isaac-deutscher-the-prophet-armed-trotsky-1879-1921

50 THE PROPHET ARMED
appeared in the Eastern Review, in several instalments, in December
1900, a month or two after his arrival in Siberia. He could
have chosen no subject more embarrassing than the work of
Nietzsche .whose hatred of socialism was notorious and whose
cult of the Superman was repugnant to the Socialist. Bronstein
began his obituary with an apology for its critical tenor: 'We
ought to behave dispassionately towards the personalities of our
... adversaries, and we ought to ... pay due tribute to their
sincerity and other individual merits. But an adversary-sincere
or not, alive or dead-remains an adversary, especially if he is
a writer who survives in his works ....' He showed how the
idea of the Superman grew out of normal bourgeois morality
and in what way it was opposed to that morality. Nietzsche, he
held, generalized and drew to its last logical, or rather illogical,
conclusion the contempt of the masses which was deeply rooted
in normal bourgeois thinking. To prove this point, the critic
showed how many of Nietzsche's views were either implied or
expressly stated in the writings of Herbert Spencer, that representative
philosopher and sociologist of the V.ictorian middle
class. The idea of the Superman was opposed to bourgeois
morality only as the excess is opposed to the norm. The immoral
Superman stood in the same relation to the virtuous middle
class in which the medieval Raubritter (with his maxim: Rauben
ist kcine Schande, das tuhn die Besten im Lande) had stood to
the feudal lord. Nietzsche's ideal was the rapacious bourgeois
freed from inhibition and stripped of pretence~. Despite this,
the Socialist could not but admire the brilliant originality with
which Nietzsche had shown how brittle were the normal workaday
ethics of the middle class. 1
To this issue Bronstein returned in an essay on Ibsen, in
whom he saw the immortal artist at loggerheads with the false
moralist. 2 'The historian of European social thought will never
forget the slaps, those truly glorious slaps, which Ibsen has inflicted
on the well washed, neatly brushed, and shiningly complacent
physiognomy of the bourgeois philistine.' In An Enemy
of the People, for instance, Ibsen had shown how subtly, without
committing a single act of violence, a bourgeois democracy
could isolate and destroy a heretic ('as effectively as if they had
deported him to Siberia'). But the Socialist cannot approve the
1
L. Trotsky, Scchinmya, vol. xx, pp. 147--62.
2
Ibid., pp. 181-95.