Nietzschean Defense of Democracy: An Experiment in Postmodern Politics |  | Author: Lawrence Hatab
Publisher: Open Court
Category: Book
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Sales Rank: 2696518
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 325
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Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 1.3
ISBN: 0812692950
Dewey Decimal Number: 321.8
EAN: 9780812692952
ASIN: 0812692950
Publication Date: October 13, 1999
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Product Description
In A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy, Hatab offers a new, postmodern account of democracy, freed from the traditional assumptions embodied in the Enlightenment project. Hatab advances a two-fold argument: first, that Nietzsche was wrong to repudiate democracy since democratic politics can be more amenable to his way of thinking than he imagined; second, Nietzsche was right to critique fundamental flaws in traditional democratic theory, especially the modernist emphasis on human equality, rational subjectivity, and natural rights.
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 An Agonistic Democracy March 14, 2006
Gilbert De Bruycker (Belgium)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
In his book, Hatab describes democracy as a continual contest, without having to depend on notions as a universal "human nature", a "common good" and "human equality".
He explains how Nietzsche assailed democracy as a secular, political extension of traditional religious frameworks; frameworks that are now suspect and have lost their central role in culture. Indeed, belief in God is no longer considered necessary and purely secular and scientific models are promoted to understand the world and human culture.
But our confidence in secular "truths" should be suspect because they arose in connection with the concept of that same God! The Christian image of a single, transcendent, omnipotent and benevolent God introduced the idea that all humans are free. For Hegel, the French Revolution - with its 'liberty, equality, fraternity' triad - was the ploitical realization of an ideal that first took form in religious imagination. Political developments in this way, explains Hatab, are the concrete expression of religious ideals. The Enlightenment was not a break with religion. For Hegel, its secular movement was the realization of a vision that in the past had been located in a transcendent realm and postponed for an afterlife.
Because democratic political principles are descendants of transcendent constructs that can no longer be sustained, Nietzsche saw no reason to believe in democracy and insisted on revising, in naturalistic terms the script of democracy's development. Democracy, like morality is dismantled in his analysis of master-slave and creator-herd exchanges, in his opposition to any system grounded in reason or universal human subject, and in his adoption of a decent red field of power plays among competing life forces. Political arrangements are power relations, originally manifested in the dominance of the master, followed by the counter-conquest of slave values.
The master expresses active will to power. Courage, conquest, command, produce feelings of power and are deemed "good". Cowardice, humility and dependence are deemed "bad". According to slave morality conquest is evil, harmlessness and security are good. Slave types find enhancement not through their own agency but through debilitation of others; by supplanting "power" with "justice" and "love". Nietzsche sees in this ideal a disguised form of power. The slave expresses reactive will to power.
The promotion of political equality, is the weak majority grabbing power to incapacitate the strong few. In democracy, slave values have now been redirected from the internal realms of religious imagination and moral ideals to the external public realm of political power. In democratic politics, the herd instinct actually rules and the consequence is the hegemony and promulgation of mediocracy and a vapid conformism. Philosophical justifications for political freedom have flowed from a modernist picture of a common - definable - "human nature": a unified order of needs, attributes and faculties, that can be discovered by rational examination. The subject is a "substance", the site of identity and the causal source of action and rights.
Nietzsche rejects this model of an individual, unified, substantive, rationally ordered human nature. The self is not an enduring substance, not a unified subject, not an organized unity, but an arena, for a irresolvable contest of deferring drives. There is no single subject, but a multiplicity of subjects, whose interplay and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness. Only the strong few can be given the freedom of self-direction. Most people, because of their weakness, would disintegrate. For Nietzsche, modern conceptions of justice and injustice are secular reverberations of ancient aversions of the inequities of the natural order, with the difference being that modern diagnosis and rectifications have turned away rom a divine script toward human and political projects. From a Nietzschean standpoint, if our politics is to be truly "worldly" we must accept and affirm the natural inequities of fortune.
Hatab, however, believes that it is possible to connect democracy with a version of will to power without making his mistake in believing that moral prescriptions against violence arose only by way of slave mentality, or that feeding the hungry, aiming at honesty in human relations, or treating people with kindness are signs of weakness. Such values can be life-affirming. But Hatab agrees that they are complex and always in danger of inciting life-denying attitudes and practices.
All in all, he says, Nietzsche was wrong in rejecting democracy and it can be more amenable to his way of thinking than he imagined. Hatab searches another route to democracy by sidestepping most of the machinery of political theory - especially its preoccupation with "human nature" because the fact that democracy does require that all citizens be given the same rights, can be red scribed in non-essentialist terms, does not depend upon any version of "sameness" in human beings.
Democracy, he argues, can be sustained without the traditional banner of human equality. He explains how other meanings of the word "equal" come through in nonsubstantive egalitarian discourse, such as equal respect and equal importance; how equal regard transfers egalitarianism from the substantive nature of persons to an ATTITUDE towards persons: from "human nature" to demands about how humans ought to view and threat each other.
Along this way, he reaches the conclusion that democratic practice can be understood agonistically: political judgments are not dictated, outcomes depend upon contest of speeches (the results are binding). Democratic elections allow for and depend upon peaceful exchanges and transitions of power (language is the weapon in democratic contests). Truth and expertise are much more problematic in politics than in certain professions and disciplines, and the coercive effects of political rule extend to all citizens; so an open, inclusive contest for temporary rule is more appropriate in politics.
The political contest of speeches must be repeated periodically; elections are decision procedures in matters that are globally undecidable; democracy is not rule by the people, but it is a rule which is decided by a contest among different perspectives. Democratic respect depends upon recognizing the finitude and contingency of one's own beliefs and interests. Authoritarianism is the only option when truth and error are presumed to be decisively delineated; it is confidence in truth that lends itself so easily to hierarchy and exclusion of the other! The finitude of the human condition and the agonistic pluralism of the social milieu leads him to a political preference for democracy as a procedural arrangement that is not reducible to any bounded concept of human nature.
