The 16th international conference. Friedrich Nietzsche society of great Britain and Ireland.
THE 16TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE SOCIETY OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND
23 – 25 March 2007
Nietzsche, Power & Politics
Nietzsche’s legacy for politics and political thought is profoundly ambivalent and controversial. A self-declared ‘antipolitical’ German, he condemned politics and all things political, yet he also called for a ‘grosse Politik’. While a fierce critic of modern democracy, pleased to be called an ‘aristocratic radical’, he also acknowledged democracy as the signature of modernity and valued it as a quarantine against tyranny.
Over the last 10 years Nietzsche’s significance for political thought has become a central and hotly contested area of Nietzsche research, especially in the Anglophone world: Is Nietzsche a political thinker at all, or an antipolitical philosopher of values and culture? Is Nietzsche an aristocratic political thinker who damns democracy as an expression of modern Nihilism, or can his thought, especially his thought on the Greek agon, be appropriated for contemporary democratic theory? Do Nietzsche’s criticisms of democracy allow for a politics that is compatible with democratic commitments? Nietzsche is known to be an important source of inspiration for Hannah Arendt, but does Arendt’s concept of politics and the public sphere go decisively beyond Nietzsche – or are they fundamentally compatible as political thinkers? These are some of the issues being currently debated.
Mark as favourite