American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Tucker saw Nietzsche himself as a philosophical anarchist and argued that anarchism, properly understood, was a philosophy of life, not a political program. He thus peppered the pages of Liberty with Nietzschean aphorisms that suggested anarchism as an intellectual movement: “We are entering upon the age of Anarchy: which is at the same time the age of the most intellectual and freest individuals. Immense mental force is being put in motion. The age of geniuses: hitherto delayed by custom, morality, etc.”38 In Nietzsche, Tucker recognized a fellow philosopher who understood freedom as a state of mind, as well as the power of the mind when freed from the state. Tucker insisted that anarchism was perfectly consistent with American ideals of freedom, and should be familiar to any “unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats” who understood that the only government which governed by the consent of the governed was no government at all.39