Can there be a Nietzschean sociology?

Author(s): W. G. RUNCIMAN
Source: European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie /
Europäisches Archiv für Soziologie , 2000, Vol. 41, No. 1, The power of language and the
language of power (2000), pp. 3-21
Published by: Cambridge University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23999522

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 W. G. RUNCIMAN

Can there be a Nietes che

The notion that there are distinctive Marxian or Weberian or

Durkheimian sociologies is (I assume) uncontentious. But the no
a Nietzschean sociology is altogether less straightforward, not
because of Nietzsche's well-known ambiguities, ironie and chan
mind but because of his equally well-known desire to underm
credentials of any and all intellectual enterprises which result
establishment of ostensibly authoritative schools. Yet for all hi
clasm, Nietzsche is not trying to pull down the entire temple of
knowledge and bury himself as well as its deluded votaries under the
ruins. On any close reading of his best-known writings (i), he is, among
other things, trying to persuade the reader whom he so insistently
harangues that there are at least some propositions to be advanced about
human history and psychology which require assent because of the
strength of the arguments, and not merely of the emotions, from which
they derive. In this article, I make no attempt either to expound or to
assess Nietzsche's philosophical opinions as such. My aim is simply to
answer the question: what sort of a sociology do we get if we (sociolo
gists, that is) take Nietzsche's arguments about human history and psy
chology as seriously as we can?

By 'sociology' I mean the study of why human communities,

institutions and societies of different kinds are as we find them. This
excludes by definition value-judgements about either the Good (or Bad)

(i) The following abbreviations are used {Zur

in Genealogie der Moral)-, GS = The Gay
the text: Science {Die fröhliche Wissenschaft)-, HATH =
Human,
AC = The Antichrist {Der Antichrist)-, BGE = All Too Human {Menschliches, Allzu
Beyond Good and Evil {Jenseits von Gut und menschliches); TI = Twilight of the Idols
Böse); DB = Daybreak (Morgenröte); EH = {Gotzen-Dämmerung)\ WP = The Will to Power
Ecce Homo; GM = The Genealogy of Morals {Der Wille zur Macht).

W. G. Runciman, Trinity College (Cambridge).

Arch, europ. sociol., XLI,i (2000), 3-21—0003-9756/00/0000-713 $07.50 per art + $0.10 per page© 2000 A.E.S.

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 W. G. RUNCIMAN

Life or the Good (or Bad) Society. Nietzsche himself, as no

readers can fail to be aware, is lavish with both of these. In
last sentence of the extended note which concludes the F
The Genealogy of Morals he says that the task of all the scienc
a philosophical solution to the problem of values, that is to ran
an ordered hierarchy'. But for my purpose, the more appr
comes later on {GM, 111.25) when he says, echoing Kant, t
natural and what he calls the 'unnatural' (i.e. self-referen
sciences 'talk human beings out of their former self-respect'. S
But to succeed in so doing—to achieve their perlocutionar
their illocutionary effect—they have to command the reluctan
the previously self-respecting human beings who are conf
their disconcerting findings. So: can a would-be science of
behaviour do this in a distinctively Nietzschean way with
compromising its own credentials in the act of doing so?
However congenial to the reader, Nietzsche's diatribes a
self-serving pretensions of pedants, professors and priests,
in themselves constitute a conclusive argument for refusing to
propositions about human history and psychology which p
fessors or even priests may assert to be true. As Alasdair
rightly observes, Nietzsche never forswore the practice of
rigorous scholarship which had secured him his professorsh
the early age of 24 (2). He remained, in his own words, a w
cher Mensch (BGE, §204) who hates the Christian God for, a
things, hating Man for having become wissenschaftlich {A
although he also describes himself as a philosopher, he insis
the paragraphs added to The Gay Science in 1887 {GS, §38
osophers, although they are different from scholars, have to b
too. Whatever he may say, as he frequently does, about th
nature of truth as such, Nietzsche never pretends that misq
texts aren't misquotations, that misstatements about the pl
of historical events aren't misstatements, that arithmetica
aren't mistakes, or that nothing can correctly be said which li
to effects—'conventional fictions' though he calls them {BG
after all, there really aren't such things under any definiti
causes or effects, how can he complain as he does in the '
Errors' chapter of Twilight of the Idols about people who conf
with the other, or charge the members of 'lower' cultures
Human All Too Human (§97), with having no more than a

(2) Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Ver worth, 1990), Chapter 2: 'Genealogies and
ons of Moral Enquiry (London: Duck Subversions'.

