Against Penal Moralism: Nietzsche on the Nonmoral Foundations of Punishment

This paper develops a Nietzschean account of punishment that challenges the moralized frameworks that dominate contemporary political philosophy. Drawing on On the Genealogy of Morality , I argue that punishment...

Thus Spoke Zarathustra as Philosophical Art

This paper examines Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a work of philosophical art whose literary-fictional form is not incidental to its philosophical significance. Zarathustra resists assimilation to standard genres of...

“One of the Deep Race . . . Who by Far Came Closest to Me”: Nietzsche and Paul Bourget

Early in 1884, Nietzsche read Paul Bourget’s Essais de psychologie contemporaine . That Nietzsche borrowed from Bourget without attribution in section 7 of The Case of Wagner is widely known. Less well known is the...

Nietzsche’s Great Politics as Fantasy Politics of Dionysian Comedy

I argue that Nietzsche’s “great politics” is neither the ravings of an unhinged madman nor a serious political program. Instead, when he calls for the destruction of the House of Hohenzollern or tries to redate the...

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Introduction

In the nineteenth century, French grapevines put at risk by phylloxera were grafted onto healthy American rootstock resistant to this plague, so that they might be saved from destruction, then brought back to Europe when it had become safe. So, in the twentieth century, political philosophy, uprooted from European soil by toxic homegrown ideologies such as communism and National Socialism, was taken to America by exiles such as Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Hannah Arendt, and Thomas Molnar and transplanted onto the healthier rootstock of American democracy. In saying that it is time for this tradition to return to Europe, we are not motivated by utopian fantasies about the condition of Europe today. Rather, we hope that the relative freedom of speech afforded to us in the present age (it is a question how exactly it relates to freedom of thought and whether it may threaten it in some ways) will make possible a renaissance of the great books, which these scholars encouraged us to read and provided inestimable guidance in our so doing, as well as of political philosophy itself. Strauss said that even if we have become accustomed to speak, in a debased manner, of the so-called political "philosophies" of "vulgar impostors like Hitler," authentic philosophizing about politics is unusual and cannot be taken for granted.