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…

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