Social justice has returned to the heart of political debate in Europe. While the phenomenon has received significant attention from several academic disciplines, social justice has rarely been explored as a historical subject in its own right. This chapter explores why this should have been so. It argues that the elusiveness of social justice as a historical subject can be explained by the way in which conceptions of social justice were located at the confluence of other historical narratives that have shaped the historiography of twentieth-century Europe. The chapter provides an extensive survey of these influential narratives, which include the rise of state power, the development of cultures of social improvement, the changing popular expectations of government, and the domain of citizenship. The chapter then presents an innovative approach for the historical study of ‘social justice in context’. Focusing on the ways in which conceptions of social justice grew out of the intricate interplay between rulers and ruled, it develops a research agenda that concentrates on the analysis of three distinctive dimensions, including the temporalities, the spatiality, and the actors and agencies of conceptions of social justice.

The nature of an individual, of a self, is defined by autobiographical memories unique to that person. Memories, however, may also be shared across individuals who have experienced the same or similar events. Moreover, personal knowledge abstracted from experience, autobiographical knowledge, may be unique to an individual or may generalize more widely within social groups, societies, and cultures – for example, in life scripts (e.g., Berntsen and Bohn, 2009; Berntsen and Rubin, 2004) and representations of lived history (e.g., Brown, Lee, Krslak, et al., 2009; Brown and Lee, 2010; Brown, Hansen, Lee, et al., this volume). Autobiographical memories and knowledge are conjoined in acts of remembering (Conway, 2009) and form mental constructions that the individual experiences as memories – that is, for which they have conscious recollective experience. We conceive of this complex form of cognition as occurring in what we have termed the self-memory system (SMS). The SMS contains conceptual representations of the self, goal structures, autobiographical conceptual knowledge, and highly event-specific episodic memories (Conway, 2005, 2009; Conway and Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). In this chapter we briefly review the SMS and link it to more recent developments in understanding conceptual autobiographical knowledge and especially to cross-cultural aspects of autobiographical remembering.

Nature of autobiographical memory

The SMS was introduced as a conceptual framework for autobiographical memory, and, uniquely for a model of memory, it emphasizes the role of the self and goals in remembering. It is a superordinate memory system consisting of a working self, operating in conjunction with a conceptual self, to generate patterns of activation in an autobiographical knowledge base: it is these transitory patterns that are, briefly, memories. The working self comprises a motivational hierarchy of goals and sub-goals that operate to constrain cognition, and ultimately behavior, into effective ways of operating in the world. The autobiographical knowledge base comprises a hierarchy knowledge from event-specific episodic memories through to temporal linked events, and finally to abstract self-conceptual knowledge. More recently, the conceptual self was introduced, and it, alongside the working self, regulates autobiographical remembering. The conceptual self integrates the SMS model more fully with current social-cognitive theorizing about the self.

The Birth of Tragedy was written in (and, in a sense, against) a number of contexts: the military context of the Franco-Prussian War; the political context of the proclamation of the German Reich in Versailles on 18 January 1871, of the declaration of the Paris Commune on 18 March of the same year, and of the growing revolutionary movement in Europe; and the academic-political context of Basel, especially the philological circles in which Nietzsche had to operate. As early as on 20 November 1868, after his first meeting with Wagner in the Brockhaus household, Nietzsche wrote a letter to Rohde in which his dissatisfaction with scholars and with his academic colleagues was expressed with some force. Here he speaks of “the teeming broods of philologists of today, […] the entire molelike activity, with their full cheek-pouches and their blind eyes” (das wimmelnde Philologengezücht unserer Tage […], das ganze Maulwurfstreiben, die vollen Backentaschen und die blinden Augen), and what upset him was not just “their joy at the captured worm and their indifference to the real, indeed the insistent problems of life” (die Freude ob des erbeuteten Wurms und die Gleichgültigkeit gegen die wahren, ja aufdringlichen Probleme des Lebens; KSB 2, 344). This letter strikes one of the first notes in what will become a constant theme in Nietzsche's writings: the relationship between scholarly, academic activities and the tasks of the “real world”; ultimately, the relation of knowledge to life.

