Preface and Acknowledgments

Over the last thirty-five years, I have written about and taught Nietzsche and Marx, as well as H. L. A. Hart, Michel Foucault, W. V. O. Quine, Sigmund Freud, and the American Legal Realists. I have also written and taught about topics in general jurisprudence, metaethics, free will, philosophical naturalism, and freedom of speech and religion. Most of that work does not appear here,1 but some of it does, and all of it reflects the thinkers and topics that have occupied me since college and graduate school. Philosophy is, as Nietzsche observed, “an unconscious memoir” that tells us something about the philosopher’s “moral or immoral intentions,” which themselves reveal, as he put it, the ”rank-order of the inner drives of his nature” (Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 6). This volume is a partial memoir, whose title is suggestive about one of the animating “morals” of this philosopher: to eschew ideological illusions about the human situation and human society (including law), with which modern societies and the philosophies that emerge from them are awash, and to face up to our actual situation, without wishful thinking. My first loves in philosophy were Nietzsche and Marx, and then other thinkers like them, mostly lesser, but nonetheless notable for being concerned with what the world and human beings are really like—and not with the stifling, scolding moralizing of those philosophers (including almost all recent ones) who took their own moral wishes and prejudices seriously, either projecting them onto reality or offering reliably implausible rationalizations for them.