The very premise of an edited anthology of Nietzsche’s political writings is bound to irritate habits of reading that still treat “politics” as either a contaminant to be quarantined from “culture” or a marginal afterthought to the “real” philosophical work. Frank Cameron and Don Dombowsky turn that irritation into method. Their Political Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche advances, by selection and by framing, the thesis that Nietzsche’s philosophy both unfolds within and aims at a field of forces that the nineteenth century called politics and that Nietzsche, more rigorously, reconfigures as legislation in the name of valuation. This is not a rearguard defense of “the political Nietzsche,” nor a reduction of concepts to circumstantial opinions, but a patient demonstration that Nietzsche’s conceptual innovations—rank, agon, cultivation, revaluation, the critique of morality and of democracy—become legible only when we see them respond to, and recompose, the pressures of the Bismarckian age: its wars and constitutional compromises; its legislative experiments, Kulturstaat ambitions, and anti-socialist panics; its confessionally charged Kulturkampf and the consolidation of an anti-Semitic “Christian state”; and its oscillations between a national politics of “petty” management and a continental imaginary of grosse Politik. The editors arrange the material chronologically, from youthful essays and poems at Schulpforta to the polemical clarity of 1888, not for the comfort of a narrative arc but to show how the problems keep shifting while the stakes—who rules, who educates, who legislates values—grow only sharper. The result is a dossier that refuses the false peace of subject-matter: the political is not the specialty corner of Nietzsche’s work but the atmosphere in which his thinking breathes and against which it tests its lungs.
Cameron and Dombowsky’s introduction clears space for this approach by overturning two familiar evasions. First, it rejects the convenient fiction that Nietzsche’s “battleground was cultural, not political,” a distinction that evaporates when we attend to the way he ritualizes the Erfurt meeting of Goethe and Napoleon into an allegory of culture’s right to command politics, not to flee it. Second, it blocks the equally convenient idea of a private thinker untouched by events. Nietzsche, they insist, “adopted a position on virtually every major political event that shaped his era,” from Schleswig-Holstein to anti-Semitism’s recrudescence; and even when a stance is refusal, the refusal takes sides. The enduring residue of his earliest commitments—monarchist, Prussian nationalist, anti-socialist—will eventually be sublimated into an anti-democratic, anti-liberal, anti-nationalist posture that is nonetheless anything but quietist: philosopher-legislators, modeled against Plato’s shadow, coincide the vocations of thought and rule. To speak of an “anti-political” Nietzsche therefore misreads the term: his negation of politics in its modern democratic and statist forms is precisely the index of a higher political claim, the cultural right to legislate rank.
Because the editors embed the selections within the Bismarckian settlement, the constitutional mechanics no longer appear as inert background but as the concrete medium Nietzsche tests and breaks. The Second Reich’s hybrid architecture—Kaiser and Chancellor commanding the executive, Bundesrat authorized to revise the constitution, Reichstag elected by male suffrage but dissolvable at will—gave Bismarck leverage to stage what Mommsen called a “revolution from above,” a regime that could be described by critics as Caesarist, Bonapartist, or “autocracy based on consent.” It stabilized through negative integration: declare enemies of the Reich, modulate concessions, redirect domestic pressure outward. Read in this light, Nietzsche’s oscillating attitude toward Bismarck—early admiration of the “strong German type” who practices Machiavellian Realpolitik; later disgust at the “petty politics” of nationalist mediocrity; intermittent hope that statecraft can hold the agon in tension; final repudiation of social-Christian paternalism—stops looking like inconsistency and begins to register as a diagnostic of the regime’s own unstable mix of repression, concession, and myth-making. What Nietzsche never forgives is the elevation of management over rank, welfare over culture, suffrage and equality over distance.
