Peter Marshall - Demanding the Impossible

They all strive towards the throne: it is madness they have – as if happiness sat upon the throne! Often filth sits upon the throne – and often the throne upon filth, too. 35

Nietzsche makes clear that the new idol of his contemporaries was the State. There were still peoples and herds in the world, but in Europe there were only States. He defined the State in terms which no anarchist could deny:

The state? What is that? Well then! Now open your ears, for now I shall speak to you of the death of the peoples.

The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’

It is a lie! It was creators who created peoples and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.

It is destroyers who set snares for many and call it the state: they hand a sword and a hundred desires over them.

Where a people still exists, there the people do not understand the state and hate it as the evil eye and sin against custom and law. 36

Nietzsche goes on to say that the State was invented for the superfluous. ‘I call it the State where everyone, good and bad, is a poison-drinker: the State where everyone, good and bad, loses himself: the State where universal slow suicide is called – life.’ It beckons the ‘preachers of death’. It claims that there is nothing greater on earth and that it is ‘the regulating finger of God’. It is nothing less than a ‘cunning device of Hell … a horse of death jingling with the trappings of divine honours’. The church moreover is a kind of State and the State is a ‘hypocrite dog’ because it wants absolutely to be the most important beast on earth. 37

Nietzsche did not restrict his criticism only to the Prussian State, for he attacked the whole conception of politics and political parties. Once they have been attained, he argued that liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal and subsequently nothing is more harmful to freedom. Liberalism comes to mean the ‘ reduction to the herd animal ’. 38

As for the relationship between culture and the State, Nietzsche insisted that the two are antagonists. Those who gain political power pay heavily for ‘power makes stupid ’. Culture and the State live off each other, one thrives at the expense of the other: ‘All great cultural epochs are epochs of political decline: that which is great in the cultural sense has been unpolitical, even anti-political : 39

Certainly Nietzsche was no egalitarian. He despised the ‘rabble’ and saw his contemporaries as superfluous in their pursuit of wealth and status. They were utterly corrupted by decadence and ressentiment in their ethics of material comfort and envy. In thinking that there had been only a few truly developed human beings in the past, Nietzsche however was an elitist rather than an aristocrat. Ability is not related to blood. Even the slave can show nobility by rebelling. Humanity is not condemned forever: the earth still remains free for great souls who can lead free lives. In the final analysis, Nietzsche’s philosophy is a song of freedom and creativity for the individual to make himself or herself anew. The individual and the moment have infinite value: ‘so live that you must wish to live again.’

It cannot be denied that Nietzsche’s extreme individualism leaves little room for community. His own experience of community was that it crushed individuality; he felt that a free life in his own time could only be possible for solitaries or couples. It is not unreasonable however to infer that his ideal of transformed humanity could exist like Stirner’s union of egoists, a voluntary association of individualists who meet to fulfil their particular desires. Human beings for Nietzsche may not be equal in the sense of being uniform, but this does not mean they are not equally capable, regardless of race and sex, of creating themselves and society anew. He would have man fit for intellectual war and woman fit for bearing children, ‘but both fit for dancing with head and heels’. 40 The dance for Nietzsche epitomized the union of creative energy with form, a joyful affirmation against all those who would renounce living in gloomy abstractions under moribund rules and regulations.

Emma Goldman, who was strongly influenced by Nietzsche, rightly insisted that he should not be decried as a hater of the weak because he believed in the übermensch : ‘It does not occur to the shallow interpreters of the giant mind that his vision of the übermensch also called for a state of society which will not give birth to a race of weaklings and slaves.’ 41 His ‘aristocracy’, she pointed out, was neither of birth nor of wealth but of the spirit: ‘In that respect Nietzsche was an anarchist, and all true anarchists were aristocrats.’ 42 Because of this, Nietzsche still speaks directly and eloquently to all those who wish to develop their full individuality, overthrow accepted values and received ideas, and to transform everyday life. He remains an inspiration, offering the hardest task of all, to create a free work of art out of oneself.

WITH ITS STRONG LIBERAL tradition, Britain has produced many great libertarian thinkers. With their Protestant background, they are suspicious of authority and wish to defend the right of private judgement. They celebrate individuality and are fearful of the individual being lost in the community or overwhelmed by the oppressive State. They follow John Locke in seeing a negative role for government in guaranteeing the rights to life, liberty and property. With Adam Smith, they believe that if all people are allowed to pursue their own interests in the long run it will result in the general good.

Amongst the great nineteenth-century libertarians, only William Godwin extended liberalism to anarchism. Nevertheless, the philosophers John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer both persuasively defended the individual against the State while retaining a faith in limited government. Towards the end of the century, the writers William Morris, Edward Carpenter and Oscar Wilde all condemned private property and envisaged a world without government. Although they remained on the fringes of the organized anarchist movement, their libertarian vision, combining a love of beauty with a concern for personal freedom, remains one of the most inspiring and far-sighted.

John Stuart Mill in his essay On Liberty (1859) insisted that individuality is one of the essential elements of human well-being. To this end, he quoted the German libertarian Wilhelm von Humboldt that ‘the end of man … is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole’ and that the two requisites for individuality are ‘freedom, and variety of situations’. 1 He further acknowledged his debt to the ‘remarkable American’ individualist anarchist Josiah Warren for the use of the phrase ‘the sovereignty of the individual’. 2

But while being a great libertarian and individualist, Mill was no democrat. He dreaded the ignorance of the masses and was fearful of the tyranny of the majority which socialism might involve. He seems to have mistaken Bakunin for the whole of the First International, and associated its socialism with general revolutionary destruction. Of the socialists, he was most impressed by Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier who retained a degree of inequality in their systems. 3

Nevertheless, Mill was not a complete believer in laissez-faire and he wanted a fairer distribution of wealth. He came very close moreover to the anarchist goal of communal individuality in his famous formula:

The social problem of the future we considered to be, how to unite the greatest individual liberty of action with a common ownership in the raw material of the globe, and equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour. 4