Nietzsche against Rousseau

Author: Zongcheng He Pearson
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-07-01
Features: Nietzsche's political thought has long been an overlooked field of study, and this work by Keith Anselm-Pearson is a significant and welcome contribution to this area. Nietzsche is commonly regarded as an important moral philosopher, while his political thought is often dismissed or glossed over, either as unrealistic individualism or as dangerous totalitarianism. Nietzsche Against Rousseau treats Nietzsche seriously as a political thinker and connects his political ideas to the mainstream traditions of modern political thought. Both Nietzsche and Rousseau are concerned with the decline of human civilization and have developed a history of human moral and political development, offering a contradictory critique of liberal political culture. Against this backdrop of shared concerns, Dr. Anselm-Pearson compares Nietzsche's sovereign, -ethics-transcendent, autonomous individual with Rousseau's concept of the general will, further arguing that Nietzsche's Dionysian self-concept and his concept of the will to power directly respond to the challenges posed by Rousseau's romanticism and historical pessimism.