In postwar Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche was seen as an intellectual proto-Nazi. A new book explains how two antifascist Italian academics — one of whom was a communist — fought to recover the “real” Nietzsche for the Left.
Over a century ago, Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought sparked a heated debate among Danish intellectuals about society’s moral foundations. The dispute prefigured today’s debates between the Left and the far right, which continues to be inspired by Nietzsche.
Today’s right-wing thinkers look to Nietzsche and other German reactionaries to ground their elitist politics — and to do battle with leftists' project of universal emancipation.
Libertarians aren't pleased with Corey Robin's new work on Nietzsche and the Austrian school. Here's his lengthy rebuttal.
The theorists of the Frankfurt School wanted to promote a critical Marxism that wasn’t hobbled by one-dimensional economic determinism. In doing so, they also drew on the thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud.
Throughout his life, Friedrich Nietzsche maintained a profound contempt for socialism. According to him, its advocates — and all other defenders of egalitarianism — had a single aim: leveling differences and suppressing individual genius.
Karl Marx believed in the self-emancipation of the working class, while Friedrich Nietzsche had nothing but disdain for the masses. But a provocative new book claims the two thinkers can be read together to develop a socialism for today.
Nietzsche’s critique of modernity has fascinated thinkers on the Right and Left — but in its essence, it belongs to the Right. The Left must advance an alternative modernity.
"Nathan Leopold is not the only boy who has read Nietzsche."
Silicon Valley capitalist Marc Andreessen has released a manifesto that decries efforts to restrain the genius of tech billionaires. Drawing heavily from Nietzsche and Hayek, it’s the same old right-wing elitism in new packaging.
In Liberalism and Its Discontents, Francis Fukuyama diagnoses the political and psychological malaise caused by capitalism. His analysis makes one thing clear: liberalism is incapable of addressing the social, economic, and ecological crises it faces.
Socialist intellectual Georg Lukács was an astute critic of right-wing philosophy and its connections to fascism. For Lukács, philosophers of the Right were united by a reactionary disavowal of reason and justice.
In Western Marxism, Domenico Losurdo takes 20th-century European and American Marxists to task for unfairly dismissing anti-colonial socialist movements. But his broad-brush condemnation fails to do justice to the rich and varied intellectual tradition he attacks.
When it comes to democracy, the United States often needs to be student rather than tutor.
Jordan Peterson claims to slay sacred cows and challenge prevailing orthodoxies. But what he’s really offering is a minor twist on tried-and-true conservatism — defending existing hierarchies and opposing the democratization of political and economic life.
Max Stirner is mainly remembered as the “nihilist” thinker derided by Karl Marx. But, a newly translated article by German socialist Hermann Duncker argues, Stirner’s philosophy of self-liberation has important lessons for the working-class movement.
We can’t talk about the rise of right-wing populists like Donald Trump, reactionary and bizarre conspiracy theories like QAnon, and the increasingly pervasive sense of nihilism across global politics without talking about neoliberalism.
Jordan Peterson's thought is filled with pseudo-science, bad pop psychology, and deep irrationalism. In other words, he’s full of shit.
In his new book, Slavoj Žižek advances a provocative understanding of Christianity as a progressive, secularizing force. It’s classic Žižek — by turns brilliant and infuriating.