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A Well-Being Out of Nihilism: On the Affinities Between Nietzsche and Anarchist Thought

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Anarchism and Moral Philosophy

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Abstract

Friedrich Nietzsche’s On The Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche, 1967) polemically deconstructs the history of Western moralisms and demonstrates much of their underlying hypocrisies and implicit power plays. In this measure, at least this part of Nietzsche’s philosophical project can be seen as anarchistic, and analogous to the critique which Mikhail Bakunin (Bakunin, 1977c) puts forward of the residual power relations in the Marxist attempt at an emancipatory project. For Nietzsche, the incongruity is that the philosophies which most claim to be virtuous and moral are those which precisely most emasculate their own hidden and malevolent will-to-power (Nietzsche, 1967); Bakunin, Proudhon (Proudhon, 1877) and Goldman (Goldman, 1977) would say exactly the same of the self-proclaimed ‘revolutionary’ philosophies.

‘the will to system is a lack of integrity

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

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Authors
  1. Jones Irwin
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Glasgow, Dumfries, UK

    Benjamin Franks

  2. Loughborough University, UK

    Matthew Wilson

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© 2010 Jones Irwin

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Irwin, J. (2010). A Well-Being Out of Nihilism: On the Affinities Between Nietzsche and Anarchist Thought. In: Franks, B., Wilson, M. (eds) Anarchism and Moral Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289680_11

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