Umberto Ecos first novel, The Name of the Rose, narrates a telling fictional story of how a medieval religious order tried to protect itself from the subversive power of laughter. It is the story of William of Baskerville, who came to visit a monastery that was disturbed by the mystery of a suicide.

In this postmodern novel, the concept of truth is possessed by the character of a poor woman, who is depicted as harmless, but tempting. But Adso, the novice, succumbs to his basic instinctssex and love. While he is the supreme portrayal of human innocence, Adso is also the inner desire of the young for existential meaning and moral significance.

Modern logic might reveal the story as something about how a reasonable man will attempt to solve a mysterious crime. Yet Eco actually foretells a postmodern twist describing the excruciating end that awaits the innocent when accused as a threat to old norms and tradition. Linguistically, Eco does not present his point by means of the plot. He employs his postmodern device by intertwining texts after texts after texts. While readers would force their way by making love the central theme of the story, the right conclusion can only be that truth is a paradox that is appealing but at the same time dangerous.

We can find a similar theme in Friedrich Nietzsches The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche projects a tapestry of human existence, arguing that reason is nothing but a despondent Western autocracy the aim of which is to destroy human passion. It is the latter, not the former, that powers the inner drive of humankind toward personal achievement and glory. Against the Greek idea of a world that is characterized by nobility and order, the dichotomy of the Apollonian and the Dionysian as proposed by the German thinker intends to show that human existence is determined by a mixture of the moral good and the universes dark forces.

Very close to the same decade that Eco published his remarkable literary masterpiece and more than a century after Nietzsches classic appeared, Filipino historian Reynaldo Ileto published his thought-provoking and highly influential Pasyon and Revolution. The monograph, which is an attempt to defy the grand narratives that mostly define the way history is written, inaugurated the birth in Philippine historiography of an idea known to scholars as history from below. For many years, Filipinos have been forced to read their history from the perspective of their colonial masters. In this emerging paradigm, history is read from the point of view of its voiceless victims.

Iletos work, which is comparable in eloquence to Renato Constantinos The Philippines: A Past Revisited, begins with the story of the strange uprising of a religious and political group called Lapiang Malaya. In May 1967, according to Iletos account, the group met its tragic end from the automatic weapons of the police. Scores of its members would lie lifeless on the street. What happened to the group is a tragedy, but hegemonic forces in Filipino elite culture simply painted the struggle of Lapiang Malaya as nothing but a comic disruption of the familiar and explicable patterns in the countrys history.

The vapid and insular interpretation of elite culture obfuscates the grievous in Philippine politics. Masahiro Kitano thinks that as comedy should pursue the ridiculous and the ridiculous is defined as a kind of error, it follows that an error plays a central role both in tragic and comic plots. The comic dimension of social reality is forced upon the consciousness of the people not only by means of the economic leverage of the oligarchy, but also through high culture. In our country, politics is all about entertainment, not substance. This has become the nefarious strategy of societys triangular structure in order to perpetuate the blind yet unchallenged loyalties of the masses to their own oppressors.

* * *

Christopher Ryan Maboloc, PhD is assistant professor of philosophy at Ateneo de Davao University.

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History from below - Inquirer.net

The artist Maira Kalman summed up the current popular regard for walking when she said, Go out and walk. That is the glory of life.

Philosophers and thinkers have long pushed the idea of walking as respite, as a creative fountain or as Nietzsche said: "Only thoughts that are reached by walking have value." But what if walking, far from being benign and noble, instead represents just another conflict of our ongoing culture wars, where the forces of progress have whitewashed the past to reach the present? This proxy battle celebrates the walker of leisure and ignores those who walk because they have no other choice.

Photo: Maggie Shannon for The Outline

Photo: Maggie Shannon for The Outline

In philosophical evocations, walking is routinely an experience described, and subscribed to, by those who don't need to walk. Walking is luxury, a high-minded ramble of the enlightened; its elitism hiding behind a ruse of apparent accessibility. Exactly what you think about when you think about walking is your own internal indicator of where you live, your status, your wealth, your class. Even walking at its seemingly most egalitarian can be anything but. When the father of America's National Parks, John Muir, declared that going out was really going in, he was speaking to people with time, to people whose lives werent monopolized by survival.

Walking is an activity through which the haves are separated from the have-nots. There are the walkers of leisure and the walkers of necessity, who walk to survive, because there is no other way for them to move.

All across the world people walk. They walk in cities not designed for those without means. They walk not as a hobby, or to keep fit, or to save the environment, or to think. They walk out of necessity. While walkers of leisure may strive to escape humanity, indentured walkers seek it out; for trade, for food, for communication, for life. The essayist Edward Abbey once described walking as ... the only form of transportation in which a man proceeds erect like a man on his own legs," forgetting that the walker of necessity is often slumped, tired, searching for satisfaction at the destination, rather than from the act of walking itself.

Photo: Maggie Shannon for The Outline

Photo: Maggie Shannon for The Outline

In much of the world, this walking for survival remains something of a national pastime, with the people who need it most often ill-served by the hand of the state. In Botswana's barren Tuli Block game reserve, I watched workers hitchhike from the side of the road after work, surrounded by a wilderness of lions, elephants, hyenas, and leopards. Across the border in South Africa, I witnessed how a lack of infrastructure makes the process of walking uniquely dangerous. The same scene played on repeat in villages dotted all over the country; groups of men, women and children wandering the roads day and night, often without any source of light save for the headlights of the cars speeding by as darkness fell. The lack of streetlights, crosswalks, and sidewalks make the very process of walking hazardous, with pedestrians accounting for a large proportion of road deaths in the country. This situation is acknowledged by alcohol labeling that sometimes features a unique warning: Dont Drink and Walk on the Road, You May Be Killed.

Social attitudes towards walking historically show a stark divide depending on who's doing the walking. When Muir was trailblazing across America, he was dismissive of the native Americans who'd forged such paths, regarding them as dirty and subhuman in the face of an ever wondrous nature. While his attitudes would change over time, this idea of walking being almost holy when practiced by some, dangerous when practiced by others, has long been established. Lauren Elkin's recent book Flneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London, notes that even today, walking for women remains a dangerous practice in cities around the world, and in the past was something that women were culturally prevented from engaging in. Both wondering and wandering were reserved solely for men.

In Australia the term walkabout has long been used to describe Aboriginal boys becoming men via long periods spent alone in the bush. In recent years the term walkabout has had to be recharacterized as "temporary mobility" due to the negative connotations it has come to represent. In regard to Nicholas Roeg's 1971 film Walkabout, which follows the intertwining stories of two white city kids and an Aboriginal boy, the critic Roger Ebert wondered: "Is it a parable about noble savages and the crushed spirits of city dwellers? That's what the film's surface suggests, but I think it's about something deeper and more elusive: the mystery of communication."

Walking is usually nothing more than a reflection of where we are at any given time. When Napoleon force-marched his men across the Egyptian desert, telling them upon seeing Giza's pyramids, "Forward! Remember that from those monuments yonder 40 centuries look down upon you," he was basking in the realization that such endeavors created on the backs of men were part of a living history. This was walking as triumphalism, for one man at least. But walkings simplicity allows it to take on infinite forms and meanings; virtue or vice. Stalin used walking and work to break the spirit of men in the Soviet Union's Gulags, while Slavomir Rawicz's book The Long Walk details a journey of thousands of kilometers to escape them. Martin Luther King Jr., like others before him, seized the idea of walking as freedom, as protest, and in the 1963 March on Washington, a walk of less than a mile, stoked government fears that a domestic invasion was afoot. You can strip a man of everything, but short of penning him in, you can't strip his ability to walk.

Walking is now big business. In almost every city in the world you'll find some kind of walking tour; modest, extravagant, historical, nature-gazing. There are walking retreats, walking holidays, walking to keep fit, walking as education, walking to "find yourself." When we're not thinking, we're achieving. We record the number steps taken, the calories burned, the Instagram photos taken, the milestones ticked off on any one of the hundreds of fitness apps available. Walking in many ways has become a luxury pursuit, serviced by multi-billion dollar brands like The North Face and Patagonia originally started as bootstrapped operations to serve a few enthusiasts that sell adventure, wilderness and silence to walkers everywhere. Well, to some walkers, at least.

Walking is now at the forefront of a push to boost public health, with its virtues increasingly discovered by authorities the world over. The U.K.'s National Health Service currently touts a myriad of benefits, from lowering the risk of certain cancers to controlling weight to reducing stress levels. Indeed one of the reasons walking is so good for us is ironically because we're so bad at it. Walking is complicated, and humans walk like a bad, inefficient pendulum. In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit captures this simultaneous complexity and simplicity of walking:

But what of the hardship of indentured walking? The sore limbs and muscles, the weight of the water on your head, the goods in your arms, or the child on your back. Walking for miles on end, only to wake up and do the same walk all over again; tired, stiff, aching.

When George A. Romero created the modern zombie genre in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead, he somehow captured this awkwardness, the exaggerated stiltedness as the undead seemed to be learning to walk all over again. Romero's allegorical films over the following decades served up social commentary on many of the perceived ills in American society, from consumerism to racism to suburbanization, something that with a sort of successive approximation led to perhaps the darkest depiction of this gait: AMC's hit show The Walking Dead. With its zombies literally called walkers, the show and the graphic novels before it unintentionally depict the less considered side of walking, with modern society using every tool it can lay its hands on to protect itself from the walkers. In this divided society, the walkers are reduced to using only their ability to walk against the people of means at least until they can sink their teeth into them.

Photo: Maggie Shannon for The Outline

Photo: Maggie Shannon for The Outline

The safe zones of The Walking Dead, brief islands of tranquility until they're eventually breached, are reflected in the design of many of the world's cities. When Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann set about renovating Paris in the 1850s, his assignment wasn't to create the walking wonderland we may know today, but rather an attempt to eradicate disease, overcrowding and crime, and allegedly the threat of revolution. Narrow streets where revolt could be and had been fomented were demolished, in their place vast boulevards carved. Haussmann would be sacked without finishing the job, but he set in motion a vast vacuum that the state and later the walkers of leisure could fill once again.

