Matthew McManus completed his Ph.D. in Socio-Legal Studies at York University, Ontario, in 2017 under the supervision of Dr. Lesley Jacobs. After completing his postdoctoral research and working on the Committee for International Justice and Accountability, Matthew assumed a Professorship teaching politics, international relations and law at Tec de Monterrey in the State of Mexico. Matthew McManus teaches at the University of Calgary and is the author of The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism amongst other books.

Introduction by Matt McManus

Part I: The Residue of Christianity and Rousseau

Matt McManus is the author or editor of The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) and Liberalism and Socialism: Embittered Kin or Mortal Enemies? (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021)) amongst other books. His chapter will examine Nietzsche's genealogical claim that liberalism, socialism and democracy are effectively a continuation of the Christian ethos by other means. He will argue that Nietzsche is correct in this assessment, but not in his denigration of its egalitarian aspirations.

Jordan DeJonge is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Ottawa. His essay will interrogate the connection between Nietzsche's metaphysics of the will and his aristocratism.

Ronald Beiner is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and the author of Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger and the Return of the Far Right (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). He will be writing on the influence of Nietzsche's thinking a post-truth age and diagnosing his popularity with contemporary far right activists.

Marion Trejo is a PhD Candidate at York University and a former Professor of Political Science and International relations at Tec De Monterrey. She will be examining the influence of Nietzsche's genealogical method on post-structuralists like Michel Foucault, and discussing why he remains an important touchstone despite being committed to many reactionary positions.

Part II: Nietzsche's Critique of Modernity

Nancy S. Love is a Professor of Political Science at Appalachian State University and the author of Marx, Nietzsche and Modernity (Columbia University Press, 1986) amongst other books. She will be writing on the uses and misuses of Nietzsche's concept of inequality by figures on both the right and the left.

Edward Andrew is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and the author of The Genealogy of Values: The Aesthetic Economy of Nietzsche and Proust (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1995) amongst other books. His essay will examine the political ramifications of genealogical deconstruction for our understanding of the modern world.

Conrad Hamilton completed a PhD on Marxist philosophy at the University of Paris VIII and is a co-author of Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson (Zero Books, 2020) amongst other works. He will be contrasting Nietzsche's analysis of modernity and its discontents with the work of egalitarian critics such as Mark Fisher and Marx.

Igor Shoikhedbrod is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto and the author of Revisiting Marx's Critique of Liberalism (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019). His paper will critically compare and contrast Marx and Nietzsche's divergent views on self-realization and its modern discontents. Drawing on primary and secondary sources, the paper will argue that the different accounts of self-realization offered by Marx and Nietzsche are inescapably prescriptive and political. This compels contemporaries to choose between two warring schools of radicalism (the socialist and the aristocratic) in response to the ongoing crises of liberalism.

Part III: The Aesthetics of Value

David Hollands is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at Trent University focusing on film narratology. His essay will be assessing Nietzsche's influence on political cinema; focusing on his appeal to right-wing directors such as Leni Reifenstahl, Dinesh D'Souza and Michael Bay.

Borna Radnik is a PhD candidate at Kingston University in the United Kingdom. His essay will examine where and how Nietzsche' conceives of value as emerging within history, and why this takes on an aristocratic caste. It will compare his approach with those of Hegel and Karl Marx.

Ben Burgis is a Lecturer in Philosophy at Georgia State University. He is the author of numerous papers in philosophy and the bestselling Give Them An Argument: Logic for the Left (Zero Books, 2019) which has sold over 7,000 copies. His essay will examine what elements of Nietzsche's thought can be extricated for the sake of an emancipatory politics.

Matthew Sharpe teaches philosophy at Deakin University, and has published widely on philosophy, critical theory, and the history of ideas. His most recent work is Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions (Bloomsbury 2021). His paper focuses on Nietzsche's distinction between the values of the master and the slave. The master morality or nobility Nietzsche celebrates in the text as a counter to the levelling slave morality of the Judaeo-Christian legacy, again, is read as unpolitical, despite Nietzsche's vocabulary of masters and slaves. Following commentators like Leo Strauss and Lawrence Lampert, and differently Dominic Losurdo and Don Dombowsky, this essay will argue that such readings can only proceed by suppressing the directly political claims about liberalism and democratic political institutions we find in BGE, as well as Nietzsche's radically inegalitarian recommendations for rule by philosopher-legislators. The essay will also examine Nietzsche's all-too-contemporary claims about peoples and fatherlands, as well as the proximity of his political claims to later 19th century preoccupations with cultural decline, the rise of the women's and worker's movements, and emergent discourses concerning race.

This book is intended as a major interdisciplinary contribution to the study of Nietzsche's thought in particular, and the political right more generally. Historically the assessment of Nietzsche's politics has ranged from denouncing him as a forerunner to Nazism to claiming he effectively did not have articulated political convictions. During the latter half of the 20th century he surprisingly became a major theoretical influence on a variety of post-structuralist radical critics, who saw in his perspectivism and genealogy of power useful tools to critique existent structures of domination. This collection of essays reframes the debate by looking at Nietzsche's constructive political project defending aristocratic values from the levelling influence of the herd and its liberal, socialist, and democratic spokesmen. The essays will also explore how this defense of aristocratic values continues to have an influence on the political right, inspiring moderates like Jordan Peterson and far right authors and activists like Aleksandr Dugin and Steve Bannon.