Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/474

458 it," this does not mean that he disapproves of empires in general, or that he would not have taken part in the defense of the German Empire, however much he disapproved of it, if it had been attacked (whether by anarchists or anybody else). Even if he does not put political activity in the highest range of human activities, he does not question its necessity—the place and function of the second class (the rulers) in his ideal scheme of social organization alone demonstrates this. It is true that he hates "the non-plus-ultra state of the socialists"; and he does not want too "ordered conditions," or to take the risks out of life absolutely, for anybody; but the ordinary protection of life and property which the state gives is something he takes for granted as necessary and desirable—he wished rather that the state should do this work better, and particularly that property should be more widely distributed.

And yet, as we have seen, higher than the citizen or any social functionary (whether policeman or prince) is to his mind the individual who takes his law from within and has his own sphere and quantum of life, more or less independently of society. Here lies whatever basis there is for the idea that Nietzsche is anarchistic. These higher individuals are unquestionably a law to themselves and above the state. But this view has so little in common with what is ordinarily called anarchism that it is positively misleading to use this word in connection with it. Anarchism in the common revolutionary sense Nietzsche abhorred. Anarchism in the so-called "philosophical" sense, had he known of it, would have been almost equally repugnant, for its ideal is liberty for all, the cure for the evils of liberty being "more liberty" and so on, while in Nietzsche's estimation only the few are fit for liberty, the rest doing best both for themselves and for society as they obey social laws. Never, so far as I remember, does Nietzsche use the term "anarchy" or "anarchism" in a laudatory sense. Laisser