discovers its real coherence and system. His philosophy performed the social task of `rescuing' and `redeeming' the German intelligentsia. It offered: a road which avoided the need for any break, or indeed any serious conflict, with the bourgeoisie. It was a road whereby the pleasant moral feeling of being a rebel could be sustained and even intensified, whilst a `more thorough', `cosmic biological' revolution was enticingly projected in contrast to the `superficial', `external' social revolution. For the later Lukacs, unsystematic Nietzsche is simply a disguise through which the organizing ideological significance of his work must be discerned. In the deluge of recent literature on Nietzsche, Lukacs's sweeping condemnation is generally passed over in silence or used to illustrate the inadequacy of a totalizing ideological reading of this supposedly open-ended and anti-systematic philosophy. Although it was written only some fifty years ago, the philosophy of history and the political commitments which inspire Lukacs's Nietzsche critique speak to a contemporary audience as from a dead epoch. This denunciation posits a reader already convinced that the realization of humanity's telos is self-evidently identified with the socialist cause. In the wake of the collapse of Eastern-bloc socialism, and with the rise of new social movements, such a reader has become virtually extinct. To late-twentieth-century critics of modern society, the very radicalness of Nietzsche's attack on the key values of modernity is the essence of his appeal. In particular, Nietzsche's reflection on knowledge and power, with its fundamental premiss that reason is nothing more than a perverted and disguised will to power, has been embraced by a generation discontented with the fruits of Enlightenment. In the face of the intensified, multidimensional vision of modernity's `iron cage', modern readers of Nietzsche have found a seeming ally in their suspicions regarding all humanist assertions of solidarity and all appeals to humanity's telos. Nietzsche's attack on the levelling image of equality harboured by the Christian bourgeois tradition has seemed to some radical critics of late modern society to voice their own crisis of faith. Foucault, for example, has described his own critique of the disciplinary society as `quite simply Nietzschean' in motivation. In Nietzsche's repudiation of the principle of equality and in his loathing of the `herd', the committed communist Lukacs discovers a backward-looking repudiation of the positive achievements of modernity. By contrast, contemporary interpreters have tended to seek in Nietzsche an advocate of their own deep misgivings about the levelling suppression of the different, the displaced, and those marginalized by the abstract liberal conception of equality. More than this, a number of contemporary interpreters have sought to brush Nietzsche's philosophy against the grain to discover in it the seeds of a new conception of social co-operation; one capable of sustaining, not suppressing, a commitment to the expression of positive difference. The following article investigates the efforts of a range of recent interpretations concerned to establish Nietzsche's relevance to us. Against the totalizing character of Lukacs's reading, these interpretations typically suppose themselves uninterested in the disclosure of the essential truth of Nietzsche's texts: theirs is an avowedly appropriative interest concerned