Many of Friedrich Nietzsche's interpreters have set out to retrieve a political theory from his work, either by trying to derive one from his scattered and idiosyncratic political remarks or by extrapolating from his broader philosophical insights. The results, as Christian Emden points out in his book, have been extraordinarily diverse, generating very little consensus on what the significance of Nietzsche's work might be for political theory. Emden himself aims, through a contextualist reading, to reconstruct the political content that Nietzsche's writings would have been understood to have in their contemporary context. At the same time, he holds that we can thereby recover a distinctive and compelling contribution to political thought. On Emden's view, Nietzsche's approach to politics preempts Max Weber's, by combining a form of political realism with an “ethic of responsibility.” Nietzsche's versions of these positions are held to be distinctively interesting on account of the way in which they interact with the project of genealogy.

Emden does not engage in detailed analysis of Nietzsche's meta-ethics, but he clearly takes Nietzsche to be a moral anti-realist. Both the political realism and the ethic of responsibility that he attributes to Nietzsche derive from this anti-realism. Emden traces through Nietzsche's work a concern with uncovering the history of our evaluative beliefs and attitudes, culminating in the project of genealogy, which aims to remind us of the contingency of the moral values we take to be “absolute.” The recognition of this contingency is at the root of Nietzsche's political realism as Emden sees it, for it reminds us that where political power is purportedly wielded in the service of high moral ideals, it is in fact being used to promote one set of culturally contingent values at the expense of others. But this form of realism does not, on Emden's view, entail a politics of will to power. Rather, the discrediting of “moral absolutes” is held to promote an ethic of responsibility. It is on the basis of such absolutes that groups and individuals have sought to dominate others, imposing on them a set of values that is held to be objectively correct. Their discrediting makes possible a new basis for social trust, one that is pluralistic and respectful of difference. The normative ambitions of Emden's book center around this claim, which is held to constitute Nietzsche's “lasting contribution to modern political thought.” The claim, then, has to be assessed in terms of its interpretive and normative merits.

It is hard to find evidence in Nietzsche's work of the ethic that attracts Emden, that is, a concern with mutual trust as a basis for solidarity under conditions of pluralism. And it cannot be simply entailed by Nietzsche's skepticism about moral truth, since such skepticism raises the question of what the status of the ethic of responsibility might be, or why it should be binding. What Emden does find, however, is convincing evidence of a sustained antiauthoritarian strain in Nietzsche's work, that is, an antipathy toward the state's ideological imposition of a set of values. The author employs an impressive wealth of scholarship in tracing the development of this concern about the state's ideological power in the early writings. He examines the way in which Nietzsche, during the 1860s, becomes increasingly aware of a tension between Machtpolitik and the neohumanist ideals that he espouses. He charts the way in which this awareness develops, in the 1870s, into opposition to the excessive authority of the state in the new German Reich. And he demonstrates that Nietzsche's critiques of Bildung and of the national foundation myths that emerged in the era of the Reichsgründung serve the purpose of exposing the state's reliance on a dominating ideology.

Emden sees genealogy as serving this same antiauthoritarian aim in the later works. He links this purported antiauthoritarianism to Nietzsche's sustained antinationalism, claiming that in his later works Nietzsche endorses a pluralistic, pan-European community that transcends loyalties based either on nationality or on shared moral absolutes. This is an interesting and imaginative synthesis of some of Nietzsche's views. But his attitudes in the later works are complex. Emden admits that Nietzsche sees hierarchy as an ineliminable feature of any future community, and that Nietzsche's vision of Europe remains intellectually elitist. But there are passages, particularly in Beyond Good and Evil, which suggest that if Nietzsche does still wish to limit state power, it is not in the name of the inclusive, tolerant, and pluralistic values that Emden attributes to him.

