American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Bloom traced the entrance of Nietzsche’s philosophy to his own German-émigré professors at the University of Chicago, who brought with them Nietzsche’s terrible insights about the bankruptcy of universal, transcendent truth in Western thought and morality. That was all well and good when the academy was committed to teaching students how to work through difficult ideas. But as his philosophy made its way from the academy of the 1940s and 1950s into the radicalized and politicized culture of the 1960s, and from the cloistered seminar to the American marketplace, it became transfigured into a blank check for late twentieth-century American “value relativism.”