The hammer of the populists. Hugo Drochon’s Nietzsche’s Great Politics

Nietzsche’s Great Politics by Hugo Drochon is one of the most creative and original efforts to mould Nietzsche’s thought to the challenges of our age. Nietzsche always wanted to have creative and critical readers and this book certainly lives up to that ideal. In highlighting some intruiging possibilities in Nietzsche’s text, the author blunts much of the “aristocratic radicalism” often attributed to Nietzsche, playing down the more visceral reading of his references to slavery and hierarchy. This approach has both merits and disadvantages. To understand Drochon’s Nietzsche and its originality we must examine the late nineteenth-century context of Nietzsche’s agon- the idea of contest, which Drochon puts at the centre of his work.