While many have portrayed Nietzsche as a romantic and misanthropic genius and as a social misfit, Young’s book reveals that for a long time Nietzsche was sociable and quite contented, and far from the stereotype of the great intellectual that one might be forgiven for extrapolating from Thus Spoke Zarathustra or the quasi-autobiographical Ecce Homo, or from most of the biographies. While Nietzsche did become increasingly reclusive in the 1880s, Young suggests that this was on account of his workaholic nature and his health problems, rather than of his social incompetence or any desire not to be constrained by the norms of the ‘herd’.

In fact, while Nietzsche is famously the purveyor of the idea of the Übermensch and the singular individual who can transform culture, Young grounds Nietzsche’s thought in his own culture. This is, in the main, a great strength of the book, especially in contradistinction to the cult of Nietzsche and the gamut of uncritical writings on genius more generally. As Young contends, surely we cannot understand Nietzsche’s distinctive contributions as a philosopher and cultural critic without understanding his culture or the way it worked upon him while he attempted to refashion its influence in more affirmative ways.

Young’s strategy does have some possible weaknesses, depending on just how reductively the relationship between Nietzsche’s cultural situation and his philosophy is construed. As Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote in ‘The Search for a Method’, ‘Valéry is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valéry.’ In Being and Nothingness, Sartre also discusses the manner in which biographies – he is particularly concerned with biographies of Flaubert – frequently rely upon bad psychology and abstract clichés about human behaviour to which the subject is then made to conform. While his book as a whole avoids this problem, Young intermittently succumbs to this tendency in his account of Nietzsche’s childhood. Early in the book, Young writes, ‘as a result of being brought up in a passionately Prussian household and in the Prussian education system, he acquired, I shall suggest, an archetypically Prussian personality’. Certainly, Nietzsche was disciplined, and exhibited, to invoke a cliché, a Protestant work ethic. But Young goes on to note that, ‘the way Fritz played his war games evinces a precocious, creative intelligence’, and that another game exhibited his ‘freakish, multi-faceted intelligence’. Such comments appear to involve a retrospective imposition of a ‘type’ or essence upon ‘Fritz’, as he was nicknamed, without acknowledging that children typically played more elaborate and creative games in the age before television.

In terms of its content, this book makes several important contributions to Nietzschean scholarship. In particular, it is an important corrective to the view – perhaps made famous by Nietzsche’s first translator, Walter Kaufman – that Nietzsche valued only élite individuals, or ‘supermen’. Young convincingly shows that Nietzsche, at least after the break with Schopenhauer’s philosophy in the early 1870s, was interested in great individuals for what they might help to produce: a revaluation of values; a cultural shift away from the decadence of modernity and the resentful ‘slave morality’ that Christianity has bequeathed us even in the absence of any community-uniting belief in God (in Europe, at least). As Young puts his twin theses: for Nietzsche, communal interests precede those of the exceptional individual; and ‘the great individual is crucially important but only ever as a means’. These ideas help Young to explain Nietzsche’s indebtedness to Darwinian ideas in both a social and biological sense, which were themselves dangerous and akin to dynamite, precisely the hopes that Nietzsche had for his own philosophy. They also help to explain Nietzsche’s consistent advocation of the ‘great artwork’ (for a time embodied by Wagner), which might bring the community together and unite all of the arts in a manner akin to Greek tragedy. Indeed, Nietzsche envisaged Thus Spoke Zarathustra being set to music, and was himself an accomplished pianist as well as a composer of less obvious talents: Wagner reputedly laughed at one of his attempts at composition, but Liszt apparently thought them reasonable. (Seventeen of Nietzsche’s compositions are available on the Cambridge University Press website, so the reader can decide.)