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 NIETZSCHEAN SOCIOLOGY

understanding of 'effective causality', or denounce the

fear of Wissenschaft and its 'sound conception of caus
§49)? And when, at the beginning of the First Essay in T
Morals, he expresses the hope that 'these English psy
really be capable of subordinating wishful thinking
truth, he ends the paragraph with the categorical ass
truths do exist (Wahrheiten), just as he had previously
§271) that mankind has progressed beyond the 'false c
superstitious past. The self-styled 'annihilator par ex
Homo is also the self-styled 'educator' out of whom 'the truth
speaks'—the 'genealogist' who enjoins his readers to assent not merely to
his diatribes against the pedants, professors and priests, but to his own
alternative propositions about some aspects, at least, of human history
and psychology.
This does not, however, make Nietzsche's claims about the limita
tions and failings of the institutional practice of Wissenschaft any less
subversive than they are generally taken to be. (I shall stay with the
German term because it rightly ignores the English-speaking distinction
between 'science' and 'scholarship'.) For all the disdain for Romanti
cism which he evinced after his breach with Wagner, Nietzsche is both a
vehement and an effective spokesman for the romantic reaction against
what Maclntyre calls 'encyclopaedic' Wissenschaft—that is, claims to
accumulated, proven, authoritative knowledge about the world and what
it contains of the kind exemplarily set out in the ninth edition of the
Britannica. For Nietzsche, there are many kinds of truths and therefore
no 'single' truth {WP, §540), 'disinterested observation' is an Unbegriff
and Widersinn {GM, 111.12), and self-styled realists are themselves the
creators of what they call 'things' {GS, §57-8): 'thingness' {Dingheit) was
created by 'us' {WP, §569). Wissenschaft, therefore, can only be one
among many perspectives on the world from which human beings
construct their various conceptualizations of their experiences of it in
order to reduce them to some kind of manageable order. These con
structions are not meaningless—far from it. But wissenschaftlich inter
pretation of the world may, as he says in The Gay Science (§373), be
'stupidest' because 'poorest in meaning', rather as he says in The Will to
Power (§452) that 'truth' paralyzes the forces that work towards enlight
enment and knowledge. As he puts it in one of the fragments from the
Nachlass, 'to see things as they are! Means to be able to see them out of a
hundred eyes, out of many persons' (3). This is not to say that the hun

(3) Quoted by John Richardson, Nietzsche's System (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996),
p. 265 n. 109.

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 W. G. RUNCIMAN

dred eyes may not all be looking at the same thing (the sa
Sophocles, the same battle between the French and Germ
Sedan, the same scientific experiment conducted with the
ratus, and so on). But looking at is not the same as seeing, and
rather, seeing as—is what we do to them, not they to us.
It follows, whatever Nietzsche's own theory of truth (if
may be, that there is a tension, not to say a paradox, inh
simultaneous attachment to veracity (Wahrhaftigkeit), wh
attributes to Zarathustra himself (§5 of the last section o
refusal to allow others who claim attachment to it for their pu
so. What are we to make of his denunciation of the philo
'dishonestly make loud, self-righteous noises as soon as the
Wahrhaftigkeit is touched upon' (BGE, §5), or his maxim in
Too Human (§483), which he repeats in The Anti-Christ (§
'Convictions (Uberzeugungen) are more dangerous enemies o
lies', or his disparagement (§146) of artists as having, when
recognizing truths, a feebler Moralität than thinkers (Denker)
do—Moralität being, I take it, the same as the 'intellectual conscience'
{Gewissen) of §2 of The Gay Science? This paradox, if such it is (recall
the maxim in §185 of Human, All Too Human that paradoxes are often in
the reader's head rather than the author's book), makes plausible, ini
tially at least, two different possible answers to the question in my title.
The first is to say that if you follow Nietzsche's arguments to their
conclusion you cannot have a sociology of any kind at all. The second is
to say that we already have a Nietzschean sociology to hand in the writ
ings of Max Weber.
Nietzsche himself says {WP, §462) that instead of 'Sociology'—the
quotation marks are his—we need a theory of power structures {eine
Lehre von den Herrschaftsgebilden)—a remark which echoes his charac
terization of psychology as 'the developmental theory {Entwicklungs
lehre) of the will to power' {BGE, §23). This, for some of his readers, is
already enough to rule Nietzschean psychology and sociology com
pletely out of court. Daniel C. Dennett, for example, although willing to
credit Nietzsche with some perceptive insights into human nature, calls
his idea of a will to power 'one of the stranger incarnations of skynook
hunger' (4)—a 'skynook' being some imaginary 'mind-first' process
invoked to account for teleological effects. This is a view whose impli
cations are shared, ironically, by those of Nietzsche's readers who seek to
interpret it as a purely metaphysical idea and welcome it on that very

(4) Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (London:
Allen Lane, 1995), p. 466.

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 NIETZSCHEAN SOCIOLOGY

account. But to a historical and comparative sociologi

a Lehre von den Herrschaftsgebilden is as plausible a
characterizing what sociologists are, in general, after:
societies is the study of people in roles, and the stud
roles is the study of the institutional distribution of
objection sometimes made to this view is that many pe
and indeed may not want any say, in how power is d
exercised in the society to which they belong. But th
it is precisely those who do seek to realize their will to power in
action, including those whose Sklavenausstand is a reaction against those
more powerful than they, who cause communities, institutions and
societies to be the kinds of communities, institutions, and societies that
they are. It seems clear from many passages that could be cited that
Nietzsche himself didn't seriously believe that everybody is everywhere
and always driven exclusively by the will to power. But then would
Dennett wish to deny that in every human society there are some people
who attempt, and succeed in the attempt, to control the behaviour of
others?
It is, in any event, fundamental to Nietzsche's Lehre von den Herr
schaftsgebilden that the particular institutions where sociology, along
with the rest of Wissenschaft, is practised are a case in point. Hence his
neo-Protagorean turn, so to speak, in the history of ideas, of which
Foucault came to be the most celebrated 20th-century exemplar, which
interprets all acquisition and diffusion of knowledge as an expression of
the will to power. But Nietzsche does not say that knowledge, including
self-knowledge, is therefore unattainable. On the contrary, he is explicit
{HATH, §32) that we can know, in his own italics, that we are illogical,
just as he is explicit {WP, §259) that to feel many pros and cons is a 'great
method of knowledge' (his italics again). To realize that knowledge is a
Werkzeug of Macht {WP, §480) is to have achieved self-knowledge. It
accordingly follows, if nothing else, that Nietzsche's sociology of
sociology is a sociology. It may lead his readers, as he evidently wants it
to do, to be more critical than they would otherwise be of would-be
encyclopaedic sociologists' pretended achievements. But to say no more
than that values are the creation of philosophers (BGE, §211) is explic
itly to assert a sociological proposition at the same time as implicitly to
deny a philosophical one.
The alternative answer, to the effect that Weber's sociology is
Nietzschean sociology, was persuasively suggested in this journal by

