A Prize-Winning Book on Nietzche – by Phin Upham

“The Contest of Extremes: An Exploration of the Foundations and the Peak of Nietzsche’s Political Philosophy” is an essay written by Peter Berkowitz included in the Phin Upham collection called Space of Love and Garbage. Peter Berkowitz is an associate professor at George Mason University School of Law and a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University.

He is the author of Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberation. He is Contributing Editor for and has written for a wide variety of other publications including Atlantic Monthly, Times Literary Supplement, Weekly Standard, Wilson Quarterly, and the Yale Law Journal. This chapter is the introduction to Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist, which won the Harvard University Press’s Thomas J. Wilson Prize for the best book by a new author. Recently Berkowitz served as editor for The Future of American Intelligence, Terrorism, the Laws of War, and the Constitution: Debating the Enemy Combatant Cases, and Never a Matter of Indifference: Sustaining Virtue in a Free Republic.

Here is the bio (above) from the essay and a quotation of my favorite paragraphs of the essay (below).

She told me herself that she had no morality—and I thought she had, like myself, a more severe morality than anybody.

—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

The dazzling beauty of Nietzsche’s writings may blind the reader to the extreme and explosive character of his opinions.Nietzsche expounded a radical and aristocratic egoism; poured scorn on Platonism, Christianity, modernity, enlightenment, democracy, socialism, and the emancipation of women; denounced the belief in human equality as a calamitous conceit; and ardently championed a rank order of desires, types of human beings, and forms of life.

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You can also buy this book on Amazon: Space of Love & Garbage by Phin Upham