To celebrate the publication of Hugo Drochon’s Nietzsche’s Great Politics (Princeton University Press), CRASSH and POLIS are hosting a book launch at 5pm on 16 March 2017 in SG1, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge. You are invited to join Dr Hugo Drochon who will be discussing his book with Professor David Runciman.
Nietzsche's impact on the world of culture, philosophy, and the arts is uncontested, but his political thought remains mired in controversy. By placing Nietzsche back in his late-nineteenth-century German context, Nietzsche's Great Politics moves away from the disputes surrounding Nietzsche's appropriation by the Nazis and challenges the use of the philosopher in postmodern democratic thought. Rather than starting with contemporary democratic theory or continental philosophy, Hugo Drochon argues that Nietzsche's political ideas must first be understood in light of Bismarck's policies, in particular his "Great Politics," which transformed the international politics of the late nineteenth century.
Nietzsche's Great Politics shows how Nietzsche made Bismarck's notion his own, enabling him to offer a vision of a unified European political order that was to serve as a counterbalance to both Britain and Russia. This order was to be led by a "good European" cultural elite whose goal would be to encourage the rebirth of Greek high culture. In relocating Nietzsche's politics to their own time, the book offers not only a novel reading of the philosopher but also a more accurate picture of why his political thought remains so relevant today.
Dr Hugo Drochon is a historian of late nineteenth and twentieth political thought, and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Conspiracy and Democracy project in CRASSH, Cambridge.
Professor David Runciman is Head of the Politics Department, Cambridge, and is the author of The Confidence Trap, Political Hypocrisy and The Politics of Good Intentions.
Attendance is free, but please register here.
The event will be followed by a reception to which all attendees are invited.