Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Cambridge University Press
Published:8th May '08
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This book explores Nietzsche's understanding of modern political culture and his position in the history of modern political thought.
Christian Emden explores Nietzsche's understanding of modern political culture and his position in the history of modern political thought. Challenging exclusively philosophical readings, this pioneering study sheds light on political culture in Germany as the ideals of the Enlightenment gave way to the demands of the modern nation state.This book explores Friedrich Nietzsche's understanding of modern political culture and his position in the history of modern political thought. Surveying Nietzsche's entire intellectual career from his years as a student in Bonn and Leipzig during the 1860s to his genealogical project of the 1880s, Christian Emden contributes to a historically informed discussion of Nietzsche's response to the political predicaments of modernity, and sheds new light on the intellectual and political culture in Germany as the ideals of the Enlightenment gave way to the demands of the modern nation state. This is a distinguished addition to the series of Ideas in Context, and a major reassessment of a philosopher and aphorist whose stature among post-enlightenment European thinkers is now almost unrivalled.
'It is one of the great merits of Christian Emden's Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History that he attempts one of the richest and most detailed accounts of Nietzsche's relationship to late nineteenth-century Germany's cultural and political inheritance, situation, and challenges. … It is to Emden's credit that he has begun a far more serious and historically informed investigation of who Nietzsche as a thinker of the historical and the political was and what he wanted.' R. Kevin Hill, Political Theory
'Christian Emden's Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History is an ambitious, provocative work. It aims to provide a synthetic reinterpretation of Nietzsche's intellectual itinerary during the quarter century between his earliest university notebooks and the texts produced immediately preceding his mental collapse.' John E. Toews, H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online
'Emden brings alive not just the intellectual debates, but also the internal and geopolitical manoeuvrings, of the age of Nietzsche. … Emden succeeds in this important book in showing why, in the words of Human, All-Too-Human, 'we need history'.' Paul Bishop, Journal of European Studies
'Emden's account of German intellectual life is detailed and engaging. … [He] likens Nietzsche's political vision to those of Burke and Tocqueville, critical of unrestrained (though not all) democracy while praising an open-textured notion of moral community.' Vincent Lloyd, The Heythrop Journal
'[Emden] aims, through a contextualist reading, to reconstruct the political content that Nietzsche's writings would have been understood to have in their contemporary context. At the same time, he holds that we can thereby recover a distinctive and compelling contribution to political thought. … Emden's detailed, scholarly, and original interpretation brings to light important themes in Nietzsche's work.' Tamsin Shaw, Perspectives on Politics
ISBN: 9780521880565
Dimensions: 235mm x 160mm x 30mm
Weight: 790g
412 pages