ABSTRACT
Historians can be more or less one dimensional, more or less mono-genealogical, but part of the business of the historian of Europe is to see how that territorial outline settled where it has by tracing the sequence of world-historical events which have brought it where it is today. In Friedrich Nietzsche's writings "Europe" comes to name an "unexhausted" promise of its own exhausted past. And this passage to its own "beyond" will make its way, he suggests, through the mechanism of a new hidden hand, a new cunning of reason that belongs within the tidal wave of what he calls "the democratic movement in Europe" that unfolds out of the French Revolution. Nietzsche is a notable exception: his own experimental "synthesis" of the "European of the future" is more or less entirely composed of a Germano-Franco-Britannic trio, although with a significant debt to Europe's Jews.
