Philosophy & Rhetoric

Philosophers and political scientists alike have habitually overlooked Friedrich Nietzsche's contributions to modern political theory, the sum of which constitutes a remarkably original alternative to the conventional precepts of both liberalism and democracy. "Few of the discussions of Nietzsche's politics are long," Bruce Detwiler writes, "and those that are (with some notable recent exceptions) tend to be of low quality, often inspired more by the political passions of the day than by any commitment to dispassionate analysis of the subject at hand" (1990, 1). The Third Reich's enthusiastic appropriation of Nietzsche's philosophy, and the pall that it cast over his subsequent reputation, explains much about why scholars for decades shied away from validating his distinctive contributions to modern political philosophy.

Even Nietzsche's intellectual redeemers, however, complicated matters in this regard. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche's esteemed biographer and translator, rescued his subject from historical and political disrepute by maintaining, in Keith Ansell-Pearson's summation, "that Nietzsche was not a political thinker at all, but someone who was mainly concerned with the fate of the solitary, isolated individual removed from the cares and concerns of the social world" (1994, 1).¹ During the 1970s and 1980s, French poststructuralist philosophers challenged Kaufmann's standard interpretation of Nietzsche by pursuing the broad implications of Nietzsche's insights on language. Such insights scandalized longstanding beliefs in the priority of truth and reason over linguistic artifice and thus amounted to a withering critique of the very foundations of Western metaphysics and rational empiricism.² The resultant Anglo-American reception of this so-called new Nietzsche, which lionized his contributions to modern views of language, truth, and aesthetics, nonetheless replicated Kaufmann's tendency to underestimate Nietzsche's uniquely valuable political insights.³

Owing to these receptions of Nietzsche's thought, modern commentators have frequently dismissed his political philosophy for its alleged naiveté and [End Page 372] recklessly antiliberal iconoclasm.⁴ Daniel Conway submits that Nietzsche's political thought is often acknowledged for the considerable difficulty it poses to his readers, but only in a negative sense: as a product of his confounding "writerly styles, experimental masks, pagan irreverence, antiquarian prejudices, arrested naiveté, [and] resentment of modernity" (1997, 2). Hence, Conway concludes, "Nietzsche is commonly received as an incisive critic, or as an agent provocateur, but not as a political philosopher of the first rank" (2).

Rhetoricians characteristically have been even less inclined than scholars in other fields to explore the relevance of Nietzsche's political philosophy to interrelated questions of rhetorical practice, liberal democracy, and political freedom. Indeed, in rhetorical studies Nietzsche's philosophy enjoys a highly circumscribed significance, understandably culled from the late twentieth-century vogue for the "new Nietzsche." His value to the history of the discipline is largely attributed to his reputation, to borrow Conway's words, as "an incisive critic, or as an agent provocateur."

Rhetoricians often examine Nietzsche's insights on language, truth, and aesthetics independently of his mature and provocative insights on rhetorical practices characteristic of liberal democratic politics and society.⁵ Sander Gilman, Carole Blair, and David Parent, in the introduction to their singular compendium of Nietzsche's lectures and writings on rhetoric, propose that "the centrality of rhetoric to Nietzsche's understanding of the formal functioning of language" is the most original element of his commentary on the subject (1989, xi). As such, they observe that "the third section of Nietzsche's lectures on rhetoric offers what appears to be an early formulation of his view of perspectivism" (xii) but fail to further connect his remarks on rhetoric to political concerns evident throughout his larger corpus. Nietzsche's revolutionary contributions to Western thought merit only glancing acknowledgements in Bruce Herzberg and Patricia Bizzell, James Herrick, James Golden, and George Kennedy's surveys of the rhetorical tradition, all of which cursorily refer to his significance as a defender of rhetoric against Platonism and German idealism.⁶ Douglas Thomas, author of the sole book-length study of Nietzsche's significance to modern rhetorical theory, recasts Nietzsche as a rhetorical thinker on the basis of his theories of interpretation, representation...