untimely hesitations

Intellectual historians owe Nietzsche a debt for many things, not least for lending the quality of untimeliness a positive connotation. In the late 1990s, when Marxism was arguably at its nadir as an intellectual program, much less a political one, Warren Breckman published an insightful study of Marxs early thought and its genesis out of a series of disputes with the Young Hegelians concerning the state and its ambiguous relationship with theological conceptions of authority. The untimeliness of Breckmans intervention had much to recommend it. Taking his distance from the pallbearers, Breckman showed that a historical inquiry into the Marxist enterprise increased rather than diminished its contemporary relevance.