Tracy Strong

Etudes hégéliennes: Raison et décision. Bernard Bourgeois (Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, Questions, 1992). 404 pp. FF 198.00 paper. Name, Hero, Icon: Semiotics of Nationalism through Heroic Biography. Anna Makolkin (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992), 264 pp. DM 148 cloth. A History of Women in the West: II. Silences of the Middle Ages. Edited by Christiane Klapisch‐Zuber (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992). Examination of Pharisaic Traditions. Exame das tradiçoes phariseas. By Uriel Da Costa. Facsimile of the only copy, Royal Library of Copenhagen. Supplement by Samuel Da Suva's Treatise on the immortality of the soul. Tratado da immortalidades da alma. Trans., notes and introduction by H. P. Salomon and I. S. D. Sassoon (E. J. Brill: Leiden, New York, Köln, 1992) 578 pp. $143.00 cloth. La transparence du mal: Essai sur les phénomènes extrêmes. By Jean Baudrillard (Paris: Galilée, 1990) 180 pp. (English translation: The Transparency of Evil: Essay on Extreme Phenomena [New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1992] 200 pp.) Equal in Monastic Profession: Religious Women in Medieval France. (Women in Culture and Society). By Penelope D. Johnson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994) pp. xv, 294, £11.95/ $17.25 paper in the U.K. and Eire. Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries. Edited by Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 447 pp. m.p.g. paper. Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn's Philosophy of Science, Paul Hoy‐ningen‐Huene, translated by Alexander T. Levin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) 310 + xx pp. $40.00 cloth $15.95 paper. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth‐Century French Thought. By Martin Jay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) xi + 632 pp. $35.00 cloth $16.00 paper. Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtue. By Lester H. Hunt (London/new York, 1991) xxiii + 200 pp. £12.99 paper. Empire, Welfare State, Europe: English History, 1906–1992 (Short Oxford History of the Modern World), 4th ed. By T. O. Lloyd (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1993) 587 pp. paper. Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894–1917. By Anna Geifman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) xii + 376 pp. $39.50 £32.50 cloth. Thucydides, Hobbes and the Interpretation of Realism. By Laurie M. Johnson (DeKalb, Ill: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993). xiv + 214 pp. $32.00 cloth. Homo Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age. By Luc Ferry, trans. by Robert de Loazia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) viii + 276 pp. Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz: The Concept of Substance in Seventeenth Century Metaphysics. By R. S. Woolhouse (London and New York: Rout‐ledge, 1993) 214 pp., £10.00 paper. Petrus Alfonsi and His Medieval Readers. By John Tolan (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993) xv + 288 pp. £31.50 cloth £15.50 paper. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. By Eric J. Sundquist (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993) pp. ix + 705. Speculative Freemasonry and the Enlightenment: A Study of the Craft in London, Paris, Prague, and Vienna. By R. William Weisberger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993; (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1993) vii + 244 pp. $52.00 cloth. Spain's First Democracy: The Second Republic, 1931–1936. By S. G. Payne (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 470 pp. £53.95 cloth £17.95 paper. Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment. The Debate over Maladies des Femmes. By Lindsay Wilson (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) vii + 246 pp. cloth, n.p.g. Pragmatism and Social Theory. By Hans Joas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) 272 pp. $45.00 cloth $16.95 paper. Karl Kautsky: Marxism, Revolution & Democracy. By John H. Kautsky (New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Transaction Books, 1994) 256 pp. $32.95/£24.95 ISBN 1–56000–109–7. The Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes. By Mark Hulliung (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994) 293 pp. $45.00 cloth. What is Property? By Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, edited by Donald R. Kelley and Bonnie G. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) xxxviii + 225 pp. $49.95 cloth $16.95 paper. Sophocles, 2 vols. Trans, and edited by Hugh Lloyd‐Jones, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1994) vii + 486 pp. and viii + 599 pp. $16.95 per volume, cloth. The Death of the Child Valerio Marcello. By Margaret L King (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) xviii + 484 pp. $22.95 paper $74.75 cloth. Men Writing the Feminine: Literature, Theory and the Question of Genders. Edited by Thaïs E. Morgan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994) vi + 207 pp. $16.95 cloth. Stone. By John Sallis (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994) 147 pp. $24.95 cloth $11.95 paper. The Humanity of Thucydides. By Clifford Orwin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) x + 235 pp. n.p.g. Bruno Kreisky: Chancellor of Austria. A Political Biography. By H. Pierre Secher (Pittsburgh: Dorrance, 1994) vii + 223 pp. $17.85 cloth. Visions of America since 1492. Edited by Deborah L. Madsen (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994) xv + 164 pp. $39.95 cloth. Flying Out of This World. By Peter Greenaway (The Parti‐Pris Series) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) vi + 199 pp. £31.95/$45.95 paper £59.95/$86.25 cloth. Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought. By Louis A. Sass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994) x + 595 pp. n.p.g., paper. Englishness and the Study of Politics: The Social and Political Thought of Ernest Barker. By Julia Stapleton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 249 pp. £35.00/$59.95 ISBN 0–521–46125–1. Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires. By Leslie Hill (Routledge, 1994) viii + 200 pp. £11.99 paper. The Rhetorical Voice of Psychoanalysis: Displacement of Evidence by Theory. By Donald P. Spence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994) 228 pp. $29.95 cloth. Nietzsche, God, and the Jews. By Weaver Santaniello (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994) 232 pp. $17.95 cloth. Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida. By Rodolphe Gasche (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994) vii + 286 pp. $45.00 cloth $22.95 paper. Eternal Russia: Yeltsin, Gorbachev, and the Mirage of Democracy. By Jonathan Steele (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994) xviii + 427 pp. $27.95 cloth. Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture. By John Gascoigne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 324 pp. £35, $59.95. National Cultures and European Integration: Explorative Essays on Cultural Diversity and Common Policies. Edited by Staffan Zetterholm (Oxford/providence USA and Berg, 1994) vii + 175 pp. £24.95 cloth £12.95 paper. English Mystics of the Middle Ages. Edited by Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) xi +311 pp. £37.50, $59.95 cloth. Schumann and His World. Edited by R. Larry Todd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) xi + 396 pp. n.p.g. English Traits: The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume 5, Historical introduction by Philip Nicolof, notes by Robert E. Burkholder, text established and textual introduction and apparatus by Douglas Emery Wilson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994) lxxiii + 433 pp. $65.00. To Destroy Painting. By Louis Marin, trans. by Mette Hjort (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) $49.95 cloth, $18.25 paper. Italian Fascism, 1919–1945. By Philip Morgan (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995) xii + 209 pp. $45.00. Leaders and Masses in the Roman World: Studies in Honour of Zvi Yavetz. Edited by I. Malkin and Z. W. Rubinsohn (Leiden, New York, and Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1995) xviii + 243 pp. 110.00/ $63.00 cloth. From Newton's Sleep. By Joseph Vining (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) xvii + 398 pp. cloth. A Requiem for Karl Marx. By Frank E. Manuel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995) xi + 255 pp. ISBN 0–674–76326–2, $24.95 cloth. The Romans. Edited by Andrea Giardina, trans. by Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) pp. x + 393 $15.95 paper.

