At the heart of my next book project is the argument that neoliberalism is the reinvention of aristocratic politics for a capitalist age, that the political theory of the free market is an effort to create what Nietzsche called “great politics” in the realm of the economy.

Nietzsche, of course, had nothing but contempt for capitalism (and economics more generally) — in part because he saw it as destroying whatever possibility there might be for aristocratic great politics. 

Yet re-reading The Gay Science on the train this morning, I found this passage, which somehow I missed on my first go-around:

Trade and nobility.—Buying and selling have become common, like the art of reading and writing. Everybody has practiced it even if he is no tradesman, and gets more practice everyday — just as formerly, when men were more savage, everybody was a hunter and practiced that art day after day. Then hunting was common; but eventually it became a privilege of the powerful and noble; it lost its everyday character and its commonness because it ceased to be necessary; it became a matter of moods and luxury. The same might happen some day to buying and selling.

One can imagine social conditions in which there is no buying and selling and in which this art gradually ceases to be necessary. Perhaps some individuals who are less subject to the laws of the general condition will then permit themselves to buy and sell as a luxury of sentiment. At that point trade would acquire nobility, and the nobility might then enjoy trading as much as they have hitherto enjoyed war and politics… (§ 31, pp. 102-103)

It’s just a moment’s notice, and it doesn’t begin to describe our contemporary reality (where more and more, rather than fewer, realms of social life are becoming subject to the economy).  Even so, it provides a glimpse of a possibility that Nietzsche seems to have dimly envisioned — when commercial transactions become acts of great noblesse — and that gets at the heart of the political theory of the free market.