The anthology’s first movements, from Schulpforta juvenilia through the agonistic essays, have often been dismissed as derivative philology or cultural conservatism in chrysalis. Cameron and Dombowsky canonize them as inaugural political interventions. The schoolboy reflections on Napoleon III, Saint-Just, and Bourbon kings, supplemented by poem and preface, do not yet invent Nietzsche’s vocabulary, but they already choose sides: against the ’48ers’ sentimentalities, against liberal harmonization of conflict, and toward a theater in which vigor, style, and command decide. The Bismarckian years make this choice urgent. After 1866’s annexations and 1871’s imperial proclamation, Nietzsche’s excitement gives way to a disgust he universalizes: military victory, he writes, can coincide with cultural defeat; a nation that consecrates itself to discipline, unity, obedience, and scientific command of war may thereby liquidate the free conditions of genius. From here, The Greek State becomes more than a classicizing provocation: its harsh economy of hierarchy and slavery functions as a political counter-image to the Reich’s democratic temptations and to the egalitarian pathos swelling after the Commune. The “use” of the state is affirmed—instrumentally, toward the cultivation of a nobler human type—but the state as such is never the end. The state’s education for citizenship is irredeemably hostile to the education for greatness, and the democratization of schooling is not progress but dilution of the very force that could redeem public life.
The editors’ notes on Kulturkampf are equally decisive. It is too simple to file Nietzsche among either secularists or clericals. He supports the struggle “in general” as an act of Enlightenment and yet predicts, almost with a strategist’s fatalism, that the result will be to strengthen the Church; in this he stands at a tangent to both state and altar. The Kulturstaat, that liberal dream in which sovereignty takes upon itself guardianship of culture and morals, receives his fiercest sarcasm: culture and state are antagonists, and “all great periods of culture have been periods of political decline.” In Twilight of the Idols, he opposes to the Reich’s inventory of self-importance—power, parliamentarianism, economy, military interests—an aristocratic culture whose measure is not popular right but distance, not equality but type. If liberal institutions possess any dignity for him, it is the dignity of struggle for them, not of possession: the fight “for” liberty keeps alive the illiberal energies without which nothing rank could be willed; the tranquilized enjoyment of liberty in practice is exactly their tomb. The anthology is careful to let this paradox stand without reconciliation.
When the editors cross the Paris Commune, they do not sanitize Nietzsche’s dread. The Commune is not simply a political episode in his pages; it is a symptom: the “hydra-head” of international insurrection that renders scholarship, art, and philosophy suddenly precarious in the heat of arson and expropriation; the collective will of slaves who have learned to name their existence an injustice and to enforce that insight as vengeance. Here the recurrent pairing of “slaves and priests,” so irritating to democratic sentiment, takes on historical contour: socialism and the Christian state, modern antinomies, continually collude in the abolition of rank. Against this pressure, Nietzsche’s early insistence on contest (agon) as the very medium of culture appears political in the strong sense. A society that refuses to stage high-stakes rivalry for honor and creation will find itself staging, instead, a universal war over compensation: equality as indemnification after the extirpation of excellence.
The core of the anthology, however, is not the historical scaffolding but the way it lets Nietzsche’s “middle” and “late” idioms disclose their political nerve. Human, All Too Human reads here not as a detour into free-spirited skepticism but as the forensic brief of a mind intent on dismantling moral anesthetics that legitimate herd equality. Socialism is anatomized as a species of despotism that seeks the destruction of the individual behind the mask of justice, a pedagogy for terror set to the drumbeat of equality of rights. The warning is doubled: socialism prepares reigns of terror, but it also prepares concentrations of state power capable of answering terror in kind. The sole credible countermeasure he is willing to name is restraint, moderation, an anti-spectacular style among the wealthy; not because he believes in bourgeois virtue but because envy, exacerbated by display, is the accelerant of the social question’s most incendiary politics. The editors resist the temptation to conscript him straightforwardly to repression. He is a tacit supporter of the anti-Socialist Laws in principle, yet he also suspects that illiberal suppression may strengthen what it aims to arrest—another appearance of the larger insight that cultural ends cannot be reached by police means.
