American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

“Nietzsche will always remain relevant as the first great writer to proclaim unadjustedness as the form heroism takes in a mechanized mass-society.” Viereck used a very Kaufmann-esque Nietzsche to diagnose the characterological deficits of midcentury Americans, to exhort them to “preserve the inner life” and to appreciate that liberty is fundamentally achieved as an “inner psychological liberty.”89 This Nietzsche—the cultural physician of the inner life—who understands the importance of the human cultural grounds of freedom, moved easily from the anti-Stalinist Right to the anti-Stalinist Left, and informed the criticism of Lionel Trilling. In 1950, Trilling presented a Nietzsche who helped him articulate his own exhaustion with collectivist ideologies and his cautious rapprochement with American culture, and identified the “liberal imagination” —what Nietzsche helped him to see as “life’s continuous evaluation of itself ” —as the only preserve of genuine freedom.