Description
By Anthony M. Ludovici. All you ever need to know about Friedrich Nietzsche and his worldview—in two classic studies by one of the earliest and most important English interpreters of his philosophy. Two books, one volume: Nietzsche’s life, philosophy, values, ambitions, and vision of humanity explained by one of his earliest English champions.
This volume brings together Anthony M. Ludovici’s Nietzsche: His Life and Works and Who is to be Master of the World? An Introduction to the Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, creating a comprehensive introduction to the life, writings, and revolutionary ideas of one of the most influential thinkers of the modern age.
Ludovici was ideally placed to explain Nietzsche to an English-speaking audience. A Nietzsche scholar, lecturer, translator, and associate of Dr. Oscar Levy—the editor of the first complete authorized English edition of Nietzsche’s works—he belonged to the pioneering circle responsible for establishing Nietzsche’s reputation in Britain. His knowledge extended across the philosopher’s writings, allowing him to explain individual doctrines as interconnected parts of a larger worldview.
Beginning with Nietzsche’s life, education, friendship with Richard Wagner, academic career, illnesses, years of solitary writing, and final tragedy, Ludovici provides the background necessary for understanding the development of his thought. He then tackles the ideas for which Nietzsche became famous: master and slave morality, the Will to Power, the Superman, the transvaluation of values, hierarchy, Christianity, altruism, pity, egoism, evolution, society, culture, and the creation of higher human types.
Of particular value is Ludovici’s determination to explain what Nietzsche actually meant. Rather than presenting isolated aphorisms, he connects Nietzsche’s arguments across Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, The Antichrist, The Twilight of the Idols, and other major works, showing the philosophical structure underlying them.
For readers approaching Nietzsche for the first time, these two books provide an accessible pathway into a challenging body of thought. For established students and scholars, they offer something equally valuable: the interpretation of Nietzsche by a writer who participated directly in the first great movement to introduce his philosophy to the English-speaking world.
Meticulously proofed and corrected.
Contents
A New Introduction to the Combined Edition
Book I: Nietzsche: His Life and Works
Preface
Chapter I: Life and Works
Chapter II: Nietzsche the Amoralist
Chapter III: Nietzsche the Moralist
Chapter IV: Nietzsche the Evolutionist
Chapter V: Nietzsche the Sociologist
Chapter VI: Books Useful to the Student of Nietzsche
Book II: Who is to be Master of the World? An Introduction to the Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
Introduction
Lecture I: Nietzsche: The Immoralist
Lecture II: Superman
Lecture III: The Transvaluation of All Values
Lecture IV: Nietzsche: The Moralist
224 pages, paperback
