Nietzsche Contra Rousseau: A Study of Nietzsche's Moral and Political Thought

Keith Ansell-Pearson's book is an important and very welcome contribution to a neglected area of research: Nietzsche's political thought. Nietzsche is widely regarded as a significant moral philosopher, but his political thinking has often been dismissed as either impossibly individualistic or dangerously totalitarian. Nietzsche contra Rousseau takes a serious look at Nietzsche as political thinker and relates his political ideas to the dominant traditions of modern political thought. In particular, the nature of Nietzsche's dialogue with the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is examined, in order to demonstrate Rousseau's crucial role in Nietzsche's understanding of modernity and its discontents. Nietzsche and Rousseau share an interest in the degeneration of human civilization, each providing a history of human moral and political development, and a paradoxical critique of liberal political culture. Against this background of similar concerns, Dr Ansell-Pearson contrasts Nietzsche's sovereign and supraethical autonomous individual with Rousseau's general will, arguing that Nietzsche's conception of the Dionysian self and the world as will-to-power is a direct response to the challenge of Rousseau's romanticism and historical pessimism. For Ansell-Pearson, it is the problem of history which constitutes the leitmotif of Nietzsche's innermost think on the fate of humanity and the question of civilization. In this study, he shows that a notion of politics is neither peripheral nor incidental to Nietzsche's concerns, but central to his overall philosophical project and emergent from his attempt to effect a 'selfovercoming of morality' which is also an overcoming of history and of metaphysics, of civilization, of tradition.