This short book comes decorated with high praise. Alongside enthusiastic endorsements from the classicist Richard Seaford and the two German academics Anton Bierl and Bernhard Böschenstein, its back cover includes acclaim from the American philosopher, linguist and social commentator Noam Chomsky. Chomsky describes the book as ‘fascinating material’, and draws attention to M.'s short preface that cites George Orwell's unpublished introduction to Animal Farm about the evils of press censorship (pp. xiii–ix). This is the first evidence of the broad philosophical aims of the book. For M., the development of industry and the global spread of capital in the nineteenth century created a sharp rupture in historical time and spatial awareness (the continuity of which constitutes what M. terms, following Bakhtin, a ‘chronotope’) between a pre-modern epoch when humankind had held a slower and more deeply felt relationship to the world and a modern era of fast, terrible and frighteningly abstract destruction. M. thus takes Nietzsche's philosophy to capture what he terms a ‘Dionysiac chronotope’ that offers an alternative to the modern chronotope, variously described as ‘visualized’ or ‘monetized’, that exists as the result of the influence of acquisitiveness, money and capitalism on the modern mind and on modern human behaviours.

Throughout the book, M. makes it clear that he intends it to form a pair with his other monograph of 2015 on the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin (Hölderlin's Dionysiac Poetry: the Terrifying-Exciting Mysteries). For M., Hölderlin and Nietzsche symbolise two writers who tried to keep alive this older chronotope by rooting their poetry and philosophy in a deep reflection on ancient Greece and, particularly, in a sensitive engagement with Athenian tragedy and Presocratic philosophy. M. describes the form of ‘Dionysiac seeing’ that both writers try to capture in their writings as ‘a literal and metaphorical style of looking that overcomes monetary alienation and reconnects with images of community and nature’ (p. xvii). M. tries to connect his discussion of these ‘Dionysiac’ themes throughout with ancient material through references to Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides (see, e.g., the discussion of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, p. 105, Sophocles’ Antigone, p. 64, and Euripides’ Bacchae, pp. 33–4), while also briefly discussing Plato (p. 7), Socrates (p. 29) and Heraclitus (pp. 120–3). However, this is a book that is much more concerned with Nietzsche than with antiquity, and Nietzsche's engagement with the ancient world appears throughout mostly as a proxy for the light it sheds on how Nietzsche grappled with the rapidly changing conditions of his modernity.

The book comprises fourteen brief chapters, including preface, introduction, conclusion and coda, and the main body of the book is divided between two sections. The first section, ‘Dionysian Philosophy’, begins with the idea that Nietzsche ‘is especially discontent with the monetization (and visualization) of his own culture and language’ (p. 3, original emphasis), and goes on to demonstrate what form the Dionysiac chronotope takes in Nietzsche's work, especially The Birth of Tragedy (though M. moves quickly across Nietzsche's works, and it is often necessary to check the notes to work out where the quotations originate). The second section, ‘Proto-National Socialism’, takes up the well-worn but still important debate about the relationship between Nietzsche's philosophy and Nazi ideology. In this, M. declares that ‘rescuing Nietzsche from National Socialism after 1945 has produced a reassuring, but outlandishly false image of his apparent antinationalism’ (p. 72). Following on from this, the most difficult part of the book is the way in which M. cites some of the parts of Nietzsche's writings that are the most offensive to twenty-first century readers without reference to any of the recent attempts by scholars to understand these utterances in their historical context and thus complicate the idea that Nietzsche was a prophet of genocide. Key examples of this are Chapter 8, ‘Blond German Beasts’, on Nietzsche's supposed anticipation of the Nazi Aryan ideology with his description of Germanic ‘blond beasts’ in Genealogy of Morals, and Chapter 9, ‘Purification of the Race’, which deals with Nietzsche's antisemitism. It is a fair point that the modern image of Nietzsche as a cosmopolitan ‘Good European’ and precursor of poststructuralism needs to work out better what to do with his frequent nationalist and racist outbursts; but the idea that this could or should be done by restoring Nietzsche to the National Socialists without an extensive and sensitive discussion of the ethical issues attendant on such a task is both troubling and potentially dangerous.

The broad intellectual scope of the study also creates difficulties for the reader. M.'s desire to tackle large issues in broad brushstrokes can strike the reader as erratic and, at its worst, condescending, such as when, in the conclusion to one chapter, he paraphrases Nietzsche's writings from Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the following declaration about the evils of ‘monetized and visualized language’: ‘One thinks of an isolated individual Facebooking or Tweeting while the corporate money behind this visual media lobbies for political power, and to increase its control of “public opinion”’ (p. 48, original emphases). Again, there are clearly important debates to be had about the politics of social media, as there are about the cultural prehistory of National Socialism, Nietzsche's philosophy and the influence of industrialisation on European thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To blend these issues together, however, does a disservice to their seriousness in their own right, and also ignores the historical complexity of their interaction.