Richard Niehart

Richard Niehart (1831-1893) was German philosopher and political activist. A minor figure in the early German Existentialist scene in his life time, he faded into obscurity after his death.

Recently, after several articles published in philosophy journals, interest in his work is rekindling. A critic of the Hegelian influence on left-wing political thought, he is noted for his attempts to disentangle basic left-wing theories from what he saw as overarching ideologies, and put them on a more pragmatic human level.

Since the demise of communism and the attempts of the left to rejuvenate itself in more libertarian guise, Niehart is regarded by many as the 'grandfather' of post-leftism. Many modern theories uncannily resemble his thought.

His life

Born in Bavaria, he was raised on the farm of his aunt and uncle, near the small town of Starnberg, just outside Munich. His mother died in childbirth, and his father was simply listed as an 'unknown' soldier.

Although the early Richard excelled at school and was offered a scholarship in Munich, his childless aunt and uncle declined the offer, needing him to stay and help on the farm. His aunt and uncle were both killed during the revolution of 1848. He travelled around Europe and fell in with set of radicals and revolutionaries, and ended up in Paris where he worked pamphleteering (writing many) and agitating in factories and warehouses. In 1871 he fought on the rue Ramponeau in Belleville barricade in the Paris commune and as a result had to flee Paris to avoid the reprisals. He attended the Hague Congress of 1872. Niehart returned to Germany that year where he spent out the rest of his life on his family farm and concentrated on being a thorn in Bismarck's side.

His Thought

Niehart wrote no books and the bulk of his thoughts are contained in articles in left wing publications and his pamphlet Tod des Geistes. Niehart's criticism of capitalism took a different direction to the popular left of the time. Like Marx he saw the notions of Alienation and The Division of Labour of importance but unlike Marx held them of central importance. He rejected both the class struggle and forces of production as simply secondary symptoms. Niehart in his pamphlet "Death of Spirit" describes a regimented society of brow beaten masses stripped of any sense of the sublime. Niehart saw capitalism as eroding away the aspects of a person which essentially defined them as human. Evolution was 'something for animals' and he held people above and beyond it because of their 'humanity' which enabled them to rise above simple mechanisms of nature. However the social fabric had been poisoned and the structure that held it in place were beginning to decay. Ethics, compassion, solidarity were being lost and the primitivism of subsistence living replacing them. For Niehart capitalism was a paradoxical system that expounded human endeavour to create new ideas and competition but locked people in a servile bondage stripping them of the capacity to enact this. the rise of increasingly fewer and larger employers he hypothecated one day the world would consist of a single company having eliminated all capacity in people to have any kind of innovativation to create an alternative.