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Nietzsche, Friedrich
It is hard to overstate the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) on the political thought and politics of the twentieth century. In part because of Nietzsche’s sister’s manipulation of his writings after his death, his concepts of the will to power and the Ubermensch—literally “overman” but often translated as “superman”—were used in support of the ideology of National Socialism for the first half of the twentieth century. Efforts by American and Italian scholars in the 1950s and 1960s to translate and study complete collections of Nietzsche’s work introduced a more complex and richer Nietzsche whose work became important to a new generation of diverse theorists. Nietzsche’s political thought is important for having effected a break with many of the foundational ideas of modern thought and ...
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