The central preoccupation of the later works is that of enhancing the species “humanity” by overcoming the current human type. Nietzsche does not claim to want to liberate Europe from authoritarianism but from the Christian morality that has “preserved too much of what should be destroyed,” that is, “the sick and suffering,” and which has thereby worked “in word and deed for the deterioration of the European race” (Beyond Good and Evil, 62, Nietzsche's emphasis). The European aristocracies, he tells us, have relinquished their dominant role because of a corruption of their instincts. A healthy aristocracy, on the other hand, “accepts in good conscience the sacrifice of countless people who have to be pushed down and shrunk into incomplete human beings, into slaves, into tools, all for the sake of the aristocracy” (Beyond Good and Evil, 258, Nietzsche's emphasis). These passages seem to betray a set of values that is at odds with the benign ethic of responsibility that Emden hopes to find in Nietzsche.

If there are aspects of Nietzsche's work that conflict with Emden's reading, however, that need not threaten the normative ambitions of the book. The argument that he attributes to Nietzsche can be evaluated in its own right. The genealogical project that Emden admires is that of bringing into question the pursuit of moral absolutes in politics. He tells us that “Political absolutism—as it is focused on a specific understanding of ‘race,’ ‘religion,’ or ‘morality’—is a highly symbolic discourse that always implies the negation, at times annihilation, of that which does not correspond to a particular set of values. The consequences of political absolutism are real: people kill, and are killed, in the name of nations, religions, and other moral communities. But political absolutes only gain momentum because they generate a set of values that are widely accepted as a self-evident truth and whose history has been forgotten” (p. 235). Genealogy reminds us of the historically and culturally contingent character of these values. Emden does not wish to fall prey to the genetic fallacy; moral antirealism is presupposed rather than demonstrated by genealogy. So if it has to be presupposed, we might wonder why the genealogical account of our values is necessary to remind us of their contingency. But the thought seems to be that it serves to shake our faith where we have become too convinced by our own cultural constructs.

The implicit premise of the argument here is that a loss of confidence in the objective correctness of our values is conducive to tolerance, pacifism, and antiauthoritarianism in politics. It is a claim that has been popular among American liberals of a pragmatist bent. Louis Menand, in The Metaphysical Club (2001), suggests that the pragmatist movement, in fact, arose as a response to the horrors of the American Civil War, opposing the idea that we should ever have such confidence in our values that we should be prepared to kill and die for them. And Richard Rorty has suggested that if we reject the idea of there being a fact of the matter about moral questions, we can “josh” our fellow citizens out of taking their moral views so seriously, encouraging instead a “light-minded aestheticism” that makes people more pragmatic, accommodating, and liberal.

At root, this argument relies on an empirical claim, since it clearly does not follow a priori that the moral antirealist will display the virtue of tolerance in spite of denying that we have any necessary reason to do so. And since Emden's Nietzsche, like his American pragmatist counterparts, repudiates belief in any unalterable human nature, this empirical claim can at best be based on a conjecture about the future psychological tendencies of complex beings, the results of whose contingent acculturation is as yet unknown.

It will be difficult, then, even for those armed with relevant empirical information, to assess the plausibility of that conjecture. But Nietzsche himself, if he is a moral antirealist, seems to provide some unfortunate counterevidence. If he takes his own values to be cultural constructs, he still thinks that they can justify extensive infliction of suffering (cf. Beyond Good and Evil, 225). And he tells us that “mutually refraining from injury, violence, and exploitation” can sometimes be good manners, but that taken as the fundamental principle of a society, such an ethic will lead to disintegration and the denial of life (Beyond Good and Evil, 259). Genealogy does not seem to have shaken him out of the kind of moral seriousness that is the supposed enemy of tolerance and pluralism. If he retains reservations about the state as a moral enforcer, it does not seem to be on the basis of a general disinclination to defend one's values with force.

Nietzsche has a habit of puncturing the most well-intended normative ambitions, and it may be that in the end he does it to Emden's own. But Emden's detailed, scholarly, and original interpretation brings to light important themes in Nietzsche's work, themes which may not ultimately add up to a political theory but whose interest, rather, lies in the obstacles they place in the path of that enterprise.