In American Nietzsche, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen delves deeply into Nietzsche's philosophy, and America’s reception of it, to tell the story of his curious appeal.

If you were looking for a philosopher likely to appeal to Americans, Friedrich Nietzsche would be far from your first choice. After all, in his blazing career, Nietzsche took aim at nearly all the foundations of modern American life: Christian morality, the Enlightenment faith in reason, and the idea of human equality. Despite that, for more than a century Nietzsche has been a hugely popular—and surprisingly influential—figure in American thought and culture. In _American Nietzsche_, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen delves deeply into Nietzsche's (...) philosophy, and America’s reception of it, to tell the story of his curious appeal. Beginning her account with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche read fervently, she shows how Nietzsche’s ideas first burst on American shores at the turn of the twentieth century, and how they continued alternately to invigorate and to shock Americans for the century to come. She also delineates the broader intellectual and cultural contexts within which a wide array of commentators—academic and armchair philosophers, theologians and atheists, romantic poets and hard-nosed empiricists, and political ideologues and apostates from the Left and the Right—drew insight and inspiration from Nietzsche’s claims for the death of God, his challenge to universal truth, and his insistence on the interpretive nature of all human thought and beliefs. At the same time, she explores how his image as an iconoclastic immoralist was put to work in American popular culture, making Nietzsche an unlikely posthumous celebrity capable of inspiring both teenagers and scholars alike. A penetrating examination of a powerful but little-explored undercurrent of twentieth-century American thought and culture, _American Nietzsche_ dramatically recasts our understanding of American intellectual life—and puts Nietzsche squarely at its heart. (shrink)

The essays in this book demonstrate the breadth and vitality of American intellectual history. Their core theme is the diversity of both American intellectual life and of the frameworks that we must use to make sense of that diversity. The Worlds of American Intellectual History has at its heart studies of American thinkers. Yet it follows these thinkers and their ideas as they have crossed national, institutional, and intellectual boundaries. The volume explores ways in which American ideas have circulated in (...) different cultures. It also examines the multiple sites--from social movements, museums, and courtrooms to popular and scholarly books and periodicals--in which people have articulated and deployed ideas within and beyond the borders of the United States. At these cultural frontiers, the authors demonstrate, multiple interactions have occurred - some friendly and mutually enriching, others laden with tension, misunderstandings, and conflict. The same holds for other kinds of borders, such as those within and between scholarly disciplines, or between American history and the histories of other cultures.The richness of contemporary American intellectual history springs from the variety of worlds with which it must engage. Intellectual historians have always relished being able to move back and forth between close readings of particular texts and efforts to make sense of broader cultural dispositions. That range is on display in this volume, which includes essays by scholars as fully at home in the disciplines of philosophy, literature, economics, sociology, political science, education, science, religion, and law as they are in history. It includes essays by prominent historians of European thought, attuned to the transatlantic conversations in which Europeans and Americans have been engaged since the seventeenth century, and American historians whose work has carried them not only to different regions in North America but across the North Atlantic to Europe, across the South Atlantic to Africa, and across the Pacific to South Asia. (shrink)

Walter Kaufmann's monumental study of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy, Nietzsche:Philosopher,Psychologist,Antichrist (1950) dramatically transformed Nietzsche interpretations in the postwar United States and rendered Kaufmann himself a dominant figure in transatlantic Nietzsche studies from 1950 until his death in 1980. While the longevity of Kaufmann's hegemony over postwar American Nietzsche interpretations in particular is remarkable, even more so is the fact that he revitalized the career of such a radical thinker in the conservative intellectual climate of the 1950s. Philosophers and historians typically credit (...) Kaufmann with rescuing Nietzsche from the Nazis, but argue that he did so by denaturing Nietzsche's philosophy of power and narrowly transforming him into an existentialist. By contrast, this essay argues that Kaufmann took a much more dramatic step by extending the scope of Nietzsche's philosophy, demonstrating how his ideas resonated with but also transcended the dominant philosophies of the day. Kaufmann presented Nietzsche as a philosopher uniquely poised to bridge the increasing mid-century rift between continental and analytic philosophies, as well as between the increasingly distinct moral worlds of academic philosophers and general readers. At a time when philosophical discourses within the university and beyond were pulling apart, Kaufmann put Nietzsche to work to bring them back together. By emphasizing Nietzsche's harmony with the range of scholarly and popular philosophical concerns of mid-century, he also established, for the first time in the United States, Nietzsche's role as a canonical thinker in the Western tradition. (shrink)

Drawing on a variety of discourses, from religion, philosophy, and political thought, to cultural criticism, social theory, and the arts,The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History shows how ideas have been major forces in American history, driving movements such as transcendentalism, Social Darwinism, conservatism, and postmodernism.