(5) W. G. Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory, Vol. II (Cambridge, Cambridge University

Press, 1989), p. 3.

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 W. G. RUNCIMAN

Eugène Fleischmann 1964 (6), and Fleischmann's case was further

strengthened by Wilhelm Hennis in 1986 (7). It is by no means easy to
establish precisely the nature and extent of Nietzsche's influence on
Weber. One commentator has gone so far as to claim that Weber was
seeking to construct a defence of liberal democratic institutions against
what he saw as Nietzsche's excessive nihilism (8), whereas to me, at
least, it seems much more plausible to suggest that Weber was seeking to
develop an authentically sociological Lehre von den Herrschaftsgebilden as
contrasted with Nietzsche's purely psychological Entwicklungslehre des
Willen zur Macht. But either way, it is difficult not to agree with Fleisch
mann and Hennis that the two famous lectures on Politik als Beruf and
Wissenschaft als Beruf which Weber delivered in the last year of his life
are unmistakably Nietzschean—to say nothing of the peroration about
the soulless modern world in the essay on 'The Protestant Ethic'. The
principal reason for which Weber's own sociology is, nevertheless,
uw-Nietzschean is that he remained too much both of a materialist and
of a structural-functionalist in the broad sense in which most historical
and comparative sociologists have been and still are. As Fleischmann
himself observes, in the eyes of the younger generation of German
Nietzscheans, Weber was precisely the kind of professorial pedant to be
repudiated alike for his presumption of academic authority and his lack
of sympathy with Romanticism. Nor were Weber's contemporaries
mistaken about him in this respect: as he himself said in response to
Hans Delbrück's attempt to enlist his thesis about the Protestant Ethic in
the cause of anti-Marxist idealism, 'I am much more materialist than
Delbrück thinks' (9). Weber, one could say, was both a sociologist and a
Nietzschean; but he was not a Nietzschean sociologist.

II

What, then, would a Nietzschean sociology look like? It would, I

think, have to be grounded in four connected propositions:

(6) Eugène Fleischmann, De Weber à (8) Robert Eden, Political Leadership and
Nietzsche, Archives européennes de sociologieNihilism:
V a Study of Weber and Nietzsche
(1964), 190-238. (Tampa: University of Southern Florida
(7) Wilhelm Hennis, Max Weber. Essays in Press, 1983), p.42.
Reconstruction (tr. Tribe, London: Allen and(9) Paul Honigsheim, On Max Weber (tr.
Unwin, 1988), Chapter 4: 'The Traces of Rytina. East Lansing: University of Michigan
Nietzsche in the Work of Max Weber' (firstPress, 1968), p. 45.
published in 1986 in the Jahrbuch der Akade
mie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen).

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 NIETZSCHEAN SOCIOLOGY

First, the 'will to power' is the driving force of histor

observed outcome of human sociocultural evolutio
does.

Second, the will to power expresses itself differently in different

historical and social contexts.
Third, these propositions apply to the explanation of human beings'
own attempts to explain their history and impose their chosen explana
tions on one another.

Fourth, since these three propositions are themselves a product of the

will to power, they can be assessed only by reference to the particular
historical and social contexts in which the will to power has found
expression.
One possible objection to a sociology grounded in these four propo
sitions is that if its substantive content is, on its own account, mythical,
then it must be a self-defeating exercise whether practised inside
universities or outside of them. But the objection is misplaced. Nietz
sche's sociology of sociology is not a variant of the Epimenides paradox.
Nietzsche does not say 'All would-be general statements about human
history and psychology, including therefore this one, are fallacious'. As a
professor of classics formidably well-read in the literature of the ancient
world, he was fully aware of the diverse functions of truths, lies, fictions,
fantasies and fables. Some myths, like Ovid's Metamorphoses, involve
what to author and reader alike are known impossibilities: as Ovid says,
'Prodigiosa loquor veterum mendacia vatum', or as Nietzsche says
{HATH, §154)) 'all poetic peoples delight in lying'. Some, like the
poems of the Symbolists who were Nietzsche's contemporaries, have
hardly more identifiable content to which truth-value could be attached
than a piece of mood music: they are part of what Habermas calls the
'non-propositional sign-system' of literature, art and music (10). But
others, like the foundation myths woven into the written, no less than the
oral, traditions of countless peoples down the ages and across the globe,
depend on an unequivocal acceptance of certain sociological facts as,
indeed, facts: American schoolchildren brought up on the myth that
George Washington never told a lie are being instructed to revere a his
torical person who did win what was a war of national independence and
did in consequence become the first President of the United States.
Even if since Wahrheit is unattainable, Wahrhaftigheit can only be a
conventional agreement about a correspondence between objects of
knowledge defined as such by 'us', Nietzsche would no more seek to

