Hatab’s Nietzschean Defense of Democracy: a Post-Modern Experiment in Political Theory and Its Relevancy in Understanding Nietzsche.

Abstract

Friedrich Nietzsche’s thoughts have had an enormous effect on contemporary discourse and are recognized to be a primary source for postmodernism, which critiques philosophical ideas from the Enlightenment. Lawrence J. Hatab, in his book A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy: an Experiment in Postmodern Politics, claims that Nietzsche was wrong to repudiate democracy, and claims to use his theories to create a political model that he should have preferred democracy to any other political arrangement if it was in the spirit of his own thinking. In the body of this paper, I will first discuss the inevitable difficulties of a post-modern democracy, and then examine several pragmatic dilemmas with Hatab’s theoretical foundation for a democratic system in his project. Next, I will highlight the internal conflicts Hatab’s analysis has with Nietzsche’s work, and bring to light egalitarian undercurrents that he uses to allow his political theory to avoid practical problems. Then, I will discus how we should look at Nietzsche in the first place and how we should read his advice on political concerns. I will end by discussing what benefit we can gain from engaging in this discussion, and what we can learn from looking at Nietzsche when conferring political questions.