Ressentiment und Politik bei Nietzsche

A "politics of resentment" involves manipulating people by redirecting their resentments onto bogeymen and scapegoats. Nietzsche puts forward a theory of this dubious ability. According to an alternative model that goes back to Joseph Butler and Adam Smith, resentment is a usually justified natural or moral sentiment; while not infallible, it is most often a reliable guide for detecting injustice. Following Butler and Smith, some contemporary theorists contrast "resentment" and "ressentiment". Nietzsche would not have accepted this distinction; he considers his model as an alternative to the other and not as its complement; in what Butler and Smith call resentment, he sees only thoroughly misunderstood, wrongly explained ressentiment. Whereas Eugen Dühring, who puts forward a cruder form of Smith's views, does not even take note of the fact that resentment can be deflected towards scapegoats, Nietzsche highlights precisely the imaginative, almost hallucinatory power that already distinguishes Taine's ressentiment (and Dostoevsky's „zloi“) from the resentment of the British theorists. Far from being exclusively and necessarily aimed at the "masters", resentment has no clearly predetermined goal and can always take new directions. This is why Nietzsche's model fits contemporary political constellations better than alternative proposals.