Democracy is described as a continual political experiment, an open-ended procedure for generating and testing outcomes. He agrees that democratic procedures imply and require familiar freedoms, rights and elements of justice - within a fluid field of social forces (not human nature), i.e. a social milieu, conflict and finitude being given, prompts Hatab to a thinking that does not depend upon fixed constructions of human nature. In his analysis, the participatory element rejects aristocraticism and the procedural element insists upon an agonistic dynamic. An agonistic perspective simply stipulates that one's commitment cannot be backed up by some decisive "truth". He argues that we have to distinguish a non-foundation list ethics from a crude relativism, which tends to mean that different moral beliefs simply holds true for those who holds them. We must see the ethical field as agonistic and decide how to live - without allowing global undecibility to demoralize us, or debilitate our capacity to make local commitments. Even if there is no ultimate answer to moral questions, we cannot avoid situations in which we have to come up with answers by choosing some options and excluding others. An agonistic pluralism is 'negative' in its depiction of human nature - arguing against universality, sameness, harmony and stressing differences and conflict.
Some outstanding conclusions of his analysis are that atomic individualism is unsustainable because of the sociality of human experience (but at the same time, social relations are agonistic); that a democratic society can and should have a certain ethical concern that basic human needs be met ( participatory requirements include "positive" rights that demand some provision by the state such as the right to education, to certain level of economic sustenance); that any perspective has the opportunity to win political support and temporary power ( but it cannot claim to have "democracy" on its side, or "the people" or the "common good" or "justice"); that the notion of separation of church and state is a great gift to politics (since religious commitments have been a significant source of oppression when joined with political power); the communitarian idea is an important counterweight to liberal individualism ( the actual danger of collective envelopment of the individual, however, rekindles libertarian narratives..... along with multicultural narratives that seek to protect particular cultural orientations from being cancelled out in favor of a universal conception of community); capitalism is in part wedded to individual freedom, but socialist criticism are built on the recognition of systemic inequities); that competitive fairness demands certain public services that can give other citizens a fighting chance because it is wrong to let people who cannot compete go to grief (but proposals for complete outcomes run afoul of agonistic conditions); that freedom is enhanced by submission to political constraints (politics is the continual interaction of competing forces, ambiguous meanings and unstable signifiers: individual liberty, order, authority, equality...); rights are social phenomena guaranteed by the power of the state (they can be defined by way of the absence of decisive truth in politics and the absence of essences in human nature - the notion of an unstable self subverts the grounding of rights in any identifiable "human nature"); that we must permit hateful or false speech, because a banned belief might turn out to be true ( free speech demands that we risk our beliefs by inviting opposition).
Concerning that last point, it might be argued that we must not respect viewpoints that deliberately speak against pluralistic openness and democratic values. But Hatab believes that we might have faith that an airing of such a viewpoint and vigorous opposition to it in the public arena would weaken it ( censoring a troublesome belief may strengthen it - commitments against racism might atrophy in the wake of a silenced opposition). There is some truth he says in every viewpoint (even a racist one) and we can learn about the fears of otherness that give rise to racist agendas, with the hope that we might learn how to forestall or diminish them.
In his opinion an agonistic democracy should conceive itself as an oscillation between capitalistic and socialistic narratives, but intrusive projects of redistribution are unjust and oppressive - guaranteeing competitive opportunity suffices. Many problems indigenous to capitalism can be ameliorated by democratic principles to the economic relationships of workers and employers.
 The Domestication of Nietzsche October 17, 2001
8 out of 16 found this review helpful
As anyone with a good understanding of Nietzsche's thought can see, the only possible title for a book which is more absurd and oxymoronic than "A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy" would be "A Christian Defense of Satanism." "Neo-Nietzscheans," like Professor Hatab, never fail to remind us of Nietzsche's contempt for the nationalists and racists who would later appropriate his ideas, yet they ignore the obvious fact that Nietzsche would feel no less disgust at his misuse by today's version of the scholarly oxen he loathed a century ago. Unless you want a calculated manipulation of Nietzsce's thought in order to justify the leftism of the average academic philosopher, do not read this book or any other book written by a "Neo-Nietzchean". Like all great philosophers, Nietzsche's thought is far too complex to be appropriated by an existing political ideology without blatantly contradicting much of what he wrote and stood for. If you want to know what Nietzsche really said, read Nietzsche and no one else.
 Makes Nietzshe accessible in terms of today's issues. October 14, 1999
Al DeLucia (currier449@aol.com) (Philadelphia, PA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is a good companion book to Hatab's earlier Myth and Philosophy. These books are a good doorway not only into Nietzsche but into the thinking of many great philosophers. Ageless issues are put into contemporary terms through very accessible language. Mr. Hatab well integrates the past with the present, and speculates on where this legacy and our present interpretation of it will likely lead us in the future. I cannot yet locate his first book, Nietzshe and Eternal Recurrence, but hope to soon.
Nietzschean insights may lead to conclusions unseen by him. October 6, 1998
J. William Nelson (buhayra@aol.com) (Monterey, California)
4 out of 7 found this review helpful
Nietzsche opposed the democracy he knew based on its underlying theories of Christian-derived egalitarianism of essence, but how does democracy as actually practiced stand up under Nietzschean criticism? As analyzed by Hatab, democracy not only stands its ground, but stands tall as perhaps the only viable way to achieve and maintain Nietzsche's agonistic, non-foundational hierarchy of merit.
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