American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Nietzsche’s antifoundationalism (the denial of universal truth), together with his sustained critiques of Christian morality, Enlightenment rationality, and democracy, has compelled many Americans to question their religious ideals, moral certainties, and democratic principles.3 Turn-of-the-last-century scholars, writers, political radicals, and ministers form the first generation of Americans whose confrontation with his thought compelled them to reevaluate their inherited values in light of his criticisms. Though they had grown up in a world still confident in universals, Nietzsche’s“genealogy of morals” caused them to question the value of their values. In his concept of the “Übermensch,” Americans found a convenient vehicle to assess the forces confronting the individual in an age of growing dislocation and anonymity associated with mass politics and mass markets. In his tragic biography they discovered a cautionary tale about the perilous course of the great man in the democratic era and the soul of man under secularism.

Postmodernism