Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/437

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ANALYSIS OF MODERN SOCIAL TENDENCIES
421

without intending to, democratic institutions are making socialism practically possible, for they are putting into the worker's hands the means for obtaining his ends. They are giving him the ballot, giving him the right of combination, making him capable of bearing arms (militärtüchtig). He thus becomes part of the political power, yes, in virtue of his numbers, the leading factor in it—he can do what he will, at least can try to (for there may be a gap between the hope and the performance).[1]

The socialist movement sometimes takes on an anarchist form. The final aims are the same, but the anarchists are more impatient, wish to proceed more summarily with the existing order. Nietzsche has in mind such communist-anarchists as we in America knew (particularly in Chicago) in the eighties, not of course the so-called "philosophical anarchists"—who are not socialists at all. As socialism is a means of agitation for individualism, so this anarchism is a means of agitation for socialism; with it socialism excites fear and begins to have the fascination of fearful things—it draws the bold, the adventurous to its side, the intellectually daring included. Uprisings, violences, novel state-experiments are to be expected.[2]

III

What unites anarchism, socialism, and democracy is the common man's impatience of rule, his hatred of lords and masters, his opposition to laws he does not himself make, his disallowance of separate and special claims, rights, and privileges—this on the negative side. Positively, as already stated, he wants himself to rule, to bring all that has hitherto been separate and on high into subjection to him: it is an extreme of self-assertion, of will to power—only now not in the quarter where we have been accustomed to look for it.[3] Restraint from tradition is as unwelcome as from rulers. The tendency is to judge everything by individual standards, to make personal or even momentary happiness the measure of right and wrong. Authorities are questioned, the aged no longer have the accustomed reverence, institutions grow weak, discipline and the idea of

  1. Twilight etc., ix, § 40; Will to Power, § 754; Dawn of Day, §§ 14, 206; Werke, XI, 369, § 559.
  2. Beyond Good and Evil, § 202: Will to Power, §§ 753, 784.
  3. Cf. Werke, XII, 205, § 436; Beyond Good and Evil, § 202.