A polemic. As a clarification and supplement to my last book, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) is a book about the history of ethics and interpretation. Nietzsche reinterprets the former as a history of cruelty and presents the central values of Jewish-Christian and liberal traditions—compassion, equality, justice—as products of a brutal conditioning process aimed at domesticating the animal vitality of earlier cultures. The result is a book that raises profoundly disturbing questions about the violence inherent in both ethics and interpretation. Nietzsche challenges moral certainties.