Walking through the streets of Paris late last year, it was hard not to be won over by the city, but the centuries of social cleansing that followed Haussmann's renovation has resulted in a Paris today where the walkers of need are marooned outside the walls, in forgotten banlieues, unable to take advantage of the boulevards, instead penned into great poverty traps. Such is the stark inequality at the heart of this that a new lexicon has arisen to deal with it: the comfortable suburb is the banlieue aise, the disadvantaged suburb the banlieue dfavoris. As thousands of cars are set alight in these banlieue dfavoris every summer, it's hard not to be reminded of The Walking Dead.

In Doha, Qatar, I witnessed a city where planners had been confronted by the opposite problem: to raise a city from the dust where there had been none before it. Founded in the early 1800s, but transformed by the discovery of oil and gas, this archly global city has in recent decades seen huge injections of cash. Billions of dollars have been pumped into skyscrapers, modern art and museums, designed by world-renowned architects like Jean Nouvel and I.M. Pei. Visiting it, it seemed fitting that the city was recently named one of the New7Wonders Cities "...that best represent the achievements and aspirations of our global urban civilization."

The end result for the inhabitants however, is a city dripping in wealth but permanently under construction, where Land Cruisers driven by impeccably dressed young men careen at high speeds down monstrous highways. When the city's indentured laborers have their rare days off, they make their way to the waterfront, not via carefully designed sidewalks but crammed against the barriers of highways, playing a constant game of chicken with the very fabric of the place they live, the place they're building.

In some, small, significant way, however, the walkers of necessity may be having the last laugh, realizing at least some of the benefits of a lifestyle we were designed for, rather than the one of endless progress. As much of the world struggles with soaring levels of obesity and diabetes, it's not hard to see why we're being encouraged to get out and walk more. In doing so we should perhaps come to the realization that walking can be both indentured and free, that the walkers of necessity have something to offer that much of the modern world now claws for. For now, the irony persists that the more we embrace the romanticism of walking, the more we seem to look down on those who walk because they have to.

Walking recently in the valleys of North Wales, far away from the inequalities of the city, on routes and paths that appeared Genesis-like, but were carved by need and nurture and nature, I was steadily seduced by Maria Kalman's words. The moorgrime thick round my shoulders, the silence at times all-embracing save for the work of the inefficient pendulum. I'd escaped the dumbfound town, discovered like Henry David Thoreau that This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night, and become sodden, enlightened, charged revived even of the glory of life.

On my return, I tried to remember that the dirt in the soles of my boots contained no less than an alternative story of man.

Read more from the original source:
this way - The Outline

You could say I was red-pilled by Nietzsche.

Thats how white nationalist leader Richard Spencer described his intellectual awakening to the Atlantics Graeme Wood in June. Red-pilled is a common alt-right term for that eureka moment one experiences upon confrontation with some dark and previously buried truth.

For Spencer and other alt-right enthusiasts of the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, that dark truth goes something like this: All the modern pieties about race, peace, equality, justice, civility, universal suffrage thats all bullshit. These are constructs cooked up by human beings and later enshrined as eternal truths.

Nietzsche says the world is in constant flux, that there is no capital-T truth. He hated moral and social conventions because he thought they stifled the individual. In one of his most famous essays, The Genealogy of Morality, which Spencer credits with inspiring his awakening, Nietzsche tears down the intellectual justifications for Christian morality. He calls it a slave morality developed by peasants to subdue the strong. The experience of reading this was shattering, Spencer told Wood. It upended his moral universe.

There is, of course, much more to Nietzsche than this. As someone silly enough to have written a dissertation on Nietzsche, Ive encountered many Spencer-like reactions to his thought. And Im not surprised that the old German philosopher has become a lodestar for the burgeoning alt-right movement. There is something punk rock about his philosophy. You read it for the first time and you think, Holy shit, how was I so blind for so long?!

But if you read Nietzsche like a college freshman cramming for a midterm, youre bound to misinterpret him or at least to project your own prejudices into his work. When that happens, we get bad Nietzsche, as the Weeks Scott Galupo recently put it.

And it would appear that bad Nietzsche is back, and he looks a lot like he did in the early 20th century when his ideas were unjustly appropriated by the (original) Nazis. So nows a good time to reengage with Nietzsches ideas and explain what the alt-right gets right and wrong about their favorite philosopher.

In her recent book about the rise of the alt-right, Irish academic Angela Nagle discusses their obsession with civilizational decay. Theyre disgusted by what they consider a degenerate culture, she told me in a recent interview.

Nietzsche made these same arguments more than 100 years ago. The story he tells in The Genealogy of Morality is that Christianity overturned classical Roman values like strength, will, and nobility of spirit. These were replaced with egalitarianism, community, humility, charity, and pity. Nietzsche saw this shift as the beginning of a grand democratic movement in Western civilization, one that championed the weak over the strong, the mass over the individual.

The alt-right or at least parts of the alt-right are enamored of this strain of Nietzsches thought. The influential alt-right blog Alternative Right refers to Nietzsche as a great visionary and published an essay affirming his warnings about cultural decay.

Future historians will likely look back on the contemporary West as a madhouse, the essays author writes, where the classic virtues of heroism, high culture, nobility, self-respect, and reason had almost completely disappeared, along with the characteristics of adulthood generally.

In his interview with the Atlantic, Spencer, an avowed atheist, surprised Wood with a peculiar defense of Christianity: that the religion is false but it bound together the civilizations of Europe.

Spencers view is common among the alt-right. They have no interest in the teachings of Christ, but they see the whole edifice of white European civilization as built on a framework of Christian beliefs. From their perspective, Christendom united the European continent and forged white identity.

Its a paradox: They believe the West has grown degenerate and weak because it internalized Christian values, but they find themselves defending Christendom because they believe its the glue that binds European culture together.

Last August, Vox Day, a prominent alt-right thinker (who often cites Nietzsche in his posts), laid out the central tenets of the alt-right in a post titled What the Alt-Right is. There are a number of revealing points, one of which reads:

The Alt Right believes Western civilization is the pinnacle of human achievement and supports its three foundational pillars: Christianity, the European nations, and the Graeco-Roman legacy.

Nietzsche accepted that Christianity was central to the development of Western civilization, but his whole philosophy was focused on convincing people that the West had to move beyond Christianity.

When Nietzsche famously declared that God is dead, he meant that science and reason had progressed to the point where we could no longer justify belief in God, and that meant that we could no longer justify the values rooted in that belief. So his point was that we had to reckon with a world in which there is no foundation for our highest values.

The alt-right skipped this part of Nietzsches philosophy. Theyre tickled by the death of God thesis but ignore the implications.

Nietzsche's argument was that you had to move forward, not fall back onto ethnocentrism, Hugo Drochon, author of Nietzsches Great Politics, told me. So in many ways Spencer is stuck in the 'Shadows of God' claiming Christianity is over but trying to find something that will replace it so that we can go on living as if it still existed, rather than trying something new.

The alt-right renounces Christianity but insists on defending Christendom against nonwhites. But thats not Nietzsche; thats just racism. And the half-baked defense of Christendom is an attempt to paper over that fact.

Nietzsche was interested in ideas, in freedom of thought. To the extent that he knocked down the taboos of his day, it was to free up the creative powers of the individual. He feared the death of God would result in an era of mass politics in which people sought new isms that would give them a group identity.

The time is coming when the struggle for dominion over the earth will be carried on in the name of fundamental philosophical doctrines, he wrote. By doctrines, he meant political ideologies like communism or socialism. But he was equally contemptuous of nationalism, which he considered petty and provincial.

Listening to Spencer talk about Nietzsche (and, regrettably, I listened to his Nietzsche podcast) is like hearing someone who never got past the introduction of any of his favorite books. Its the kind of dilettantism you hear in first-year critical theory seminars. He uses words like radical traditionalist and archeofuturist, neither of which means anything to anyone.

Like so many superficial readers of Nietzsche, Spencer is excited by the radicalism but doesnt take it seriously. Spencers rejection of conventional conservatism clearly has roots in Nietzsches ideas, but Spencers fantasy of a white ethnostate is exactly what Nietzsche was condemning in the Germany of his time.

Nietzsche's way forward was not more [racial] purity but instead more mixing, Drochon told me. His ideal was to bring together the European Jew and the Prussian military officer. Spencer, I take it, only wants the latter. Nietzsche, for better or worse, longed for a new kind of European citizen, one free of group attachments, be they racial or ideological or nationalistic.

Racists find affirmation in Nietzsches preference for Aryan humanity, a phrase he uses in several books, but that term doesnt mean what racists think it means. Aryan humanity is always contrasted with Christian morality in Nietzsches works; its a reference to pre-Christian Paganism. Second, in Nietzsches time, Aryan was not a racially pure concept; it also included Indo-Iranian peoples.

People often say that the Nazis loved Nietzsche, which is true. Whats less known is that Nietzsches sister, who was in charge of his estate after he died, was a Nazi sympathizer who shamefully rearranged his remaining notes to produce a final book, The Will to Power, that embraced Nazi ideology. It won her the favor of Hitler, but it was a terrible disservice to her brothers legacy.

Nietzsche regularly denounced anti-Semitism and even had a falling-out with his friend Richard Wagner, the proto-fascist composer, on account of Wagners rabid anti-Semitism. Nietzsche also condemned the blood and soil politics of Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian statesman who unified Germany in 1871, for cementing his power by stoking nationalist resentments and appealing to racial purity.

So theres no way to square Nietzsches philosophy with the racial politics of the alt-right, just as it wasnt fair to charge Nietzsche with inspiring Nazism. But both of these movements found just enough ambiguity in his thought to justify their hate.

Nietzsche liked to say that he philosophized with a hammer. For someone on the margins, stewing in their own hate or alienation or boredom, his books are a blast of dynamite. All that disillusionment suddenly seems profound, like you just stumbled upon a secret that justifies your condition.

He tells you that the world is wrong, that society is upside down, that all our sacred cows are waiting to be slaughtered. So if youre living in a multiethnic society, you trash pluralism. If youre embedded in a liberal democracy, you trumpet fascism. In short, you become politically incorrect and fancy yourself a rebel for it.

