• DOI:10.1080/17496977.2016.1140404
• Corpus ID: 170389740

Overcoming the preachers of death: Gustav Landauer's reading of Friedrich Nietzsche

@article{Miething2016OvercomingTP,
  title={Overcoming the preachers of death: Gustav Landauer's reading of Friedrich Nietzsche},
  author={Dominique Miething},
  journal={Intellectual History Review},
  year={2016},
  volume={26},
  pages={285 - 304}
}

• Dominique Miething
• Published 18 March 2016
• Art
• Intellectual History Review

Over the past 80 years, the German anarchist Gustav Landauer’s (1870-1919) reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy has been assessed in a number of different ways. Two voices at each end of this timespan should make us aware of its significance. First, there is Max Nettlau (1865–1944), who, in his time, was the most knowledgeable historian of anarchism. Looking back from the 1930s to the turn of the century, when the Übermensch and similar ideas were in vogue and felt most acutely both inside and outside of anarchist circles, Nettlau remarked that Landauer was someone who “knew Nietzsche much better than any of us.” When we fast forward to the timespan’s other end, we encounter the assessment of Canadian sociologist Richard J. F. Day, which he lays out in his 2010 preface to the latest English language translation of Landauer’s writings. Here, the German anarchist is said to have developed a discursive understanding of the State and capitalism, supposedly thanks to Nietzsche’s influence. While clearly having Landauer’s most famous passage in mind – “The state is a social relationship; a certain way of people relating to one another. It can be destroyed by creating new social relationships; i.e. by people relating to one another differently” –Day unfortunately does not provide any credible evidence of Nietzsche’s influence on Landauer’s conceptualization. Instead, Day pushes the point further, revealing that the purported appropriation of Nietzsche struck him as remarkable enough to label Landauer as “one of the first post-anarchists.” Similarly, Saul Newman welcomes him as a precursor to post-anarchism, because Landauer’s “immediate” utopianism entails meaningful political action outside of the traditional sphere of the State while simultaneously eschewing essentialist prescriptions for a future society. Newman adopts this stance as his own in pursuit of what he calls “the anti-political imaginary,” though he overlooks the fact that Landauer himself had already worked as an “Antipolitiker” (i.e., an “anti-politician”) in the late 1890s. Moreover, by confronting the psychological phenomenon of “voluntary servitude,” Newman credits Landauer with a “‘micro-political’ understanding” of oppression, yet without properly tracking down the theoretical foundation of this understanding within Landauer’s work – namely, the French humanist Étienne de La Boétie (1530–1563), whose reception by Landauer shall be explored more fully in my discussion of anti-politics below. In light of these shortcomings, this paper attempts to contextualize Day and Newman’s postanarchist claims and to show that, in denominating a Nietzsche-reading anarchist as their forebear, they have failed to produce a qualified evaluation of Landauer’s positions for want of a close analysis of his texts. From the perspective of intellectual history, we require much more historical and philological evidence in order to evaluate the Nietzsche-Landauer-Post-anarchism lineage.