First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

`Lowith's essay is brilliant and it is a sign of something that we have had to wait half a century for its' translation' - The British Journal of Sociology

`The publication of this English translation of Max Weber and Karl Marx is a major event, particularly for those who seek to understand "the characteristic uniqueness of the reality in which we move"' - Sociological Review

Modern man sees with one eye of faith and one eye of reason. Consequently, his view of history is confused. For centuries, the history of the Western world has been viewed from the Christian or classical standpoint--from a deep faith in the Kingdom of God or a belief in recurrent and eternal life-cycles. The modern mind, however, is "neither" Christian "nor" pagan--and its interpretations of history are Christian in derivation and anti-Christian in result. To develop this theory, Karl Lowith--beginning with the more accessible philosophies of history in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries and working back to the Bible--analyzes the writings of outstanding historians both in antiquity and in Christian times. "A book of distinction and great importance. . . . The author is a master of philosophical interpretation, and each of his terse and substantial chapters has the balance of a work of art."--Helmut Kuhn, "Journal of Philosophy "

This long overdue English translation of Karl Lowith's magisterial study is a major event in Nietzsche scholarship in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Its initial publication was extraordinary in itself - a dissident interpretation, written by a Jew, appearing in National Socialist Germany in 1935. Since then, Lowith's book has continued to gain recognition as one of the key texts in the German Nietzsche reception, as well as a remarkable effort to reclaim the philosopher's work from political misappropriation. For Lowith, the centerpiece of Nietzsche's thought is the doctrine of eternal recurrence, a notion which Lowith, unlike Heidegger, deems incompatible with the will to power. His careful examination of Nietzsche's cosmological theory of the infinite repetition of a finite number of states of the world suggests the paradoxical consequences this theory implies for human freedom. How is it possible to will the eternal recurrence of each moment of one's life, if both this decision and the states of affairs governed by it appear to be predestined? Lowith's book, one of the most important, if seldom acknowledged, sources for recent Anglophone Nietzsche studies, remains a central text for all concerned with understanding the philosopher's work.