Leiter, Brian. Review of Tamsin Shaw's NIETZSCHE'S POLITICAL SKEPTICISM. NDPR (January 2009).

Shaw, Tamsin. Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. Nietzsche's Political Skepticism (hereafter NPS) is a serious, learned, and novel contribution to the literature on Nietzsche's relevance to political theory. Against the two dominant strands in the secondary literature -- one attributing to Nietzsche a kind of flat-footed commitment to aristocratic forms of social ordering, the other denying that Nietzsche has any political philosophy at all -- Shaw stakes out a new and surprising position: namely, that Nietzsche was very much concerned with the familiar question of the moral or normative legitimacy of state power, but was skeptical that with the demise of religion, it would be possible to achieve a practically effective normative consensus about such legitimacy that was untainted by the exercise of state power itself. Although, as I will argue below, there are reasons to be quite skeptical that Nietzsche was interested in anything like these questions, Shaw has laid down a clear and invigorating challenge to existing scholarship on Nietzsche's politics, and it is one worth meeting. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15105.