Reminder to Charles. You ever get around to pulling out of library stacks these books on Nietzsche I recommended to you a while back? And your usage of "public intellectual, " is incorrect, at least as the term was used by Russell Jacoby. Your habitual, "Enemy of the People, " orthodox M-L style thought, to indicate the fascistoid essence of anyone to your Right, is tiresome. Public intellectuals can be any variety of leftist, rightist, centrist.
http://old.thing.net/ttreview/images/corpse.jpg , "Nietzsche's Corps/E: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, Or, the Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life, " by Geoff Waite, a post-modern communist reading (Waite was in the PLP when Hilary Putnam was. A "stupid party, " {"Marcuse: Cop or Cop-Out?"} but, I suppose they had their reasons.
"Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: Ally and Adversary, " by Bernice
Glatzer Rosenthal and, "New Myth, New World
>From Nietzsche to Stalinism, " by the same scholar.
http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-02218-3.html
>...The Nazis' use and misuse of Nietzsche is well known. The
Superman, the "will to power," Nietzsche's equation of bourgeois
democracy and decadence, and his denigration of reason were staples of
Nazi propaganda. Communists also used and misused Nietzsche, but that
fact is largely unknown because Soviet propagandists invoked reason
and labeled Nietzsche the "philosopher of fascism," even while
covertly appropriating his ideas. In this pioneering book, Bernice
Glatzer Rosenthal excavates the trail of long-obscured Nietzschean
ideas that took root in late Imperial Russia, intertwining with other
elements in the culture to become a vital ingredient of Bolshevism and
Stalinism.
Nietzsche made a difference. He furnished intellectual ammunition for a prolonged conflict about culture, society, and politics that began around the turn of the century. His first Russian admirers were poets, philosophers, and political activists. They responded to the changes transforming their society by espousing new values and seeking a new faith by which to live and work. This response resulted in new aesthetic and political amalgams, such as Symbolism, Futurism, Nietzschean Christianity, and Nietzschean Marxism. The ensuing debates between and among their partisans reverberated throughout the wider culture and therefore also into Bolshevism, becoming the subject of an uninterrupted polemic between Bolsheviks and non-Bolsheviks, and among Bolsheviks, that continued into the 1930s.
In Stalin's time, unacknowledged Nietzschean ideas were used to mobilize the masses for the great tasks of the first Five-Year Plan and the Cultural Revolution, which was intended to eradicate "bourgeois" values and attitudes from Soviet life and to construct a distinctly Socialist culture. Nietzsche's belief that people need illusions to shield them from reality underlay Socialist Realism, the official Soviet aesthetic from 1934 on.
In the aftermath of de-Stalinization, the government cast Nietzsche as the personification of "bourgeois" nihilism and "bourgeois" individualism. Soviet intellectuals wishing to reappropriate their lost cultural heritage discovered the Nietzsche-influenced intellectuals of late Imperial Russia and reopened discussion on the issues they had posed.
More than an exercise in historical rediscovery, New Myth, New World offers a new interpretation of modern Russian history. By uncovering the buried influence of Nietzschean ideas on Soviet culture and politics, Rosenthal opens new avenues for understanding Soviet ideology and its influence on the twentieth century.
Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal is Professor of History at Fordham University. She is the editor of three prior books that have paved the way for this study—Nietzsche in Russia (1986), Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: Ally and Adversary (1994), and The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (1997). She is also the co-author of A Revolution of the Spirit: Crisis of Value in Russia, 1890-1924 (1990).
All those Heidegger buffs on the academic left just Fascists? "Left in form, Right in Essence?"
-- Michael Pugliese