Nietzsche was a lot of things iconoclast, recluse, misanthrope but he wasnt a racist or a fascist. He would have shunned the white identity politics of the Nazis and the alt-right. That hes been hijacked by racists and fascists is partly his fault, though. His writings are riddled with contradictions and puzzles. And his fixation on the future of humankind is easily confused with a kind of social Darwinism.

But in the end, people find in Nietzsches work what they went into it already believing. Which is why the alt-right, animated as they are by rage and discontent, find in Nietzsche a mirror of their own resentments. If youre seeking a reason to reject a world you dont like, you can find it anywhere, especially in Nietzsche.

View post:
The alt-right is drunk on bad readings of Nietzsche. The Nazis were too. - Vox

They call me bermensch 'cause I'm so driven!

Nietzsche

Nietzsche, alongside Socrates and Voltaire, battled the Eastern Philosophers as a part of the Western Philosophersin Eastern Philosophers vs Western Philosophers. He also turned against Socrates partway through the battle. He was portrayed by Nice Peter.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on October 15th, 1844, in Rcken bei Ltzen, Germany. He was a German philosopher, scholar, and cultural critic. His works are strongly associated with critical analysis of religion, philosophy, psychology, and morality, and promote atheism, psychologism, and historism. His most known key ideas are: the "bermensch" (or "Superman"), a goal for humanity to set for itself and that God is dead, killed by ourselves as a race. As a writer, he wrote several books such as The Gay Science andThe Antichrist. Nietzsche's ideology was also noted to be very nihilistic and he is believed to have created the ideals of Nazism. However, many of his ideas that formed the backbone of Nazism were actually modified from his original works by his sister, who reworked them to fit her own ideology. In 1889, he had a mental breakdown and was committed to a mental asylum where he spent the rest of his life. He diedat the age of 55 on August 25th, 1900, in Weimar, Germany.

[Note: Nietzsche is in brown, while Socrates and Voltaire are in regular text. All philosophers rapping together is in italics.]

I'm coming off the Acropolis to start some pandemonium.

Don't bring limp raps to a pimp-slap symposium!

The mad gadfly, philosophy was my invention!

Rolling with the flyest nihilist, and me, their French henchman!

We've got the wisdom and the wit that even I couldn't question!

Dropping Western medicine on these East infections!

It's evident you've never been our type of mental brethren!

We're betterthinkers, betterspeakers, betterlovers, better men!

Oh, I'll give you something you can bow and kowtow to

When I squat down and squeeze out a Tao of Pooh on Lao Tzu!

You need to take control of the life you're given!

They call me bermensch 'cause I'm so driven!

And I'm a freethinker, so confronting conformists like you? It's my job!

Got a sharp wit like a spit that'll skewer you like a Confu-shish kebab!

(Oh!) You flubbed the mission. I'm beating your submissive ass into submission!

Dishing out more disses than letters and pamphlets and plays I've been publishing!

Now that we've covered the two Yin and Yang twins, I can move onto Jackie Chan!

Sun Tzu, I'll be picking apart your Wu with my method, man!

The seminal general isn't so tough on the mic; all your men must be like, "Yo, what happened?"

You're pitiful lyrically. Lucky for history, you didn't author The Art of Rapping!

I wouldn't exactly call myself a student of this plebe.

Don't make Nietzsche come over and put a knee up in your chi!

'Cause I'm N-I-E-T-Z-S-C-H-E,

And I'll end any mother fucker like my name in a spelling bee!

Plebe, bitch? I'm toxic like a hemlock sip!

Hang a sandal on the door 'cause you can suck Soc's dick!

Sacr bleu, Socrates! You're making things a little tense!

Come, let's blind these Chinese heinies with some shiny bright enlightenment!

I'll not be taught camaraderie from a frog who rigged the lottery!

You make a mockery of ethics, so keep your fat nose in your coffee!

Let me be frank: don't start beef with the Frank,

Who hangs with B. Franks, giving ladies beef franks!

Like, how did these boring geeks from the Far East get invited?

Well, I hope they can speak their minds better than they can write it!

Oh, I'm delighted by their writing; such charming little thoughts

From such charming simple little men in charming little smocks!

What a fearsome trio! Yes, but what does it all mean?

It means the fate of these ancients is about to be seen!

We got the logical means to philosophically dominate your rhetoric

And get it boiled down to its essentials till it's evident!

But first I'll squat down and drop a Dao of Pooh on Lao Tzu!

And call me bermensch 'cause I'm so driven!

I'm Voltaire; I'm fucking fabulous, bitch!

Yo!

Motherfucking French, bitch!

I'm Voltaire; motherfucking French, bitch!

That covers the Yin and Yang twins; now it's on to Jackie Chan!

I'll Chang your Wu with my Method, Man!

You're supposed to be the tough one, dude, what happened?

History's lucky that you didn't write The Art of Rapping!

Wise guys from the East are supposed to be the best,

But we've seen more flavor in a Panda Express!

Our philosophy flourishes! Western culture has ascended!

While even your descendants seem a bit disoriented!

That's N-I-T-Z-C-H-E!

When I squat down and drop a Tao of Pooh on who?

Lao Tzu!

The rest is here:
Nietzsche | Epic Rap Battles of History Wiki | FANDOM powered ...

14 August 2017, 16:32

Friedrich Nietzsche argued that the will to power is the force that drives us as humans. He also said that without music, life would be a mistake.

Despite finding most of his influence in philosophy and philology, Nietzsche also composed several works for voice, piano and violin.Surprised? Fear not: Nietzsches compositions might come as a revelation to even the most clued-up classical music geeks.

Nietzsches involvement in music began in 1858 at the prestigious Pforta school in Naumburg, Germany, when he started to work on musical compositions.

He was also introduced to the music and writing of Richard Wagner, who introduced the philosopher to the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt after they met in 1868. Surrounded by great 19thcentury composers, it was easy to see how Nietzsches love for music could be nurtured.

Despite his love for music, the polymaths compositions were heavily criticised even by his friend Wagner. The story goes that in 1871, Nietzsche sent a birthday gift of a piano composition to Wagners wife, Cosima. When Cosima played the piece in public, Wagner left before the end, and one of the guests found him rolling around on the floor, laughing, shortly after. Imagine that: Wagner literally ROFLing at your handiwork. Although, kudos to Nietzsche, he got him back with this epic insult:

However, Wagner wasn't the only one to criticise Nietzsche's work: German conductor and pianist Hans von Blow also labelled another of his pieces the most undelightful and the most antimusical draft on musical paper that I have faced in a long time.

via GIPHY

Possibly not the *most* encouraging feedback for poor Friedrich.

Although his compositions were not always positively received, Nietzsches influence on classical composition has been widely accredited.

His philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra influenced several composers during the 1890s: Gustav Mahlers Symphony No. 3 used the leitmotif from Zarathustra, and Frederick Delius based his choral piece A Mass of Life on the novel.Richard Strauss also based his Also sprach Zarathustraon Nietzsche's novel of the same name.

What do you think of Friedrich Nietzsches compositions? Have a listen to a few more of them on Spotifyand on the Cambridge Press website.

Read more:
Who knew? Friedrich Nietzsche was also a pretty decent classical composer - Classic FM

Why did I decide to paint "based on" Zarathustra? Why was not I satisfied enough by simple book text? The fact is that when I read a book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, images appear by themselves. The text of the book is extraordinarily metaphorical. Of course, I will never have the strength and time to paint all the pictures that arise in my imagination. Therefore, it is necessary to choose the strongest from an infinite number of images. Nietzsche himself preferred music more than painting, so his works are full of music, I feel it. And since I'm an artist, it's easier for me to "grab" this musical imagery and embody it on canvas.

Some people believe that my paintings after Thus Spoke Zarathustra are a subjective perception of Nietzsche's images. In addition, most philosophers believe that philosophy can not be "depicted" at all. My biggest disappointment in life was that the overwhelming majority of people do not perceive the world at all in a figurative way. Such people look and do not see. Therefore, when one of such a majority begins to say that Nietzsches metaphorical language can not be translated into the language of images, then the point here is not in my righteousness, but in the fact language of images, then the point here is not in my righteousness, but in the fact that the eyes of the speaker are simply slightly blind. And if this is what the philosopher claims, then one thing I can say: he is not philosophical enough.

What is primary for me - a word or an image? What was in the beginning - a word or an image? I try to explain it. Everyword that comes to me easily turns into an image. Therefore, it's easy for me to write texts. As the physiologists would say, both the right and left brain hemispheres are equally well developed.

By the way, the Egyptian god Ptah, the patron of craftsmen and artists was often portrayed as a bisexual androgyne. Priests, singers and artists prayed to him and offered sacrifices. After all, the ability to embody a word is a gift from God.

The process of painting "based on Nietzsche" continues now, because Nietzsche's texts live in me, its real. I am just one of those who have already memorized them a long time ago, but not in the sense of having learned it, but inwardly absorbing the content itself. "He who writes in parables wants to be not read, but memorized". So I memorized! When one speaks of the demonic Nietzsche, citing quotes taken out of context, (for example, that everything is "allowed", "push the falling one", that "going to a woman, do not forget the whip", etc.), then Nietzsche really can seem some kind of evil demon. But when one really reads Nietzsche, he perceives Nietzsche not in quotes, but in all paradoxical completeness.

I am saddened by the fact that I am alone in this field and that other artists are not engaged in the artistic embodiment of Nietzsche's texts. Perhaps this is because artists in the mass are not enough philosophers, or as Marina Bessonova told me - "they are mostly uneducated people" (although, I think, it's not just about education). Such people do not know how to embody a word, they do not see the word. Very often artists are engaged in cheap substitution - they make the subject of art their inner world and their problems. And since the inner world is often small and unsightly, then such art is also uninteresting and boring. Nietzsche regarded the human history of the past two or three millennia as a personal story. The inner world of this kind has the right for a long life in culture, in art! Such creativity goes beyond individual psychological complexes and garbage, which nobody needs and from which it is necessary to release.

Lena Hades

Once I was asked to describe Nietzsche's ethical teaching in two words, I tried and answered with a question that I should ask myself. "Who are you?" Of whining plebs, waiting for a piece of your pie and accusing everybody else in all the sorrows and misfortunes that have fallen to you? Or are you one of those who make their own life? And themselves are the judges and executioners" for themselves, And this person honestly replied that in this sense he was a" pleb".