Once the selections enter the orbit of Dawn, The Gay Science, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Cameron and Dombowsky allow Nietzsche’s metaphors to keep their edge as political diagnoses. The “new idol” is the state, obese with imagined virtues and adored for the convenience with which it aggregates the appetites of the envious into the flattery of an abstraction. The “tarantulas” secrete justice as venom; the “rabble” degrades all that rises above mere usefulness. These are not rhetorical ornaments to a timeless critique of morality; they are dramatis personae of a European theater in which universal suffrage, equal right, and parliamentarianism are the moralized form of what he calls petty politics. By returning these passages to the 1880s’ constellation—anti-Socialist legislation, social insurance as “practical Christianity,” imperial adventures, colonial conferences that moralize anti-slavery while consolidating rule—the anthology lets us feel how Nietzsche’s symbols, however mythic, retain their referents. The politics he wants is grand because it refuses to confuse the administration of a mass with the creation of a rank of creators.
If Beyond Good and Evil and the Genealogy are the anthology’s fulcrum, it is because the selections demonstrate how genealogical work cuts two ways at once: it dissolves the transcendent pretenses of moral and political ideals, and by doing so, it clears conceptual space for a legislating aristocracy of the future. In the Genealogy’s first essay, the lexicon of “good and bad” versus “good and evil” is not a semantic curiosity but a political memory: the inversion that installs ressentiment’s tables into law is the historic victory of the priestly type, the precondition of modern democracy, socialism, and the rights-talk that universalizes weakness as norm. The second essay’s account of guilt and bad conscience is equally political: the internalization of cruelty and the constitution of the “sovereign individual” are not liberal fables of autonomy but ambiguous achievements, whose juridical and punitive forms cement herd discipline. And the third essay’s “ascetic ideal” locates the modern state’s religious unconscious: without the priestly logic of meaning-through-suffering, the democratic and socialist promise would have nothing to consecrate. Read within the era’s conflicts rather than above them, the Genealogy names a battlefield on which Europe’s future will be decided.
1888, in this curation, becomes less a culmination than an intensification into crystalline offense. Against the Reich’s self-representation as civilization’s steward, Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist sharpen the antithesis: noble valuation against Christian décadence; aristocratic commonwealths (Rome, Venice) and even the caste ordering of Manu, scandalously affirmed for the sake of rank, against the flattening of types under equal rights; Russia as the opposite of petty European statism; the Renaissance as Europe’s last great age, interrupted by the Reformation and the Wars of Liberation; Napoleon as the squandered chance of a unified Europe for the sake of world-rule. Where the Reich recognizes itself in social insurance, enclosure of education within civic utility, and the parliamentary fiction of popular sovereignty, Nietzsche recognizes nothing but the offense of equality and the degradation of distance. When he names himself “the last anti-political German,” it is not withdrawal but refusal: a repudiation of the modern state’s claim to culture, and a claim on a trans-European future in which “good Europeans” will legislate for a universal culture without the idol of the nation.
The anthology’s historical framing around anti-Semitism and the “Christian state” is judicious in its refusal to retrofit Nietzsche to later catastrophes while also refusing to excuse his provocations. The editors distinguish the currents of Christian anti-Judaism from anti-Christian, racial anti-Semitism, and they show how the era’s propaganda networks tried to conscript Nietzsche to their cause—citing, as he himself notes with irony, the “Antisemitische Correspondenz” that invoked his name even as he scorned their ressentiment and mocked court-preacher moralism. The target that binds these polemics is not a people but a value-complex: the ascetic-democratic equalization of rank, the “Christian state” as the political theology of leveling. The scandal is deliberate and unmitigated: where the scriptural tradition enthrones equality of souls, he enthrones order of rank; where the Christian state sacralizes welfare as justice, he judges it as the moralization of weakness into law. The editors do not try to smooth this offense into liberal paradox; they document it as the engine of a politics that wants to be legislating, not representative.
