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American Nietzsche: A History of An Icon and His Ideas. By Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen. University of Chicago Press. 464pp, Pounds 19.50. ISBN 9780226705811. Published 15 November 2011
Who would have thought it? Who could have imagined in 1900, when Friedrich Nietzsche died, that the philosopher of the aristocratic distance and elitist heights would enjoy a reincarnation of sorts in the land of the radical democratic ethos and mass entertainment industry? And yet as Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen persuasively shows, this is exactly what happened to Nietzsche in the United States.
Few European philosophers have been more actively present on the American intellectual scene than Nietzsche; possibly nowhere has he been more variously interpreted, his ideas more imaginatively reformulated and his life story more spectacularly retold than in the US. Radicals and moderates, progressives and conservatives, believers and atheists, black activists and white supremacists, cowboys and Indians, all could find in him something to which they could relate. Nietzsche has never let anyone down.
If you were, say, a US socialist looking for revolutionary inspiration, Nietzsche was there to help you; he was, after all, a professional idol- breaker and "transvaluator of all values". If you were, on the contrary, a radical conservative, you could easily find in him plenty of anti- socialist remarks....