Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull. Customers and Patrons of the Mad-Trade: The Management of Lunacy in Eighteenth-Century London with the Complete Text of John Monro's 1766 Case Book. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2003. 352 pp. $44.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-520-22660-7.
✍ Scribed by Peter Bartlett
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2004
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 139 KB
- Volume
- 40
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-5061
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
and key studies by Danto and Schacht, scholarship on Nietzsche in the past twenty-five years has seldom waned. One would imagine this is largely the result of Nietzsche's relationship to some of the most important philosophical movements in the twentieth century: existentialism, postmodern thought, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, and (usually) rightwing sociopolitical thought. This last point, Nietzsche's association with hard-line conservatism, is often based on the view of Nietzsche as having an almost pathological hatred of "weakness" of any kind, and an interpretation of the Übermensch (superman) concept that entailed a master race rescuing humanity from modernity and nihilism. Such a view, while not without some generic basis, has been severely confabulated with the Nazi movement, which used Nietzsche's name in connection with their own putrid distortions of these concepts. After World War II, Nietzsche was posthumously indicted at the Nuremberg trials as believing in the primacy of Germany and the superiority of a master race. As a result of this and other false connections, his reputation among scholars and the public was severely scarred. Thanks to Kaufmann's work, as well as many others, the idea that Nietzsche could ever be construed as a type of "proto-Nazi" has been flatly rejected and disproved using Nietzsche's own writings.
Carol Diethe's Nietzsche's Sister and the Will to Power is part biography of Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche and part genealogy of Friedrich Nietzsche's work as presented to the Nazis through the hands of his sister. Diethe paints a portrait of Elisabeth Nietzsche that is fair and thoughtful but never vindictive or glossy. This is quite an accomplishment, considering Elisabeth's egomaniacal handling of her brother's affairs and philosophical legacy after his collapse in 1889. For the last 11 years of his life, Nietzsche was little more than a vegetable, probably the result of a syphilitic infection. His mother was the primary caretaker of her son until she died in 1897. For the last three years of Nietzsche's life, Elisabeth was in sole control over her brother. Her main energies were directed toward establishing the Nietzsche Archive, which would collect Nietzsche's letters, notebooks, and manuscripts. The most important of these were a collection of notebooks and other miscellaneous manuscripts that Elisabeth published as The Will to Power, rightly regarded as the most controversial work in the Nietzschean oeuvre. However, the controversy is based on the impression that this was a complete posthumous text and one Nietzsche would have wanted published. Clearly, this is not the case, and Diethe reveals how Elisabeth saw this as an opportunity to pursue her own pretentious agenda of intellectual and social status. As Diethe notes, and her rather clever title implies, Elisabeth's own unrefined "will to power" is what ironically and sadly co-creates her