As Jos Ortega y Gasset said in his book The Revoltof the Masses, "The select man is not the petulant person who thinks himself superior to the rest, but the man who demands more of himself than the rest, even though he may not fulfil in his person those higher exigencies." The conclusion is simple - compete in all that you do with maximum effort and intensity. Thats what I am doing.

One artist I was acquainted with, once said, so and so, she paints a picture, writes a quote from Nietzsche, and thats all - a masterpiece is ready. Well, and what's the matter? - I replied paint a picture, put a quote on it. Go on, try! Let's see what happens! For some reason, he did not paint a picture with a quote.

I know several artistic attempts of Nietzsche's interpretation. For example, the Russian artist Pyotr Fateev, as well as Pavel Filonov, created several paintings on the themes of Nietzsche's books (Nietzsche was unusually trendy in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century!) And after that they stopped drawing on Nietzsche - Nietzsche was in trend not for long. Nietzsche tried all his life to go beyond human limits, his life was "a cognizers experiment on himself" and a brilliant artistic action at the same time, so all attempts to follow him mechanically will never succeed. To approach Nietzsche, one must be "called out by his spirit." These are very accurate words - to be called out. If we are called out by Nietzsche, we can do something interesting.

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Thus Spoke Lena Hades: Nietzsche's Texts Live In Me - HuffPost

If youre an atheist who has talked with a Christianwho has read Christian apologists, youve probably run into the notion that atheist morality is a failure because it is bankrupt of assigned meaning from God. You have no purpose, you have no meaning, you have no value, you have no worth. This is horrifying, in the Christian scheme, and crippling to the core. You are trapped in a nihilistic nightmare, they claim.

The problem, I think, is worse than that for Christianity. And, at the same time, better than that for atheists. To illustrate why, Ill share a common text that Christian apologists love to quote, which is from the atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. I know its long, but it is one of the most powerful discussions of God in history. If you are somewhere where you can do it, get the full weight of the passage by reading it aloud:

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: I seek God! I seek God!As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. Whither is God? he cried; I will tell you.We have killed himyou and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

So, the Christian apologist will read this and say that this is terrible. There is no purpose in the atheist scheme, no value, no worth, nada. And, therefore, theyll continue, isnt it better to be Christian? Wouldnt you prefer to have purpose and value in your life?

It has seemed to me that this argument, each of the thousands of times I have heard it in my lifetime, is not fundamentally based on a rational discussion on the existence of God. The argument is based on the assumption that I want there to be some foundation to thought, Iwantto have purpose and meaning in my life. More fundamentally, Iwantto belong in the world, and to know I have a place within it that is fully rationalized and reasonable. I want to know that I have a right to take in every breath, and to do that, the implication is, I have to have a purpose, areason why I am here.

And if God exists, the argument goes, that reason is straightforward. I can embrace and walk the world as if I have a right to be here. Let the vast universe overwhelm the miniscule dot on an infinite timeline, that infinitely small speck I call me that doesnt matter, because the God of it all said that I matter. Thats where I get my worth and value from.

And so, people become Christian because of that insecurity, and they try to force you to share that insecurity too, so they find a Nietzsche quote that seems to them the picture of that desperation, cast it onto you, and insist that you have to accept or convert.

That would be a mistake.

What Neitzsche is doing is changing up the game of morality more fundamentally than these Christian apologists imply.

Now, I dont agree with the entirety of Nietzsches philosophy, but the part I do agree with is his eloquent removal ofGod from the equation. All the way, down to the dregs. For Nietzsche to build his morality, he has to start with a God-free existence, one in which God has absolutely no authority to assign anyone purpose, to tell anyone to be humble, to create our horizons, or to give us a foundation.

He is burning the chess board we have been playing on and then yelling in our faces that it is over, it is done, the game is up, and taunting anyone who would dare try to move the pieces back in place or set up a firm external meaning. There is no God. There is no purpose from God, no foundation made up by Godat all.

All of the God-based morality, the morality that insists you have to be subservient to some type of higher master God all that is wiped away. That entire view of purpose as something that is ordained, that you are given from a Great Beyond its gone. And all we have left iswhat? What is left? God has been so integral to our morality, to the way that we think of ourselves and the world, that we have to start over.

And Nietzsche wants to start over; he wants nothing of God left. We are starting completely and totally from scratch. Hes not even just talking about the idea of God itself hes trying to rip out the roots of where the concept of God has made an impact on the way that we think about each other and the universe, including the way those roots sometimes sink into society for people after they have pruned the above-ground concept of God from their lives.

Lemme make this concrete. When I left Christianity, I had to unlearn a lot. I thought that I had left God, but the old ways of thinking still were there. I had puritanical views for the next couple years, for example, when it came to things like sex and alcohol. Today, I still find ways that the concept of God has infiltrated my thinking or the thinking of supposedly secular society in ways that I had not determined before.

Getting rid of that and starting over is an extreme project. It requires washing away the horizons we have taken for granted, deconstructing the morality we have taken for granted and re-examining the reasons we hold it, and embracing a godless universe which can (and likely should) be a jolting paradigm shift at first, as Nietzsche is articulating the above quote.

But Nietzsche did not see the problem of finding your way in a godless universe as unsolvable. After the God-concept is wiped from the slate, after he has burnt the chessboard of divine morality so that there is no game on the table, and he has forcefully articulated that there is no divine morality available and we have to start over, he has another step in mind, as is revealed when the quote continues.

Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

We have killed him.

What does that mean?

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Christian Apologists, Stop Misusing Nietzsche's The Madman - Patheos (blog)

In a social-media snipe-off thats gone on an impressive six full days, a dispute between Kendall Jenner and Brooklyn nightclub Babys All Right trickleson. At the heart of the matter is the alleged absence of gratuity on behalf of Jenner, on a $24 bar tab.

Last Thursday, the evening that Babys hosted a release party for the new A$AP TWELVYY release, Jenner was atthe bar. A$AP Rocky, who Jenner has long been rumored to be dating, performed at the event. Though SPIN has reached out to the establishment for comment, were still not sure what she ordered. However, according to an Instagram post from Babys, we do know it ran $24 even. And thats where it stoppedJenner left the field for a tip completely blank, though her florid signature finds its way into that portion of the receipt.

We know this because, on Friday, Babys posted an Instagram shot of the receipt, with the caption, Dont forget to tip your bartender :). The post has since been deleted, but the image is the one above.

After a weekend of assessing the impending PR disaster, Jenner came back to Twitter on Monday to insist that she did tip. Or at least someone involved in the collective we tipped. Apparently, it was in cash. Was there a stack on the bar top associated with another customer that Kendall hoped would represent her patronage?

Tuesday evening, Babys continued to call out Jenner for the service-industry faux pas (not her first foray into allegedly treating waitstaff poorly). The bar posted a screen cap of Jenners tweet, with a quote from none other than Friedrich Nietzsche: Im not upset that you lied to me, Im upset that from now on I cant believe you, the caption read. This post was deleted by Wednesday morning.

What a world.

SPIN reached out to Babys but received no comment.

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Baby's All Right Quotes Nietzsche Over Kendall Jenner Tip Controversy - SPIN

I was repulsed when I heard a young thug pretending to represent me, a white person in America. He further poisoned my identity by claiming he represented Christianity. He ended his diatribe by, of course, wishing the death to the Jews.

These people do realize that Jesus was not white, right? And that Jesus was born a Jew? As a Christian leader watching white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members (alt-right) call for "taking America back," I thought, "these people don't understand the idea of America, nor Christ." Their true ideological leader is Friedrich Nietzsche, not Jesus. In "The Antichrist," Nietzsche asserts that Christianity, as a religion and as the predominant moral system of the Western world, is "the religion of pity." It "elevates the weak over the strong."

"Another Christian concept ... has passed even more deeply into the tissue of modernity: the concept of the 'equality of souls before God.' This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights."

Nietzsche really understood Christianity, he hated it, but he understood it.

White supremacist Nazi types, ironically, when they attack "liberal values," are fighting against the very values of Jesus while yelling at everyone how they are "Christians."

The spirit of Jesus' teaching is foundational for us all.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

These are the values; this is the America, we must "take back!"

Lindensmith is pastor of Seventh-day Adventist Church in Fargo.

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Letter: Members of the Alt-Right do not represent the Christian faith - INFORUM

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One day, Nietzsche wrote in Ecce Homo, my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous, a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience. It is one of the ironies of intellectual history that the terms of the collision can best be seen in the rise of a discourse that Nietzsche, in all likelihood, would have despised.

* * *

In 1869, Nietzsche was appointed professor of classical philology at Basel University. Like most junior faculty, he was bedeviled by meager wages and bore major responsibilities, such as teaching fourteen hours a week, Monday through Friday, beginning at 7 am. He also sat on multiple committees and covered for senior colleagues who couldnt make their classes. He lectured to the public on behalf of the university. He dragged himself to dinner parties. Yet within three years he managed to complete The Birth of Tragedy, a minor masterwork of modern literature, which he dedicated to his close friend and sublime predecessor Richard Wagner.

One chapter, however, he withheld from publication. In 1872, Nietzsche was invited to spend the Christmas holidays with Wagner and his wife Cosima, but sensing a potential rift with the composer, he begged off and sent a gift instead. He bundled The Greek State with four other essays, slapped a title onto a cover page (Five Prefaces to Five Unwritten Books), and mailed the leather-bound text to Cosima as a birthday present. Richard was offended; Cosima, unimpressed. Prof. Nietzsches manuscript does not restore our spirits, she sniffed in her diary.

Though presented as a sop to a fraying friendship, The Greek State reflects the larger European crisis of war and revolution that had begun in 1789 and would come to an end only in 1945. More immediately, it bears the stamp of the Franco-Prussian War, which had broken out in 1870, and the Paris Commune, which was declared the following year.