Young seems to have an axe to grind in regard to ‘postmodern’ interpretations of Nietzsche, and to postmodernism itself. Young comments that understanding Nietzsche as the godfather of contemporary postmodernism is a tribute to the almost unlimited capacity of philosophers to wilfully misunderstand each other. This is too strong. The great philosophers of our time bequeath us a fertile ambiguity and richness that admits of multiple interpretations. So-called postmodern philosophers – say Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida (the last three of whom have resisted the characterisation) – were all aware of Nietzsche’s conservativism and of the kind of communitarianism in his work that Young seems to endorse, and which they themselves might not have endorsed. But the only reason that Young finds this ‘postmodern’ indebtedness to Nietzsche impossible to understand is that ‘postmodernism’, in Young’s hands, becomes something of a caricature. It seems to be shorthand for laissez-faire relativism, and perhaps an anti-realism about truth. But even Young concedes that Nietzsche’s ‘perspectivism’ sometimes tilts in this direction and seems to be a form of relativism, and sometimes seems to be a plural realism (there are multiple interpretations of different aspects of reality, but they are compatible with the way the world is per se). Most of the philosophers deemed postmodernist are no different in this respect. For Young, the aspects of Nietzsche’s work that they focus upon, such as ‘On Truth’, and ‘Lies in a Non-moral Sense’, are unjustly celebrated, since Young says our beliefs about the world are mostly true, with Darwinism making this likely.

This is not an uncommon view, but it should be noted that Darwinism may mean that it is likely that our perceptual abilities are truth-bearing or fit the world (since this explains the adaptive success of humanity, notwithstanding global warming and the catastrophic wars of the twentieth century), but it does not show that various other sorts of judgement and belief are typically true. Other critical comments about postmodernism abound: it has a thirst for appearing excited at all costs, which is cultivated to disguise its lack of substance; Nietzsche never, as with Young’s view of deconstruction, invokes an irrationalist anti-logocentrism, nor advocates multiplicity and frivolous play, despite the Dionysian sentiments in The Birth of Tragedy and elsewhere. In such comments, Young’s fair and even-handed tone, which even argues that we must see some basis in Nietzsche’s texts for the nonetheless egregious injustice that was the Nazi interpretation of his work, is momentarily abandoned.

Indeed, Nietzsche was a man of contradictions, as Young’s own text repeatedly attests. One of Nietzsche’s declared heroes was Marquis de Mirabeau, a statesman who reputedly could never forgive an insult because he had already forgotten it, but Nietzsche held a grudge against Salomé and Wagner for his entire sane life. We can multiply examples of this kind. Nietzsche criticised the ascetic ideal but nonetheless came to practise it himself (philosophical asceticism is argued to be different from other forms of slave morality). He was a (sometimes) very rational philosopher who nevertheless believed that he could cure himself of various physical ailments through strange diets without fruit and vegetables and by staying in temperatures between nine and twelve degrees Celsius (and hence moving for summers in Sils Maria and winters in Nice and elsewhere). He was overtly anti-feminist, yet many of his most enduring friends were feminists. Moreover, as Young is entirely right to emphasise, he was an anti-Christian philosopher who nonetheless preached his own version of theodicy in regard to how to explain the existence of evil, attempting to show that problematic phenomena are really blessings in disguise; hence his advocation of amor fati, and the point behind his most famous aphorism, ‘What does not kill me, makes me stronger.’

An anti-democrat, Nietzsche believed in spiritual and intellectual leadership in a manner that was closely related to Plato’s conception of philosopher-kings. This may seem an unappealing prospect, especially to those who know academic philosophers, but Nietzsche refers to philosophers in a much broader sense – more Greek, more Renaissance – than to those of us ensconced in the ‘publish or perish’ sector with its resultant push to increasing specialisation.

While I am no anti-democrat in the Nietzschean vein, we observed some of the pitfalls of democracy in the electoral tussle between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott. Both leaders are clearly thoughtful people, and yet, during the recent campaign, we heard little from them of any substance. What have we made of them, and what have they made of themselves? For Nietzsche, cultural change happens, ‘through individuals, powerful, influential … who announce … their hoc est ridiculum, hoc est absurdum (this is ridiculous, this is absurd)’. Let us hope that genuine intellectual leadership is not a fossil of a bygone era, replaced by a politics of saying little, of minimising differences and of presenting small targets, in which guarding against error seems to be the prime ambition. Some of Nietzsche’s solutions to this democratic predicament may be untenable to modern eyes, but Young’s book compellingly shows that, as a cultural critic, Nietzsche is as relevant as ever.