'It is one of the great merits of Christian Emden's Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History that he attempts one of the richest and most detailed accounts of Nietzsche's relationship to late nineteenth-century Germany's cultural and political inheritance, situation, and challenges. ... It is to Emden's credit that he has begun a far more serious and historically informed investigation of who Nietzsche as a thinker of the historical and the political was and what he wanted.' R. Kevin Hill, Political Theory
'Christian Emden's Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History is an ambitious, provocative work. It aims to provide a synthetic reinterpretation of Nietzsche's intellectual itinerary during the quarter century between his earliest university notebooks and the texts produced immediately preceding his mental collapse.' John E. Toews, H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online
'Emden brings alive not just the intellectual debates, but also the internal and geopolitical manoeuvrings, of the age of Nietzsche. ... Emden succeeds in this important book in showing why, in the words of Human, All-Too-Human, 'we need history'.' Paul Bishop, Journal of European Studies
'Emden's account of German intellectual life is detailed and engaging. ... [He] likens Nietzsche's political vision to those of Burke and Tocqueville, critical of unrestrained (though not all) democracy while praising an open-textured notion of moral community.' Vincent Lloyd, The Heythrop Journal
'[Emden] 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. ... Emden's detailed, scholarly, and original interpretation brings to light important themes in Nietzsche's work.' Tamsin Shaw, Perspectives on Politics