Theoria

CALL FOR PAPERS

Nietzsche’s legacy for politics and political thought is profoundly ambivalent and controversial. A self-declared ‘antipolitical’ German, he condemned politics and all things political, yet he also called for a ‘grosse Politik’. While a fierce critic of modern democracy, pleased to be called an ‘aristocratic radical’, he also acknowledged democracy as the signature of modernity and valued it as a quarantine against tyranny.

Over the last 10 years Nietzsche’s significance for political thought has become a central and hotly contested area of Nietzsche research, especially in the Anglophone world: Is Nietzsche a political thinker at all, or an antipolitical philosopher of values and culture? Is Nietzsche an aristocratic political thinker who damns democracy as an expression of modern Nihilism, or can his thought, especially his thought on the Greek agon, be appropriated for contemporary democratic theory? Do Nietzsche’s criticisms of democracy allow for a politics that is compatible with democratic commitments? Nietzsche is known to be an important source of inspiration for Hannah Arendt, but does Arendt’s concept of politics and the public sphere go decisively beyond Nietzsche – or are they fundamentally compatible as political thinkers? These are some of the issues being currently debated.

The 2007 conference will follow the standard FNS conference format of five parallel sessions and five plenary sessions with well-known speakers in the field. But it will also depart from this format in the sense that three of the plenary sessions will involve not a single speaker, but two speakers, each making the case for one side in some of the current controversies mentioned above.

Confirmed plenary speakers include:

Dan Conway (Texas A&M University) on Nietzsche as a political thinker

Paul van Tongeren (Radbound University, The Netherlands) on Nietzsche as
antipolitical thinker

William Connolly (Johns Hopkins University) on Nietzsche and radical
democracy

Dana Villa (UC Santa Barbara) on Arendt contra Nietzsche

James Conant (University of Chicago) on Nietzsche’s Perfectionism and
Democracy

Keith Ansell-Pearson (Warwick University) will chair the round table
discussion.

The Friedrich Nietzsche Society welcomes proposals for 30-minute papers on all topics relevant to the conference theme, including the following:

• Nietzsche and ancient political philosophy / Nietzsche and modern political philosophy
• Nietzsche and political values: freedom, justice, equality, pluralism, tolerance, identity & community
• Nietzsche and political action: praxis and poiesis
• Nietzsche and political power
• Topics in Nietzsche’s political thought, including ‘grosse Politik’, the critique of democracy, aristocracy, the agon, legislation, Germany / das Reich, the Greeks
• Nietzsche and Liberalism / Republicanism / Aristocratism / Agonistic democracy
• Nietzsche and the Frankfurt School / Critical Theory; Foucault; Leo Strauss; Hannah Arendt; Carl Schmitt; Machiavelli; Spinoza; Rousseau; Hobbes; Plato; Thucydides
• Nietzsche and Nineteenth Century politics / political thought (Bismarck; Napoleon; Burckhardt, Marx, Feuerbach, de Tocqueville, Mill; Wagner)

Papers on other relevant topics will also be considered.

Abstracts (no longer than 400 words) should be submitted by 01 November to Herman Siemens (fnsleiden2007@hotmail.com). Early submissions are welcome.

Webpage under construction at: http://www.fns2007.leidenuniv.nl/