ABSTRACT Nietzsche’s life project remains constant throughout his life: it is the project of transformation or transfiguration. He formulates this as the necessity of dealing with the way that one’s past (be it that of an individual, or a society, or the species) shapes one’s present. The paradigm for this transformation is first to be found in The Birth of Tragedy, but it reappears in various guises in all of his work. I argue that Nietzsche’s writing is itself designed so as to make possible such a transformation in his readers.

In this book, Rousseau is understood as a theorist of the common person. For Strong, Rousseau resonates with Kant, Hegel, and Marx, but he is more modern like Emerson, Nietzsche, Eittegenstein, and Heidegger. Rousseau's democratic individual is an ordinary self, paradoxically multiple and not singular. In the course of exploring this contention, Strong examines Rousseau's fear of authorship , his understanding of the human, his attempt to overcome the scandal that relativism posed for politics, and the political importance of sexuality

_Nietzsche's New Seas_ makes available for the first time in English a representative sample of the best recent Nietzsche scholarship from Germany, France, and the United States. Michael Allen Gillespie and Tracy B. Strong have brought together scholars from a variety of disciplines—philosophy, history, literary criticism, and musicology—and from schools of thought that differ both methodologically and ideologically. The contributors—Karsten Harries, Robert Pippin, Eugen Fink, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Kurt Paul Janz, Sarah Kofman, Jean-Michel Rey, and the editors themselves—take a new approach to Nietzsche, one that begins with the claim that his enigmatic utterances can best be understood by examining the style or structure of his thought.

From Plato through the nineteenth century, the West could draw on comprehensive political visions to guide government and society. Now, for the first time in more than two thousand years, Tracy B. Strong contends, we have lost our foundational supports. In the words of Hannah Arendt, the state of political thought in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has left us effectively “thinking without a banister.” _Politics without Vision_ takes up the thought of seven influential thinkers, each of whom attempted to construct a political solution to this problem: Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Lenin, Schmitt, Heidegger, and Arendt. None of these theorists were liberals nor, excepting possibly Arendt, were they democrats—and some might even be said to have served as handmaidens to totalitarianism. And all to a greater or lesser extent shared the common conviction that the institutions and practices of liberalism are inadequate to the demands and stresses of the present times. In examining their thought, Strong acknowledges the political evil that some of their ideas served to foster but argues that these were not necessarily the only paths their explorations could have taken. By uncovering the turning points in their thought—and the paths not taken—Strong strives to develop a political theory that can avoid, and perhaps help explain, the mistakes of the past while furthering the democratic impulse. Confronting the widespread belief that political thought is on the decline, Strong puts forth a brilliant and provocative counterargument that in fact it has endured—without the benefit of outside support. A compelling rendering of contemporary political theory, _Politics without Vision_ is sure to provoke discussion among scholars in many fields.