Abstract

In the second of the UM, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life", Nietzsche delivers a rare and lengthy encomium to the traditional Platonic-Aristotelian virtue of justice. "In truth," he says, "no one has a greater claim to our veneration than he who possesses the drive to and strength for justice. For the highest and rarest virtues are united and concealed in justice as in an unfathomable ocean that receives streams and rivers from all sides and takes them into itself".1 This claim seems to echo, or at least allude to, the thesis of Plato's Republic that justice is the virtue in which the other virtues are united, each in its proper place in the...