Bismarck’s “change of course”—anti-Socialist Laws in 1878, tariffs in 1879, and the 1880s pivot to social insurance—anchors several editorial cross-references that clarify Nietzsche’s ambivalence. He applauds suppression of revolutionary organization and despises the parliamentary theater that accustoms a people to confuse voting with ruling; he also recognizes that the state’s “practical Christianity” is not neutrality but a spiritual project, pacifying class antagonism by sacralizing the worker as beneficiary and the Emperor as shepherd. By treating the social question as a technical problem for insurance rather than a matter of rank and cultivation, the regime confirms that it cannot produce what for Nietzsche is the only legitimate “public good”: conditions for the emergence of exceptional individuals. Even his moments of quasi-liberal minimalism—“as little state as possible”—are never reducible to laissez-faire; they are the hard negative of an affirmative legislating project that refuses to be institutionalized into majority rule. The anthology draws this tension without relieving it, thereby rescuing Nietzsche from the simplifications that would either make him an early neoliberal or a reactionary statist.
The colonial detour matters here not as biography (though the shadow of Nueva Germania makes an appearance) but as a scale-problem. When Nietzsche proclaims that the time of petty politics is past and that the next century will be the theatre of world-dominion, his polemic does not suddenly become “imperialist” in any ordinary sense. It becomes European: a supra-national ambition to legislate for a world culture, to install rank where the nation-state has installed management. In that sense, his irritation at Germany’s moralized “civilizing missions” (including the anti-slavery rhetoric that baptizes power) is inseparable from his own dream of “good Europeans” whose task will be guardianship of a universal culture. By folding these passages into selections from Beyond Good and Evil and The Wanderer and His Shadow, the anthology shows how even Nietzsche’s provocations about caste and Manu belong to a larger determination: to break with the metaphysics of equal souls in order to restore distance as the grammar of greatness.
Methodologically, Cameron and Dombowsky’s most important accomplishment lies in the reciprocal pressure they establish between text and context. The introduction’s brisk anatomy of the Reich’s parties—German Conservatives, Free Conservatives, National Liberals, Progressive Liberals, Catholic Centre, Social Democrats—reads not as textbook preface but as an index of the types Nietzsche is constantly transmuting into conceptual figures. The Kreuzzeitung’s ideology of a divinely grounded sovereignty; the Centre’s oscillation between social reform and hierarchy; the National Liberal narrative of the Kulturstaat; the SPD’s wager on parliamentarism; the conservative Christian-social fusion—all these map onto Nietzsche’s typology of priests, herd, legislators, ressentiment-breeders, and the rare “free spirits.” The editors’ footnoted cross-references further perform what they recommend: that Nietzsche’s aphorisms and diatribes are not atmospheric thunder but strikes against a specific terrain of institutions, newspapers, pulpit rhetorics, and laws. The great virtue of the volume is to teach us to read him with this double vision simultaneously active.
As a curation, the book’s architecture embodies the claim it makes. It begins with the Schulpforta pieces not to antiquarianize Nietzsche but to stage the earliest deposits of his later fixations: a fascination with rulers and their theater, a suspicion of revolutionary sentimentality, a willingness to speak disturbance to friends. It then concentrates the agonistic cluster (Greek State, Homer’s Contest, the educational lectures and Untimely Meditations) to force us to confront the scandalous premises of Nietzsche’s politics of culture: slavery as cultural precondition, hierarchy as educational necessity, genius as public aim. The free-spirit intermezzo does not relax the pressure; it universalizes it into a campaign against the mental habits that sustain herd politics. The mid-1880s crystallize into the critique of modern moral-equality; the last year names enemies and exempla without anesthesia. The Nachlass fragments bind each period to its underlines, ensuring that the aphoristic shock is not mistaken for ungrounded verdict. By keeping the selections anchored to specific editorial prefaces that give historical coordinates, the volume does not dilute Nietzsche’s force; it thickens it.
