Essays on Max Weber and Friedrich Nietzsche

Abstract

This dissertation compares two diagnoses of problems facing Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the first offered by Max Weber and the second by Friedrich Nietzsche. The dissertation is composed of three papers. The first paper asks why Weber locates a threat to Germany in the growing entrenchment of a “bureaucratic caste.” Weber argues that the increasing complexity of modern technology and social organization requires a deep division of labor and specialization which insulate the state bureaucracy from democratic control. To counter this and promote “co-rule” among citizens, he advocates for a strong parliament to keep the public informed about the bureaucracy which has such extraordinary power over its daily life. But Weber also argues for a national “plebiscitary leader” elected directly by the people rather than by parliament. Only such a figure, backed by the “trust of the masses,” would have the power to wrestle the bureaucracy into submission and thereby exert a kind of democratic control over it. He attempts to strike a delicate balance between a plebiscitary leader sufficiently powerful for this task and a parliament sufficiently powerful to check the “plebiscitary dictator” and prevent a slide into “Caesarism.” Weber insists on equal suffrage, excoriating proposals which would deny soldiers returning from the First World War a say in the affairs of the state whose existence they have preserved. His defense of equal suffrage is based not on natural rights but on a sense of “political decency” toward the returning soldiers and on reasons of national unity, especially that required for future military mobilization. In this paper I argue that it would be a mistake to understand Weber as paving the way to a kind of proto-fascism, as some have argued. The second paper contrasts Weber and Nietzsche by comparing their attitudes toward “national political ambition.” Weber insists that participation in great power politics both requires and promotes the “political maturity” of the citizens by confronting them with weighty decisions of international commerce, diplomacy, war, and peace. Only a nation in which citizens are co-rulers rather than subjects of a bureaucratic caste has the right to participate in world politics, and in turn this participation offers an essential political education in citizen co-rule. Because of its specific historical circumstances leading up to the First World War, including its position as a Machtstaat (power-state), Germany has a “tragic” duty to defend the Germanic peoples of central and northern Europe against English and Russian encroachment. This reflects Weber’s view that politics should aim to preserve a distinct national character and should resist universal political moralities such as utilitarianism. He understands Germany’s “fate” to require the sacrifice of “other cultural possibilities,” including artistic values, as the nation directs its most talented individuals into politics and war. The paper here turns to Nietzsche, who agrees with Weber that the pursuit of national power politics will produce a culture antithetical to the creation of great art and philosophy. But Nietzsche disagrees with Weber’s conclusion, warning that the “political blossoming of a people almost inevitably brings with it a spiritual impoverishment and exhaustion.” He asks whether the “coarse and gaudy flower of the nation” is worth the sacrifice of the nation’s “more noble, more delicate, more spiritual plants and growths.” The remainder of the paper explores Nietzsche’s hostility toward national political ambition and public life more broadly, with particular attention to his understanding of the role of solitude in the creation of art and philosophy. It attempts to say why Nietzsche thinks “anything great in the cultural sense is apolitical, even anti-political.” The third paper explores why Nietzsche thinks solitude is important here, and why he suspects that modern moral psychology risks insisting that “all solitude is guilt.” The paper pays particular attention to Nietzsche’s understanding of the genesis of guilt in modern morality, especially its evolution within Christianity under the concept of “sin.” The dissertation concludes by offering reflections on the supposed connection between Nietzsche and twentieth-century fascism. My view is that it would be misguided to understand Nietzsche as preparing the ground for Nazism, primarily due to his hostility to the “petty provincialism” of nationalism and to any form of mass politics. But it would be equally misguided to use his ideas for egalitarian or democratic ends, and here the contrast with Weber, who defends a kind of democratic nationalism, is most stark.