(io) Jürgen Habermas, Zur Rekonstruktion des historischen Materialismus (Frankfurt: Suhr
kamp, 1976), p- 345

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 W. G. RUNCIMAN

deny the veracity of the sociological proposition that the U

has a form of presidential government than that of the
proposition that Linear B is a form of Greek.
The sociological implication is therefore twofold. Once t
'defined and denoted according to its "intelligible character
'"the will to power" and nothing else' (BGE, §36), both the
social relationships and the world of the intellect have to b
preted accordingly. Sociologists are neither forgers nor fantasi
have now to see through new eyes the actions and motives
political, economic and religious leaders, but of the scholar
them in the hope of realizing their supposedly disinterested am
arrive at what they suppose to be 'the' truth; and from this it
there is an inescapable constraint on the possibility of ex
would-be wissenschaftlich discoveries about human history
ogy beyond a much narrower limit than the pedants, pro
priests have hitherto persuaded themselves and the Volk who m
look up to them. 'Strict' Wissenschaft, Nietzsche says (HAT
release us only to a small extent from the world of ideas w
inherited from ancient tradition—and, he characteristica
don't much want to be released in any case. Viewed from the b
ramparts of the previously unchallenged, complacent, sel
encyclopaedists, that is no doubt a seriously threatening assert
does not entail either the kind of subjectivism which seeks
claims to knowledge to the practice of idiosyncratic languag
the kind of scepticism which denies the possibility of ever
what is going on in the mind of any other human being. On th
it leads to the conclusion that the minds of human beings, incl
least professional practitioners of Wissenschaft, are full of
can first of all be exposed to view and then unmasked as il
only from that conclusion, which is itself wissenschaftlich
follow the notion that the encyclopaedic professorial treatises
history and psychology could be replaced to advantage by c
aphorisms—unfashionable though even those of the 'mast
searcher' La Rochefoucauld have become (HATH, §35, 36).

Ill

Then what exactly are these aphorisms? What information about

human history and psychology do they convey? And how could a
sociology recognizable as such be constructed out of them? At this point,

10

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 NIETZSCHEAN SOCIOLOGY

I feel bound to quote from myself again, but this time

showing how not to answer the question. 'The differenc
think) 'between an aphorism like [one of] La Rochef
generalization like those to be found in textbooks of
its accuracy does not rest on its claim to generality... It
does, a modest discovery about human behaviour bec
rate report not of what always, or even nearly alway
what sometimes can and in practice does more ofte
pecting reader has hitherto supposed' (n). But that's
The functions of Nietzsche's aphorisms, both illocu
cutionary, are more than that. Wahrhaftigkeit is cer
aphorism, however arresting, provocative or apparen
be, has to be grounded in an observation of human b
both the aphorist and the reader can agree to be accu
perlocutionary force will be nullified. But those whi
should be, but aren't, the aims of the encyclopaedic
those which make Nietzsche's readers change their p
ways in which power is pursued, distributed and exe
communities, institutions and societies of different kin
Here, accordingly, is an example from The Gay Scie
submission to powerful, frightening, even terrible pers
and generals, is not experienced as nearly so painful
unknown and uninteresting persons, which is what all captains of
industry are'. This compound proposition is not merely striking but
plausible: striking, because of the seeming contradiction in someone's
finding it preferable to be in the power of a frightening and terrible
person than in that of a remote and boring one; plausible, because we
can all see that tyrants and generals can and do secure the willing obedi
ence of their subordinates even at high personal risk whereas boards of
directors who neither have nor seek to have the same power over their
workers as tyrants and generals have over their soldiers are, nevertheless,
often the objects of intense collective resentment. So what prevents this
proposition from appearing in the sort of orthodox textbooks which are
published by university presses and assigned by professors to their stu
dents? Why shouldn't sociology professors treat Nietzsche as if he were
a sober-suited academic like themselves rather than a goat-skinned
prophet fulminating in the wilderness? Might it not be open to us to
construct from his writings a Nietzschean sociology which could be
taught as such alongside the sociologies of Marx, Weber and Dürkheim?

(i i) W. G. Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory, Vol. I (Cambridge, Cambridge University

Press, 1983), p. 109.

