Abstract

Jeffrey Church's book Nietzsche's Culture of Humanity is a flawed but nonetheless significant contribution to the still fairly scant Anglophone literature on Nietzsche's early works. The book argues for two major intertwined theses and a third, less central one. The first thesis is that Nietzsche distinguishes between two types or layers of culture: national culture, which Nietzsche characterizes in §1 of the first essay of UM as "unity of artistic style in all the expressions of the life of a people," and cosmopolitan culture, which consists in the "republic of genius" that stretches across nations and eras. Church's second thesis, advertised in the book's subtitle, is that the early Nietzsche is not as much of an...