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Nietzsche is Peachy Because I've been derelict in my
blogging, I missed But I thought of Daniel Bell's The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,
which opens (in the introduction) with Nietzsche's predictions about
the advent of nihilism. Bell doesn't side with Nietzsche, but he does
diagnose a similar breakdown of modernity. The contradictions of the
book's title "derive from the unraveling of the threads which had once
held the culture and the economy together, and from the influence of
the hedonism which has become the prevailing value in our society." The
book's last words evoke Nietzsche as well:
Within
limits, men can remake themselves and society, but the knowledge of
power must coexist with the knowledge of its limits. This is, after
all, the oldest and most enduring truth about the human condition -- if
it is to remain all too human. So I would tentatively
suggest that neoconservatism had its roots in confronting the problems
Nietzsche identified in modern liberalism. In his essay, "Capitalism,
Socialism, and Nihilism," Irving Kristol writes that: liberal
civilization finds itself having spiritually expropriated the masses of
its citizenry, whose demands for material compensation gradually become
as infinite as the infinity they have lost. All of this was clearly
foreseen by many of the antimodern critics who witnessed the birth of
modernity. And concludes: Perhaps one
can say that the secular, 'libertarian' tradition of capitalism -- as
distinct from the Protestant-bourgeois tradition -- simply had too
limited an imagination when it came to vice... It never really could
believe that self-destructive nihilism was an authentic and permanent
possibility that any society had to guard against. It could refute Marx
effectively, but it never thought it would be called upon to refute the
Marquis de Sade and Nietzsche. So perhaps one can say, too,
that the neoconservative project was to add a refutation of Nietzsche
to conservatism's refutation of Marx. Laurence Cooper, a professor at
Carleton College, has written an essay called "Irving Kristol and the
Reinvigoration of Bourgeois Republicanism" that elaborates on this
theme, though it doesn't mention Nietzsche. It's available in this volume.
I know Reihan thinks the neoconservatives abandoned this project, but I'm not so sure.
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