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Nietzsche and Machiavellianism

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Nietzsche’s Machiavellian Politics

Abstract

Nietzsche’s radicalization of the aristocratic liberal critique, his resolve to ’arrive at something’, a resolve he sees lacking in his allies Burckhardt and Taine, leads him to embrace a conception of politics he associates with Machiavelli. Not the republican freedom and the appreciation of the political capacities of the masses found in the Discourses which, in any case, Nietzsche does not appear to have read, but rather the authoritarian practices found in The Prince. Nietzsche did not read Machiavelli as Spinoza or Rousseau did, as someone who revives republicanism and defends democratic freedoms (Spinoza and Rousseau read The Prince as a book for Republicans, designed to educate the people), but adheres to what has been called the ‘vulgar’ conception of Machiavellianism.1 Rousseau would have considered Nietzsche to be a ‘superficial and corrupt’ reader of Machiavelli. What Nietzsche adapts from Machiavelli are his conceptions of virtù (at the operational basis of his ethics) and immoralism (at the operational basis of his political conception) based primarily on a reading of The Prince.2

at bottom the masses are willing to submit to slavery of any kind, if only the higher-ups constantly legitimize themselves as higher; as born to command.

(GS 40)

perfecting consists in the production of the most powerful individuals, who will use the great mass of people as their tools …

(WP 660 Nachlaß 1885–86 KSA 12 2[76])

Therefore… is a new nobility needed: to oppose all mob-rule and all despotism.

(Z Law-Tables 11)

Hohepunkte der Redlichkeit: Macchiavelli, der Jesuitismus …

(Nachlaß 1884 KSA 11 25[74])

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Notes

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© 2004 Don Dombowsky

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Dombowsky, D. (2004). Nietzsche and Machiavellianism. In: Nietzsche’s Machiavellian Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230000650_5

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