What Nietzsche Really Said:A Reader’s Guide

Cutting through decades of ideological distortions, Montinari offers a lucid, balanced, and rigorously researched introduction to Nietzsche's life and thought.

Mazzino Montinari's classic short introduction to Nietzsche is exceptional for the concision, sobriety, sophistication and balance to summarize and critically illuminate the life and work of one of the world's most controversial philosophers. A distillation of the author's twenty years of research in the Goethe and Schiller Archive in Weimar preparing the standard edition of the philosopher’s writings, the book seeks to rescue Nietzsche from his appropriation by National Socialism, doctrinaire "Nietzscheans," and others. Here in English for the first time, What Nietzsche Really Said clears away decades of myth-making to recover Nietzsche as he really was: not as a prophet or system-builder, but as a thinker in motion who challenged Europe's moral, political and cultural assumptions in ways that still speak to the present.