In her book, Tamsin Shaw attempts to extract a political understanding from Nietzsche's complicated, and at times seemingly contradictory, philosophical corpus. This is done largely in response to prior academic attempts at similar extractions or extrapolations. In the process, Shaw largely abstracts from contemporary political debates and everyday political categories. This has the virtue of avoiding the annoying and all-too-frequent form of interpretation that is little more than a thinly veiled excuse for ideological assertion. The author is to be thanked for helping to immunize us against frivolous ideological readings of Nietzsche that add little to our philosophical understanding.

The potential problem toward which Shaw's approach points is twofold. First, there is a tendency to address questions to Nietzsche that are not his own, making him jump through hoops that are those of the interpreter rather than his. Second, we run the danger of approaching the nature of political things from an abstract direction that lacks the phenomenological richness, and the actual sinew and ligature, of moral and political life. This abstractness can become distorting of the phenomena we hope to display more clearly than they immediately display themselves.

Further, we turn to authors of the first rank like Nietzsche precisely in hopes that they may give us a deeper and richer perspective on life than we get from within our everyday world and its various inarticulately shared perceptions. By failing to take seriously Nietzsche's questions and issues, we run the risk of denying ourselves access to the fullness of that deeper and richer perspective. That said, this is a serious work by a clear, informed, and philosophically interesting mind in which the author shows intellectual honesty—an all-too-rare quality—and a refusal to take the easy way out when confronting difficult issues. This too is to be applauded.

Shaw's argument is that Nietzsche is a “moral realist” who believes in “normative truth”—despite all the places where he praises the fecundity of unself-conscious “self-expression” rather than self-conscious “rational justification.” Reliance on the latter is precisely what he terms “the problem of Socrates,” a problem that leads inevitably to nihilism.

According to Shaw, Nietzsche's problem is that the modern, secular State is incapable of giving manifestation to the normative truth he has discovered and, hence, there is no contemporary basis for genuine legitimacy, which is alleged to require a basis in normative truth. Consequently, Nietzsche is incapable of taking the Modern State seriously. This leads to his “political skepticism.” Shaw concludes, therefore, that he fails to articulate any positive, normative political theory. There is no indication that she sees him as pointing beyond the modern State (his “New Idol”) to some novel future political possibilities. He is simply left with a conundrum he cannot resolve.

We seem to live in an age of political impotence as a result. What one is to do in this environment is far from clear. Shaw's rather lukewarm and unsatisfying conclusion is that widespread, open debate may be the best means to the public articulation of normative truth in the absence of a class of “normative experts” or philosopher-kings, which her Nietzsche allegedly espouses. Shaw does not consider that he sees philosophy as an end in itself and, hence, that he is precisely trying to insulate philosophy from future politics which, in one of his assertions, will be ruled more directly by priests subordinate to the “philosophers of the future.”

Surprisingly, Shaw's Nietzsche seems to be an Enlightenment figure who cannot find a way to make normative truth the basis of legitimacy for the modern State—despite his seeming multiple attempts to reinvigorate myth as a basis of legitimacy. This leads to a form of “skepticism” that seems on the border of crossing over to a straightforward “pessimism.” But while painting Nietzsche as a skeptic of a distinct kind, Shaw does not seem to make him a pessimist or ironist. Her Nietzsche is ultimately a philosopher-king wannabe despite all his apparent determination to construct a “pathos of distance” that insulates the future philosopher from “the necessary dirt of all politics.”

Shaw gives no indication that Nietzsche is looking beyond the modern State to some new form of political organization, or some unique future way of insulating those with normative and other forms of truth from those who will never be able to receive it directly or even through the auspices of the political habituation of others. Yet she seems to accept that the many can never receive normative truth through rational argument publicly deployed despite the democratic bone thrown in the direction of public debate.

Arguing that Nietzsche's understanding has a foundation in normative truth is an iconoclastic position that runs in the face of most interpretations of Nietzsche, as well as the occasionally hyperbolic and seemingly self-consciously constructed surface of his teaching, which appears to publicly stress thoroughgoing relativism and historicism. I would suggest that failure to take that public surface of Nietzsche's teaching into account will always keep us at a distance from his political teaching regarding the novel future he desires. That teaching relies upon the rhetorical surface of his texts being accepted by a significant part of his audience. In a way, that public surface teaching is Nietzsche's political teaching, his teaching for the public.

Shaw's argument that philosophically Nietzsche, like all philosophers, has his “truth,” which is more than his own groundless projection, is nonetheless quite nicely presented. But Shaw never considers the possibility that normative truth is phenomenologically available in everyday perception and needs only to be made articulate. The possibility is not considered that it is precisely the modern State that covers and occludes this already given understanding. The need then would be to philosophically articulate this “prescientific” awareness. Therein, normative truth already exists as the basis for the political legitimacy Shaw demands.

When we are finished with this intelligent book, we are left to wonder why it matters one way or the other that we view Nietzsche as a political skeptic, or why we ourselves should adopt political skepticism as a, if not the only, reasonable stance in our time. We are left to wonder why Nietzsche is an author from whom we late moderns can learn something useful. Shaw seems sympathetic to the skeptical and morally realistic Nietzsche. Hence, a few more words on why we have taken this journey would have been helpful. Is this iconoclastic Nietzsche helpful primarily in resolving academic debates or in clarifying moral and political life for a larger audience?