Shaw, Tamsin. Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism.

(Princeton: Princeton University Press,

2007): 16-21.

In this excerpt Shaw asserts that in the early phase of Nietzsche’s philosophical

writings he criticised the contemporary version of realpolitik. This contemporary version

imbued the machinations of the State and its actors with what amounted to a version of

divine right, the leeway to implement policy that may not seem moral to the individual

but which stemmed, apparently, from a divine plane of causation.

Shaw lucidly points out that this can be viewed as a religious approximation of

Nietzsche’s idea of the will to power and the “self-justifying dynamic of human history”.

He then refutes this same argument due to Nietzsche’s emphasis on the individual, ad

extremum of course the notion of the Übermensch, highlighting this difference between

Nietzsche’s background in the “Basel” school of thought to the Berlin school from which

Ranke’s realpolitik stems and which is the same Nietzsche criticises.

Through the lens of this Schopenhauerian worldview, Nietzsche could even

justify a mutiny against the state on the grounds of the principle of the individual’s

freedom to greatness, so to speak. This is further morally justifiable by Nietzsche’s

Burckhardtian view of the origins and evolution of the state apparatus as an externally

imposed yoke upon man as opposed to being an instrument of divine hierarchy.

Nietzsche opines that the blind identification of the individual with the forcefully imposed

state apparatus is being eroded, and assuming this manifestation of expanded

consciousness for him was strongest in the greatest individuals this would further justify

such individuals’ rejection of the state and assumably the ideals of the body politic.