¹ Kaufmann, Walter, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (New York: Vintage Books, 1950)Google Scholar.

² Bergmann, Peter, Nietzsche: The Last Anti-Political German (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

³ Thiele, Leslie Paul, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individualism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

⁴ Derrida, Jacques, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, trans. Harlow, Barbara (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Derrida, Jacques, The Politics of Friendship, trans. Collins, George (London: Verso, 1997)Google Scholar; Hatab, Lawrence J., A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy: An Experiment in Postmodernism (Chicago: Open Court, 1995)Google Scholar.

⁵ Connolly, William, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

⁶ Strong, Tracy B., Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Strong, Tracy B., “Nietzsche's Political Aesthetics,” in Nietzsche's New Seas, ed. Gillespie, Michael Allen and Strong, Tracy B. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

⁷ Detwiler, Bruce, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

⁸ Lampert, Laurence, Nietzsche and Modern Times: Bacon, Descartes, and Nietzsche (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

⁹ Conway, Daniel W., Nietzsche's Dangerous Game: Philosophy in the Twilight of the Idols (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ See, e.g., Mearsheimer, John, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001), 11Google Scholar. See also Walz, Kenneth, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Nietzsche, Friedrich. Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgaube, ed. Colli, Giorgio and Montinari, Mazzino, 30 vols. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967)Google Scholar. I have followed the translations of Kaufmann, Walter for citations: Beyond Good and Evil (New York: Vintage, 1966)Google Scholar, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner (New York: Vintage, 1967), On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Vintage, 1954), which contains Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, and Nietzsche Contra Wagner. I have used the following abbreviations for citations to Nietzsche's works. All citations refer to aphorism or section number: BGE = Beyond Good and Evil; BT = The Birth of Tragedy; EH = Ecce Homo; GM = On the Genealogy of Morals; HH = Human, All Too Human; TI = Twilight of the Idols; TSZ = Thus Spoke Zarathustra; UD = “Uses and Disadvantages.”

¹² Mark Warren argues that such a separation of Nietzsche's politics from his philosophy is justified because Nietzsche fails to elaborate the political possibilities that stem from his philosophy (Warren, , Nietzsche and Political Thought [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988], 208, 246Google Scholar). Warren claims that the will to power requires the political goal of “maintaining conditions under which humans fully develop their powers as agents,” which he argues is best achieved in a pluralist egalitarian society (ibid., 226, 247). Jacques Derrida describes Nietzschean affirmation as “play” that disrupts “presence” and opens the way beyond metaphysics to infinite openness of interpretation. (Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978], 292). For Derrida, the political analogue of infinite openness of interpretation is a democratic politics that is perpetually incomplete and involves ever expanding openness to the others it excludes (Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 305–6). Derrida describes Nietzsche's antidemocratic position as an assault on the “hyperbole of democracy” that points toward the “incalculable equality” of “incommensurable subjects” and the perpetual openness of “friends of the perhaps” that may condition a politics of friendship (39, 43). Thus, Derrida takes Nietzsche's critique of democratic reductionism, not as a recipe for hierarchy, but as a spur to an egalitarian politics informed by awareness that its equality can never be complete, a perpetual quest for recognition among unknown others. William Connolly uses Nietzsche as a source for developing his postmodern agonistic democracy. Connolly draws on Nietzsche's “skeptical contestation of transcendental and teleological philosophies, indebted to his genealogies, touched by his reverence for life and the earth” while eschewing the politics of domination and hierarchy in order to “fold Nietzschean agonism into the fabric of ordinary life” (Connolly, Identity/Difference, 185, 187). Drawing on Nietzsche while contesting his choice of political metaphors, Connolly argues that “agonistic democracy” serves the “pathos of distance” and “strife,” lauded by Nietzsche, for a late-modern interdependent age (Connolly, Identity/Difference, 193). For another example of an argument for an agonistic democracy supported by Nietzsche's thought, see Lawrence Hatab, A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy (Chicago: Open Court, 1996).

¹³ Machiavelli, Prince, chap. 15.

¹⁴ Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 5.105.

¹⁵ See Orwin, Clifford, The Humanity of Thucydides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 105–6Google Scholar, on the Athenians' hubris and their revised theology.

¹⁶ Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, 2.65.

¹⁷ See Plato, Apology, 30e.

¹⁸ Strong, “Nietzsche's Political Aesthetics,” 164.

¹⁹ Ibid., 171.

²⁰ Strong, Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration.

²¹ Heilke, , Nietzsche's Tragic Regime: Culture, Aesthetics and Political Education (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998), 27Google Scholar.

