Nietzsche's Political Naturalism: Beyond Logocentrism and Anthropocentrism

Abstract

This essay argues that although political thinkers frequently draw on his thought, Friedrich Nietzsche has not been read as a ‘thinker of politics’ in his own regard because the Euro-American field of political thought owes its very notion of ‘politics’ to the conceptual heritage Nietzsche's project directly challenges. The first part of the essay traces the prevailing conception of politics to Aristotle, in whose view politics is the quintessentially human ( anthropos) activity of organising collective life through reason/speech ( logos). The second part presents Nietzsche's project as a novel type of political naturalism, one which replaces the two Aristotelian axioms underpinning standard construals of politics, namely logocentrism and anthropocentrism. For Nietzsche, politics is not a unique, intra-species behaviour of certain bipedal primates, but the relational power dynamics present in all of nature, humans included. Nietzsche's political naturalism thereby gifts us an image of politics befitting the thoroughly entangled, volatile world we urgently have to come to terms with today.