1 Etica & Politica/ Ethics & Politics, 2006, 1 http://www.units.it/etica/2006_1/DEGRANDIS.htm The Rise (and Fall?) of Normative Ethics. A Critical notice of Sergio Cremaschi’s L’etica del Novecento Giovanni De Grandis Department for Continuing Education University of Oxford ABSTRACT Sergio Cremaschi’s L’etica del Novecento offers a clear and careful account of the development of ethical theory in English-language and German Philosophy. The focus on meta-ethics and normative concerns allows the author to offer a very concise, reliable and comprehensive overview of philosophical ethics. In this respect the book effectively fills the gap left by the lack of a good, updated history of ethics. Although those qualities establish Cremaschi’s work as a valuable reference book, a few doubts are raised about the highly theoretical approach adopted. On the one hand this choice proves not to be very hospitable to some traditions (like most of French philosophy, Marxism, Virtue ethics etc.) and overlooks the connections between ethics and the socio-historical world, with the effect of giving a picture of moral philosophy as a very abstract and academic discipline. On the other hand it is not clear whether the emergence of applied ethics is to be greeted as the culmination of the resurgence of normative ethics, or whether it is conspiring with other trends to undermine the whole enterprise of constructing normative theories. If, as I suspect, the latter is the case, the moral of Cremaschi’s narrative may be different from the one he suggests. 1. Sergio Cremaschi’s L’etica del Novecento: Dopo Nietzsche(Carocci, Roma, 2005, pp. 282, € 23) is the first volume to appear of a trilogy aimed at covering the history of ethics. The other two volumes will cover moral philosophy from Pythagoras to scholasticism and from Grotius to Nietzsche respectively. The whole project is to be welcomed as it addresses a regrettable gap in philosophical publishing: not only is there no history of ethics in Italian, but also the international scene does not offer much on this topic. Furthermore the gap to be filled by the trilogy is one that needs filling, since the undeniable revival of ethics witnessed in the last forty years has failed to bring with it an adequate attention to the history of ethics, and it is hard to deny that much contemporary discussion suffers from a lack of familiarity with many strands of the western ethical tradition. If Cremaschi’s books will help to encourage a better knowledge of our ethical inheritance they will no doubt render a very valuable service to our philosophical culture. However, here I am concerned only with the volume dedicated to the 20th Century, a period that poses a