This book takes a serious look at Nietzsche as political thinker and relates his political ideas to the dominant traditions of modern political thought. It also demonstrates Rousseau's crucial role in Nietzsche's understanding of modernity.

"Franco explores the relationship between Nietzsche and Rousseau and their critique of modern life. Franco begins by arguing that 'among philosophers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche are perhaps the two most influential explorers and shapers of the moral and cultural imagination of late modernity.' And yet Nietzsche was often highly critical of Rousseau. Indeed, their critiques of modern life differ in important respects. Rousseau focused on the growing political and economic inequality in modern society and proposed a more egalitarian politics. Nietzsche decried the inability of society to take account of the exceptional individual and found Rousseau's political ideas wrong-headed"--Publisher marketing.

Rousseau and Nietzsche: Toward an Aesthetic Morality offers a vivid depiction of the problems and potential of modernity through the words of two of its most poignant voices. The book focuses upon the modern self's desire to individuate while facing the ethical responsibility to integrate into the world. Katrin Froese elegantly juxtaposes Nietzsche's drive for extraordinary individualism with Rousseau's call for the dependable citizen, demonstrating that where Nietzsche's aestheticism embraces the limitless and irreconcilable longings of a divided being, Rousseau's approach emphasizes the imposition of limits to ensure that harmony and contentment prevail. Going beyond conventional scholarship, the work emphasizes the similarities at the heart of Rousseau's notion of morality and Nietzsche's aestheticism: the moral vision that underlies Nietzsche's notion of art and the aesthetic understanding prevalent in Rousseau's moral system. This stunning new work of political philosophy will be of great use to scholars of political thought and readers seeking to understand what made Rousseau and Nietzsche's thought so decidedly modern.

One of the most distinguished cultural and intellectual historians of our time, Frank Turner taught a landmark Yale University lecture course on European intellectual history that drew scores of students over many years. His lectures—lucid, accessible, beautifully written, and delivered with a notable lack of jargon—distilled modern European history from the Enlightenment to the dawn of the twentieth century and conveyed the turbulence of a rapidly changing era in European history through its ideas and leading figures. Richard A. Lofthouse, one of Turner’s former students, has now edited the lectures into a single volume that outlines the thoughts of a great historian on the forging of modern European ideas. Moreover, it offers a fine example of how intellectual history should be taught: rooted firmly in historical and biographical evidence.

"The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms" is a novel by the famed German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche wrote the rough draft of "The Case of Wagner" in Turin, during the month of May 1888 and it was published in the following autumn. "Nietzsche contra Wagner" was also written about the middle of December 1888 but it was not published until long afterwards owing to Nietzsche's complete breakdown in the first days of 1889. Being a disciple at first of Richard Wagner, Nietsche found himself drifting farther and farther away intellectually from Wagner resulting in this book. In Wagner's music, in his doctrine, in his whole concept of art, Nietzsche saw the confirmation, the promotion—aye, even the encouragement, of that decadence and degeneration then rampant in Europe; and it is for this reason, although to the end of his life he still loved Wagner, the man and the friend, that we find him, on the very eve of his spiritual death, exhorting his readers to abjure Wagner the musician and the artist.