The Mask of Enlightenment is the most detailed textual and thematic study of one of Nietzsche's most important but least understood works: Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In this book Nietzsche was laying the groundwork for a fundamental philosophical and political revolution on a global scale. One of the difficulties that the text poses is Nietzsche's prophetic style; Stanley Rosen unravels the complex threads that form the rhetorical voices of the work, and so explains the style in an accessible manner. He rejects recent skeptical, deconstructionist interpretations of Nietzsche and reveals a coherence underlying the multiple and apparently incompatible intentions embedded in the text. There is extensive interpretation of the doctrine of eternal return, of the nature of the philosophical prophet, and of the dialectic of philosophical revolution. Professor Rosen is also concerned to provide an adequate contextualization of Zarathustra; and he thus devotes considerable space to the Greek and Christian background to Nietzsche's thought, to Nietzsche's relation to Plato, and to Nietzsche's relationship with the Enlightenment in one direction and with postmodernism in the other.

Nietzsche is a figure whose influence on contemporary thought in the humanities and social sciences continues to be enormous. This book is sure to become the definitive study of Zarathustra, it will have broad appeal to philosophers and students of modern philosophy, intellectual historians, political scientists, and literary theorists.