American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

American reviewers enthusiastically greeted Kaufmann’s effort to establish Nietzsche as a philosopher worthy of serious examination. In scholarly journals and the popular press, commentators described Kaufmann’s study as a “revelation,” “one of those rare works that no student of modern thought can afford to ignore,” and “one of the best expositions of Nietzsche’s philosophy,” noting that one of his greatest achievements was that he made Nietzsche make sense.54 Positive as the initial reviews had been, Kaufmann likely suspected that it would be difficult to persuade academic philosophers of Nietzsche’s value. At midcentury, the rift that had been growing since the late nineteenth century between Anglo-American and Continental thought was as wide as ever.