American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

If, as Nietzsche argued, moral language is not an expression of universal truth but rather an instrument to serve particular social functions, then it would be their role as critics of American values to investigate how, for example, modern-day Christians and laissez-faire capitalists used words as strongholds to defend or justify their religious traditions and aggrandized wealth. The young intellectuals were committed to progressive reform and cultural renewal but also to the belief that neither God nor natural law demanded that they be so. In A Preface to Politics (1913), Walter Lippmann used Nietzsche’s insights to imagine a democratic theory without foundations. To do so, he first sought to demonstrate that political and economic discourse, though grounded in claims of universality, had no such recourse to absolutes. He argued that political commitments, even democratic ones, were informed by human temperament, not by rationality. To understand politics, we should analyze people’s psychological longings, their aesthetic tastes, even their irrational impulses, more than the first principles they espouse. Nietzsche had argued that dogmas are no more than “instruments of human purposes.” What a culture identifies as moral, therefore, is really just “an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good.”

Lippmann sums up politics