ABSTRACT
The view of Nietzsche that prevails among literary intellectuals in America and England is that of the "good European" (one of Nietzsche's favorite self-descriptions). Nietzsche's concept of the will to power, which at one time put him, falsely, into a connection with naziism, is now related to traditional philosophic virtues: intelligence, reason, self-possession. Indeed, Walter Kaufmann in his influential book on Nietzsche virtually identifies the will to power with the rationality of man. Nietzsche knows how dangerous such a doctrine is, and his qualifications suggest all those qualities of intelligence and sanity with which his humanist apologists credit him. Nietzsche points out, it is one of the characteristics of the democratic social order that the assigning of value, which had originally been the prerogative of the aristocrat, becomes a universal activity: "the originally noble and rare impulse to 'think well' of themselves will now be more and more encouraged and extended."
