# Anarchism and Friedrich Nietzsche

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The relation between anarchism and Friedrich Nietzsche has been ambiguous. Even though Nietzsche criticized anarchists, his thought proved influential for many of them. As such "[t]here were many things that drew anarchists to Nietzsche: his hatred of the state; his disgust for the mindless social behavior of 'herds'; his anti-Christianity; his distrust of the effect of both the market and the State on cultural production; his desire for an 'übermensch'—that is, for a new human who was to be neither master nor slave".

## Overview

During the last decade of the 19th century, Nietzsche was frequently associated with anarchist movements, in spite of the fact that in his writings he seems to hold a negative view of anarchists. This may be the result of a popular association during this period between his ideas and those of Max Stirner.
Nietzsche was highly critical of the state, something that is a common theme in Anarchist thinking as well as his critique of conventional morality, writing in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, that "State is the name for the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly, it tells lies; and this lie crawls out of it´s mouth: "I, the state, am the people."". Also, he would say, "This sign I give to you: every people speaks it´s own tongue of good and evil: this the neighbour does not understand. It has invented it´s own language of customs and rights." .

## Max Stirner and Nietzsche

Max Stirner was a Hegelian philosopher whose "name appears with familiar regularity in historically-orientated surveys of anarchist thought as one of the earliest and best-known exponents of individualist anarchism". In 1844, his The Ego and Its Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum which may literally be translated as The Unique Individual and His Property) was published, which is considered to be "a founding text in the tradition of individualist anarchism".
The ideas of 19th-century German philosophers Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche have often been compared, and many authors have discussed apparent similarities in their writings, sometimes raising the question of influence. In Germany, during the early years of Nietzsche's emergence as a well-known figure, the only thinker discussed in connection with his ideas more often than Stirner was Schopenhauer. It is certain that Nietzsche read about Stirner's book The Ego and Its Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, 1845), which was mentioned in Lange's History of Materialism (1866) and Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869), both of which young Nietzsche knew very well. However, there is no irrefutable indication that he actually read it, as no mention of Stirner is known to exist anywhere in Nietzsche's publications, papers or correspondence.
And yet as soon as Nietzsche's work began to reach a wider audience the question of whether or not he owed a debt of influence to Stirner was raised. As early as 1891 (while Nietzsche was still alive, though incapacitated by mental illness) Eduard von Hartmann went so far as to suggest that he had plagiarized Stirner. By the turn of the century the belief that Nietzsche had been influenced by Stirner was so widespread that it became something of a commonplace, at least in Germany, prompting one observer to note in 1907 "Stirner's influence in modern Germany has assumed astonishing proportions, and moves in general parallel with that of Nietzsche. The two thinkers are regarded as exponents of essentially the same philosophy."
Nevertheless, from the very beginning of what was characterized as "great debate" regarding Stirner's possible influence on Nietzsche—positive or negative—serious problems with the idea were noted. By the middle of the 20th century, if Stirner was mentioned at all in works on Nietzsche, the idea of influence was often dismissed outright or abandoned as unanswerable.
But the idea that Nietzsche was influenced in some way by Stirner continues to attract a significant minority, perhaps because it seems necessary to explain in some reasonable fashion the often-noted (though arguably superficial) similarities in their writings. In any case, the most significant problems with the theory of possible Stirner influence on Nietzsche are not limited to the difficulty in establishing whether the one man knew of or read the other. They also consist in establishing precisely how and why Stirner in particular might have been a meaningful influence on a man as widely read as Nietzsche.

## Individualist anarchism
### Individualist anarchism in the United States

The two men were frequently compared by French "literary anarchists" and anarchist interpretations of Nietzschean ideas appear to have also been influential in the United States. One researcher notes: "Indeed, translations of Nietzsche's writings in the United States very likely appeared first in Liberty, the anarchist journal edited by Benjamin Tucker." He adds "Tucker preferred the strategy of exploiting his writings, but proceeding with due caution: 'Nietzsche says splendid things, – often, indeed, Anarchist things, – but he is no Anarchist. It is of the Anarchists, then, to intellectually exploit this would-be exploiter. He may be utilized profitably, but not prophetably.'"

### Individualist anarchism in Latin America

Among the European workers who came to Argentina in the early 1900s, some Stirnerian individualists influenced by Nietzsche opposed syndicalism and instead created affinity groups.

## Anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-communists

The anarchist Gustav Landauer appropriates Nietzsche into the anarchist tradition but differentiates Nietzsche's hardness and elitism incompatible with anarchism.
Rudolf Rocker's interpretation of Nietzsche is not only directed against right-wing extremist and Nazi appropriations of the German philosopher's works, but also serves as an explicit rebuttal of Oswald Spengler's deterministic view of history in his main book The Decline of the West.

## Post-anarchism

According to a more recent study by Dominique Miething, who has compared anarchist readings of Nietzsche's philosophy in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States between 1890 and 1947, it is "not true that post-anarchists have introduced anything substantially new when they incorporated Nietzschean ideas into their variants of anarchism. Rather, many classical anarchists that learned from Nietzsche had already rejected typical modern ideas, for instance essentialist ontologies. It is just that post-anarchists lack the detailed knowledge of classical anarchist thought [...]".