Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. ;This thesis examines the contentious question of Nietzsche's politics by situating Nietzsche's political thought in the context of his chief theoretical concerns. Attention is focused on the role the concepts of nihilism and the will play in Nietzsche's moral and political thought. With this theme of "nihilism and the will" as a way of comprehending the meaning and significance of Nietzsche's moral and political thought, the thesis shows how Nietzsche's work can be interpreted in terms of a political education that aims to educate the will to nothingness about its disfigured and misrecognised will to power through tracing the formation and deformation of the will to power in terms of its social and historical evolution. It is shown that Nietzsche develops an historical understanding of nihilism that presupposes in his work a philosophy of history. It is shown that with the notion of will to power Nietzsche does not simply posit a universal, ahistorical will to domination, but rather that the notion represents an attempt to formulate a philosophy of praxis in which questions of freedom and action bequeathed by Kant can be fruitfully posed in terms of a history of culture and discipline. This theme is explored in his two most systematic pieces of writing. On the Genealogy of Morals and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Finally, on the basis of the inquiry into his understanding of nihilism and the will to power, the thesis addresses the question of Nietzsche's politics. His overt aristocratic politics are presented and critically examined in the context of recent appraisals of his political philosophy and in the context of the antinomies of modern political theory. It is argued that Nietzsche's political thought can only be fully appreciated when situated in this latter context. It is shown that Nietzsche's moral and political thought develops two different responses to the antinomy of discipline and autonomy that lies at the centre of modern political philosophy. On the one hand his work succeeds in giving a meaning and identity to the experience of dissolution and meaninglessness, and does not impose a new metaphysics; on the other hand his work fails to reconcile the concern with discipline with a recognition of autonomy based on a principle of subjective freedom, and thus conceives of the imposition of values through philosophical legislation and political domination. The main conclusion reached is that Nietzsche's overt aristocratic politics does not adequately address the central problem of political alienation that he has located as an essential experience of nihilism in his historical and genealogical account of morals.