Nihilism, democracy and liberalism: Maudemarie Clark’s ‘Nietzsche on Ethics and Politics’
| Author | Hugo Halferty Drochon |
| Published date | 01 October 2017 |
| Date | 01 October 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1474885116648057 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Review Articles |
European Journal of Political Theory
2017, Vol. 16(4) 481–489
!The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885116648057
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EJPT
Review Article
Nihilism, democracy and
liberalism: Maudemarie
Clark’s ‘Nietzsche on
Ethics and Politics’
Hugo Halferty Drochon
University of Cambridge, UK
Maudemarie Clark,Nietzsche on Ethics and Politics. Oxford University Press, 2015; 328
pp. ISBN: 9780199371846
Abstract
Maudemarie Clark is a leading interpreter of Nietzsche’s theory of truth, and as such we
are fortunate to have her papers on his ethics, politics and metaphysics collected in one
volume. Opening her section on politics – the subject of this review – with a critique of
Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, she condemns Bloom’s Straussian demand that
philosophers lie about the fact that no truth exists to protect their way of life as a
recurrence of the nihilist ascetic ideal Nietzsche rejected at the end of the Genealogy.In
doing so, she definitively frees Nietzsche from Strauss’ grip, and opens up the possibility
of questioning anew Nietzsche’s relationship to feminism, queer theory, democracy and
community. Her most striking claim is that Nietzsche’s aristocratic ethics can be recon-
ciled with modern democratic politics. Whether that is the case or not is up for debate,
but what clearly isn’t, as this collection reminds us, is that we cannot do our thinking
about politics without him.
Keywords
Nietzsche, Allan Bloom, Nihilism, feminism, democracy, liberalism
Maudemarie Clark is considered, on the basis on her book Nietzsche on Truth and
Philosophy (1991), as one of – perhaps the – leading interpreter of Nietzsche’s
theory of truth. As such to have access to her collected papers, some of them
unpublished or maybe less readily accessible, on Nietzsche’s views on ethics,
Corresponding author:
Hugo Halferty Drochon, University of Cambridge, CRASSH, Alison Richard Building, Cambridge CB3 9DT,
UK.
Email: hpph2@cam.ac.uk
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