Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History

Christian J. Emden is Associate Professor of German Studies and Modern Intellectual History at Rice University.

• Acknowledgements; Abbreviations and translations; Introduction; Part I. The Failure of Neohumanism: 1. Philologists, liberals, and the nation; 2. The Austro-Prussian War in Leipzig; 3. The demands of history; 4. Toward a cautious materialism; 5. Teleology and the laws of history; Part II. The Formation of Imperial Germany, Seen from Basel: 1. Intellectual culture in Basel; 2. The practice of cultural history; 3. The need for philosophical education; 4. The 'German Spirit' and the Franco-Prussian War; Part III. The Crisis of Historical Culture: 1. The crisis of historicism; 2. What is orientation in history?; 3. The political mobilization of myth; 4. 'The Soul of the Antiquarian'; 5. The impossible critical historian; Part IV. Political Lessons from Cultural Anthropology: 1. The view from outside; 2. Lessons from anthropology; 3. Metaphor, myth and cultural reality; 4. 'Survivals': religion and the state; 5. Political realism and the 'Free Spirit'; Part V. Geneology, Naturalism and the Political: 1. The path to geneology; 2. A natural history of moral communities; 3. Sovereign individuals and the ethic of responsibility; 4. The task of geneology; 5. 'To translate humanity back into nature'; Part VI. The Idea of Europe and the Limits of Geneology: 1. 'The creation of the European individual'; 2. Beyond the modern nation state; 3. Political realities in Imperial Germany; 4. Modernity and the limits of geneology.

'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