Given the popular press’s image of Zarathustra as the Ur-text of European totalitarianism, and the academy’s general disregard for him, it was hard to imagine that Nietzsche’s philosophy had much of a future in American intellectual life. Commentators in the United States sympathetic to Nietzsche worked hard to redeem his damaged reputation after World War I. After his being linked to a second world war, however, few were willing to try it again. But one Harvard graduate student in philosophy stepped forward: Walter Kaufmann. Much as we may prefer to believe that ideas spread because of their
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