Nietzsche contra Rousseau: A Study of Nietzsche’s Moral and Political Thought

Keith Ansell-Pearson’s book is an important and very welcome contribution to a neglected area of research: Nietzsche’s political thought. Nietzsche is widely regarded as a significant moral philosopher, but his political thinking has often been dismissed as either impossibly individualistic or dangerously totalitarian. Nietzsche contra Rousseau takes a serious look at Nietzsche as political thinker and relates his political ideas to the dominant traditions of modern political thought. In particular, the nature of Nietzsche’s dialogue with the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is examined, in order to demonstrate Rousseau’s crucial role in Nietzsche’s understanding of modernity and its discontents.

• Has been very successful in hardback • Now accessible to a student readershop • Ansell-Pearson is a popular author on Nietzsche

1. Nietzsche contra Rousseau; 2. Civilization and its discontents: Rousseau on man’s natural goodness; 3. Squaring the circle: Rousseau on the General Will; 4. Nietzsche’s Dionysian drama on the destiny of the soul: on the ‘Genealogy of Morals’; 5. Zarathustra’s descent: on a teaching of redemption; 6. Bending the bow: great politics, or, the problem of the legislator; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.