Abstract
Nietzsche on Resentment and Politics A “politics of resentment” involves redirecting people’s resentments towards bogeymen and scapegoats. Nietzsche puts forward a theory of this dubious phenomenon. An alternative account offered by Joseph Butler and Adam Smith characterizes resentment as a natural or moral sentiment that is usually justified; while not infallible, it is a mostly reliable guide for detecting injustice. Following Butler and Smith, some contemporary theorists therefore distinguish “resentment” from “ressentiment”. Nietzsche would not have accepted this distinction. In what Butler and Smith call resentment, he sees only misunderstood, wrongly explained ressentiment. Unlike Eugen Dühring, who puts forward a cruder form of Smith’s views, Nietzsche highlights the imaginative, almost hallucinatory power that already distinguishes Hippolyte Taine’s ressentiment (and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “zloi”) from the British theorists’ concept of resentment. Far from being exclusively aimed at the “masters”, resentment has no clearly predetermined target and can always take new directions. It is for this reason, I argue, that Nietzsche’s model better fits contemporary political constellations than other theories.
