Like Shaw and London, the socialist critic Max Eastman saw in Nietzsche’s Übermensch a prototype of the new individual who would lead in the radical reorganization of American political, economic, and social life. In all three interpretations, the enemies of the Übermensch were the retrograde aspects of modern life: laissez-faire economics, the American plutocracy, repressive sexuality and gender roles, and the “slave morality” of bourgeois culture. Although critical of the socialistic reading of Nietzsche, H. L. Mencken’s unashamed version of the unbounded immoralist Übermensch shared a
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