The journalist Graeme Wood, author of the groundbreaking investigation on ISIS titled "What ISIS Really Wants," recently interviewed Richard Spencer, one of the leaders of the alt-right, a noted fascist, and coincidentally on of Wood's high school classmates. The entire profile, titled "His Kampf，值得一读，但我特别想介绍伍德对斯宾塞哲学背景的探索。

斯宾塞尤其从哲学家弗里德里希·尼采和卡尔·施密特那里汲取灵感，前者被纳粹挪用，后者则是一位忠诚的成员。Starting with Nietzsche, Spencer began by reading "On the Genealogy of Morals, a systematic dismantling of the moral and religious truths of European civilization. Nietzsche saw Christianity as a slave religion, a consolation to the weak. Spencer says that the general effect, an inversion of his moral universe, was 'shattering.'"

另一方面，施米特提供了斯宾塞对自由主义的大部分批判。Schmitt has experienced a resurgence in academic political theory, especially since a special issue of the journalTeloswas devoted to reconsidering his work. Since then, both the radical left and the right have found him useful toward critiques of the basic assumptions at the heart of liberal democracy. He was, however, a fully-fledged Nazi, so this revival has not come without its controversies. Wood testifies that Spencer's understanding of Schmitt is actually "fair and reasonably nuanced."

It isn't everyday that you read Schmitt and Nietzsche, or philosophy at all, as serious theoretical influences for a rather large movement in the morning paper. But Spencer's fascist reading of Nietzsche and Schmitt represents only one strand of interpretation of either philosopher. Nietzsche, for example, has been contested far longer than Schmitt, and there has been considerable work in trying to disentangle Nietzsche from the deep anti-semitism his sister contorted his works into.

Have you read Nietzsche and/or Schmitt? What do you think of Spencer's interpretation?

Read the full article here:https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/his-kampf/524505/