American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

moral indeterminacy could place heavy demands on the individual, however. Indeed, as Emma Goldman admitted, it “urges man to think.” While Goldman stressed that “perfect personality” could be realized once moderns liberate their minds from “man-made law” and “truth grown false with age,” she also insisted that they would prefer gilding their cages to breaking free of them. Though the masses would be the first to benefit from recognizing how religious and even supposedly democratic ideals espoused in American public life were instruments of internecine terror rather than divine commandments, they were the least likely to do so. The beneficiaries of industrial capitalism manufacture the fictional idol of the free market, for example, but it is the masses who willingly worship it. To demonstrate how the common people were their own tormentors, Goldman went to some of the unlikeliest passages in Nietzsche’s writings. She turned, for example, to Nietzsche’s maxim, “When you go to woman, take the whip along,” to demonstrate how even liberated suffragists couldn’t get liberation right. According to Goldman, suffragists grounded their arguments for voting rights on the very outmoded essentialist ideas of female purity and virtue that had subjugated them. If woman is a “purist,” Goldman argued, it is only because she has become “bigoted and relentless in her effort to make others as good as she thinks they ought to be.” The daily workings of Christian ressentiment in American cultu...