11

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 W. G. RUNCIMAN

The answer to these questions is that Nietzsche is right to se

as doing something other than what the conventional acad
tioners of the 'unnatural' sciences are doing. It is not only bec
own very personal just-so stories about the evolution of mank
own very idiosyncratic pronouncements about free spirit
and eternal recurrences—to say nothing of his curious vi
women or food. It is also because his aphorisms about the human
condition, like those of the other aphorists whom he admires, are only
incidentally and in part hypotheses of cause and effect. They are more
descriptive than they are explanatory. By their ability to 'hit the black
bullseye of human nature' (HATH, §36), they compel the reader to
agree what it is like to be a human being rather than to subscribe to a
wissenschaftlich account of what causes it to be like it is to be one. To
illustrate this, it is enough to put a finding typical of a contemporary
journal of human behavioural Wissenschaft into as near as can be a
Nietzschean form. Here is one which I have chosen not least because I
think Nietzsche himself would have been intrigued by it: 'Oddly, when a
male chess-player is easily defeated by a manifestly more powerful
opponent his testosterone level is unaltered, but when he is narrowly
defeated after a struggle in which he has performed with significantly
greater boldness and subtlety, his testosterone level falls sharply and that
of his opponent rises equally sharply' (12). This finding has, if not to the
same degree as Nietzsche's aphorism about submission to tyrants and
generals, some suggestive implications about the subjective aspects of
the psychology of power and subordination. But the psychologists
studying the chess-players are engaged in an enterprise directed to
elucidating in a strictly causal sense the complex interrelation between
human physiology, consciousness and action. Nietzsche's intention, by
contrast, although not devoid of causal implications, is much closer to
Conrad's when Conrad says in one of his Prefaces that he wants above all
to make the readers of his novels 'see'—see, that is, from Conrad's
perspective as opposed to their own.
Now, it is true that so-called paradigm-shifts in Wissenschaft can also
be described in terms of 'seeing': Maclntyre, in Three Rival Versions of
Moral Enquiry, cites Kuhn's well-known example of a stone swinging
from a line which an Aristotelian sees as constrained natural motion but
a Galilean sees as a pendulum. But what the seer sees in that case is a
function of one or another of a set of alternative theories derived from
their respective paradigms which are in principle testable, even if not

(i2) A. M azur, A. Booth, and J. M. Dabbs, Testosterone and chess competition, Social Psy
chology Quarterly, LV (1992), 70-77.

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 NIETZSCHEAN SOCIOLOGY

immediately or by a single crucial experiment, agains

able to both. Does anyone seriously suppose that if Ar
until today, he would still be an unreconstructed 'Aristot
of physical theory (13)? To agree that 'presupposition
impossible is not to deny that some presuppositions gener
inaccuracies in Wissenschaft than others. The function
aphorism, by contrast, is much more akin to what w
Wittgensteinian terms the correction of 'aspect-blindness' in the
reader—including, it may well be, the inability which Wittgenstein
deplored to see that what the reader supposes to be a causal question is in
fact a conceptual one (14).
On the other hand, this is not to say that a Nietzschean sociology
would be a Wittgensteinian sociology. A Wittgensteinian sociology
would presumably be a philosophical exercise of the kind proposed in
Wittgenstein's (and also Collingwood's) name by Peter Winch, whereby
the reader is pressed to acknowledge that sociologies are indeed no more
than idiosyncratic language-games embedded in local forms of life and
that, accordingly, the criteria for the answers to the questions asked by
sociologists of religion must come not from sociology but from religion.
There is, no doubt, a valid point to be made about the need for the
enquiring sociologist to understand alien systems of belief in their own
terms before claiming to be able to explain why they are the systems in
fact adhered to by the community, institution or society under study.
Winch is right, moreover, when he says that sociology can never be a
predictive science—in the words of Humphrey Lyttleton, 'If I knew
where jazz was going I'd be there already'. But when Winch proceeds
not merely to remove sociology altogether from 'the world of statistics
and causal laws' but to call the 'quasi-causal' notion of function 'perilous
to apply to social institutions' (15), he leaves behind not only Marx and
Weber and Dürkheim but Nietzsche as well.
The recourse to aphorism is imposed on the would-be Nietzschean
sociologist not as a retreat into either scepticism or subjectivism but as a
corollary of Nietzsche's sociology of sociology. It is the least self
deluding way of talking about the pursuit, distribution and exercise of
power in a world, including an intellectual world, which anyone of good
intellectual conscience must acknowledge to be a 'disenchanted' one. To
some readers of Nietzsche, this disenchantment leads all the way from

(13) See Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, cal Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958),
Intellectual Impostures (London: Profile Books, p. 203.
1998), 70-72. (15) Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social
(14) Ludwig Wittengenstein, Philosophi Science (London: Routledge, 1958), p. 116.

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 W. G. RUNCIMAN

the proclamation that God is dead through the acknowledgemen

final, comprehensive, encyclopaedic Wissenschaft is unattainable
kind of revaluation, not to say celebration, of madness and cruelty
Foucault, once again, was later to make his own. But the substa
sociology which it implies is not a Foucauldian so much as a Law
sociology, in which contemporary civilization, so called, is reve
the disenchanted eye as a world in which the will to power finds
expression in degenerate impulses, empty rituals and self-serving
creeds, in contrast to the vanished world of Nietzsche's virile, clear
eyed, life-enhancing, pre-Socratic Greeks with their proud and noble
gods (GM, II.23). The implicit Lehre von den Herrschaftsgebilden is the
Entwicklungslehre of the will to power as it finds different expression in
different social contexts, most if not all of which either distort or repress
what only a Nietzschean sociology can reveal to be its workings. To the
reader who questions the grounds on which such a sociology lays claim
to a validity which rival sociologies are denied, Nietzsche's answer is
there in The Gay Science (§265) where he asks 'What then in the last
resort are the truths of mankind?' and replies 'They are the irrefutable
errors (unwiderlegbaren Irrtümer) of mankind'. In other words, it is no
more possible for revisionist sociologists to think their way out of
Nietzsche's discovery of the nature and function of the will to power
than for revisionist philologists to think their way out of Ventris and
Chadwick's discovery that Linear B is a form of Greek, or revisionist
astronomers to think their way out Kepler's discovery of the elliptical
orbits of the planets. Instead, such discoveries, whatever reactions they
may provoke at the time when they are made, become in due course, as
Nietzsche says in Human, All Too Human (§25), as boring as the good
old multiplication tables: what is the relevance of 'perspectivism' if
there is no perspective from which 12X12 is, or could be, anything but
144, Linear B anything other than Greek, or the planetary orbits any
thing other than elliptical?
The trouble is, however, that it is possible, and indeed necessary, for
sociologists to think themselves out of Nietzsche's discovery of the
nature and function of the will to power; and to see why, the best way is
to look backwards from Nietzsche to Darwin and then forward to
Darwin's 20th-century successors. Nietzsche was just as aware of
Darwin as any of his contemporaries, and sometimes sounds quite
Darwinian himself (as when in the same paragraph of The Will to Power
where he says that knowledge is an 'instrument of power' he says that for
a species to 'maintain itself and increase its power' it must have a
conception of reality on which a consistent and calculable behavioural

