ABSTRACT
Friedrich Nietzsche offers an extreme solution by dismissing virtually all modern philosophy as little more than the peddling of superstitious nonsensical falsehoods. His contempt extends to all great intellectual leaders as well as those who follow and admire them. Nietzsche had little interest in the nuances of modern political economy and none at all for the operation of markets or the conditions of modern consumption. He is rightly considered to be a major influence as far as studies of the social, the self, psychology, epistemology, morality and ethics, and aesthetics are concerned – which is to say just about everything that consumer researchers are interested in nowadays. Nietzsche's wholesale rejection of any principle of ethical certainty casts an eerie shadow over the unfolding circumstances of the twentieth century, which has culminated in the cultural relativism of contemporary social life. He gives little or no serious consideration to the controversies surrounding nineteenth-century capitalism.
