Refreshing this quotation from Zeev Sternhell’s The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition (Yale University Press, 2010), a scholarly study of the most disturbing intellectual trend of the modern world — the ongoing lineage of intellectuals opposed to the Enlightenment tradition of reason, naturalism, individualism, and freedom. Along the way Sternhell asks, of Nietzsche’s place in the trend, an excellent series of questions:
“When a work is seized upon and shamelessly pillaged, as was Nietzsche’s by the Nazis, should one not nevertheless ask if it did not lay itself open to this treatment? Did not Nietzsche’s long campaign against humanism, equality, and democracy, despite his strong criticism not only of German nationalism but also of nineteenth-century German culture, help, by playing a leading role in the education of two generations of Germans, to open up a breach that permitted this — in itself unacceptable — usurpation? Why did a mishap of this kind not happen to the work of Tocqueville or of Mill?” (pp. 32-33)
Exactly. My thoughts Nietzsche and the Nazis are here.
See also the episode on Nietzsche in the Philosophers, Explained series.
