ABSTRACT
The modern State is the inverse image of the Greek state. These moderns are “slaves,” men given over exclusively to what the Greeks saw as degradation par excellence, i.e., to “pure work,” to something incapable of “justifying existence,” namely, the simple struggle for survival and satisfaction of the system of organic needs. The founding myths of the Greek polis — before Plato and the decadence of Hellenistic and above all Roman universalism which prefigured the world State — were always associated with a bond, as well as with a local protective divinity always watching from the Acropolis. The difficult problem that the question of “great politics” poses in Friedrich Nietzsche’s posthumous fragments comes from their assuming — given all his critiques of the State, of extreme equalization, or of the mechanization of the political animal become a cog in a blind state machine — a complete reversal of perspectives.