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 NIETZSCHEAN SOCIOLOGY

schema can be based). But he had no serious understanding of the

significance of the ideas of heritable variation and competitive selection.
Although in §253 of Beyond Good and Evil he is prepared to credit
Darwin with wissenschaftlich discoveries, despite at the same time attrib
uting them to a characteristically English narrowness, dryness, and
assiduous attention to detail, in §349 of The Gay Science he denounces
Darwinism for its 'incomprehensibly one-sided' doctrine of the 'strug
gle for existence' and 'musty air of English overpopulation'; and the
'anti-Darwin' paragraphs in The Will to Power (§647, 648 and 685) and
Twilight of the Idols (§14 of 'Skirmishes in a War with the Age') simply
treat Darwin as proclaiming the victory of the strong over the weak
(which to Nietzsche is the wrong way round—much as he deplores it).
But it is neo-Darwinian theory which disqualifies even the most retro
spectively indulgent interpretation of Nietzsche's theory of the will to
power as one of the irrefutable errors. Neither Darwin nor Nietzsche
could know that, thanks to the population geneticists and molecular
biologists, the explanation of biological evolution in terms of heritable
variation and competitive selection would become an 'irrefutable error';
and we also know, despite Nietzsche's castigation of Spencer as 'deca
dent' because 'he saw something to be desired in the triumph of
altruism' (TI, 'Skirmishes', §37), and his derisory dismissal ( WP, §653)
of the 'false "altruism" of biologists', that neo-Darwinian theory can
account for altruistic as well as antagonistic behaviour-patterns. A will to
cooperate with our fellow human-beings, including some (but not all)
people to whom we are not, or not necessarily, related genetically has
coexisted alongside a will to dominate them ever since we diverged,
some 5 or 6 million years ago, from our close genetic relatives the
chimpanzees. Moreover, there is some compelling evidence from the
'unnatural' sciences that human beings as a species are programmed to
punish defectors from social contracts (16), that cooperative solutions to
what economists call common-pool resources problems can be found
without a Hobbesian (or Nietzschean) sovereign to impose them (17),
and that evolution can select from the limitless range of what game
theorists call Nash equilibria in multi-person conflicts of interest a sta
ble equilibrium that becomes a rule of fair division (18).

(i6) See Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, (17) See Elinor Ostrom, Governing the
Commons (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange, in
J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, Press, 1990).
eds, The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psycho (18) See Brian Skyrms, Evolution of the
logy and the Generation of Culture (Oxford: Social Contract (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni
Oxford University Press, 1992). versity Press, 1996).

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 W. G. RUNCIMAN

This isn't to say that present-day evolutionary psycholog

ics and game theory have solved the further questions whi
like these have raised in their turn. But the title of an inte
volume of essays published by the University of Chicago Press in
1990—Beyond Self-interest (19)—is enough to give point to the sugges
tion that one of Nietzsche's aphorisms might appropriately be turned
against himself: 'However far a man may go in self-knowledge, nothing
can be more incomplete than his image of the totality of drives which
constitute his being' (DB, §119). Sociology is still about structures of
power. But it is not all about the will to power. It is about the complex
and varying interplay between relations of domination and of coopera
tion in human institutions, communities and societies of different kinds.
It follows that rather than being bound to see the world as Nietzsche
came to see it, we are bound to subject Nietzsche's view of it to the same
treatment that he metes out to the pedants, professors and priests. We
may, thereafter, be disposed to adopt what is still a distinctively Nietz
schean perspective. History will always be, from the very un
Nietzschean perspective of G. M. Young, 'the way that Herodotus and
Fra Paolo and Tocqueville and Maitland, and all those people, saw
things happening' (20), and Nietzsche will always be one of 'those
people'. Narratives, whether of a single person's life or of humanity
itself, remain both selective and discretionary, and disenchanted
Nietzschean narratives (or the disenchanting Nietzschean aphorisms
which do duty for them) can remain compelling even if the ostensibly
wissenschaftlich elements of his history and psychology have had to be
modified. We can continue both to see and to see through academic in
stitutions with Nietzschean eyes and to recognize, even in the eigentlich
wissenschaftlichen Menschen to whom Nietzsche does at one point
concede (BGE, §6) a little piece of knowledge-seeking mental clockwork
ticking away by itself, the basic desire to impose their personal
perspectives on their colleagues. What else, after all, am I doing in
publishing this article? But once we admit the possibility of genuinely
collaborative intellectual endeavour, we are bound to see the 'irrefutable
errors' as irrefutable not simply by imposition and manipulation driven
by the will to power but by acceptance of a progressive series of intel
lectual innovations which pass a test of attempted disconfirmation
independent of the psychological and institutional hold of pedants,
professors and priests over their pupils and acolytes.