Although Nietzsche had sought, and found, solitude in Sils Maria, he had not given up on his project for a secular monastery. Before leaving Nice, he had written to Franz Overbeck about his hope, when he returned next winter, to establish “a society” (eine Gesellschaft) in which he would not be completely in hiding: possible members included the poet Paul Lanzky (1852–?), whom Nietzsche had gotten to know in Nice, and Heinrich Köselitz (known as Peter Gast), his trusted friend, perhaps even (as unlikely as it sounds) Paul Rée and Lou von Salomé (KSB 6, 494–95). And in a postcard to his mother and his sister in November 1884, he had envisaged Nice as the site of his “future ‘colony’” (zukünftige “Colonie”), which would consist of “pleasant people to whom I can teach my philosophy” (sympathische Menschen, vor denen ich meine Philosophie doziren kann; KSB 6, 563) — as we shall see, a very different colony from the one his sister had in mind …

But Nietzsche was aware that he needed to create a community of readers for his ideas. For, now that it was complete, Zarathustra was intended to act as “an entrance-way“ (eine Vorhalle; KSB 6, 496 and 499) — or, to use a Goethean term, a propylaeum — to his philosophy as a whole, and in 1883, while he was completing part 3 of Zarathustra, he was working on “a larger philosophical project” (eine gröΒere philosophische Arbeit; KSB 6, 414; cf. KSB 6, 427 and 429), provisionally entitled “The Innocence of Becoming: A Guide to Redemption from Morality” (“Die Unschuld des Werdens: Ein Wegweiser zur Erlösung von der Moral”; KSA 10, 8[26], 343) or “Morality for Moralists” (“Moral für Moralisten”; KSA 10, 7[201], 305—6 and 24[27], 660—61).

Of Nietzsche's publications to date (i.e., to 1886), Beyond Good and Evil (Jenseits von Gut und Böse) had enjoyed arguably the best critical reception. In a review for the Swiss journal Der Bund, Josef Victor Widmann described it as Nietzsche's “dangerous book” (gefährliches Buch), pointing out that the dynamite used in the construction of the Gotthardbahn, the railway line that traverses the Swiss Alps, always bore a black warning-flag to alert people to its danger — and that Nietzsche's book deserved a similar warning. Nietzsche was delighted by the review, both for commercial reasons (KSB 7, 249 and 256) and because, in essence, it said his book was dynamite (KSB 7, 251-52 and 258); in Ecce Homo, he would allude to Widmann's review and playfully apply his description of Beyond Good and Evil to himself: “I am not a man, I am dynamite” (Ich bin kein Mensch, ich bin Dynamit; EH “Why I Am a Destiny” §1; KSA 6, 365). Other reviews were positive, too, but Nietzsche's old friend, Erwin Rohde, was not impressed. The two friends were reunited when Nietzsche visited Leipzig again in 1886, but the encounters left both disappointed. Rohde told Franz Overbeck that there was “something totally uncanny” (etwas mir damals völlig unheimliches) about Nietzsche, “as if he came from a country where no one else lived” (als käme er aus einem Lande, wo sonst Niemand wohnt); for his part, Nietzsche wrote to Overbeck that Rohde's case simply proved that “the best go to seed in the atmosphere of the university”

The catastrophic breakdown in relations with family and friends alike after the débâcle with Lou von Salomé and Paul Rée left Nietzsche isolated from almost everyone in his life. After his mother accused him of having besmirched the name of his father, Nietzsche packed his bags and left Naumburg for Leipzig in September 1882 (cf. KSB 6, 256 and 326); his sister, Elisabeth, was seemingly unable to understand why Nietzsche was so upset by this remark, but we should remember Nietzsche's identification with his father, following his early death. Although the Pindaric imperative, “become who you are” that Nietzsche had earlier drawn to Lou von Salomé's attention (KSB 6, 203) was one that he continued to urge upon her in the form of her “emancipation from her emancipation” (schließlich muß man sich noch von dieser Emancipation emancipiren; KSB 6, 247–48), his discovery that Lou was, as he told Malwida von Meysenbug, “almost a caricature of what I admire as an ideal” (beinahe die Caricatur dessen, was ich als Ideal verehre; KSB 6, 315), had led to complete disillusionment; Nietzsche's attitude became increasingly grim and bleak. Consumed by his emotions “in the school of the affects” (in der Schule der Affekte), and plagued by bad headaches and migraines, he turned to opium for relief (KSB 6, 306–7).