In a work that constitutes the most important contribution to Nietzschean studies in recent decades, Domenico Losurdo restores the philosopher's works to their complex nineteenth-century context.

Domenico Losurdo (14 November 1941 - 28 June 2018) was an Italian Marxist philosopher and historian. He was a Professor of History of Philosophy at the University of Urbino and one of the world's leading Hegel scholars and an expert on 19th and 20th-century intellectual history. He has produced a large body of scholarly work that aims at an analysis of European, and particularly German, philosophy and political thought, taking in Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger and, appropriately, Gramsci, as well as Bonapartism, Italian Neo-Hegelianism and historical revisionism. He also exemplifies the cultural gap that still persists between the theoretical cultures of continental Europe and the Anglo-American world. While strongly influencing Italian academia with over twenty monographs, only two of them have made it to an English translation so far. These two studies--Heidegger and the Ideology of War: Community, Death, and the West (2001; Italian edition 1991) and Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns (2004; Italian edition 1992)--have become fundamental reference works.