Seeking to rescue Nietzsche from ill repute, following his (mis)appropriation by National Socialist Germany, Walter Kaufmann undertook a monumental scholarly effort. Through extensive translation, commentary, and interpretation, culminating in his seminal Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, Kaufmann brought Nietzsche back into the fold of respectable philosophic interlocutors. In rehabilitating Nietzsche, however, Kaufmann offered the public a somewhat tamed version of the philosopher. Nietzsche's antagonistic, martial pronouncements, his declaration of the need for war, courage, and hardness, were interpreted as part of his cultural criticism—perhaps pertinent to a personal, individualistic ethics, but certainly not relevant to anything political.

Kaufmann's approach set the terms of English-language Nietzsche scholarship for decades. Nietzsche's ostensibly more bombastic proclamations—especially those regarding democracy and equality—were interpreted in a manner that made the infamous thinker less threatening. His most provocative statements could be safely relegated to the private sphere. One could love reading Nietzsche and still be a good liberal democrat.

While various aspects of Kaufmann's interpretation have been challenged, the view of Nietzsche as the apolitical philosopher still persists. For example, Brian Leiter asserts that Nietzsche “has no political philosophy” and that his scattered remarks about politics fail to “add up to a theoretical account of any of the questions of political philosophy” (49). And even such a sympathetic and thoughtful reader as Bernard Williams concluded that Nietzsche lacks a “coherent politics,” which he believed requires four elements: (i) “ethical and psychological insights”; (ii) “an intelligible account of modern society”; (iii) “the ability to relate these insights to this account of society”; and (iv) “a coherent set of opinions about the ways in which power should be exercised in modern societies, with what limitations and to what ends” (3).

Hugo Drochon wholeheartedly repudiates this view, presenting a thoroughly political Nietzsche, who is both a penetrating theoretician of the state and an advocate of a specific political project. Moreover, he takes Williams's interpretation as a foil and sets about demonstrating that Nietzsche's political thought does in fact contain the four desiderata Williams identified. In doing so, Drochon not only offers a fresh perspective on Nietzsche but also raises a number of deep questions about the assumptions of contemporary political thought.

Two examples of Drochon's probing investigation are especially worth highlighting, as they attest to the philosophic integrity of the work. First, Drochon identifies Nietzsche's “rejection of equality” as the cause for the standard scholarly “rejection of Nietzsche as a politic philosopher: as Nietzsche does not share the ‘egalitarian premise’ of contemporary political philosophy, he is therefore excluded from its ranks” (54). Second, Drochon does not shy away from the conclusions that follow from Nietzsche's analysis of the connection between democracy and Christianity: If Nietzsche is right that democracy is essentially linked to Christianity, “and we too live in the era of the death of God, how do we stand vis-à-vis democracy and equality? Does our loss of faith in God preclude our belief in universal equality, which has historically been grounded in that faith?” (181–82). Or even more directly: “Can one be a democrat if one is no longer a Christian?” (103).

Such questions emerge from a rigorously argued, historically informed account of Nietzsche's political thought. Methodologically, Drochon identifies with the Cambridge school of intellectual history, asserting that “instead of coming to Nietzsche with predetermined categories… we must start with the historical Nietzsche” and identify the specific context within which his thought develops (74). Bismarck's ascendancy provides the requisite context as it “defined the period of Nietzsche's intellectual, social, and political adult life” (154). Internationally, this took the form of grosse Politik—the attempt to make Germany a great power—through Machtpolitik defined “by the twin concepts of ‘blood and iron’—namely, war and advanced technology”; domestically, this entailed the subordination of policy to geopolitical ambitions, for example, the Kulturkampf against Catholics was motivated by Prussia's rivalry with Austria (154). Bismarck's Germany, in short, exemplified “the modern nationalist Kulturstaat,” which instrumentalizes culture for its self-perpetuation (51).

This background proves crucial for understanding Nietzsche's mature political thought; for beyond mere criticism of Bismarck's policies, which Nietzsche early on judged as essentially linked to “slave-morality-infused concepts such as mass democracy, fragmentation, mediocrity, religion, dynastic politics, and philistinism,” Nietzsche sought to transform the very idea of “grosse Politik into his own notion of… the unification of continental Europe led by a cultivated and interbred elite class of good Europeans, so that it may engage in the geopolitical struggle against the British Empire and Russia for mastery of the world” (2, 155). This revaluation or transvaluation (Umwerthung) of Bismarckian “petty politics” into “a truly great politics on the basis of master morality” is the culmination of Nietzsche's political reflection (156). Moreover, far from being an incidental part of Nietzsche's thought, this political project is integral to his philosophic ambition of undertaking a “Revaluation of All Values” (152). Drochon thus argues that in his final writings Nietzsche “starts to legislate new values and writes a political strategy, a great politics, for his men—the party of life—to follow” (152).

Lest such a political program sound outlandish, Drochon carefully prepares the reader for taking Nietzsche's grosse Politik seriously. Through six tightly interwoven chapters, Drochon (1) traces the continuities and developments of Nietzsche's political thought from his earliest reflections on the Greek polis to his fully mature political prognostications in the Twilight of Idols; (2) addresses Nietzsche's relation to Wagner, their disagreement over the institution of slavery, and slavery's importance for creating a political order conducive to the production of high culture; (3) connects Nietzsche's accounts of both the origin of the state (in the conquering hordes of blond beasts) and the decay of the state in modernity to a penetrating analysis of the weaknesses of nineteenth-centiry democratic nationalism; (4) gives an ethical and a political interpretation to Nietzsche's most famous philosophical concepts: the will to power, the eternal return, and the Übermensch; (5) investigates Nietzsche's Nachlass to round out an interpretation of the idea of a Revaluation of All Values that emerges from a study of Nietzsche's great “yes-saying” work, Zarathustra; (6) ties all these threads together to present Nietzsche as a political philosopher, whose fundamental question is: “who do we want to be?” (182).

This final question lies at the heart of Drochon's book, for politics on Nietzsche's view is inseparable from the cultivation of a certain type of human being. Different political orders necessarily promote or hinder different ways of life. According to Nietzsche, modern politics, under “the sway of Christianity,” has lost sight of this fact, namely, that “the true core of politics [is] the breeding of a certain type of being” (152). But this raises the question not only of the best way of life, but why the production of one type of human being ought to be the guiding concern of politics. What criterion or standard does Nietzsche appeal to in order to make such a judgment?

Nietzsche's response seems to be the striking assertion that genius makes possible “the justification of the world and existence as an aesthetic phenomenon” (10). On this view, political life is the condition for the production of “a certain type of being,” the existence of which justifies not only the political order but life itself: the telos of politics proves to be something transpolitical. Drochon returns to this idea on several occasions, and while he lucidly reconstructs Nietzsche's argument for how a flourishing high culture might justify the state, the question of how philosophic genius might justify existence as such remains obscure (cf. 58–60, 92, 109, 182). Drochon's study invites one to wonder if Nietzsche's great politics is part of Nietzsche's attempt to respond to the wisdom of Silenus.

There is much to recommend in Drochon's bold, erudite, and lucid study of Nietzsche's political thought. In particular, Drochon should be commended for meeting the rigorous demands of a contextualist methodology while also demonstrating Nietzsche's contemporary relevance. Drochon's philosophic interpretation is thus both historically grounded and timely. Nietzsche's Great Politics will surely open up new areas of research and revitalize ostensibly settled questions of interpretation.