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On the Genealogy of Morality, or On the Genealogy of Morals (German: Zur Genealogie der Moral),...

On the Genealogy of Morality, or On the Genealogy of Morals (German: Zur Genealogie der Moral), subtitled "A Polemic" (Eine Streitschrift), is a work by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, composed and first published in 1887 with the intention of expanding and following through on certain new doctrines sketched out in his previous work Beyond Good and Evil. The most straightforward of Nietzsche's books and the least aphoristic in form and style, it is considered by Nietzsche scholars to be a work of sustained brilliance and power, and Nietzsche's masterpiece. It consists of a preface and three interrelated Abhandlungen ("treatises" or "essays"), which trace episodes in the evolution of moral concepts with a view to undermining "moral prejudices", and specifically the morality of Christianity. The subject of Nietzsche's treatises are his thoughts "on the origin of our moral prejudices", thoughts a long time in the making and already given brief and imperfect expression in his Human, All Too Human. Nietzsche attributes the desire to publish his "hypotheses" on the origins of morality to reading his friend Paul Rée's book The Origin of the Moral Sensations (1877) and finding the