On the Genealogy of Morals

Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) asks where our moral ideas came from and what they have cost us, using history, psychology and philology to give an old discipline a new direction.

Its three essays make up a single argument. The first sets master morality against slave morality and shows how the word "good" means very different things in each. The second takes up guilt and bad conscience, tracing them to the older relationship of debtor and creditor and to the history of punishment. The third asks what ascetic ideals mean and why they have held such power, not only in religion but in philosophy and the academy.

This Vintage paperback pairs the Genealogy with Ecce Homo, written in 1888 and first published in 1908, in which Nietzsche reviews his own life and surveys each of the books he published. Walter Kaufmann edited the volume and translated both works, with R. J. Hollingdale sharing the translation of the Genealogy, and adds running footnote commentary that is fuller than in his other Nietzsche editions because both books have so often been misread.