Books

I am Not a Man I am Dynamite: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Anarchist Tradition

Brian Morris deplores John Moore and friends’ views on Nietzsche and anarchism.

This interesting collection of essays, mostly by male academic philosophers, is largely an attempt to convince us that the reactionary philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was actually a true anarchist – pure, creative, life affirming, elitist. By contrast, those awful nineteenth century anarchists such as Bakunin and Kropotkin, in criticizing and challenging state power, economic exploitation under capitalism and all forms of social oppression, were not real anarchists, for they were motivated only by envy, weakness and ressentiment and were lacking in any creative impulse. These academics have their understanding back-to-front, of course.

The collection is edited by the late John Moore, who is described in the introduction as an eccentric ‘iconoclastic’ thinker – even though Moore joyfully embraced every intellectual fad around, from primitivism and spiritualism to Nietzschean aristocratic individualism, and never lost an opportunity to denigrate reason, socialism and class-struggle anarchism. Moore also repudiated the Enlightenment – unlike his guru Nietzsche – and arrogantly described Kropotkin as “obsolete”, ignorant of the fact that Kropotkin had critiqued ‘modernity’ even before Nietzsche.

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