Herbert Marcuse's Copy of Nietzsche Der Wille zur Macht. (The Will to Power)

Item Details

NIETZSCHE, Friedrich. Der Wille zur Macht [The Will to Power. Versuch einer Umwertung aller Werte — Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values]. Leipzig: Alfred Kröner Verlag, [1920]. 716 pp., + catalog. Kröner's Taschenausgabe Band 78  (pocket edition), from Nietzsche's Sämtliche Werke. Small 8vo. Original grey-blue publisher's cloth, light wear. 

Herbert Marcuse's copy, with his pencil ownership signature to the front flyleaf and his pencil check-marks in the margins in a few places, with specific page numbers noted on endpaper. Descended through the estate of his elder son, the urban theorist Peter Marcuse (1928–2022), of Waterbury, Connecticut. A working book from the library of the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), author of Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964) and, in the 1960s, the so-called "father of the New Left."  Nietzsche was a lasting presence in Marcuse's own writing.

As expected, scholarly interest in their association abounds. Christopher Holman has argued that Marcuse turns to the will to power in Eros and Civilization (1955) precisely where Freud fails to yield a principle of gratification; Sid Simpson, writing in Constellations in 2017, extends the case to An Essay on Liberation (1969), reading Nietzsche's "gay science" and aesthetic ethos as central to that later work. In Eros and Civilization itself, most directly in the "Philosophical Interlude," Marcuse draws on the will to power and eternal recurrence in support of his vision of a non-repressive civilization, while defining his own image of a liberated humanity as the determinate negation of Nietzsche's superman — a critical engagement rather than simple borrowing. [Credit Claude AI for the the succinct summation.]