“Arm, fröhlich und Sklave”: Nietzsche’s Happy Worker

Abstract Scholars have generally maintained that Nietzsche has little – and certainly little good – to say about happiness, labor, and the distinct values and needs of those not counted as “free spirits” or “masters.” This article resists these commonplaces via a contextual investigation of Nietzsche’s rich and extensive thought around the nineteenth-century social question. For Nietzsche this chiefly concerns the possible existence of the “happy worker”: an unintelligent yet contented laborer who has accepted the impossibility of changing their situation. Nietzsche uses the happy worker to trace a narrative of decline from the serene slave class of Ancient Greece to the discontents and delusions of nineteenth-century Europe. In that it represents a structural ideal, a figure prior to ressentiment and nihilism, the construct of the happy worker also allows us to establish Nietzsche’s overarching and affirmative concept of happiness as the contented acceptance of one’s fate. Closely analyzing Nietzsche’s harsh critiques of capitalism and socialism, this article asks precisely how they prevent the worker from being happy, before considering his proposed solutions to the social question, on the level of both individual and society.