Early liberalism’s exclusion of nonwhite people can be seen as the result of the abstractions that dominated Enlightenment thinking when the European mind was detached from its religious roots. In order to create a fictional world of interchangeable, “colorblind” individuals, liberalism first had to politically and philosophically erase those whose very existence was a testament to the unchosen and particular realities of human life. The rights were kept for “white people” because “white” functioned as the signifier for the “abstract individual” that the liberal imagination had invented.

Nietzsche’s continued presence and resonance in America suggests that he never forgot his Emersonian inheritance. Although Nietzsche’s self-creating individuals and free spirits take their bearings from man’s deepest spiritual yearnings and conflicts—rather than the shallow self-interest of anglophone classical liberalism—his characters are immediately and perpetually recognizable to American democrats, pragmatists, and entrepreneurs. Nietzsche’s followers in America, therefore, always seem at once the country’s most vehement critics and quintessentially American types. Indeed, Nietzsche might well be understood as a temporarily embarrassed American…