B&C, 3-4/14 review of Patrick Connelly's review of Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's American Nietzsche-a history of an Icon and his ideas, KH: subverting Christian and foundational assumptions, identifies Nietzsche, how he was influenced by Emerson

The tragic and ironic final chapter of Friedrich Nietzsche's life began with a spectacular collapse into debilitating insanity on the streets of Turin, Italy. It ended with the incapacitated philosopher occupying the second floor of a Weimar villa that housed the archives from which his sister Elizabeth would assume controversial control over his legacy. Prior to his breakdown, Nietzsche balanced his expectation of being a seer and facilitator of a civilizational crisis with the conviction that he was criminally underappreciated in his lifetime. The European "Nietzsche vogue" of his incomprehensible final years, however, gave credence to the notion that his time had indeed come. Among the witnesses of this phenomenon was Wilbur Urban, an American doctoral student at the University of Leipzig and son of an Episcopal priest who discovered The Genealogy of Morals in a local bookstore. Urban later described the resulting personal encounter with Nietzsche's ideas, as he read through the night and undertook an intellectual and spiritual reevaluation of everything he held dear.

They give evidence of a thinker who struck a nerve with American readers due to his unconventional biography and singular vision of a modern world without foundations.

"Antifoundationalism" is a foundational idea in American Nietzsche, which explores how a motley crew of readers in the United States appropriated Nietzsche's "denial of universal truth" in a distinctly American context. Academic philosophers, literary radicals, clergy, and political thinkers of various stripes are among the cast of characters concerned with the implications of Nietzsche's ideas for "the moral and cultural grounds" of modern Americans.

Emerson's influence, Ratner-Rosenhagen speculates, was particularly crucial in Nietzsche's loss of faith, with his discovery of Emerson seemingly "the turning point" leading to his decision to abandon Christianity.

Ratner-Rosenhagen does not exhaustively record every reference to Nietzsche in American print, though she examines in great detail how Americans experienced Nietzsche's ideas. Her thematic and somewhat chronological survey begins with "the making of the American Nietzsche" by literary radicals and cultural critics. Literary radicals fretted over the state of American culture while hoping for a "cosmopolitanism" that would look to the example of Europe, which they believed had already been transformed by Nietzsche's "challenge to all external authority." H. L. Mencken was among an eclectic group of cultural critics who focused on "the persona of Nietzsche." Mencken's influential monograph on Nietzsche refashioned the philosopher in Mencken's image while suggesting that Americans desperately needed Nietzsche's "fearless independence and fierce intelligence." American Nietzsche later returns to the allure that Nietzsche contained for literary radicals and critics. Once again, Nietzsche's biography educates these enthusiasts, who gravitated toward his paradigm of "the unaffiliated intellectual" changing the world through "literary expression and the social efficacy of ideas." Writers and activists such as Emma Goldman, Kahlil Gibran, Randolph Bourne, and Walter Lippmann drew deeply from Nietzsche's model of "the antifoundational intellect" and expressed hope that he could help them renew an impoverished American culture.

Mencken and other critics believed that religion was significantly to blame for that cultural poverty and were gripped by Nietzsche's extraordinary attack on Christianity. ... Fundamentalists, who frequently lumped together Nietzsche and Darwin, are virtually absent from Ratner-Rosenhagen's story. The addition of these neglected constituencies would strengthen the case that Protestants of all theological persuasions worried about the prospect of a civilization adrift from Christian foundations—even if they defined the problem and solution differently.

Historians of celebrity, she argues, have focused inordinate attention on musicians and actors and their respective industries while neglecting the emergence of "the prophetic thinker" as celebrity. But it is difficult to see how a relatively small sample of letters can be used as evidence of celebrity, which by its very nature is about mass appeal and consumption.

How then does one gauge Nietzsche's broader impact on American culture? Ratner-Rosenhagen provides much food for thought on this question throughout American Nietzsche, particularly when she discerns a larger popular effect as in the case of Walter Kaufmann's monograph and translations. I wonder whether a more specific distillation of the notion of cultural authority would be instructive as well. "Cultural authority" is an amorphous term that sociologists and historians have used more than defined. It involves the authority of individuals, ideas, and institutions to promote certain understandings of meaning and values in the culture at large and to shape core assumptions about God, human personhood, social and political order, science, economics, law, and other spheres of public and private life. Protestant Christianity had long informed the American cultural milieu but faced substantial challenges to its authority by the time Nietzsche's ideas first registered in the United States. Sociologist Christian Smith writes that a "secular revolution" was afoot, involving "secularizing activists" seeking "to overthrow a religious establishment's control over socially legitimate knowledge." Many of the same American academics, critics, activists, and clergy who appear in American Nietzsche were participants in the seismic shifts of authority in culture-shaping institutions.

Nietzsche's early American admirers may have questioned whether the European "Nietzsche vogue" would take root in the United States, but they recognized his awareness of and contribution to the larger story of secularism. William Mackintire Salter wrote in 1917 that "a subtle, slow secular revolution in the mental and moral realm was what Nietzsche had in mind." Nietzsche himself realized that uprooting Christianity's cultural authority was a long historical process involving more than simply rejecting traditional beliefs. It would be overreaching, of course, to suggest that Nietzsche's ideas singlehandedly accomplished this revolutionary aim in the United States, but many of the subjects of Ratner-Rosenhagen's book were willing to utilize his ideas to accelerate the process. The result of this secular revolution, along with the rise of competing authorities and understandings of the world, meant further openings were created for Nietzsche's antifoundationalism to gain a hearing in the decades to come. Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's wonderfully written and stimulating American Nietzsche compels us to reckon not only with what he said, but with what we have become.

Patrick Connelly is associate professor of history and director of the Honors Program at Montreat College.