(i9) Jane J. Mansbridge, ed., Beyond (2o) G. M. Young, Victorian England:

Self-interest (Chicago: Chicago University
Portrait of an Age (2nd. Edn. Oxford: Oxford
Press, 1990). University Press, 1953), p. 185.

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 NIETZSCHEAN SOCIOLOGY

IV

At this point, I may appear to have started to build up a distinctively

Nietzschean sociology only to knock it down. But although a sociology
derived exclusively from the supposedly universal significance of the
will to power is refutable, any sociology which succeeds in becoming one
of the 'irrefutable errors' will have to have passed the test of Selbst
erkenntnis that Nietzsche's sociology of sociology itself does, on my view
of it, pass. Nietzsche is right to argue that all accounts of the world in
which we find ourselves are given from the observer's particular per
spective, not just for the logical reason that there cannot be a view from
nowhere but for the sociological reason that no sociologist's writings can
be causally independent of whatever his or her social context may be;
and since this sociological proposition can be applied to itself without
generating an Epimenides paradox, it can become one of what Nietzsche
calls 'our' truths. A Lehre von den Herrschaftsgebilden, even if it goes no
further than to expose the Herrschaftsgebilden which are intrinsic to the
institutional practice of sociology itself, will to that extent have trans
cended successfully the 'premature hypotheses, the fictions, the good
stupid will to "believe", the lack of suspicion and patience' which he
says will be found by anyone who studies the historical development of
any individual Wissenschaft (BGE, §192).
Any suggestion of this kind that a properly conducted wissenschaftlich
study of Wissenschaft can discriminate between good Wissenschaft and
bad may seem merely to substitute one paradox for another. Isn't one
sociologist's assertion that a rival sociologist is guilty of a 'good stupid
will to "believe"' just another instance of itself? Even the select band of
scholars of good intellectual conscience who can't be accused of fudging
their results, or suppressing observations which conflict with their
prejudices, or allowing themselves to be influenced by the preferences
and priorities of their patrons or paymasters, can't claim to be seeing the
world from a perspective which is on that account privileged over all the
rest. Agreed: nobody can deny that German sociology, including Ger
man sociology of sociology, is different from French sociology, including
French sociology of sociology, or claim that Weber would have written
about sociology and the sociology of sociology exactly as he did if he
had lived his life in France any more than that Dürkheim would have
written about them exactly as he did if he had lived his life in Germany.
But that doesn't prevent Weber and Dürkheim from finding themselves
compelled to agree, among other things, that their respective writings

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 W. G. RUNCIMAN

are alike the product of their different personal Moral and social
Umwelt.

I accordingly conclude that Nietzsche has put forward sociological

arguments which do convincingly address the explanation of the nature
and scope of sociological enquiry without thereby undermining their
own claims on the reader's assent. It might still be argued against this
conclusion that Nietzsche himself sees all ideas about ideas as merely the
first term in an infinite regress: as he puts it (BGE, §289), 'Every philo
sophy also conceals another philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding
place, every word is also a mask'. But this doesn't bring to a halt what he
is prepared to call the 'steady and strenuous process' of Wissenschaft
(HATH, §16). However many masks are behind the first, to remove the
first is to have exposed and therefore discovered something. There can
be a wissenschaftlich sociology of Wissenschaftssoziologie, just as there can
be a wissenschaftlich history (or as Nietzsche would say, 'genealogy') of
historiography. Nietzsche's contention that the wissenschaftlich conclu
sions we advance are merely masks concealing our shifting impulses and
desires still leaves him and us with some 'irrefutable errors', including
the proposition that behind the mask of the wissenschaftlich Mench can
always be discerned both a personal Moral and a social Umwelt.
When this central tenet of Nietzsche's sociology of sociology is
applied, as it accordingly has to be, to the successive sociologies, includ
ing his own, which seek to explain why power is pursued, distributed
and exercised as it is in the different communities, institutions and
societies in the historical and ethnographic record, it may well reveal
reasons for which they fail to live up to the standard of Wahrhaftigteit to
which they lay claim. But sometimes it will not. Nietzsche and the
would-be encyclopaedic professors thus mirror each other. A Nietz
schean sociology fails for reasons which the professors are well placed to
adduce but which leave his sociology of sociology largely intact. Their
sociology of sociology (or, as it may be, their failure to acknowledge their
need for one) is damagingly compromised by his, but that doesn't mean
that one of them may not, after all, produce a Lehre von den Herr
schaftsgebilden some part of which turns out to be as unwiderlegbar as the
multiplication tables.
What better example than Weber? Weber's 'world of desires and
passions', to pick up Nietzsche's phrase in §36 of Beyond Good and Evil,
and the Lehre von den Herrschaftsgebilden which Weber conjures from it,
are clearly a reflection both of a disillusioned personal Moral and of a
social Unweit to which Bismarckian Realpolitik is central. Weber's
taxonomy of the forms of power, his conviction of the inescapability of

