Herrschafts-Gebilde, Schemes of Sovereignty, Structures of Domination

On the Genealogy of Morals, II 17. Nietzsche’s original, 1887:

Ihr Werk ist ein instinktives Formen-schaffen, Formen-aufdrücken, es sind die unfreiwilligsten, unbewusstesten Künstler, die es giebt:—in Kürze steht etwas Neues da, wo sie erscheinen, ein Herrschafts-Gebilde, das lebt, in dem Theile und Funktionen abgegrenzt und bezüglich gemacht sind, in dem Nichts überhaupt Platz findet, dem nicht erst ein „Sinn“ in Hinsicht auf das Ganze eingelegt ist.

Transl. Horace B. Samuel, 1913:

Their work is an instinctive creating and impressing of forms, they are the most involuntary, unconscious artists that there are:—their appearance produces instantaneously a scheme of sovereignty which is live, in which the functions are partitioned and apportioned, in which above all no part is received or finds a place, until pregnant with a “meaning” in regard to the whole.

And transl. Carol Diethe, 1994:

What they do is to create and imprint forms instinctively, they are the most involuntary, unconscious artists there are:—where they appear, soon something new arises, a structure of domination that lives, in which parts and functions are differentiated and related to one another, in which there is absolutely no room for anything that does not first acquire “meaning” with regard to the whole.

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche and Political Thought, p. 98, offers “complex of mastery.” Others include “ruling structure” and “domination-formation.”

“[T]he German word Herrschafts-Gebilde,” explains Franz Graf zu Solms-Laubach, “‘forms of domination,’ means both abstract as well as concrete forms of domination” (Nietzsche and Early German and Austrian Sociology [2007], p. 26).

“Structure of domination,” to the modern ear, has a moralistic, condemnatory overtone. Samuel’s “sovereignty” captures more of the rich resonances of the original “Herrschaft.” “Mastery” would do it better, though: Herrschaft and mastery suggests also the craft and virtù of the master or dominus.

Maudemarie Clark in Nietzsche on Ethics and Politics (Oxford, 2015): “As the result of brutish, forcible interaction, the interaction among these primitive humans is no longer simply brute and forced: it has become political” (p. 279). “To the extent that there is a ‘whole,’ there is a foothold for judgments that can be made about […] what is just or fair” (ibid.).

And re. the emergence of unity, Nietzsche, quoted in Ansell-Pearson, p. 97:

All unity is only as organisation and interplay unity: not otherwise than how a human community is a unity: so, opposite of atomistic anarchy; therewith a complex of rule, which signifies One, but is not one.