Initially ambivalent about the war, Nietzsche quickly became a partisan of the German cause. Its about our culture! he wrote to his mother. And for that no sacrifice is too great! This damned French tiger. He signed up to serve as a medical orderly; Cosima tried to persuade him to stay put in Basel, recommending that he send cigarettes to the front instead. But Nietzsche was adamant. In August 1870, he left for Bavaria with his sister Elisabeth, riding the rails and singing songs. He got his training, headed to the battlefield, and in no time contracted dysentery and diphtheria. He lasted a month.

The war lasted for six. A half-million soldiers were killed or wounded, as were countless civilians. The preliminary peace treaty, signed in February 1871, favored the Germans and punished the French, particularly the citizens of Paris, who were forced to shoulder the burden of heavy indemnities to the Prussians. Enraged by its impositionsand a quarter-century of simmering discontent and broken promisesworkers and radicals in Paris rose up and took over the city in March. Nietzsche was scandalized, his horror at the revolt inversely proportional to his exaltation over the war. Fearing that the Communards had destroyed the Louvre (they hadnt), he wrote:

The reports of the past few days have been so awful that my state of mind is altogether intolerable. What does it mean to be a scholar in the face of such earthquakes of culture! It is the worst day of my life.

In the quicksilver transmutation of a conventional war between states into a civil war between classes, Nietzsche saw a terrible alchemy of the future: Over and above the struggle between nations the object of our terror was that international hydra-head, suddenly and so terrifyingly appearing as a sign of quite different struggles to come.

By May, the Commune had been ruthlessly put down at the cost of tens of thousands of livesmuch to the delight of the Parisian aesthete-aristocrat Edmond Goncourt:

All is well. There has been neither compromise nor conciliation. The solution has been brutal, imposed by sheer force of arms. The solution has saved everyone from the dangers of cowardly compromise. The solution has restored its self-confidence to the Army, which has learnt in the blood of the Communards that it was still capable of fightinga bleeding like that, by killing the rebellious part of a population, postpones the next revolution by a whole conscription.

Of the man who wrote these words and the literary milieu of which he was a part, Nietzsche would later say: I know these gentlemen inside out, so well that I have really had enough of them already. One has to be more radical: fundamentally they all lack the main thingla force.

* * *

The clash of these competing worlds of war and work echoes throughout The Greek State. Nietzsche begins by announcing that the modern era is dedicated to the dignity of work. Committed to equal rights for all, democracy elevates the worker and the slave. Their demands for justice threaten to swamp all other ideas, to tear down the walls of culture. Modernity has made a monster in the working class: a created creator (shades of Marx and Mary Shelley), it has the temerity to see itself and its labor as a work of art. Even worse, it seeks to be recognized and publicly acknowledged as such.

The Greeks, by contrast, saw work as a disgrace, because the existence it servesthe finite life that each of us liveshas no inherent value. Existence can be redeemed only by art, but art too is premised on work. It is made, and its maker depends on the labor of others; they take care of him and his household, freeing him from the burdens of everyday life. Inevitably, his art bears the taint of their necessity. No matter how beautiful, art cannot escape the pall of its creation. It arouses shame, for in shame there lurks the unconscious recognition that these conditions of work are required for the actual goal of art to be achieved. For that reason, the Greeks properly kept labor and the laborer hidden from view.

Throughout his writing life, Nietzsche was plagued by the vision of workers massing on the public stagewhether in trade unions, socialist parties or communist leagues. Almost immediately upon his arrival in Basel, the First International descended on the city to hold its fourth congress. Nietzsche was petrified. There is nothing more terrible, he wrote in The Birth of Tragedy, than a class of barbaric slaves who have learned to regard their existence as an injustice, and now prepare to avenge, not only themselves, but all generations. Several years after the International had left Basel, Nietzsche convinced himself that it was slouching toward Bayreuth in order to ruin Wagners festival there. And just weeks before he went mad in 1888 and disappeared forever into his own head, he wrote, The cause of every stupidity todaylies in the existence of a labour question at all. About certain things one does not ask questions.

One can hear in the opening passages of The Greek State the pounding march not only of European workers on the move but also of black slaves in revolt. Hegel was brooding on Haiti while he worked out the master-slave dialectic in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Though generations of scholars have told us otherwise, perhaps Nietzsche had a similar engagement in mind when he wrote, Even if it were true that the Greeks were ruined because they kept slaves, the opposite is even more certain, that we will be destroyed because we fail to keep slaves. What theorist, after all, has ever pressed so urgentlynot just in this essay but in later works as wellthe claim that slavery belongs to the essence of a culture? What theorist ever had to? Before the eighteenth century, bonded labor was an accepted fact. Now it was the subject of a roiling debate, provoking revolutions and emancipations throughout the world. Serfdom had been eliminated in Russia only a decade beforeand in some German states, only a generation before Nietzsches birth in 1844while Brazil would soon become the last state in the Americas to abolish slavery. An edifice of the ages had been brought down by a mere centurys vibrations; is it so implausible that Nietzsche, attuned to the vectors and velocity of decay as he was, would pause to record the earthquake and insist on taking the full measure of its effects?

If slavery was one condition of great art, Nietzsche continued in The Greek State, war and high politics were another. Political men par excellence, the Greeks channeled their agonistic urges into bloody conflicts between cities and less bloody conflicts within them: healthy states were built on the repression and release of these impulses. The arena for conflict created by that regimen gave society time to germinate and turn green everywhere and allowed blossoms of genius periodically to sprout forth. Those blossoms were not only artistic but also political. Warfare sorted society into lower and higher ranks, and from that hierarchy rose the military genius, whose artistry was the state itself. The real dignity of man, Nietzsche insisted, lay not in his lowly self but in the artistic and political genius his life was meant to serve and on whose behalf it was to be expended.

Instead of the Greek state, however, Europe had the bourgeois state; instead of aspiring to a work of art, states let markets do their work. Politics, Nietzsche complained, had become an instrument of the stock exchange rather than the terrain of heroism and glory. With the specifically political impulses of Europe so weakenedeven his beloved Franco-Prussian War had not revived the spirit in the way that he had hopedNietzsche could only detect dangerous signs of atrophy in the political sphere, equally worrying for art and society. The age of aristocratic culture and high politics was at an end. All that remained was the detritus of the lower orders: the disgrace of the laborer, the paper chase of the bourgeoisie, the barreling threat of socialism. The Paris commune, Nietzsche would later write in his notebooks, was perhaps no more than minor indigestion compared to what is coming.

Nietzsche had little, concretely, to offer as a counter-volley to democracy, whether bourgeois or socialist. Despite his appreciation of the political impulse and his studious attention to political events in Germanyfrom the Schleswig-Holstein crisis of the early 1860s to the imperial push of the late 1880she remained leery of programs, movements and platforms. The best he could muster was a vague principle: that society is the continuing, painful birth of those exalted men of culture in whose service everything else has to consume itself, and the state a means of setting [that] process of society in motion and guaranteeing its unobstructed continuation. It was left to later generations to figure out what that could mean in practiceand where it might lead. Down one path might lay fascism; down another, the free market.

* * *

Around the timealmost to the yearthat Nietzsche was launching his revolution of metaphysics and morals, a trio of economists, working separately across three countries, were starting their own. It began with the publication in 1871 of Carl Mengers Principles of Economics and William Stanley Jevonss The Theory of Political Economy. Along with Lon Walrass Elements of Pure Economics, which appeared three years later, these were the European facesAustrian, English and French-Swissof what would come to be called the marginal revolution.

The marginalists focused less on supply and production than on the pulsing demand of consumption. The protagonist was not the landowner or the laborer, working his way through the farm, the factory or the firm; it was the universal man in the market whose signature act was to consume things. Thats how market man increased his utility: by consuming something until he reached the point where consuming one more increment of it gave him so little additional utility that he was better off consuming something else. Of such microscopic calculations at the periphery of our estate was the economy made.

Though the early marginalists helped transform economics from a humanistic branch of the moral sciences into a technical discipline of the social sciences, they were still able to command an audience and an influence all too rare in contemporary economics. Jevons spent his career as an independent scholar and professor in Manchester and London worrying about his lack of readers, but William Gladstone invited him over to discuss his work, and John Stuart Mill praised it on the floor of Parliament. Keynes tells us that for a period of half a century, practically all elementary students both of Logic and of Political Economy in Great Britain and also in India and the Dominions were brought up on Jevons.

According to Hayek, the immediate reception of Mengers Principles can hardly be called encouraging. Reviewers seemed not to understand it. Two students at the University of Vienna, however, did. One was Friedrich von Wieser, the other Eugen von Bhm-Bawerk, and both became legendary educators and theoreticians. Their students included Hayek; Ludwig von Mises, who attracted a small but devoted following in the United States and elsewhere; and Joseph Schumpeter, dark poet of capitalisms forces of creative destruction. Through Bhm-Bawerk and Wieser, Mengers text became the groundwork of the Austrian school, whose reach, due in part to the efforts of Mises and Hayek, now extends across the globe.

The contributions of Jevons and Menger were multiple, yet each of them took aim at a central postulate of economics shared by everyone from Adam Smith to the socialist left: the notion that labor is aif not thesource of value. Though adumbrated in the idiom of prices and exchange, the labor theory of value evinced an almost primitive faith in the metaphysical objectivity of the economic spherea faith made all the more surprising by the fact that the objectivity of the rest of the social world (politics, religion and morals) had been subject to increasing scrutiny since the Renaissance. Commodities may have come wrapped in the pretty paper of the market, but inside, many believed, were the brute facts of nature: raw materials from the earth and the physical labor that turned those materials into goods. Because those materials were made useful, hence valuable, only by labor, labor was the source of value. That, and the fact that labor could be measured in some way (usually time), lent the world of work a kind of ontological statusand political authoritythat had been increasingly denied to the world of courts and kings, lands and lords, parishes and priests. As the rest of the world melted into air, labor was crystallizing as the one true solid.

By the time the marginalists came on the scene, the most politically threatening version of the labor theory of value was associated with the left. Though Marx would significantly revise and recast it in his mature writings, the simple notion that labor produces value remained associated with his nameand even more so with that of his competitor Ferdinand Lasalle, about whom Nietzsche read a fair amountas well as with the larger socialist and trade union movements of which he was a part. That association helped set the stage for the marginalists critique.

