The only English translation of a crucial interpretation of Nietzsche

Employing a perspectival technique inspired by Nietzsche himself, Bertram constructs a densely layered portrait of the thinker that shows him riven by deep and ultimately irresolvable cultural, historical, and psychological conflicts. At once lyrical and intensely probing, richly complex yet thematically coherent, Bertram's book is a masterpiece in a forgotten tradition of intellectual biography.

Once regarded as a conservative critic of culture, then enlisted by the court theoreticians of Nazism, Nietzsche has come to be revered by postmodern thinkers as one of their founding fathers, a prophet of human liberation who revealed the perspectival character of all knowledge and broke radically with traditional forms of morality and philosophy.

In Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist, Peter Berkowitz challenges this new orthodoxy, asserting that it produces a one-dimensional picture of Nietzsche's philosophical explorations and passes by much of what is provocative and problematic in his thought. Berkowitz argues that Nietzsche's thought is rooted in extreme and conflicting opinions about metaphysics and human nature. Discovering a deep unity in Nietzsche's work by exploring the structure and argumentative movement of a wide range of his books, Berkowitz shows that Nietzsche is a moral and political philosopher in the Socratic sense whose governing question is, "What is the best life?"

Nietzsche, Berkowitz argues, puts forward a severe and aristocratic ethics, an ethics of creativity, that demands that the few human beings who are capable acquire a fundamental understanding of and attain total mastery over the world. Following the path of Nietzsche's thought, Berkowitz shows that this mastery, which represents a suprapolitical form of rule and entails a radical denigration of political life, is, from Nietzsche's own perspective, neither desirable nor attainable.

Out of the colorful and richly textured fabric of Nietzsche's books, Peter Berkowitz weaves an interpretation of Nietzsche's achievement that is at once respectful and skeptical, an interpretation that brings out the love of truth, the courage, and the yearning for the good that mark Nietzsche's magisterial effort to live an examined life by giving an account of the best life.

Born in a log cabin on a Texas prairie in 1890, T. V. Smith—distinguished philosopher, teacher, politician, lecturer, and editor—left an imprint on the twentieth century seldom equaled by a university professor.

Simply listing his activities reveals the versatility of this extraordinary man. He held posts as professor at Texas Christian University and the University of Texas, as professor and dean at the University of Chicago for a quarter-century, and as professor of citizenship and philosophy at Syracuse University for eight years.

An independent Democrat, he spent four years in the Illinois State Senate before being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as congressman at large from Illinois.

He served as private (“no class”) in World War I; he held the rank of colonel in World War II and was a military governor with the Allied Control Commission in Sicily and Italy, was Director of Democratization for Select German Prisoners of War, and was a member of the U.S. Education Mission to Germany and Japan.

As a founder of the Chicago Round Table of the Air and one of its most frequent participants, he became one of radio’s best-known personalities. He was editor of the International Journal of Ethics, and his democratic wisdom has found expression in more than twenty books and in hundreds of articles.

In open forum he often tilted with such opponents as Robert A. Taft, Clarence Darrow, Harry Gideonse, Will Durant, and Norman Thomas. He was an orator of national renown. He held seven degrees from as many institutions.

A maverick, intellectual as well as political, Smith never feared to strike off the shackles of conventionality and dogma when they hampered his search for truth, and his stout conscience challenged all comers. Long involvement with people of many ideas, backgrounds, and interests so permeated his thinking that his message was to and for all of America. He spoke of actual situations that affect actual human beings, illuminating his impressions with sensitivity and understanding.

T. V. Smith’s story has heart and vision. It manifests, in approximately equal portions, poetic imagination, resourcefulness, limitless energy, public service, and pride. Early in life Smith set his heart not on accumulating material possessions but on discovering how men and women of every station and degree can have the blessing of a sane and reasonable life in an increasingly complex society. What he says here is witty and wise, “nuggets mined from the hills of life . . . the living stuff of biography, the inner essence which transcends the world of fact.” In such a record lies democracy’s best boast.

In a compelling meditation on the ideas that shape our lives, one of the world’s most provocative and creative philosophers explains how his eccentric early years influenced his lifelong critique of liberalism.

Liberalism is so amorphous and pervasive that for most people in the West it is background noise, the natural state of affairs. But there are nooks and crannies in every society where the prevailing winds don’t blow. Raymond Geuss grew up some distance from the cultural mainstream and recounts here the unusual perspective he absorbed: one in which liberal capitalism was synonymous with moral emptiness and political complacency.

Not Thinking like a Liberal is a concise tour of diverse intellectual currents—from the Counter-Reformation and communism to pragmatism and critical theory—that shaped Geuss’s skeptical stance toward liberalism. The bright young son of a deeply Catholic steelworker, Geuss was admitted in 1959 to an unusual boarding school on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Outside was Eisenhower’s America. Inside Geuss was schooled by Hungarian priests who tried to immunize students against the twin dangers of oppressive communism and vapid liberal capitalism. From there Geuss went on to university in New York in the early days of the Vietnam War and to West Germany, where critical theory was experiencing a major revival.

This is not a repeatable journey. In tracing it, Geuss reminds us of the futility of abstracting lessons from context and of seeking a universal view from nowhere. At the same time, he examines the rise and fall of major political theories of the past sixty years. An incisive thinker attuned to both the history and the future of ideas, Geuss looks beyond the horrors of authoritarianism and the shallow freedom of liberalism to glimpse a world of genuinely new possibilities.