Journal of the History of Philosophy

1OO HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY deceived, for neither of them understood himself well enough..." (quoted on p. t89). That in the final analysis the best accounts of Nietzsche are given by Nietzsche himself brings me to my concluding point. Despite Hayman's research and imagination , little or no light is shed on Nietzsche's thought by the knowledge of the events of his life. Though we can admire his obsessive devotion to his writing the better for knowing how difficult it was for him to see the page he was writing on, it simply is of no use at all to be told that there is a connection between Nietzsche's thinking of Lou as someone "sharp-witted as an eagle" and the eagle's pride of place in Zarathustra (pp. 258-59). Hayman's discussion of Nietzsche's thought, which consists in the main of quotation and paraphrase--judicious, to be sure, but making no original contribution of its own--is not illuminated by such parallelisms. As Hayman correctly points out throughout his book, Nietzsche relied more than any other philosopher on writing for communicating. It is accordingly mainly in his texts, which include his letters (themselves belonging to a literary genre in their own right), that Nietzsche is to be found. But if this is so, how are we to account for the quotation with which we, and Hayman, began? The answer is to be found in a careful reading of the passage itself. Nietzsche's point, correctly interpreted, is not that a mode of life, antecedently existing , is expressed in a philosophy, but that a philosophy can embody a mode of life, a life implicit in that philosophy itself. Hayman has given us a vivid portrait of the meek, neat, punctiliously polite man who composed a number of texts that we are still trying to understand today, and we should be grateful for that splendid achievement . But this portrait, in the end, has little to do with the very different character who emerges out of these texts and who bears a very slight resemblance to that man. This character, who is distinct from that man, is not the subject of a biography. He has been, and remains, the subject of an essentially philosophical investigation. In Hayman's own wonderful phrase, this "first of the last metaphysicians" (p. 3) is indissolubly, that is, formally and not causally, linked to the texts of which he is both creator and creature. To understand him, more than almost anyone else, is to read him. ALEXANDER NEHAMAS University of Pittsburgh Roberto Racinaro. La crisi del marxismo nella revisione di fine secolo. Bari: De Donato, a978. Pp. 262. L.45oo. The crisis of Marxism mentioned in the title occurred in the t89os at the time of such "revisionist" critics as Benedetto Croce, Georges Sorel, Giovanni Gentile, Georg Adler, Conrad Schmidt, Werner Sombart, and E. von Boehm-Bawerk. The author analyzes and criticizes all these named authors from a point of view partly Hegelian and partly based on some of the works of Antonio Labriola, supposedly a more orthodox interpreter and follower of Marxism at the time. The analysis is conducted BOOK REVIEWS 101 with an eye toward present-day Marxist discussions, to which frequent references are made. The main issues dealt with are the epistemological status of the materialist conception of history and its connection with the socialist movement, and the epistemological status of the labor theory of value and its connection with economic reality (primarily the relation between "value" and prices). Racinaro argues that all revisionist critiques fail for various reasons that uhimately reduce to a failure to appreciate the (Hegelian) dialectic and to the tendency to introduce unacceptable dichotomies (e.g., between value and fact, fact and theory, theory and practice). Racinaro's arguments are not always convincing. For example, he criticizes Croce's interpretation that the materialist conception of history is a generally useful but not universally true principle of explanation and that hence the socialist classless society is possible, but merely possible and not inevitable. This is criticized partly by recourse to Gentile's argument that socialism is either impossible or necessary, even though this proposition was for Gentile merely...