Review: “Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel” by Domenico Losurdo

“First published in Italy, [Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel] has finally been translated into English by Gregor Benton and released as part of the Historical Materialism Book Series with Haymarket Books.”

Introduction

“The great majority of men have no right to life, and serve only to disconcert the elect among our race; I do not yet grant the unfit that right. There are even unfit peoples.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will To Power

Like many of his readers, I came to Nietzsche young and eager. I was 18 years old, was wavering in my Catholic faith, and wanted something that spoke to my (admittedly myopic) yearning for a sense of meaning. Philosophy seemed like the cure, but flipping ignorantly through a few books by Descartes, Aristotle, and Hegel did not do the trick. Then I picked up Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1886 work Beyond Good and Evil, which had an effect that is something close to what I imagine getting struck by lightning must feel like. Here was someone who not only spoke from the gut but seemed to delight in undermining or even lampooning everything I had hitherto believed and considered sacred. Not only that, Nietzsche did it with a frankness that put to shame all the dry scholasticisms I had begun to believe was philosophy’s house style.

Here was a thinker whose energy and vitality seemed to leap from page after page of sparkling aphorisms and profound thought. Imagine my surprise then to find out that Nietzsche was also a favorite thinker of some of the most sinister figures and political movements of the 20th century. Reading Walter Kaufmann’s apologias, where he pointed out the many ways Nazi and far-right authors distorted his thought, temporarily settled the conscience. Like too many of Nietzsche’s readers, my eyes became trained to glance over the more bombastic and seemingly unworthy passages where he waxed nostalgic about slavery, described going to women with a whip, or dismissed the vast majority of humankind as little better than herd animals. Brought up in an academic environment where he was touted as the godfather to post-structuralist critiques of power, my Nietzsche was somewhere between a metaphysically inclined but mostly apolitical individualist and a radical pluralist.