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Book Review: Political Philosophy Cross-Examined1 7 9claimed” (166–67). But this requires the presence of society. In Rousseau’scase, it is persecution that enables him to achieve this sort of freedom: societyis the precondition for the possibility of transcending society and, throughthe philosophic life, reclaiming in a higher form the happiness and freedomof natural man. The citizen’s ego turns outward, “forming a common ego andreaching the higher form of existence of a participant in the state’s sovereigntyand power.” The philosophic life involves an “expansion of the ego inward”through self-reflection (166). This “profound self-absorption” and “godlikeself-sufficiency” can become a self-abandonment that leads to literal “ecstasy:being outside oneself through an expansion of the conscious self. The highesthappiness of freedom of the solitary individual life…is self-abandon insteadof alienation totale, is unio mystica with the universe instead of…with thepolitical corps moral et collectif of the ideal republic” (167–68).Robert Pippin takes up Heidegger’s understanding of Nietzsche andnihilism, arguing that even though Heidegger’s approach “helps a great dealto clarify Nietzsche’s understanding of and diagnosis of nihilism,” nonetheless,his post-1936 turn against Nietzsche “distorts Nietzsche and misses anopportunity to make better use of Nietzsche’s diagnosis in addressing thecentral points of the issue” (177). In particular, Pippin wants to examineHeidegger’s Seinsfrage, what Heidegger means when he claims Nietzscheunderstands Being as will to power, and finally, why Heidegger thinks thewill-to-power teaching reveals Nietzsche’s failure to overcome a metaphysicaltradition that tends toward nihilism. Employing the orientation towardeveryday being-in-the-world in terms of concern, Pippin presents the Seinsfragein terms that prove quite illuminating for Nietzsche’s understanding ofnihilism: the Seinsfrage “concerns the significance of there being anythingat all, a horizon of the general significance of anything at all—the way inwhich we understand how the meaning of our own being ‘fits in’ with therebeing anything at all—always already presupposed and taken for granted inour dealings with entities” (181). The post-1936 Heidegger identifies will topower as continual and aimless flux, which requires that the overman dominatethe earth. While it “would not exclude it as a possible response,” it doesnot require it, says Pippin. Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche is a “forced andunfounded reading of Nietzsche. Nietzsche is much better read in the termsof Being and Time…concerned above all with how anything could matter…and how mattering is a condition for the possibility of intelligibility” (184).Heidegger, in his post-1936 thought, forces Nietzsche into a role for whichhe is not suited; rather, “Nietzsche can be viewed as in many ways, at least