If there is a single center of gravity in this anthology’s implicit argument, it is the word legislation. Nietzsche’s politics is neither the seizure of the state nor a theory of representation. It is the sovereign act of valuation that sets a rank-order of purposes, institutions, and disciplines compatible with the emergence of higher types. Against the Reich’s administrative genius, he sets the legislator’s courage to offend; against the parliament’s arithmetics, the pathos of distance; against the Christian state’s justification of suffering, the revaluation that refuses to spiritualize weakness; against socialism’s justice-nail driven into semi-educated heads, the command to educate for greatness rather than to equalize through indemnities. This is why his supposed “anti-politics” is a higher politics, and why any attempt to call him “liberal” can be true only in a paradoxical sense: he appreciates the struggle that forges liberties, not the institutions that routinize them; he trusts conflict as pedagogy more than settlement as ideal; he distrusts the state most when it presumes to be the steward of culture. The editors neither apologize for nor weaponize this posture; they situate it in the precise fields of force out of which it arose and to which it sought to give law.
The book’s scholarly apparatus—its acknowledgments of translation sources, its clean abbreviations for a canon of texts the reader can triangulate, its bibliography of political-Nietzsche studies—confirms rather than constrains the editors’ wager. By refusing to confine Nietzsche’s “political thought” to declared positions on elections or foreign policy, and by refusing equally to abstract his core conceptuality from the legislative and party struggles of his Europe, Cameron and Dombowsky make it possible to read Nietzsche’s offenses at their intended scale. When he praises caste, he is not designing civil service exams; when he mocks equal rights, he is accusing a civilization of trading in dignity for indemnity; when he conjures “good Europeans,” he is not drafting a supranational parliament but envisioning an aristocracy of legislators whose medium is culture itself. The anthology allows these gestures to be what they are—dangerous, uncompromising, productive of offense—without either absolving them into metaphors or condemning them into anachronism. That is its editorial integrity.
It would be easy, and pious, to end by resolving Nietzsche’s politics into a warning about twentieth-century nightmares. The volume resists that ease. Instead it offers a composed field in which readers can watch a thinker contest his century’s institutions with the resources of philology, polemic, prophecy, and analysis. It is an invitation to trace how a mind, convinced that culture and state are antagonists, will nonetheless use the state as tool when culture requires it; how a philosopher who names himself “anti-political” can be most political in his refusal of the modern state’s moral theology; how a free spirit’s attack on moral consolations is identical with his attack on parliamentary consolations. By bringing together texts rarely translated, anchoring them in the sequence of a life that inhaled the Bismarckian air and refused to breathe it complacently, and by writing an introduction that neither sentimentalizes nor prosecutes, Cameron and Dombowsky have provided more than a reader. They have provided a staging ground for thinking what it would mean, again, to distinguish governance from legislation, administration from rank, equality from dignity, and politics from the culture that judges it. That this staging ground is “problematic, convoluted, complex” will be the best measure of its fidelity to its subject.
What the anthology finally shows is that Nietzsche’s political writings are not detachable organs but the vascular network of his philosophy. They pulse whenever he speaks of education, genius, slavery, caste, democracy, priests, law, ressentiment, the state, Europe, or the future. They constrict when he hears the word “rights” used as a sleep-aid; they dilate when he names a legislator who would risk offense for the sake of rank. Read in order, from youth to collapse, the selections track not conversion but intensification: the same decisions recast at higher temperatures as the century’s pressures mount. If the reader comes away with discomfort, the editors will have succeeded: without discomfort there is no rank, and without rank, Nietzsche insists, there is no culture worthy of politics—only politics without a culture to justify it.
In this way, Political Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche: An Edited Anthology is indispensable precisely because it refuses to be reassuring. It neither domesticates Nietzsche into a liberal pluralist nor surrenders him to the caricatures of authoritarian myth. It does the harder thing: it lays the texts bare with enough historical voltage that the reader cannot help but feel that the perennial arguments about culture, equality, education, labor, religion, sovereignty, and Europe are not debates at the edge of Nietzsche’s work but engines at its core. The editors’ achievement is to have assembled those engines, fueled them with context, and invited us to hear the sound they make when they run without moral mufflers. What happens after that is not a matter for parliamentary debate. It is a matter of whether we can still endure the pathos of distance that Nietzsche claims is the precondition of all high politics—and, if we cannot, whether our consolation prizes are anything but the latest refinements of the “new idol” he warned us against.
Simon Gros 
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