The overarching goal of this book is to rescue Nietzsche’s concept of culture from postmodernist appropriations and their critiques of modern subjectivity in order to reconcile it with the modern idea of the autonomous subject and the political principles of liberalism. On Jeffrey Church’s account, through his ideal of culture, Nietzsche sought to promote liberal conceptions of equality and liberty. Church argues that the politics that best supports Nietzsche’s vision of cultural renewal is a liberal conception of the state based on the rule of law and the protection of individual rights. While Nietzsche’s Culture of Humanity is impressively clear in its writing and in the general presentation and development of its argument, the main thesis of the book is ultimately unconvincing.

Church argues that Nietzsche’s commitment to classical liberalism becomes clear when we situate his views in the “right philosophical context” (p. 5) and read him against the backdrop of Kant’s cosmopolitan and Johann von Herder’s nationalist conceptions of culture; and furthermore, it becomes clear when we turn to his early period as it offers a “much clearer statement of his view” on politics (p. 4), in contrast to Nietzsche’s later reflections on politics that tend to be “elliptical, ambiguous and hence open to divergent interpretations” (p. 207). Church’s rather ad hoc choice of discursive context and texts may explain why The Birth of Tragedy, a book which Nietzsche himself described as “un-German” (Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giogio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 1988, 6: 310), lacking “logical cleanliness,” and “odd and rather inaccessible” (Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giogio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 1988, 1: 11) plays only a minor role in Church’s reconstruction of culture and politics in the early Nietzsche.

For Church, Nietzsche envisages culture as a new form of community dedicated to the advancement of human excellence that is distinct from politics, where human excellence consists not in the perfection of nature but in the realization of our freedom, and which finds its highest example in “geniuses” (p. 2). The idea that for Nietzsche culture consists in the promotion of the self-determining individual is highly contestable, in particular because it presupposes a clear-cut separation between culture and nature in his thought. For example, Church thinks (p. 30) that Nietzsche’s reference to the wisdom of Silenus—that it is better for human beings “never to have been born” and second best to “die soon” (Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giogio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 1988, 1: 35)—shows that for Nietzsche, nature has no value and that natural human existence is not worth living. While it is true that for Nietzsche nature is indifferent to human individual concerns, and even that nature has no teleology or purpose, this does not mean that nature does not have any value or meaning for human beings. Rather than following Kant and Herder, Nietzsche seems to remain faithful to the Greeks and adheres to their conception of culture as the imitation and perfection of nature.

The question of Nietzsche’s debt to the Greeks is not at stake in Church’s argument, however. Instead, the goal of Nietzsche’s Culture of Humanity is to move “Beyond Aristocracy and Democracy” as the subtitle indicates. Church holds that Nietzsche’s conception of culture as the promotion of self-determining individuals is meritocratic, and as such, he believes that it allows us to move beyond the unresolved debate between aristocratic and democratic interpretations of Nietzsche’s political thought. In reality, it is unclear whether meritocracy is just one possible way to try to harmonize aristocratic and democratic demands or whether it constitutes a real move beyond the distinction between aristocracy and democracy. While on Church’s meritocratic account Nietzsche sees human excellence as the goal of politics and culture, he rejects the aristocratic view of a natural order of rank of human beings, as well as the view that politics is for the personal good of the few (p. ix). The meritocratic view judges excellence not in terms of natural inequalities but in terms of human effort possible for all human beings. Conversely, Church holds that Nietzsche adheres to the democratic belief that all human beings are capable of achieving human excellence and that community is for the good of all (p. ix). But unlike the democrat, he does not believe that everyone can become a “genius” (p. 4).

The problem is that Church imputes to Nietzsche a “liberal” construal of the idea of genius, and only because of this does it seem to follow that Nietzsche supports a liberal political system as best oriented toward the flourishing of genius. Let me say something about meritocracy, and then about liberalism.

Meritocracy is the idea that, given equal conditions of opportunity, individuals deserve whatever rewards they can get based on their greater ability, talent, and effort. Underlying this view seems to be a Protestant story about the role of personal responsibility in individual salvation, where personal success is a sign of increased worthiness. We are here at the antipode of the Greek conception of responsibility, where responsibility is carried by the individual in virtue of being individual. Furthermore, one can argue that there seems to be little relation between merit and genius in the first place. Genius is both much more democratic and aristocratic than merit: We typically associate genius with a gift that no one has “merited,” so that literally anyone, from any social background, could turn out to be a genius. Moreover, there is no connection between the achievement of genius and the amount of effort and toil. And also the products of genius are not things that can be “graded” on the kind of scale that considerations of merit invoke. On the contrary, in Nietzsche’s view, it is the geniuses of cultures who first offer any idea of standard on the basis of which we can then speak of merits or demerits. These standards are not “good” because they are so judged by the people who adopt them, but, conversely, the people are “good” to the degree that they espouse these standards. If the agreement of everyone is needed to make a standard into a standard, then there would be no standard of what is good: Nietzsche seems to follow Plato’s aristocratic view that democratic free speech is a freedom to say both what is true and what is false, what is good and what is bad, and that is why he opposes democracy to a “good constitution,” that is, a political system that favors those who speak and act according to what is really good.

With respect to the second point, namely, that only a liberal state can maintain the priority of culture over politics because a liberal state limits political power in order to favor geniuses of culture, this seems to underplay the complicated connection between genius of culture and political power that Nietzsche has elsewhere established. For instance, in The Greek State Nietzsche suggests that the more dominating the political sphere is, the more genius will flourish at the cultural level. In other words, for Nietzsche there seems to be an inverse relation between genius and political freedom—which again points to an aristocratic idea of genius that is opposed to democracy as the rule of the many. It is also not clear why Church believes that Nietzsche’s geniuses of culture—artists, saints, and philosophers—are themselves “liberal” rather than “political,” that is, individuals who desire to impose a certain set of values and a certain way of life as normative for all. After all, this is the tyranny of genius: that an entirely unique and idiosyncratic form of life or value demands to be the value or form of life for all and for all time; anything less is not genius but merely achievement.