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Grounds for suspicion are further amplified by the thought that such
conceptions of agency may be far from ideologically innocent. As
Williams puts it, a second helpful thought to be recovered from
Nietzsche is that such a peculiar account must have a purpose, and
that the purpose is a moral one (1995a: 72). The point of positing
some such conception is to guarantee that people are capable of
both recognising moral reasons and freely doing or freely violating
whatever morality demands. And the point of that is to vindicate
practices of moral blame. Furthermore, Williams (like Nietzsche)
thinks that moral blame may be objectionable because blame can
function as a mechanism of control or power. For given that being
blamed (by others or, as in the case of guilt, oneself) is typically
unpleasant, the desire to avoid blame may readily become
internalised. And since a necessary means for avoiding moral blame
is complying with morality, one way to ensure that one does avoid it
is to internalise moral values. Hence blame may be used as a tool
by which to recruit people into the morality system.
Williams Nietzschean realism is not limited to his critique of
morality but also informs an approach to political philosophy that
emerges from this critique. This approach is indebted not only to
Nietzsche but also to the influence of Nietzschean realism on Max
Weber and it will be helpful to briefly discuss this aspect of Webers
uptake of Nietzsche to situate Williams own political realism.
Although Max Webers commitment to Nietzschean realism is given
expression throughout his work (Owen, 1991, 1994 and 2000), the
salient aspect for our current concerns involves two points that
Weber develops from Nietzsche. The first is that the
disenchantment of the world undercuts the claim to authority of
morality and pushes us to acknowledge that different domains of
human activity (science, politics, art, religion, etc.) are characterised
ii.
iii.
iv.
v.
vi.
vii.
Genealogy
There is considerable debate in both Nietzsche scholarship and in
relation to the work of contemporary agonists concerning the sense,
if any, that genealogy is a form of critique. Seeing Nietzsches
practice of genealogy against the background of his commitment to
agonism, however, helps us to understand that we can analytically
separate out two different objects of critical attention. Thus, in
Nietzsches own case, there is, on the one hand, the substance of
morality as a distinct kind of ethical outlook which pictures ethical
agency in a particular way and supports certain values rather than
others - and, on the other hand, the claim to authority of morality,
its claim to be the rational form of ethics as such. Although a
genealogy of morality may have implications for the former, it is
primarily directed at the latter. Nietzsches main target in his
genealogy is the default authority of the institution of morality
rather than the value of the values that it cultivates. By providing
an account of the formation of morality in which each of threads
that compose it is identified as expressing the interests of particular
social groups, namely, the slaves and, especially, the priests,
Nietzsche offers us an account of the formation and triumph of
morality as shaped by power struggles. Rather than expressing the
historical development (or cunning) of ethical reason and hence a
vindication of the authority of morality, Nietzsches genealogy of
morality is decidedly non-vindicatory: morality rules as the
contingent product of struggles for social and political power. This
account does not by itself undermine the values that morality
promotes (or support the values that morality devalues), but it does
undermine the default claim of morality to legitimate authority
over the ethical domain. It, thus, makes morality into an object
that can be legitimately subject to critical evaluation or, to put the
same point another way, it makes possible an agonic relationship to
morality. Note that it is an important part of this critical role of
audience and thereby draws them into the agonic encounter that
the author has constructed.
Conclusion
Nietzsches significance for contemporary political philosophy is
diverse, varied and, obviously enough, dependent on the different
readings of Nietzsche that contemporary theorists adopt. However,
it is not, I think, too controversial to say that it is through his
distinctive commitment to realism in ethics and politics, to agonism
as offering an account of freedom, and to genealogy as a form of
historical philosophy that constructs agonic encounters that his
influence is most vividly present in the field of contemporary
political philosophy.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Paul Katsafanas for incisive editorial comments and
to my colleague Tracy Strong for his wise advice.
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