²² Ibid., 24, 51, 125, 183.

²³ Ibid., 185.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Paul Glenn argues that Napoleon exemplifies Nietzsche's higher man, demonstrating that political action is an activity proper to the higher man for Nietzsche (“Nietzsche's Napoleon: The Higher Man as Political Actor,” The Review of Politics 63 [2001]: 129–58). In so doing, he properly rejects those views that would see Nietzsche as nonpolitical such as Kaufmann's apolitical reading, Bergmann's antipolitical one, Thiele's claims that he is concerned only with the regime in the soul, or claims like Nehamas's that see the arts to the exclusion of politics as the model for higher human lives.

²⁶ Rousseau, Discourse On the Origin of Inequality, pt. 1.

²⁷ Rousseau, Emile, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 40.

²⁸ Strong, Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, 293.

²⁹ Associating this politics of transfiguration with Nietzsche's teaching of eternal return, Strong transforms the doctrine that demands embracing life as it is into its opposite (Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, 287–92). Consider TSZ 3.13.

³⁰ Frederick Appel shows that Nietzsche views liberal democracy as conditioning the higher human beings and potential tyrants that would subvert its principles (Nietzsche Contra Democracy [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999], 130).

³¹ Glenn suggests that instrumental views have characterized all of Western political thought even as the goals change drastically. By contrast, he claims, Nietzsche believes “the value of a political action, just as with art, is rooted in the act itself” (“Nietzsche's Napoleon” 146), thus giving way to an “aesthetic” view of politics. By contrast, Bruce Detwiler demonstrates the higher human type to be the goal of Nietzsche's politics, an instrumental view that fits more neatly into the history of Western political philosophy (Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism, 191).

³² Neither would Nietzsche's concern with those political orders under which the highest human possibilities come to be support a view that separates the politics of the soul from external politics, as Thiele attempts (Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul, 222).

³³ TSZ, prologue, 5. This famous formulation is a vestige of Zarathustra's Persian eschatology.

³⁴ Conway, Daniel, “Ecce Caesar: Nietzsche's Imperial Ambitions,” in Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy, ed. Golomb, Jacob and Wistrich, Robert S. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 176–77Google Scholar. For Conway, Nietzsche's imperial plans are a part of Nietzsche's strategy to ensure for himself a role in shaping future European culture beyond the decadence in which he and his “anachronistic and nostalgic” hopes are implicated (“Nietzsche's Imperial Ambitions,” 190; Nietzsche's Dangerous Game, 163).

³⁵ Glenn suggests, “The failure of the higher man is thus tragic because it deprives us of something magnificent, but it is also expected” (“Nietzsche's Napoleon,” 157). Of course, if his failure is tragic, it should also be an expected and necessary consequence of his very height.

³⁶ Ibid., 154.

³⁷ Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism, 66.

³⁸ Peter Berkowitz demonstrates that philosophic command, which he calls “right making based on right knowing,” stands higher in Nietzsche's estimation of types than the grand conquerors whose health he lauds (Nietzsche: Ethics of an Immoralist [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995], 244, 246). Laurence Lampert argues that Nietzsche ultimately pursues a philosophical politics. He argues, for example, that Beyond Good and Evil reveals philosophy's essentially political task (Nietzsche's Task: An Interpretation of “Beyond Good and Evil” [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001], 303).

³⁹ Nehamas claims that Nietzsche's estimable figure beyond good and evil is “always modeled on his view of literature and the arts” (Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985], 227). In so doing, he denies Nietzsche's efforts to foster an embrace of political realities. Nehamas goes so far as to explain away Nietzsche's praise for the likes of Alcibiades and Caesar, suggesting that Napoleon receives praise as an artist “steeped in world literature” (but his canvas is Europe), and that Nietzsche's praise of Caesar ignores the historical figure and concerns Shakespeare's Caesar (227). Rather than looking for literary creations, this praise involves looking to politics in order to praise a literary figure. Nietzsche looks to politics, to The Tragedy of Julius Caesar in order to find adequate expression of Shakespeare's achievement.

⁴⁰ Cf. Machiavelli, Prince, chap. 7.

⁴¹ HH, 237; BGE, 200; TI, Skirmishes 37; TI, Ancients 2.

⁴² He describes this strategy as an “esotericism for decadents” and claims that Nietzsche's work ultimately lacks a positive teaching (Conway, Nietzsche's Dangerous Game, 152–70).

⁴³ William Connolly, Identity/Difference, 9–24, 210–22; Hatab, Lawrence J., A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy: An Experiment in Postmodernism (Chicago: Open Court, 1995)Google Scholar; Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought.