ABSTRACT
Nietzsche is trying to foreground the fundamental assumption in modern social and moral theory. Jean Jacques Rousseau had already performed that act of table-turning. Nietzsche's purpose was not to inspire a direct turn to nature in the wake of an unmasking of the pretensions of civil society. The question was directed at the moralists of modernity. It was in many ways inspired by the tragedians of ancient Greece, especially Aeschylus and Sophocles. Nietzsche attempted to throw the mythic self-evidences of modernity into a sharp relief through a juxtaposition with the ancients. One way of initially approaching this dimension of Max Weber's work is to explore some of the themes raised in the closing pages of his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber was also committed to the argument that it is only through societal relationships, and only through the intrinsically social problem of the moral conduct of life, that the individual can be rendered human.
