The Meaning and History of Political Nihilism

There is little dispute about the meaning of political nihilism. Although the term can be, and has been, used in other contexts, in the history of ideas it is generally considered synonymous with the nineteenth-century phenomenon of Russian nihilism. In other words, political nihilism is the generalized form of Russian nihilism, from which it derives its essential properties. This is evidently the sense in which it is meant by Biedermann when he speaks of Stirner's Der Einzige as a literary version of nihilism, “which … allowed none but the sovereign ego to celebrate its triumphs on the ruins of society.” Likewise for Masaryk when he declares that, in Der Einzige, he “was already advocating political nihilism; … for Stirner, a republic was no longer enough: the state as such is to be abolished.” Perhaps the most colorful instance of Stirner's association with political nihilism is Heman's description of Stirner as an anarchist and nihilist “whose followers want, with dagger, revolver, and bombs, to make themselves owners of the whole world.”

It is significant that all of these comments were written in the quarter century following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 when the memory of this and other acts of violence committed by Russian nihilists was still fresh in the mind. Nonetheless, however negative Stirner's critics meant the association to be, these crimes, shocking though they were, especially in an age where monarchical government was the rule, were carried out as part of an escalating response to the brutal repressiveness of the Russian imperial regime, which was characterized by countless atrocities in the form of indiscriminate massacres, public executions, and mass deportations to Siberia of perceived enemies of the state, be they rebellious Poles or revolting peasants. The Russian nihilists were not, as a rule, unprincipled thugs who practiced violence for its own sake. As the eminent Russianist, Eugene Lampert, writes: “They were rebels because they felt man's inhumanity to man…. They were the conscience of Russia.”

The effective equivalence of political and Russian nihilism is borne out in general usage. In the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, one finds the following definition: “Political nihilism calls for the complete destruction of existing political institutions, along with their supporting outlooks and social structures, but has no positive message of what should be put in their place.”