Both outside the academy and within, American readers turned to the Übermensch as a concept essential for understanding modern selfhood. Whereas popular authors, journalists, and social reformers typically cast the figure as an aggrandized self at war with society, philosophers, humanists, and social scientists within the academy understood the Übermensch as the self at war with itself. While few scholars thought it a salutary image of modern self-hood, they nevertheless recognized its value for testing the moral discourses of romanticism, naturalism, liberalism, and pragmatism.
