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BOOK REVIEWS 485 Mill's arguments are occasionally treated too sympathetically. FOr example, Mill thought that local government spent proportionally more time on dispensing money than national government did. Is this a good reason for his willingness to base a plural local franchise on money qualifications? Further, is the doctrine of "higher pleasures" properly used to argue that the competent have a superior view of where the general interest lies? More generally, even if we have a clear statement of the assumptions on which Mill worked-and this Thompson has certainly provided-how should we use Mill's theory when these assumptions are not our own? For example, as this study makes plain, we now have the sort of political party of which Mill disapproved. His theory is therefore less relevant to us to the extent that he assumed the absence of parties but highly relevant in suggesting reasons for disliking them. Certainly Mill's theory provides a counterpoint to our political practice and our theoretical concerns, and there will be no excuse in the future for misrepresenting his views on democracy. Readers will be grateful to Professor Thompson for the careful and clear treatment of those views that he has provided. ANDREW REEVE University of Warwick James C. O'Flaherty, Timothy F. Sellner, and Robert M. Helm, eds. Studies in Nietzsche and the Classical Tradition. University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures, no. 85. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1976. Pp. xviii + 278. $14.95. Here are fifteen essays on Nietzsche, in English; ten have not appeared previously in any form. Two that are most important, in my judgment, deal with The Birth of Tragedy and are sharply critical of Nietzsche. In a piece translated by T. F. Sellner, and available only here, Max L. Baeumer refutes the notions that Nietzsche originated concern with the role of Dionysus in Greek life and the Dionysus-Apollo contrast. He traces the history of German preoccupation with Dionysus through a full century before Nietzsche's discussion, and he includes remarkable quotations from philosophers, poets, archaeologists, philologists, and historians and theoreticians of myths. He shows that the issues involved had been of central importance, especially in the classicism-romanticismdebates, and he shows that Nietzsche knew many of the writings in question. "One can grant Nietzsche the primacy he asserts for himselfonly with relation to his 'transformation' of the Dionysian into a 'philosophical pathos', that is, into a rhetorical clich6." Baeumer cites much relevant secondary literature but says that he sets forth the tradition of the Dionysian in German literature for the first time here. I think this is true, but it is obvious anyway that his points are of great importance: no interpreter of Nietzsche or of his influence can neglect them. Walter Kaufmann's contribution, reprinted from his Tragedy and Philosophy (1968), is a bracing, iconoclastic, and well-argued critique of Nietzsche and others on the death of tragedy. He maintains that "optimism" about reason was not antithetical to tragedy and that Aeschylus was the most optimistic of the Greek tragedians. He rejects the notion that tragedies have to "end badly." He denies that Euripides was an inferior tragedian, and also that Euripides was Socratic; more likely, in his view, is the possibility that both Socrates and Plato attempted to rebut Euripides. There are other good points, including a theory of what did kill tragedy: "its sickness unto death was and is despair." This essay is not new but is still required reading. Two other essays deal mainly with The Birth of Tragedy. Hugh Lloyd-Jones surveys several aspects of Nietzsche's relations to the study of the ancients. He disputes Karl Reinhardt's claim that Nietzsche lacked any great positive achievement in philology, but he argues that the technical contributions are trivial in comparison with Nietzsche's general contribution to our understandingof Greek life and thought. He thinks that The Birth of Tragedy, for all its faults, was a turning point for that understanding. He does not spell out very carefully, however, 486 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY what Nietzsche's "general contribution" was. The essays cited above contribute to my sense that a clarification of...

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