American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

During the Victorian period, the old Puritanism lost its hold on individual conscience, but its zealotry remained. The once self-accusing sinners in the hands of an angry God were now self-righteous zealots on the prowl for souls to torment. Neo-Puritanism, Mencken argued, explained the modern American: His enthusiasm was not for repentance, but for what he began to call service. In brief, the national sense of energy and fitness gradually superimposed itself upon the national Puritanism, and from that marriage sprung a keen Wille zur Macht, a lusty will to power. The American Puritan, by now, was not content with the rescue of his own soul; he felt an irresistible impulse to hand salvation on, to disperse and multiply it, to ram it down reluctant throats, to make it free, universal and compulsory. Mencken’s genealogy showed what was possible when American intellectual history was pressed through Nietzsche’s terminology and reassembled by the hands of an angry critic. According to Mencken, the errand into the wilderness had gone terribly awry. From Puritanism to philistinism to a “bellicose” intellectual style that regards its Sklavenmoral as “universal and compulsory” —this was American intellectual history. And it explained its intellectual poverty.90

Woke as Puritanism