The Use and Abuse of History: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Use and Abuse of History, credited to Friedrich Nietzsche, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of The Use and Abuse of History by Friedrich Nietzsche. (Translated by Adrian Collins.) Read in English by Public Domain Scholar. “Whoever asks his friends whether they would live the last ten or twenty years over again, will easily see which of them is born for the ‘super-historical standpoint.’” “The Use and Abuse of History” is a work antithetical to Hegelian and Darwinian views of history and progress of Nietzsche’s epoch. Modern man, Nietzsche claims, for all his meticulous studies of the Hellenes and Renaissance has yet to become anything resembling the life-affirming objects of his studies. However, central to this work is the “historical,” “unhistorical,” and “super-historical” senses. Historical studies make man unhappy, yet while man envies the animals who live unhistorically, man would not trade places with them. A healthier organism, for Nietzsche, is one who can appropriately learn and forget history. Part of a larger work, “Thoughts Out of Season,” yet published, read, and taught independently of it, “The Use and Abuse of History” is an early work of Nietzsche’s in which he questions the overly scholarly studies of history and asks “How are such studies serving or not serving life?” - Summary by Public Domain Scholar

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Use and Abuse of History
• Author credits: Friedrich Nietzsche
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 11
• Listed recording duration: 2:40:49

Catalogue topics

• philosophy
• history
• classicism
• modernity

Track guide

1. 00 - Preface — 3:39
2. 01 - Section I — 16:15
3. 02 - Section II — 12:04
4. 03 - Section III — 9:57
5. 04 - Section IV — 14:22
6. 05 - Section V — 12:41
7. 06 - Section VI — 18:04
8. 07 - Section VII — 12:54
9. 08 - Section VIII — 16:47
10. 09 - Section IX — 24:11
11. 10 - Section X — 19:55

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.