Admittedly, the relationship between marginalism and anti-socialism is complex. On the one hand, there is little evidence to suggest that the first-generation marginalists had heard of, much less read, Marx, at least not at this early stage of their careers. Much more than the threat of socialism underpinned the emergence of marginalist economics, which was as opposed to traditional defenses of the market as it was to the markets critics. By the twentieth century, moreover, many marginalists were on the left and used their ideas to help construct the institutions of social democracy; even Walras and Alfred Marshall, another early marginalist, were sympathetic to the claims of the left. And on some readings, the mature Marx shares more with the constructivist thrusts of marginalism than he does with the objectivism of the labor theory of value.

On the other hand, Jevons was a tireless polemicist against trade unions, which he identified as the best exampleof the evils and disasters attending the democratic age. Jevons saw marginalism as a critical antidote to the labor movement and insisted that its teachings be widely transmitted to the working classes. To avoid such a disaster, he argued, we must diffuse knowledge to the workersempowered as they were by the vote and the strikeand the kind of knowledge required is mainly that comprehended in the science of political economy.

Menger interrupted his abstract reflections on value to make the point that while it may appear deplorable to a lover of mankind that possession of capital or a piece of land often provides the owner a higher incomethan the income received by a laborer, the cause of this is not immoral. It was simply that the satisfaction of more important human needs depends upon the services of the given amount of capital or piece of land than upon the services of the laborer. Any attempt to get around that truth, he warned, would undoubtedly require a complete transformation of our social order.

Finally, there is no doubt that the marginalists of the Austrian school, who would later prove so influential on the American right, saw their project as primarily anti-Marxist and anti-socialist. The most momentous consequence of the theory, declared Wieser in 1891, is, I take it, that it is false, with the socialists, to impute to labor alone the entire productive return.

* * *

With its division of intellectual labor, the modern academy often separates economics from ethics and philosophy. Earlier economists and philosophers did not make that separation. Even Nietzsche recognized that economics rested on genuine moral and philosophical premises, many of which he found dubious, and that it had tremendous moral and political effects, all of which he detested. In The Wanderer and His Shadow, Nietzsche criticized our economists for having not yet wearied of scenting a similar unity in the word value and of searching after the original root-concept of the word. In his preliminary outline for the summa he hoped to publish on the will to power, he scored the nihilistic consequences of the ways of thinking in politics and economics.

For that reason, Nietzsche saw in labors appearance more than an economic theory of goods: he saw a terrible diminution of the good. Morals must be understood as the doctrine of the relations of supremacy, he wrote in Beyond Good and Evil; every morality must be forced to bowbefore the order of rank. But like so many before them, including the Christian slave and the English utilitarian, the economist and the socialist promoted an inferior human typeand an inferior set of valuesas the driving agent of the world. Nietzsche saw in this elevation not only a transformation of values but also a loss of value and, potentially, the elimination of value altogether. Conservatives from Edmund Burke to Robert Bork have conflated the transformation of values with the end of value. Nietzsche, on occasion, did too: What does nihilism mean? he asked himself in 1887. That the highest values devaluate themselves. The nihilism consuming Europe was best understood as a democratic hatred against the order of rank.

Part of Nietzsches worry was philosophical: How was it possible in a godless world, naturalistically conceived, to deem anything of value? But his concern was also cultural and political. Because of democracy, which was Christianity made natural, the aristocracy had lost its naturalnessthat is, the traditional vindication of its power. How then might a hierarchy of excellence, aesthetic and political, re-establish itself, defend itself against the massparticularly a mass of workersand dominate that mass? As Nietzsche wrote in the late 1880s:

A reverse movement is neededthe production of a synthetic, summarizing, justifying man for whose existence this transformation of mankind into a machine is a precondition, as a base on which he can invent his higher form of being.He needs the opposition of the masses, of the leveled, a feeling of distance from them. [He] stands on them, he lives off them. This higher form of aristocracy is that of the future.Morally speaking, this overall machinery, this solidarity of all gears, represents a maximum of exploitation of man; but it presupposes those on whose account this exploitation has meaning.

Nietzsches response to that challenge was not to revert or resort to a more objective notion of value: that was neither possible nor desirable. Instead, he embraced one part of the modern understanding of valueits fabricated natureand turned it against its democratic and Smithian premises. Value was indeed a human creation, Nietzsche acknowledged, and as such could just as easily be conceived as a gift, an honorific bestowed by one man upon another. Through esteeming alone is there value, Nietzsche has Zarathustra declare; to esteem is to create. Value was not made with coarse and clumsy hands; it was enacted with an appraising gaze, a nod of the head signifying a matchless abundance of taste. It was, in short, aristocratic.

While slaves had once created value in the form of Christianity, they had achieved that feat not through their labor but through their censure and praise. They had also done it unwittingly, acting upon a deep and unconscious compulsion: a sense of inferiority, a rage against their powerlessness, and a desire for revenge against their betters. That combination of overt impotence and covert drive made them ill-suited to creating values of excellence. Nietzsche explained in Beyond Good and Evil that the self-conscious exercise and enjoyment of power made the noble type a better candidate for the creation of values in the modern world, for these were values that would have to break with the slave morality that had dominated for millennia. Only insofar as it knows itself to be that which first accords honor to things can the noble type truly be value-creating.

Labor belonged to nature, which is not capable of generating value. Only the man who arrayed himself against naturethe artist, the general, the statesmancould claim that role. He alone had the necessary refinements, wrought by that pathos of distance which grows out of ingrained difference between strata, to appreciate and bestow value: upon men, practices and beliefs. Value was not a product of the prole; it was an imposition of peerless taste. In the words of The Gay Science:

Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its naturenature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time, as a presentand it was we who gave and bestowed it.

That was in 1882. Just a decade earlier, Menger had written: Value is therefore nothing inherent in goods, no property of them, but merely the importance that we first attribute to the satisfaction of our needs, that is, to our lives and well-being. Jevonss position was identical, and like Nietzsche, both Menger and Jevons thought value was instead a high or low estimation put by a man upon the things of life. But lest that desiring self be reduced to a simple creature of tabulated needs, Menger and Jevons took care to distinguish their positions from traditional theories of utility.

Jevons, for example, was prepared to follow Jeremy Bentham in his definition of utility as that property in an object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness. He thought this perfectly expresses the meaning of the word Economy. But he also insisted on a critical rider: provided that the will or inclination of the person concerned is taken as the sole criterion, for the time, of what is good and desirable. Our expressed desires and aversions are not measures of our objective or underlying good; there is no such thing. Nor can we be assured that those desires or aversions will bring us pleasure or pain. What we want or dont want is merely a representation, a snapshot of the motions of our willthat black box of preference and partiality that so fascinated Nietzsche precisely because it seemed so groundless and yet so generative. Every mind is inscrutable to itself: we lack, said Jevons, the means of measuring directly the feelings of the human heart. The inner life is inaccessible to our inspections; all we can know are its effects, the will it powers and the actions it propels. The will is our pendulum, declared Jevons, a representation of forces that cannot be seen but whose effects are nevertheless felt, and its oscillations are minutely registered in all the price lists of the markets.

Menger thought the value of any good was connected to our needs, but he was extraordinarily attuned to the complexityand contingencyof that relationship. Needs, wrote Menger, at least as concerns their origin, depend upon our wills or on our habits. Needs are more than the givens of our biology or psyche; they are the desideratum of our volitions and practices, which are idiosyncratic and arbitrary. Only when our needs finally come into existencethat is, only when we become aware of themcan we truly say that there is no further arbitrary element in the process of value formation.

Even then, needs must pass through a series of checkpoints before they can enter the land of value. Awareness of a need, says Menger, entails a comprehensive knowledge of how the need might be fulfilled by a particular good, how that good might contribute to our lives, and how (and whether) command of that good is necessary for the satisfaction of that need. That last bit of knowledge requires us to look at the external world: to ask how much of that good is available to us, to consider how many sacrifices we must bearhow many satisfactions we are willing to forgoin order to secure it. Only when we have answered these questions are we ready to speak of value, which Menger reminds us is the importance we attribute to the satisfaction of our needs. Value is thus a judgment that economizing men make about the importance of the goods at their disposal for the maintenance of their lives and well-being. It does not exist outside the consciousness of men. Even though previous economists had insisted on the objectification of the value of goods, Menger, like Jevons and Nietzsche, concludes that value is entirely subjective in nature.

* * *

In their war against socialism, the philosophers of capital faced two challenges. The first was that by the early twentieth century, socialism had cornered the market on morality. As Mises complained in his 1932 preface to the second edition of Socialism, Any advocate of socialistic measures is looked upon as the friend of the Good, the Noble, and the Moral, as a disinterested pioneer of necessary reforms, in short, as a man who unselfishly serves his own people and all humanity. Indeed, with the help of kindred notions such as social justice, socialism seemed to be the very definition of morality. Nietzsche had long been wise to this insinuation; one source of his discontent with religion was his sense that it had bequeathed to modernity an understanding of what morality entailed (selflessness, universality, equality) such that only socialism and democracy could be said to fulfill it. But where Nietzsches response to the equation of socialism and morality was to question the value of morality, at least as it had been customarily understood, economists like Mises and Hayek pursued a different path, one Nietzsche would never have dared to take: they made the market the very expression of morality.

Moralists traditionally viewed the pursuit of money and goods as negative or neutral; the Austrians claimed it embodies our deepest values and commitments. The provision of material goods, declared Mises, serves not only those ends which are usually termed economic, but also many other ends. All of us have ends or ultimate purposes in life: the cultivation of friendship, the contemplation of beauty, a lovers companionship. We enter the market for the sake of those ends. Economic action thus consists firstly in valuation of ends, and then in the valuation of the means leading to these ends. All economic activity depends, therefore, upon the existence of ends. Ends dominate economy and alone give it meaning. We simply cannot speak, writes Hayek in The Road to Serfdom, of purely economic ends separate from the other ends of life.