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 NIETZSCHEAN SOCIOLOGY

conflict, and his preference for explanations of social beh

of identifiable self-interest all derive from a distinct
which he seeks to impose on his readers. But as a Nietz
it. Unlike not only the would-be encyclopaedists but N
he expects his conclusions to be overtaken sooner or l
others. He has no unrealistic aspirations about conclu
any timeless general theory of how power is pursued
exercised in human society. He would claim no more t
those whose personal Kampf, as Nietzsche puts it (HA
'sharpened his methods' to the point that he might, perhaps, leave
behind him one or two of the 'hard won, certain, enduring truths'
(HATH, §3) which sustain their Wahrhaftigkeit in the face of any
empirical evidence or logical argument deployed against them. A post
Nietzschean sociologist like Weber analyzing the pursuit, distribution
and exercise of power in human societies is accordingly to be likened not
to a post-Newtonian astrologer or post-Darwinian creationist so much
as to a post-Gödelian number theorist who struggles to prove new
theorems (and sometimes succeeds) in full awareness that if axiomatic
set theory is consistent there are theorems which cannot be proved or
disproved and that axiomatic set theory itself cannot be proved to be free
of any possible contradiction. It is in this sense that a Lehre von der
Herrschaftsgebilden can claim Wahrhaftigkeit even after conceding that
Wahrheit is an illusion.
V

But what then, at the end of all this, is to be said about the 'ordered
hierarchy' of values? Here, Nietzsche is consistent where Weber is not,
and vice versa.
Weber, as is well known, thought that the 'unnatural' sciences are,
like the natural, value-free, but unlike them, 'value-relevant'. But for
Nietzsche, any and all Wissenschaft is value-relevant. Nietzsche's ques
tion, in §6 of Beyond Good and Evil—auf welche Moral will es (will er- )
hinaus?—isn't restricted to the 'unnatural' sciences. Look only—or
perhaps I should say, even—at the history of mathematics, and in par
ticular at Pythagoras, who was for Nietzsche, in his lecture on Heracli
tus, one of the 'purest types' of 'the sage as religious reformer' (21). The
Pythagoreans not only revered the so-called 'perfect' numbers whose
divisions add up to the number itself, but held that by understanding the

(2i) Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche (4th edn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974),
p. 396.

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 W. G. RUNCIMAN

relation between numbers they were bringing humanity

contact with the divine—a belief which, in its turn, provok
political opposition from people whose Moral was differen
own. Nietzsche's sociology and psychology of Wissenschaf
mathematics and physics just as they do to sociology and p
The 'thingness' of the natural scientists' elementary partic
Nietzsche's perspective, just as much their creation as the p
moral values are creations of theirs. The paradox is that Nie
exempts himself from the apparently self-defeating self
implications of his own perspectivism, but this time with
sibility of an irrefutably erroneous justification. It is not as if
further than to say that, as Weber would wholeheartedly
practice of Wissenschaft requires by definition intellectu
science', scholarly integrity (Redlichkeit), and the Wahrhaft
Wahrhaftigheit which he suggests (BGE, § 172) that nobody
achieves. Nietzsche also demands of his readers that the
admiration for the kind of people he admires and contempt fo
of people he despises, even though these can, on his own ac
more than a Zeichensprache of his own emotions {BGE, §187
said in my opening remarks, lavish with value-judgement
Good and Bad Life and the Good and Bad Society; and any
fails to agree with him about those virile, clear-eyed, life
pre-Socratic Greeks is by implication morally decadent.
Weber, on the other hand, whatever the criticisms to be made of the
notion of Wertbeziehung that he took from Rickert (22), sees that
although all practitioners of Wissenschaft may be influenced by their
values, values cannot be ranked by Wissenschaft. The 'polytheism', as he
called it, of values is inescapable. His own values, as his writings attest,
were very similar to Nietzsche's. Hennis persuasively argues that Weber
read Nietzsche as a moralist, and Weber evidently shared with Nietzsche
not only his conception of intellectual integrity as a duty to be followed
at whatever personal cost but also his dislike of political hypocrisy, scorn
for wishful thinking, admiration for responsible leadership, and disdain
for the doctrines of the Sermon on the Mount. But Weber explicitly
acknowledges, in a way that Nietzsche never does, that those whose
values are different from his own are as fully entitled to theirs as he to his,
not least his pacifist colleague F. W. Foerster and those for whom, as he

(22) See W. G. Runciman, A Critique of the Methodological Status of Max Weber's

Max Weber's Philosophy of Social Science Concept of Bureaucratization, Transactions of
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, XXX
1972), p. 33, cited by Wolfgang J. Mommsen, (1980), p. 164 n. 14.
Towards the Iron Cage of Future Serfdom? on

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 NIETZSCHEAN SOCIOLOGY

says, the arms of the old churches remain 'widely and

open (23).
By this point, discussion of the relation of Nietzsch
taken us some way beyond the specific question to which
proffered an answer. But whether or not the philosop
values is as irreconcilable as Weber appears to believe
appears to deny, the relation of sociologists' values to
Wissenschaft remains as relevant as ever to the under
they see the world as they do and advance the propos
which their views of it have led them. And on this, it
today as it was in 1964 to end on the same note that F
The course of human history since Nietzsche's and We
has been such that the values which Weber shared with
if they have no transcendental validity, still, in Fleis
ing phrase, 'gardent toute leur actualité' .*

suggested
* This paper was initially given to the version submitted for publi
at a seminar
in Cambridge in May 1999. I cation. am grateful to
the members of the seminar for their contri (23) Max Weber, Wissenschaft als Beruf,
butions to the discussion, to Bernard Williams
Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre
for his comments on an earlier version and to (2nd edn. Tübingen: Mohr, 1951), p. 596.
Steven Lukes for the amendments which he

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