And indeed Walter Kaufmann who translated and wrote about Nietzsche, found him to be misunderstood, and going toward liberal humanism. I felt quite the lift reading Nietzsche in college, after many years of Christian mind programming, and I especially enjoyed the rejection of slave morality, his description of herd values, and his way of turning everything upside down, as far as what I thought I knew before reading Nietzsche.
Immediate political influence on…?
Congress? Voters? The President? Foreign policy? Aside from being popular amongst a small circle, I’d say he has very little influence.
And yes, he is a philosopher. What is your definition of philosopher, anyway?
I wonder if part of the issue is the constant focus in academia for specialization, combined with the separation of academic work from the classroom and later the masses? My academic friends refuse to write books for the masses - it won’t help with tenure, the time takes away from journal publication, and when you dumb-down your work for the masses you are sneaked at.
That all said, I think that Jon Haidt has done a good job of bridging the academic / masses, and he has some interesting stuff to say.
After that, we get the slightly more erudite talking heads like William F Buckley, Lind, and others.
I didn’t say useful, I said creative and fruitful. There is a slight but measurable difference. In fact, one could say that having an established status quo to examine tends to result in a subversion thereof. Right now, it’s more a matter of the blind men hanging on to the elephant as it stampedes. They’re not going to describe it too well, and they have no idea where the hell it’s going.
At least in Aristotle’s time, even if the elephant was heading for a cliff, the philosophers could come to an agreement that there was, in fact, an elephant, and not, say, a crowd of lemmings carefully shaved and glued together.
Why has nobody mentioned Jesus Christ?
Well, that’s not how it worked in Aristotle’s time. The status quo was subverted for entirely different reasons.
As “a truly seminal thinker or important philosopher with respect to the future political or social direction of the US”? Definitely not. America really cannot afford to take him seriously. We would have no Defense Department.
Noted deep political philosopher George Bush disagrees with you.
I think that may in part because much of the Anglo-American philosophical basis had already been established by the time the United States came of age intellectually. Hence as a result most philosophers ended up refining the already existing ideas of people like Locke or Smith (and Bacon too for that matter).
What about the libertarian movement such as people like Ayn Rand or Murray Rothbard or the founder of Scriptualism Gordon Clark?
More info on Scriptualism: http://www.trinityfoundation.org/
I’m afraid so. But I’m interested in reading criticism of American society based on people like Nietschze or Evola rather than just leftist ones.
Whatever Gordon Clark was, he was not a political intellectual heavyweight. Neither was John Rushdoony or any Dominionist or Christian Reconstructionist.
We’re not living in Martin Luther’s day. I doubt there can be such thing, now, as a political intellectual heavyweight who starts from the point that “The Bible alone is the Word of God” and bases everything on that. That’s like asking for the Klan to produce a political intellectual heavyweight, it’s preposterous. They can’t be anything but cranks. The most extremely stupid Communists or Objectivists are serious political thinkers by comparison.
Nietzsche may have inculcated the culture of opposition to camaraderie, but he had little to no influence on the synthesis of Hiter’s philosophy.
It is a shame that his sister worked to fraudulently connect Nietzshe with anti semitism, leading to part of the misinterpretation of his writing. She was married to a nazi that Nietzshe disagreed with and criticized.
Nietzsche had nothing against Jews, really. He did once publish a pamphlet purporting to prove Wagner was a Jew – but that was a parody on Wagner’s antisemitism.