Political Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche

"With this comprehensive selection of texts, Frank Cameron and Don Dombowsky have made an important contribution to our understanding of the political dimensions in Nietzsche's philosophy. Especially the little known juvenilia and excerpts from the (still untranslated) Nachlass throw new light on Nietzsche's continuous preoccupation with the national and the social question. In a very substantial introduction, the editors set these writings in their historical contexts and offer a powerful challenge to the still widely held belief that Nietzsche was an 'unpolitical' thinker." - Martin A. Ruehl, University of Cambridge, UK. This anthology brings together for the first time selections of Nietzsche's political commentary found throughout his corpus, including some never before translated writings from his youth. The texts were carefully chosen to highlight Nietzsche's political views and arranged chronologically to allow the reader to trace the development of Nietzsche's political thought from his youth to his final writings of 1888. In their introduction and prefaces, Frank Cameron and Don Dombowsky insightfully demonstrate that Nietzsche was an observer of and responded to the political events which shaped the Bismarckian era. In the past two decades Nietzsche's political thought has received increasing attention, yet only rarely has there been any attempt to situate it historically. This anthology thus provides an essential resource for understanding Nietzsche's political ideas as they were stirred by the conflicts of this turbulent era.