This claim, however, could just as easily be enlisted as an argument for socialism. In providing men and women with the means of lifehousing, food, healthcarethe socialist state frees them to pursue the ends of life: beauty, knowledge, wisdom. The Austrians went further, insisting that the very decision about what constitutes means and ends was itself a judgment of value. Any economic situation confronts us with the necessity of choice, of having to deploy our limited resourceswhether time, money or efforton behalf of some end. In making that choice, we reveal which of our ends matters most to us: which is higher, which is lower. Every man who, in the course of economic activity, chooses between the satisfaction of two needs, only one of which can be satisfied, makes judgments of value, says Mises.

For those choices to reveal our ends, our resources must be finiteunlimited time, for example, would obviate the need for choiceand our choice of ends unconstrained by external interference. The best, indeed only, method for guaranteeing such a situation is if money (or its equivalent in material goods) is the currency of choiceand not just of economic choice, but of all of our choices. As Hayek writes in The Road to Serfdom:

So long as we can freely dispose over our income and all our possessions, economic loss will always deprive us only of what we regard as the least important of the desires we were able to satisfy. A merely economic loss is thus one whose effect we can still make fall on our less important needs. Economic changes, in other words, usually affect only the fringe, the margin, of our needs. There are many things which are more important than anything which economic gains or losses are likely to affect, which for us stand high above the amenities and even above many of the necessities of life which are affected by the economic ups and downs.

Should the government decide which of our needs are merely economic, we would be deprived of the opportunity to decide whether these are higher or lower goods, the marginal or mandatory items of our flourishing. So vast is the gulf between each soul, so separate and unequal are we, that it is impossible to assume anything universal about the sources and conditions of human happiness, a point Nietzsche and Jevons would have found congenial. The judgment of what constitutes a means, what an end, must be left to the individual self. Hayek again:

Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rated higher and which lowerin short what men should believe and strive for.

While the economic is, in one sense readily acknowledged by Hayek, the sphere of our lower needs, it is in another and altogether more important sense the anvil upon which we forge our notion of what is lower and higher in this world, our morality. Economic values, he writes, are less important to us than many things precisely because in economic matters we are free to decide what to us is more, and what less, important. But we can be free to make those choices only if they are left to us to makeand, paradoxically, if we are forced to make them. If we didnt have to choose, wed never have to value anything.

* * *

By imposing this drama of choice, the economy becomes a theater of self-disclosure, the stage upon which we discover and reveal our ultimate ends. It is not in the casual chatter of a seminar or the cloistered pews of a church that we determine our values; it is in the duressthe ordealof our lived lives, those moments when we are not only free to choose but forced to choose. Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, Hayek wrote, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily re-created.

While progressives often view this discourse of choice as either dime-store morality or fabricated scarcity, the Austrians saw the economy as the disciplining agent of all ethical action, a moment ofand opportunity formoral artistry. Freud thought the compressions of the dream world made every man an artist; these other Austrians thought the compulsions of the economy made every man a moralist. It is only when we are navigating its narrow channelswhere every decision to expend some quantum of energy requires us to make a calculation about the desirability of its posited endthat we are brought face to face with ourselves and compelled to answer the questions: What do I believe? What do I want in this world? From this life?

While there are precedents for this argument in Mengers theory of value (the fewer opportunities there are for the satisfaction of our needs, Menger says, the more our choices will reveal which needs we value most), its true and full dimensions can best be understood in relation to Nietzsche. As much as Nietzsche railed against the repressive effect of laws and morals on the highest types, he also appreciated how much on earth of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance, and masterly sureness was owed to these constraints. Confronted with a set of social strictures, the diverse and driving energies of the self were forced to draw upon unknown and untapped reserves of ingenuityeither to overcome these obstacles or to adapt to them with the minimum of sacrifice. The results were novel, value-creating.

Nietzsches point was primarily aesthetic. Contrary to the romantic notion of art being produced by a process of letting go, Nietzsche insisted that the artist strictly and subtlyobeys thousandfold laws. The language of inventionwhether poetry, music or speech itselfis bound by the metrical compulsion of rhyme and rhythm. Such laws are capricious in their origin and tyrannical in their effect. That is the point: from that unforgiving soil of power and whimsy rises the most miraculous increase. Not just in the artsGoethe, say, or Beethovenbut in politics and ethics as well: Napoleon, Caesar, Nietzsche himself (Genuine philosophersare commanders and legislators: they say, thus it shall be!).

One school would find expression for these ideas in fascism. Writers like Ernst Jnger and Carl Schmitt imagined political artists of great novelty and originality forcing their way through or past the filtering constraints of everyday life. The leading legal theorist of the Third Reich, Schmitt looked to those extraordinary instances in politicswar, the decision, the exceptionwhen the power of real life, as he put it in Political Theology, breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition. In that confrontation between mechanism and real life, the man of exception would find or make his moment: by taking an unauthorized decision, ordaining a new regime of law, or founding a political order. In each case, something was created out of nothingness.

It was the peculiarand, in the long run, more significantgenius of the Austrian school to look for these moments and experiences not in the political realm but in the marketplace. Money in a capitalist economy, Hayek came to realize, could best be understood and defended in Nietzschean terms: as the medium through which a forcethe selfs desire for power to achieve unspecified endsmakes itself felt.

* * *

The second challenge confronting the philosophers of capital was more daunting. While Nietzsches transvaluation of values gave pride of place to the highest types of humanityvalues were a gift, the philosopher their greatest sourcethe political implications of marginalism were more ambidextrous. If on one reading it was the capitalist who gave value to the worker, on another it was the workerin his capacity as consumerwho gave value to capital. Social democrats pursued the latter argument with great zeal. The result was the welfare state, with its emphasis on high wages and good benefitsas well as unionizationas the driving agent of mass demand and economic prosperity. More than a macroeconomic policy, social democracy (or liberalism, as it was called in America) reflected an ethos of the citizen-worker-consumer as the creator and center of the economy. Long after economists had retired the labor theory of value, the welfare state remained lit by its afterglow. The political economy of the welfare state may have been marginalist, but its moral economy was workerist.

The midcentury right was in desperate need of a response that, squaring Nietzsches circle, would clear a path for aristocratic action in the capitalist marketplace. It needed not simply an alternative economics but an answering vision of society. Schumpeter provided one, Hayek another.

Schumpeters entrepreneur is one of the more enigmatic characters of modern social theory. He is not inventive, heroic or charismatic. There is surely no trace of any mystic glamour about him, Schumpeter writes in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. His instincts and impulses are confined to the office and the counting table. Outside those environs, he cannot say boo to a goose. Yet it is this nothing, this great inscrutable blank, that will bend a nation to his willnot unlike the father figures of a Mann or Musil novel.

What the entrepreneur hasor, better, isare force and will. As Schumpeter explains in a 1927 essay, the entrepreneur possesses extraordinary physical and nervous energy. That energy gives him focus (the maniacal, almost brutal, ability to shut out what is inessential) and stamina. In those late hours when lesser beings have given way to a state of exhaustion, he retains his full force and originality. By originality, Schumpeter means something peculiar: receptivity to new facts. It is the entrepreneurs ability to recognize that sweet spot of novelty and occasion (an untried technology, a new method of production, a different way to market or distribute a product) that enables him to revolutionize the way business gets done. Part opportunist, part fanatic, he is a leading man, Schumpeter suggests in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, overcoming all resistance in order to create the new modes and orders of everyday life.

Schumpeter is careful to distinguish entrepreneurialism from politics as it is conventionally understood: the entrepreneurs power does not readily expandinto the leadership of nations; he wants to be left alone and to leave politics alone. Even so, the entrepreneur is best understood as neither an escape from nor an evasion of politics but as its sublimation, the relocation of politics in the economic sphere.

Rejecting the static models of other economistsequilibrium is death, he saysSchumpeter depicts the economy as a dramatic confrontation between rising and falling empires (firms). Like Machiavelli in The Prince, whose vision Nietzsche described as perfection in politics, Schumpeter identifies two types of agents struggling for position and permanence amid great flux: one is dynastic and lawful, the other upstart and intelligent. Both are engaged in a death dance, with the former in the potentially weaker position unless it can innovate and break with routine.

Schumpeter often resorts to political and military metaphors to describe this dance. Production is a history of revolutions. Competitors command and wield pieces of armor. Competition strikes at the foundations and very lives of firms; entrepreneurs in equilibrium find themselves in much the same situations as generals would in a society perfectly sure of permanent peace. In the same way that Schmitt imagines peace as the end of politics, Schumpeter sees equilibrium as the end of economics.

Against this backdrop of dramatic, even lethal, contest, the entrepreneur emerges as a legislator of values and new ways of being. The entrepreneur demonstrates a penchant for breaking with the routine tasks which everybody understands. He overcomes the multiple resistances of his worldfrom simple refusal either to finance or to buy a new thing, to physical attack on the man who tries to produce it.

To act with confidence beyond the range of familiar beacons and to overcome that resistance requires aptitudes that are present in only a small fraction of the population and that define the entrepreneurial type.

The entrepreneur, in other words, is a founder. As Schumpeter describes him in The Theory of Economic Development:

There is the dream and the will to found a private kingdom, usually, though not necessarily, also a dynasty. The modern world really does not know any such positions, but what may be attained by industrial and commercial success is still the nearest approach to medieval lordship possible to modern man.

That may be why his inner life is so reminiscent of the Machiavellian prince, that other virtuoso of novelty. All of his energy and will, the entirety of his force and being, is focused outward, on the enterprise of creating a new order.

And yet even as he sketched the broad outline of this legislator of value, Schumpeter sensed that his days were numbered. Innovation was increasingly the work of departments, committees and specialists. The modern corporation socializes the bourgeois mind. In the same way that modern regiments had destroyed the very personal affair of medieval battle, so did the corporation eliminate the need for individual leadership acting by virtue of personal force and personal responsibility for success. The romance of earlier commercial adventure was rapidly wearing away. With the entrepreneurial function in terminal decline, Schumpeters experiment in economics as great politics seemed to be approaching an end.

* * *

Hayek offered an alternative account of the market as the proving ground of aristocratic action. Schumpeter had already hinted at it in a stray passage in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Taking aim at the notion of a rational chooser who knows what he wants, wants what is best (for him, at any rate) and works efficiently to get it, Schumpeter invoked a half-century of social thoughtLe Bon, Pareto and Freudto emphasize not only the importance of the extra-rational and irrational element in our behavior, but also the power of capital to shape the preferences of the consumer.

