Newspaper Reader: On the toxic menace of Rousseau, Marx and Nietzsche! Yet Adam Smith remains outside this Economist political evaluation?
Jan 31, 2026
Editor: the opening paragraphs of this diatribe the Econonist fellow traverls provide a sketch of what is to follow. The miscreants are named and shamed. In italics below, and the virtious in bold font! The Economist writer is attached to her self-regard, while ignoring the powerful figure of Adam Smith! And his The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) that are equal in importance, to a possible intellectual rapprochement, that eludes the The Economists self-serving reductivist Intelectual History !
Liberalism is a broad church. In this series we have ranged from libertarians such as Robert Nozick to interventionists such as John Maynard Keynes. Small-government fundamentalists like Friedrich Hayek have rubbed shoulders with pragmatists such as John Stuart Mill.
But there are limits. Our last brief seeks to sharpen the definition of liberalism by setting it in opposition to a particular aspect of the thought of three anti-liberals: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a superstar of the French Enlightenment; Karl Marx, a 19th-century German revolutionary communist; and Friedrich Nietzsche, 30 years Marx’s junior and one of philosophy’s great dissidents. Each has a vast and distinct universe of ideas. But all of them dismiss the liberal view of progress.
In this primer
- Liberalism encompasses diverse views, from libertarians like Nozick to interventionists like Keynes. Yet it is opposed by thinkers like Rousseau, Marx and Nietzsche, who dismiss the liberal vision of progress.
- Rousseau believed society corrupts natural goodness. Marx argued progress can be achieved not by inquiry and debate, but only through class struggle. And Nietzsche believed society was in moral collapse, and that people needed to rediscover their noble morality.
- The illiberal view of progress has a terrible record. Robespierre invoked Rousseau. Stalin and Mao hailed Marx, and Hitler revered Nietzsche. Each showed the dangers of power concentrating in people who professed to have all the answers. Liberalism’s greatest strength may be that it does not have them.
Liberals believe that things tend to get better. Wealth grows, science deepens understanding, wisdom spreads and society improves. But liberals are not Pollyannas. They saw how the Enlightenment led to the upheaval of the French revolution and the murderous Terror that consumed it. Progress is always under threat.
And so liberals set out to define the conditions for progress to come about. They believe that argument and free speech establish good ideas and propagate them. They reject concentrations of power because dominant groups tend to abuse their privileges, oppressing others and subverting the common good. And they affirm individual dignity, which means that nobody, however certain they are, can force others to give up their beliefs.
In their different ways Rousseau, Marx and Nietzsche rejected all these ideas. Rousseau doubted that progress takes place at all. Marx thought progress is ordained, but that it is generated by class struggle and revolution. Nietzsche feared that society was descending into nihilism, but appealed to the heroic übermensch in each person as its saviour. Those coming after them did terrible things in their name.
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Editor: In the final paragraphs of this essay, Nietzsche and his epigones take center stage. Name it political histeria mongering for the Economist reader to chew on! Via Sue Prideaux!
The will to power
Nietzsche sets out his view of progress in “On the Genealogy of Morality”, written in 1887, two years before he was struck down by insanity. In writing of extraordinary vitality, he describes how there was a time in human history when noble and powerful values, such as courage, pride and honour, had prevailed. But they had been supplanted during a “slave revolt in morality”, begun by the Jews and inherited by the Christians under the yoke of the Babylonians and later the Romans. Naturally, the slaves elevated everything low in themselves that contrasted with their masters’ nobility: “The miserable alone are the good…the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly are also the only pious, the only blessed…”.
The search for truth remained. But this has led ineluctably to atheism, “the awe-inspiring catastrophe of a 2,000-year discipline in truth, which in the end forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God.” “God is dead…” Nietzsche had written earlier. “And we have killed him.”
It takes courage to stare into the abyss but, in a life of pain and loneliness, courage was something Nietzsche never lacked. Sue Prideaux, in a new biography, explains how he tried desperately to warn the rationalists who had embraced atheism that the world could not sustain the Christian slave morality without its theology. Unable to comprehend suffering in terms of religious virtue or the carapace of virtue vacated by religion, humanity was doomed to sink into nihilism, in a bleak and meaningless existence.
Nietzsche’s solution is deeply subjective. Individuals must look within themselves to rediscover noble morality by becoming the übermensch prophesied in “Thus Spake Zarathustra”, Nietzsche’s most famous work. Characteristically, he is vague about who exactly an übermensch is. Napoleon counted as one; so did Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the German writer and statesman. In his lucid survey of Nietzsche’s thought, Michael Tanner writes that the übermensch is the heroic soul eager to say Yes to anything, joy and sorrow alike.
Nietzsche is not susceptible to conventional criticism—because ideas pour out of him in a torrent of constantly evolving thought. But both left and right have found inspiration in his subjectivity; in linguistic game-playing as a philosophical method; and in how he merges truth, power and morality so that might is right and speech is itself an assertion of strength. He is father to the notion that you cannot divorce what is being said from who is saying it.
The illiberal view of progress has a terrible record. Maximilien Robespierre, architect of the Terror, invoked Rousseau; Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong invoked Marx; and Adolf Hitler invoked Nietzsche.
Newspaper Reader.
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