American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

as the startling news emanated from the academy that professors were instructing their students that crucial Western conceptions of the moral subject were nothing more than white male apologetics, conservative cultural commentators responded with alarm. The growing thunder on the Right heightened drama around a postmodern Nietzsche, whose ideas challenged the truthfulness of truth. Conservatives regarded his philosophy as an exogenous pathogen infecting young Americans’ hearts and minds. Giving voice to frustrations with the American academy and popular culture of the growing lyrical Right in the 1980s and ’90s, Allan Bloom provided a blistering attack on the “Nietzscheanization” of the academy in The Closing of the American Mind (1987). He articulated a growing grievance among conservatives that it was bad enough to have the spectacle of the counterculture’s constant carnival migrate from the be-ins and student protests of the sixties to the popular culture of the seventies and eighties, but it was worse to have this kind of political theater migrate to the academy. Bloom railed against the “value relativism” he believed left-wing professors were peddling to their students, eager for Nietzsche’s authoritative license of their moral licentiousness.