Consumers do not quite live up to the idea that the economic textbooks used to convey. On the one hand, their wants are nothing like as definite, and their actions upon those wants nothing like as rational and prompt. On the other hand, they are so amenable to the influence of advertising and other methods of persuasion that producers often seem to dictate to them instead of being directed by them.

In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek developed this notion into a full-blown theory of the wealthy and the well-born as an avant-garde of taste, as makers of new horizons of value from which the rest of humanity took its bearings. Instead of the market of consumers dictating the actions of capital, it would be capital that would determine the market of consumptionand beyond that, the deepest beliefs and aspirations of a people.

The distinction that Hayek draws between mass and elite has not received much attention from his critics or his defenders, bewildered or beguiled as they are by his repeated invocations of liberty. Yet a careful reading of Hayeks argument reveals that liberty for him is neither the highest good nor an intrinsic good. It is a contingent and instrumental good (a consequence of our ignorance and the condition of our progress), the purpose of which is to make possible the emergence of a heroic legislator of value.

Civilization and progress, Hayek argues, depend upon each of us deploying knowledge that is available for our use yet inaccessible to our reason. The computer on which I am typing is a repository of centuries of mathematics, science and engineering. I know how to use it, but I dont understand it. Most of our knowledge is like that: we know the how of thingshow to turn on the computer, how to call up our word-processing program and typewithout knowing the that of things: that electricity is the flow of electrons, that circuits operate through binary choices and so on. Others possess the latter kind of knowledge; not us. That combination of our know-how and their knowledge advances the cause of civilization. Because they have thought through how a computer can be optimally designed, we are free to ignore its transistors and microchips; instead, we can order clothes online, keep up with old friends as if they lived next door, and dive into previously inaccessible libraries and archives in order to produce a novel account of the Crimean War.

We can never know what serendipity of knowledge and know-how will produce the best results, which union of genius and basic ignorance will yield the greatest advance. For that reason, individualsall individualsmust be free to pursue their ends, to exploit the wisdom of others for their own purposes. Allowing for the uncertainties of progress is the greatest guarantor of progress. Hayeks argument for freedom rests less on what we know or want to know than on what we dont know, less on what we are morally entitled to as individuals than on the beneficial consequences of individual freedom for society as a whole.

In fact, Hayek continues, it is not really my freedom that I should be concerned about; nor is it the freedom of my friends and neighbors. It is the freedom of that unknown and untapped figure of invention to whose imagination and ingenuity my friends and I will later owe our greater happiness and flourishing: What is important is not what freedom I personally would like to exercise but what freedom some person may need in order to do things beneficial to society. This freedom we can assure to the unknown person only by giving it to all.

Deep inside Hayeks understanding of freedom, then, is the notion that the freedom of some is worth more than the freedom of others: The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use. Hayek cites approvingly this statement of a nineteenth-century philosopher: It may be of extreme importance that some should enjoy libertyalthough such liberty may be neither possible nor desirable for the great majority. That we dont grant freedom only to that individual is due solely to the happenstance of our ignorance: we cannot know in advance who he might be. If there were omniscient men, if we could know not only all that affects the attainment of our present wishes but also our future wants and desires, there would be little case for liberty.

* * *

As this reference to future wants and desires suggests, Hayek has much more in mind than producers responding to a pre-existing market of demand; hes talking about men who create new marketsand not just of wants or desires, but of basic tastes and beliefs. The freedom Hayek cares most about is the freedom of those legislators of value who shape and determine our ends.

The overwhelming majority of men and women, Hayek says, are simply not capable of breaking with settled patterns of thought and practice; given a choice, they would never opt for anything new, never do anything better than what they do now.

Action by collective agreement is limited to instances where previous efforts have already created a common view, where opinion about what is desirable has become settled, and where the problem is that of choosing between possibilities already generally recognized, not that of discovering new possibilities.

While some might claim that Hayeks argument here is driven less by a dim view of ordinary men and women than his dyspepsia about politics, he explicitly excludes the decision of some governing elite from the acid baths of his skepticism. Nor does he hide his misgivings about the individual abilities of wage laborers who comprise the great majority. The working stiff is a being of limited horizons. Unlike the employer or the independent, both of whom are dedicated to shaping and reshaping a plan of life, the workers orientation is largely a matter of fitting himself into a given framework. He lacks responsibility, initiative, curiosity and ambition. Though some of this is by necessitythe workplace does not countenance actions which cannot be prescribed or which are not conventionalHayek insists that this is not only the actual but the preferred position of the majority of the population. The great majority enjoy submitting to the workplace regime because it gives them what they mainly want: an assured fixed income available for current expenditure, more or less automatic raises, and provision for old age. They are thus relieved of some of the responsibilities of economic life. Simply put, these are people for whom taking orders from a superior is not only a welcome relief but a prerequisite of their fulfillment: To do the bidding of others is for the employed the condition of achieving his purpose.

It thus should come as no surprise that Hayek believes in an avant-garde of tastemakers, whose power and position give them a vantage from which they can not only see beyond the existing horizon but also catch a glimpse of new ones:

Only from an advanced position does the next range of desires and possibilities become visible, so that the selection of new goals and the effort toward their achievement will begin long before the majority can strive for them.

These horizons include everything from what we regard as good or beautiful, to the ambitions, goals and ends we pursue in our everyday lives, to the propagation of new ideas in politics, morals, and religion. On all of these fronts, it is the avant-garde that leads the way and sets our parameters.

More interesting is how explicit and insistent Hayek is about linking the legislation of new values to the possession of vast amounts of wealth and capital, evenor especiallywealth that has been inherited. Often, says Hayek, it is only the very rich who can afford new products or tastes. Lavishing money on these boutique items, they give producers the opportunity to experiment with better designs and more efficient methods of production. Thanks to their patronage, producers will find cheaper ways of making and delivering these productscheap enough, that is, for the majority to enjoy them. What was before a luxury of the idle richstockings, automobiles, piano lessons, the universityis now an item of mass consumption.

The most important contribution of great wealth, however, is that it frees its possessor from the pursuit of money so that he can pursue nonmaterial goals. Liberated from the workplace and the rat race, the idle richa phrase Hayek seeks to reclaim as a positive goodcan devote themselves to patronizing the arts, subsidizing worthy causes like abolition or penal reform, founding new philanthropies and cultural institutions. Those born to wealth are especially important: not only are they the beneficiaries of the higher culture and nobler values that have been transmitted across the generationsHayek insists that we will get a better elite if we allow parents to pass their fortunes on to their children; requiring a ruling class to start fresh with every generation is a recipe for stagnation, for having to reinvent the wheelbut they are immune to the petty lure of money. The grosser pleasures in which the newly rich often indulge have usually no attraction for those who have inherited wealth. (How Hayek reconciles this position with the agnosticism about value he expresses in The Road to Serfdom remains unclear.)

The men of capital, in other words, are best understood not as economic magnates but as cultural legislators: However important the independent owner of property may be for the economic order of a free society, his importance is perhaps even greater in the fields of thought and opinion, of tastes and beliefs. While this seems to be a universal truth for Hayek, it is especially true in societies where wage labor is the rule. The dominance of paid employment has terrible consequences for the imagination, which are most acutely felt by the producers of that imagination: There is something seriously lacking in a society in which all the intellectual, moral, and artistic leaders belong to the employed classes. Yet we are moving everywhere toward such a position.

When labor becomes the norm, in both senses of the term, culture doesnt stand a chance.

* * *

In a virtuoso analysis of what he calls The Intransigent Right, the British historian Perry Anderson identifies four figures of the twentieth-century conservative canon: Schmitt, Hayek, Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss. Strauss and Schmitt come off best (the sharpest, most profound and far-seeing), Oakeshott the worst, and Hayek somewhere in between. This hierarchy of judgment is not completely surprising. Anderson has never taken seriously the political theory produced by a nation of shopkeepers, so the receptivity of the English to Oakeshott and Hayek, who became a British subject in 1938, renders them almost irresistible targets for his critique. Andersons cosmopolitan indifference to the indiscreet charms of the Anglo bourgeoisie usually makes him the most sure-footed of guides, but in Hayeks case it has led him astray. Like many on the left, Anderson is so taken with the bravura and brutality of Strausss and Schmitts self-styled realism that he cant grasp the far greater daring and profundity of Hayeks political theory of shopkeepinghis effort to locate great politics in the economic relations of capitalism.

What distinguishes the theoretical men of the right from their counterparts on the left, Anderson writes, is that their voices were heard in the chancelleries. Yet whose voice has been more listened to, across decades and continents, than Hayeks? Schmitt and Strauss have attracted readers from all points of the political spectrum as writers of dazzling if disturbing genius, but the two projects with which they are most associatedEuropean fascism and American neoconservatismhave never generated the global traction or gathering energy that neoliberalism has now sustained for more than four decades.

It would be a mistake to draw too sharp a line between the marginal children of Nietzschewith political man on one branch of the family tree, economic man on the other. Hayek, at times, could sound the most Schmittian notes. At the height of Augusto Pinochets power in Chile, Hayek told a Chilean interviewer that when any government is in a situation of rupture, and there are no recognized rules, rules have to be created. The sort of situation he had in mind was not anarchy or civil war but Allende-style social democracy, where the government pursues the mirage of social justice through administrative and increasingly discretionary means. Even in The Constitution of Liberty, an extended paean to the notion of a spontaneous order that slowly evolves over time, we get a brief glimpse of the lawgiver whose task it is to create conditions in which an orderly arrangement can establish and ever renew itself. (Of the modern German writings on the rule of law, Hayek also says, Schmitts are still among the most learned and perceptive.) Current events seemed to supply Hayek with an endless parade of candidates. Two years after its publication in 1960, he sent The Constitution of Liberty to Portuguese strongman Antnio Salazar, with a cover note professing his hope that it might assist the dictator in his endeavour to design a constitution which is proof against the abuses of democracy. Pinochets Constitution of 1980 is named after the 1960 text.

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Nietzsches Marginal Children: On Friedrich Hayek | The Nation