Anti-Nietzsche Bibliography
(Or, Why Marx & Not Nietzsche)

compiled by Ralph Dumain

Key Critiques on the Net

On this site:

Dumain, Ralph. The Owl of Minerva: The Evolution of German Ideology Critique and Social Theory from Hegel to Nietzsche: A Sketch (2005).

Gedö, András. “The Contemporary Attack on Science”, Nature, Society, and Thought, vol. 3, no. 2, 1990, pp. 179-195.

Gedö, András. "Why Marx or Nietzsche?", Nature, Society, and Thought, vol. 11, no. 3, 1998, pp. 331-346.

On other sites:

Goldner, Loren. Ontological "Difference" and the Neo-Liberal War on the Social: Deconstruction and Deindustrialization, 2001.

Lukacs, Georg. The Destruction of Reason. Translated by Peter Palmer. London: The Merlin Press, 1980. See Nietzsche as Founder of Irrationalism in the Imperialist Period (Chapter III).

One hundred years since the death of Friedrich Nietzsche: a review of his ideas and influence—Part 1
By Stefan Steinberg
20 October 2000

One hundred years since the death of Friedrich Nietzsche: a review of his ideas and influence--Part 2
[21 October 2000]

One hundred years since the death of Friedrich Nietzsche: a review of his ideas and influence--Part 3
[23 October 2000]

Other links of interest on this site:

Crisis Consciousness in Contemporary Philosophy by András Gedö; see esp.:
        Chapter 1: "Two Aspects of Bourgeois Crisis Consciousness"
        Chapter 2: "The Contemporary Crisis in Bourgeois Philosophy"
               2. Life Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie)

"The Historical Character of the Concept of Nature" by András Gedö

"Existentialism" by Georg Lukács

Georg Lukacs on Nazism & Irrationalism: The Unity of Cynicism & Credulity

"On Unreflective Reflexivity" by R. Dumain

"A Note on My Dialectic" by Jack Lindsay

Review: Michael Mack, German Idealism and the Jew by R. Dumain

Positivism vs Life Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie) Study Guide

Books on Nietzsche & His Influence, Race, & Fascism

Ansell-Pearson, Keith. An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker: The Perfect Nihilist. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Contents. Publisher description. Sample text (including Introduction).

Aschheim, Steven E. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany: 1890 - 1990. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Golomb, Jacob, ed. Nietzsche and Jewish Culture. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Losurdo, Domenico. Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico: Biografia intellettuale e bilancio critico [Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel: Intellectual Biorgaphy and Critical Assessment]. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002.

MacIntyre, Ben. Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1992.

Mandel, Siegfried. Nietzsche & The Jews: Exaltation & Denigration. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998.

Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism?: On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy, edited by Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. See publisher description & table of contents.

Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer. New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. See table of contents.

Stone, Dan. Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain. Liverpool : Liverpool University Press, 2002. See publisher description & table of contents.

Thomas, R. Hinton. Nietzsche in German Politics and Society, 1890-1918. Manchester, UK; Dover, NH: Manchester University Press, 1983.

Wolin, Richard. The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism: From Nietzsche to Postmodernism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. See publisher description & table of contents.

Yovel, Yirmiahu. Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998.

Essays on Nietzsche, Race, Class & Fascism

Aschheim, Stephen E. "Nietzschean Socialism—Left and Right, 1890-1933," Journal of Contemporary History, 23 (April 1988), pp. 147-168.

Bull, Malcolm. "Where is the Anti-Nietzsche?" New Left Review, new series, no. 3, May-June 2000, pp. 121-145.

INTRODUCTION: Opposed to everyone, Nietzsche has met with remarkably little opposition. In fact, his reputation has suffered only one apparent reverse—his enthusiastic adoption by the Nazis. But, save in Germany, Nietzsche’s association with the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust has served chiefly to stimulate further curiosity. Of course, the monster has had to be tamed, and Nietzsche’s thought has been cleverly reconstructed so as perpetually to evade the evils perpetrated in his name. Even those philosophies for which he consistently reserved his most biting contempt—socialism, feminism and Christianity—have sought to appropriate their tormentor. Almost everybody now claims Nietzsche as one of their own; he has become what he most wanted to be—irresistible.

Cohen, Jonathan R. "Nietzsche's Elitism and the Cultural Division of Labor," in Rending and Renewing the Social Order; Hudson, Yeager (ed.) (Lewiston: Mellen Press, 1996).

ABSTRACT: Some have recently tried to show Nietzsche to be egalitarian, despite his infamous elitism. The truth, however, lies between: Nietzsche outlines (in "Human, All-Too-Human") a division of labor between society's productive members, well-ensconced in their culture, and its "avant-garde", the free spirits. The latter contribute innovative ideas which become the trelliswork on which a society's culture grows; without them there would be stagnation. Nietzsche's elitism is a calculated strategy to promote the development of this "avant-garde"; the egalitarian elements in his work reflect the fact that the hierarchy envisioned is neither exclusive in its membership nor limited in its benefits.

Franklin, A. Todd. "The Political Implications of Nietzsche's Aristocratic Radicalism," Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 37, supplement, pp. 143-50.

