ABSTRACT
The editors of a collection on the intersection of the world of ideas and politics, title their essays around Friedrich Nietzsche’s influence in just this sense, naming him the “godfather of fascism.” Nietzsche thus seems to be the most enduring, certainly the most recognizable symbol of the foundational irrationalism traced by Georg Lukacs. Nietzsche’s understanding of will to power as the positive expression of spontaneous abundance rather than reactive anxiety or scarcity recurs in his discussion of the origin of creativity. The difference between Nietzschean critique and traditional defenses in favor of the Western project of modernity, or the Enlightenment to use more globally ambitious European language, such as post-Habermasian critical theory is also the difference between social, practical or political science and art or philosophy. Nietzsche means to turn everything on its head: “The concept politics has then become completely absorbed into a war of spirits, all the power-structures of the old society have been blown into the air.”
