The Nietzsche Polemic at the Turn of the Century: Selected Early Critiques, 1890-1900 (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798244144055)

University professors explicate and disseminate his writings; prominent public intellectuals celebrate him; podcasters propagate his teachings; teenagers and adolescents who consider themselves rebellious swear by him. Right-wingers invoke his extreme tough-mindedness and his calls for a return to a more hierarchical social order; conservatives applaud his invectives against the French Revolution and the Enlightenment. Leftists, progressives, and individualists, by contrast, are inspired by his nomadic lifestyle, his anti-nationalist stance, and his critiques of the state and of Christianity.
Among postmodernists he has the status of a patron saint, with his oft-quoted phrase "Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms", serving as their methodological point of departure and enduring credo. Big capitalists can only approvingly nod to Nietzsche's conviction that ''life itself is essentially appropriation, violation, overcoming of the foreign and the weaker, oppression, harshness, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation, and at least, at best, exploitation.' Narcissistic individuals feel affirmed by his self-aggrandizement and self-obsession in their own self-conception.

Today, much as at the turn of the twentieth century, a Nietzsche cult exists. How is this to be explained?

Substantial and often incisive critiques of Nietzsche, already articulated in the 1890s, were largely forgotten. They were for the most part neither presented nor even mentioned in editions of his works, nor in philosophy textbooks. As a result, the vast majority of readers never encountered these critiques and thus approached Nietzsche largely uncritically, many of them developing a cult-like devotion to his thought.
Readers encounter Nietzsche as if in a vacuum, largely detached from the history of philosophy and the history of ideas. They also remain unfamiliar with the authors from whom Nietzsche drew-whom he rarely acknowledged-and consequently regard him as far more original than he in fact was. Most of Nietzsche's followers show little willingness to seriously engage with critical perspectives. Such critiques are quickly dismissed as malicious, slanderous, or as expressions of envy toward an allegedly unparalleled genius.

All of Nietzsche's critics represented in this collection wrote, to a large extent, in an attempt to counteract Nietzsche's sudden and rapidly spreading influence among readers from very different walks of life. Shaking their heads in disbelief at his popularity, they warned his uncritical admirers of what they regarded as the flaws of his positions on morality, culture, and society.

The aim of this volume is to contribute to the English-language literature on Nietzsche by making these largely forgotten critiques available to a wider audience and, in doing so, to provide a corrective to Nietzsche's frequently uncritical reception.

This collection contains the following texts:

E. v. Hartmann - Nietzsche's ''new Morality''

Max Nordau - Degeneration ('Friedrich Nietzsche', excerpt)

Ferdinand Tönnies

-Nietzsche-Fools
-The Nietzsche-Cult (excerpt)

Franz Mehring

-On the Philosophy of Capitalism [Nietzsche].
-Nietzsche against Socialism
-On Nietzsche

Julius Hart - The new God (excerpt)

Otto Henne am Rhyn - Anti-Zarathustra (selected chapters)

Author: Bojan Viculin
ISBN-13: 9798244144055
Publisher: Independently Published
Language: English
Published: 01/15/2026
Pages: 226
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.68lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.52d