American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

There were plenty of European “geniuses” for Americans to turn to, but Nietzsche especially spoke to their romance with independence from institutions and their consequent anxiety of being marginalized. He helped those like Stearns, who sought intellectual freedom yet disliked its consequences: “In our national life to-day the young intellectual speedily finds that he is not wanted.”49 If genius has a history, so too does the hero worship of the alienated genius; and it is this iteration of the young intellectuals’ cult of genius that helps explain how the ground for the romance with Nietzsche in the twentieth century was laid in the nineteenth.50 As we have seen, the early twentieth-century Nietzsche vogue had a broad cultural scope, and was not limited to professional or aspiring thinkers and writers. But for the young intellectuals, it was Nietzsche’s role as a freelance philosopher without institutional support, affiliation, or recognition that had particular appeal.