Landa, Ishay. "Aroma and Shadow: Marx vs. Nietzsche on Religion," Nature, Society, and Thought, vol. 18, no. 4, 2005, pp. 461-499. The latest [as of April 2007], and a must-read!

Landa, Ishay. "Nietzsche and African American Thought: A Review Essay," Nature, Society, and Thought, vol. 19, no. 3, 2006, pp. 366-378. The latest critique of academic charlatanism: Critical Affinities: Nietzsche and African American Thought, edited by Jacqueline Scott & A. Todd Franklin.

Landa, Ishay. "Nietzsche, the Chinese Worker’s Friend," New Left Review I/236, July-August 1999, pp. 3-23.

Roche, Mark W. "National Socialism and the Disintegration of Values: Reflections on Nietzsche, Rosenberg, and Broch," Journal of Value Inquiry. 26(3) (1992): 367-380.

ABSTRACT: Nietzsche's perspectivism is logically incoherent and passes over into power positivism. The philosopher of National Socialism, Alfred Rosenberg, is shown to share Nietzsche's position. National Socialism arises not from an absolute philosophy but from a relativistic position that has passed over into power positivism: because there are no universal truths, one subject or group of subjects has the right to assert its irrational truths over others. A literary analogue is evident in Broch's "The Sleepwalkers", where we see the development from an undermining of truth (Bertrand) to the arbitrary assertion of truth (Esch) and the arbitrary assertion of power (Huguenau).

Stack, George J. "Marx And Nietzsche: A Point of Affinity," Modern Schoolman, 60 (1983): 247-263:

ABSTRACT: Despite Nietzsche's well-deserved reputation for anti-communism, anti-socialism and his critique of democratic values, in his earlier writings, especially "Schopenhauer as educator", "Dawn", and "Human, All Too Human", he criticized what could be called the German "military-industrial complex," criticized his age for its social atomism, and lambasted the excesses of the capitalist class. an attempt is made to show that he was familiar with the main ideas of Marx through F A Lange and E Duhring. From time to time, he expresses Marxian socialist sentiments which reflect his indirect familiarity with the central ideas of Marx.

Thomas, Peter. "Over-Man and the Commune," New Left Review, new series, no. 31, January-February 2005, pp. 137-144. (Review of: Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico & Jan Rehmann, Postmoderner Links-Nietzscheanismus: Deleuze und Foucault; eine Dekonstruktion.)

INTRODUCTION: Few thinkers have enjoyed such widespread appeal over the last forty years as Nietzsche. The instrumentalization of the Nazi period seemingly left behind—Lukács’s dissenting voice notwithstanding—Nietzsche’s almost Heraclitean metaphors and images, visceral incarnations of some mythological wisdom which always seems to be in excess of itself, have fascinated theorists from the whole range of the political spectrum. For some, such as Kaufmann and Rorty, Nietzsche dissolved philosophy into an aesthetic play and a relativism entirely in accord with, but lying beyond, the values of the liberal democracies. For others—in the so-called ‘New Nietzsche’ emerging from post-war France—his critique of the overweening pretensions of the western philosophical tradition seemed to offer the possibility to begin philosophy again, as a post-philosophy. While this current of interpretation was not too shy to appropriate some of Nietzsche’s concepts for a radical critique of contemporary bourgeois society—one thinks in the first instance of Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze—its presupposition was that Nietzsche himself was an essentially apolitical philosopher, an innocent victim of right-wing distortion whose ‘indeterminacy’ permitted an attempt to expropriate him for the Left.

Winchester, James. "Nietzsche's Racial Profiling," in Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy, edited by Andrew Valls (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), chapter 13. See also my comments in my New Year's Resolution: Exploring Philosophical Cultures (Dec. 2003 - Jan. 2004).

Miscellaneous Books of Interest on Nietzsche

Nietzsche and Science, edited by Gregory Moore and Thomas H. Brobjer. Aldershot, Hants, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003.

Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge, and Critical Theory: Nietzsche and the Sciences I, edited by Babette E. Babich; in cooperation with Robert S. Cohen. Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999. (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science; v. 203)

Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II , edited by Babette E. Babich; in cooperation with Robert S. Cohen. Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999. (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science; v. 204)

Babich, Babette E. Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.

Houlgate, Stephen. Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Criticism of Metaphysics. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Contents.

Parkes, Graham, ed. Nietzsche and Asian Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. See publisher description & table of contents.

Sloterdijk, Peter. Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism; translation by Jamie Owen Daniel; foreword by Jochen Schulte-Sasse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Waite, Geoff. Nietzsche’s Corps/E: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, The Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.

Other Essays of Interest on Nietzsche

Babich, Babette E. "On the Analytic Continental Divide in Philosophy: Nietzsche's Lying Truth, Heidegger's Speaking Language, and Philosophy," in A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy, edited by C. G. Prado (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2003), pp. 63-104.

Other Works of Possible Relevance

Williams, Raymond. The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, edited and introduced by Tony Pinkney. London; New York: Verso, 1989.

Selected Nietzsche Resources on the Net

The Nietzsche Channel

HyperNietzsche

Nietzsche's Features - Nietzsche, Friedrich

Friedrich Nietzsche Society

New Nietzsche Studies

Brian Leiter's Nietzsche Blog