Aristocrats and Tyrants. Nietzschean Rulers versus Today’s Autocrats

This paper wishes to discuss whether present-day autocrats show distinctively Nietzschean characteristics or not. Achieving that implies a discussion of Nietzsche’s admiration of certain strongmen in history, and, overall, on the nature of truly Nietzschean rulers: as it turns out, they are all aristocrats. Being an aristocrat, for Nietzsche, not necessarily implies belonging to a social elite or hierarchy, but rather accepting agon as selbst-Bildung, displaying a solid rule over oneself, and striving to achieve self-realization as the wholeness of the spiritual and the animal. These characteristics put Nietzsche’s aristocrats against tyrannical rulers, who are rather described as men who, like Luther and especially Socrates, exert control over themselves, and nurtur their will to power, by over-emphasizing a single characteristic (faith and reason, respectively) over the rest of the human whole. In conclusion, present-day autocrats seem to have much more in common with these essentially sick tyrannical natures than with true aristocratic rulers; however, this does not allow us to rule Nietzschean features in them out entirely.