Church offers a highly knowledgeable, thoroughly documented, and indeed exhaustive exploration of the theme of individuality in the work of both Hegel and Nietzsche, along with some side attention to the contributions of Rousseau and Kant. He sees his main authors as advocates of “individuality” in a robust, philosophically weighty form, distinguishing them from the slighter “romantic” individualism of J. S. Mill. For Hegel and Nietzsche both, he argues that ethical duty serves as an important, indeed vital, component of an individuality worthy of the name. In Hegel's case, we complete our individuality by contributing to the common good as knowing participants in “the state.” More controversially, he finds in Nietzsche a significant ethical emphasis. Nietzsche demands, he argues, that individuality be completed by more than purely private activity; human beings “become individuals by enlivening and transforming” a community, and even by appealing to the “wider fellowship of humanity” over the heads of an existing community, should it be repressive or narrow-minded (140–41).

What will strike anyone delving into this study is a pair of questions. First, what exactly do Hegel and Nietzsche have to do with each other? The two philosophers seem to differ radically from each other, and they embrace contradictory views, as Church concedes. Equally if not more puzzling is the title itself: how can the autonomy of an individual be “infinite,” especially if that individual is divided, as in Church's subtitle? Can internal divisions be overcome? Does a prospect of “infinite autonomy” arise when we conduct our individuality well, as Church suggests in treating Nietzsche's remarks on the “Thousand and One Goals” (194–95)? Both Hegel and Nietzsche are expounded with real authority and perceptiveness, yet Church withholds his own answer to my two questions until the final pages of the book.

After noting some contemporary reservations about individualism, Church's study has the merit of going to the “heart of the matter” by putting the philosophical question “what is individuality?” at the center of his reflections. He follows both Hegel and Nietzsche, who in turn follow Rousseau, by insisting that reflection must start from the “historical individual,” the individual who can “combine independence, autonomy, and personal uniqueness” with direct engagement in a specific historical context. Hegel and Nietzsche hope to “restore an ancient ethos of nobility or excellence to the modern age” while combining it with the distinctively modern grasp of the rights of the subject or the individual (23). Both aspire to show how an opening for this remarkable and unprecedented synthesis might be understood.

Church's three chapters on Hegel expound the well-known ethical component of his understanding of the subject and of subjectivity in general. For Hegel, he argues, the “only individuality worth having is the individuality we share in ethical institutions of public life” (83). We want to “be a member of a particular communal whole” and to “pursue a common good jointly with others,” yet without sacrificing individuality; the individual wants to identify with the common good, but while making a distinctive individual mark (71). Modern civil society could well become an obstacle to this project. Church argues, however, that Hegel responded strongly to “Rousseau's critique of modern commercial society” (96), and proposed that “mediating institutions” (likened by Church to guilds crossed with labor unions) might train members to care for public objectives while tolerating or even incorporating “lowly but solid modern foundations,” particularly the tolerance for “subjective particularity” (96, 99). Church sympathizes with Hegel's case for the good society as an “assembly of estates” or of organized groups more than a strict majoritarian democracy. Individuals need the opportunity to question what they are required to do, and thus to deepen the basis of their membership. Mediating institutions contribute to political moderation and enable “historical individuals” to “craft their own identities and see themselves in the institutions of public life” (110).

While some have posed Hegel and Nietzsche as opposites, Church maintains that Nietzsche owes a debt to “the German tradition of individual autonomy and practical reason represented by Kant, Fichte, and Hegel” (113). Much of his argument in the three Nietzsche chapters consists in expounding Nietzsche's position in terms exposing linkages to Hegelian themes. Where others have seen a “radical opposition” between these two, one reinforced by the sometimes explicit Nietzschean “war against Hegel and the Hegelians on nearly every count,” Church contends that Nietzsche in actuality accepts the principle of the “historical individual,” including awareness of an ethical obligation to the community, while then contending, against Hegel, that the outcome lies in serving a “cosmopolitan, nonpolitical community” (190), something other than “the state.”

Disregarding some of Nietzsche's tough talk, and labeling the “will to power” thesis as “obscure, underdetermined, and possibly even incoherent,” Church nevertheless reformulates it to become a standard able to explain what is “distinctively human” (121). The “will to power” can become a “power over nature itself” (121–22), enabling the fully realized individual, when guided by his own standards and thus a “subject” in Hegel's sense, to become the highest expression of the will to power. Church particularly emphasizes Nietzsche's stress on aesthetic criteria. The “sovereign individual” fashions a life as an artful whole (129–39) and in so doing “redeems a community by transforming its experiences into a meaningful narrative” (140). Narrative can hide all that is tragic in cruel and indifferent nature; art more than “corrosive” reason has the power to keep “the face of the abyss” out of view (150–51).

To be sure, the “justificatory aesthetic experience” is less about art objects than about beautiful lives, the life of the genius, the “great individual human beings”—a community receives justification and redemption by such examples. They establish a narrative for themselves and for others that will lead “in the present and into the future” (155). Nietzschean examples are Achilles, Socrates, Rousseau, Goethe, and Schopenhauer (158). The cases cited are notably figures from “culture” as much as from politics. Indeed, Nietzsche's “central disagreement” with Hegel comes to sight concerning political life. Nietzsche derides the Bismarckian Reich, and more generally denies altogether that the “state” is a force for progressive rationality. The modern state looks to him like a force for diminishing creativity, individuality, and ambition; the “last man” is a grave danger. That said, Church also vigorously denies that Nietzsche aspires to revive old-fashioned aristocracy or to create a quasi-fascist “strong state.” His Nietzsche prefers a weak state, inspired by and for the creative geniuses, and anticipates that in such conditions individuality might be able to flourish as never before.

In a concluding chapter, Church brings out in a more radical sense the disagreement between Hegel and Nietzsche and ultimately the defect in the aspiration to “infinite autonomy.” Their views are contradictory. Both seem to grasp only one side of the phenomenon incorporated in Rousseau's republican citizen, on the one hand, and Rousseau's solitary walker, on the other. The difficulties exposed to view in the arguments of Hegel and Nietzsche illustrate a “wound in the nature of human subjectivity.” In his final paragraph, Church maintains that “we must give up on the hope for infinite autonomy” because the self-sufficient individuality that Hegel and Nietzsche sought is not really available for “divided beings such as we are” (209–10).