The Philosophy of Slavery from Prussia to Virginia: Friedrich Nietzsche, George Fitzhugh, and Aristocratic Radicalism

Posthumously, Friedrich Nietzsche became one of the most important and influential European philosophers in human history. By contrast, the work of the Virginian pro-slavery writer George Fitzhugh has been largely forgotten. In the aftermath of their impacts, academics strove to attach new, unintended meanings to their works. In the hands of Walter Kaufmann and admirers, Nietzsche became a popular philosophy icon, a beacon of “self-help” and anti-moralism. More restricted to Southern history, Fitzhugh variably became a fascist, an anti-capitalist, or a naive Southern progressive. Following the work of Domenico Losurdo, who drew parallels between the thought of Nietzsche and Fitzhugh, this paper argues that both men fall under an ideological category described by Bruce Detwiler as “aristocratic radicalism” and Jeffrey Herf as “reactionary modernism”: a revolutionary antisocialist, antidemocratic, anti-Enlightenment school of thought which integrated technological progress and modern perceptions of feudal order into a clash against the forces of perceived liberal capitalist and socialist modernity. The unique discursive affinities for Burkean conservatism and Thomas Carlyle, perceptions of race and class, the critique of socialism, education, and democracy all link Fitzhugh and Nietzsche into philosophical and political allies, separated in time by a decade and spatially by the Atlantic Ocean.