I can think of no better way to begin this book on the influence of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) than with this well-known assessment of his own significance. As he himself foretold, Nietzsche has indeed been one of the most influential figures in modern thought since the end of the nineteenth century. Nietzsche's work, how-ever, is also notoriously ambiguous. It has been interpreted in a great variety of ways, and has influenced starkly contrasting movements and schools of thought, from atheism to theology, from existentialism to poststructuralism, and from Nazism to feminism. This book will chart Nietzsche's influence, both historically and thematically, across a variety of these contrasting disciplines and schools of interpretation.

While Nietzsche's importance to modern thought cannot be reduced to a single idea or point of interpretation, if there is one over-arching theme that helps us to understand his tremendous influence, then arguably it is nihilism, the devaluation of the highest values of Western culture. More than any other thinker of his age, Nietzsche analysed the significance of the vast changes wrought in culture since the Enlightenment at the level of values.