ch.18; cf. 25.4.
105. See esp. “I know what will destroy these states, the non plus ultra of the state, which is that of
the socialists; whose opponent I am, I hate it already in the present state. […] The great
laments about human misery do not move me, they do not induce me to participate in
that lament” (KSA IX, 294).
106. 1.17–18.
107. 18.5. To quote from the “free death” chapter of TSZ: “For some life fails [missräth]: a poi-
sonous worm eats its way to their heart. Let them see to it that their dying succeeds all the
more. Some never become sweet, they rot already in summer. It is cowardice that keeps
them clinging to the branch. Far too many live and far too long they hang on their branches.
Would that a storm came to shake all this rot and wormwood from the tree! Would that
preachers of the quick death came! They would be the right storms and shakers of the
trees of life for me! But I hear only preaching of the slow death and patience with all
things ‘earthly’. Indeed, you preach patience with earthly things? It is the earthly things
that have too much patience with you, you slanderers!”. TSZ, I, “On Free Death” [53].
Cf. “the earth is full of the superfluous, life is spoiled by the all too many. May they be
lured from this life with the ‘eternal life!’” (TSZ, I, “On the Preachers of Death” [31]).
These passages, which like several in the other later texts are published in Nietzsche’s life-
time and with his condoning(cf. esp. AC, 2), are cited at Losurdo, 2020: 591–2.
108. AC, 25, at 11.2, 466.
109. 14.5; cf. 13.4. See “‘I suffer: someone or other must be guilty’ – and every sick sheep thinks
the same. But his shepherd, the ascetic priest, says to him, ‘Quite right, my sheep! Somebody
must be to blame: but you yourself are this somebody, you yourself alone are to blame for it,
you yourself alone are to blame for yourself’. … That is bold enough, wrong enough: but at
least one thing has been achieved by it, the direction of ressentiment is, as I said – changed”
(GM, III, 15).
110. 12.8.
111. 20.1; 33.1; Appendix 2.3.
112. Cf. KSA VII, 338; 140.
302 M. SHARPE

113. GS, 377.

114. Ch. 12; 23.
115. 17.3.
116. See esp. on Kaufman’s elisions, including concerning “breeding”, but also cases of simply
omitting troubling clauses, Scarpetti, “The Perils of Translation”. In our text, for comparable
Italian language cases, see Appendix 1.1–3. See also Ishay Landa, “Nietzsche, Extermination,
and the Hermeneutics of Innocence,” unpublished manuscript on the politics of English
translations.
117. 11.1; 19.1–5; 23.1–2.
118. See 9.4–5.
119. KSA IX, 546–7, at 6.6, 208.
120. KSA XI, 69. Cf. 11.1; 19.5.
121. See Taureck, “Civil Mass Murder.”
122. 20.1; 33.1.
123. 19.1–6; 23.1–3.
124. 23.2.
125. 15.7; cf. 18.6.
126. 18.1.
127. Gobineau, at Losurdo, Aristocratic Rebel, 743.
128. See 23.3, 24.8.
129. 24.4, 945.
130. O’Brien, The Suspecting Glance, 60.
131. KSA XI, 295.
132. KSA XI, 547.
133. BGE, 259.
134. 24.5, 732–734. Cf. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany; “Nietzsche, Anti-Semitism,
and the Holocaust,” 3–20.
135. Cf. GS 377.
136. Cf. 14.3.
137. AC, 24. 27.1; 27.3.
138. 10.7.
139. Göpffarth, “Rethinking the German Nation as German Dasein.”
140. Cf. 36.7.
141. 33.8.
142. 28.5.
143. 2.5–6, ch. 12.
144. BGE, 199; GS 40.
145. Viz. “Perhaps pain – I say this to comfort the squeamish – did not hurt as much then as it
does now; at least, a doctor would be justified in assuming this, if he had treated a Negro
(taken as a representative for primeval man) for serious internal inflammations which
would drive the European with the stoutest constitution to distraction; – they do not do
that to Negroes. (The curve of human capacity for pain actually does seem to sink dramati-
cally and almost precipitously beyond the first ten thousand or ten million of the cultural
elite)” (GM II, 7). We can note also the proximity here to longstanding European claims
that negroes’ capacity to work in the tropics, in ways that white people could not,
justified their enslavement.
146. Ch. 12, 14.
147. 12.4.
148. “Today, at a time when the state has a ridiculously bloated belly, there are in all fields and
subjects, besides the actual workers themselves, also ‘representatives’, for example, besides
the learned and the literati, besides the suffering [leidende] popular classes, there are also
chattering and boastful ‘do-no-goods’ that ‘represent’ that suffering [Leiden], not to
mention the politicians by profession, who are feeling fine, and ‘represent’ extreme
misery [Nothstände] in Parliament” (KSA XI, 475).
 CRITICAL HORIZONS: A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY 303

149. 7.11; 8.1; 14.3.

150. 21.1–4.
151. EH 2.
152. 9.1.
153. 11.5.
154. 10.5.
155. 11.5.
156. 28.1.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on Contributor
Matthew Sharpe teaches philosophy at Deakin University, and is the co-author of Philosophy as a
Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions (Bloomsbury, 2021) and author of Camus, Philosophe:
To Return to Our Beginnings (2015) and The Other Enlightenment: Self-Estrangement, Race, &
Gender (in press, Lexington, 2022).

ORCID
Matthew Sharpe http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8165-5775

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