Making a Nietzscheanism

German troops massed on the western front soon after the letter was drafted, and Levy moved to England, the country from which he had once been expelled—deported as an alien in 1921 for the imprudence of writing a preface to George Pitt-Rivers’s inflammatory pamphlet The World Significance of the Russian Revolution. He returned to old company: Norman Douglas, who urged him toward what became his last book, The Idiocy of Idealism; and, from an earlier emigration, D. H. Lawrence, William Somerset Maugham, Aleister Crowley, H. G. Wells, T. E. Hulme, Curzio Malaparte, and Graham Greene, most of them met at the Vienna Café in Bloomsbury after Levy had reached London at twenty-five by way of a voyage round the world as a ship’s doctor. What united this company, beyond temperament, was a shared discomfort with National Socialist Germany’s folkish racism and its revival of an archaic, land-hungry peasant ideal. Levy himself wanted to wed Continental culture to the noblesse of British Empire; he translated Disraeli’s Contarini Fleming in 1909 for its unromantic portrait of a man mastering hostile circumstance, and he admired Disraeli’s fusion of social politics, imperialism, and race—”other than which there is no other truth,” as Disraeli wrote in Tancred; or, The New Crusade, which Levy rendered into German. This range of opinion on race and social evolution is the real subject here. The Idiocy and Revival are less arguments to be adjudicated than specimens of a lost ecology of thought.

Radically different, and yet from a distance oddly similar, versions of Darwinism, “Nietzscheanism,” radical meliorism, and Spencerite liberalism competed for cultural supremacy across the turn of the century, and Levy wanted his stake in the contest. Between 1909 and 1913, at his instigation, an eighteen-volume complete edition of Nietzsche in English appeared—the achievement for which he is now chiefly remembered, and the one on which any judgment of his career must finally rest. He had a predecessor and rival in Alexander Tille, the social-Darwinist who translated Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1896 and issued his own incomplete Works of Nietzsche through 1909; Levy’s edition depended on a team of cotranslators—William A. Haussmann, Horace B. Samuel, Paul V. Cohn, Adrian Collins, J. M. Kennedy, Maximilian A. Mügge, Helen Zimmern, and, above all, Anthony Ludovici and Thomas Common. Common produced a quarterly, Notes for Good Europeans, later The Good European Point of View, meant to enlarge the English appetite for Nietzsche and to confront what the master called his seriousness: the creation of a new noble caste to rule Europe and possibly the earth. That such a program could be advanced in a literary quarterly rather than whispered is itself a measure of the age’s permissiveness.

This intellectual permissiveness flourished on both sides of the Atlantic, the more easily because eugenics and social reform were often treated as synonymous—even in progressive circles, as Thomas C. Leonard forcefully argued in Illiberal Reformers. Tille sought to expose the “unnaturalness” of accumulated ethical principles and their tendency to retard progress; against Haeckel and Spencer, he denied that progress and humanity were compatible at all, holding that humanism, Christianity, egalitarianism, socialism, and democracy would together smother the development of superior specimens. This was also the argument of Levy’s first book, The Revival of Aristocracy, published in German in 1904 as Das neunzehnte Jahrhundert—literally “The Nineteenth Century.” To frame what he called the century’s “nationalistic decadence” and “topsy-turvydom of the masses,” Levy prophesied the rebirth of “classical man” in Napoleon, presenting him, with Stendhal and Goethe as literary counterparts, as the embodiment of higher life.

The book’s opening portrays a “new renaissance” trinity of Stendhal, Goethe, and Nietzsche, read in a strongly antipopulist register for their paganism and their cult of the ego. But the century, to the chagrin of those who hoped for a Helleno-Roman revival on the Napoleonic model, went another way, and Levy’s account of its actual tendencies—utilitarianism, socialism, the salonnières, early feminism, Millian meliorism—turns at times into scattershot anti-Christian polemic that the book does not fully earn. These economistic ideologies had a latent tendency to outdo the Church in solicitude for the poor and the “undeveloped,” reproaching it for insufficient altruism, a word Levy notes was coined in that period by Comte, the positivist founder of the “religion of humanity.” Such “Hyper-Christians,” on his reading, promulgated a negative vision aimed at forcing the fusion of classes, nations, and finally of humanity itself. Against this prospect Levy proposed a new aristocracy, or several, to reinvigorate the old dynasties under an ethos of human greatness; orations like the Sermon on the Mount, he argued, demand an impossible ideality that, taken seriously, would distort human affairs and ruin the best human types. Here it becomes clear that what animated Levy’s fury toward National Socialism was philosophical and theological as much as political. He felt that the very phrase “Chosen People” was a contradiction, one he indicted Hitler for appropriating. Beneath the indictment lay Levy’s conviction that Abrahamic monotheism, and what he considered its secularized after shoots like Hegelian metaphysics and Comtean positivism, stood below the paganism of Greece and Rome because they made it difficult for ideas or positive values to take substantive hold on a people.

It was on these grounds that he denounced the “Aryan” mythology of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the prime contemporary exponent of Western racialist thought. In a foreword Levy wrote in the 1913 English translation of Arthur de Gobineau’s most consequential books, The Renaissance—which reads the revival of antiquity through profiles of Savonarola, Cesare Borgia, Julius II., Leo X., and Michelangelo—he deploys Gobineau polemically against Chamberlain, faulting the latter’s “Germanizing” distortions and his vulgar political antisemitism. Levy argued, contra Chamberlain and his National Socialist adherents, that the true followers of Nietzsche had no use for racial scapegoating or nationalistic resentments. Chamberlain, for his part, had earlier charged Gobineau with treating “pure race” as a given rather than a thing to be made and fought for; Levy held that the later Gobineau had ceased to believe in any peoples, equal or chosen, at all. It is not surprising then that Levy and his spiritual kindred viewed the rightwing mass movements of the interwar years as pessimistically as Chamberlain viewed them with hope. He detested Chamberlain’s “nationalization” of race and believed, as he supposed the late Gobineau had, that what survived was only a remnant—an invisible aristocracy of “perhaps no more than 3,500 people in the whole world,” in Mencken’s words. Fused with a settled pessimism about human nature and capacities, this elitism eventually turned against the Germans themselves: Levy scorned their modern pretension to be a “race,” let alone an approximation of Gobineau’s Aryan ideal. In the letter to Hitler, Levy ironically remarked that the only beneficiaries of Hitler’s antisemitism would be the Zionist movement since their racial theories, on the testimony of Theodor Herzl himself, were among the founding ideas of the Jewish state. In that same vein, Levy further took aim at the Nuremberg racial laws:

Only one Nazi grandfather—and as you know, there were many Nazis before you [Hitler] — and no descendant is fit to be an honest scribe or an honorable guest in the house of Zarathustra in the mountains. Spirit shapes blood, and blood shapes spirit: the spirit of truthfulness. But this truthfulness is a product of Jewish thought and Christian conscientiousness: Nietzsche was not for nothing the scion of a long line of Protestant pastors. Their piety and honesty blossomed and emerged in him, ultimately driving him to turn against our religion and our morals: It is therefore the spirit of Christianity and the Christian discipline of generations that have killed our God and his morals.

Levy lambasts Hitler as “a Jew in spirit,” a heathen trafficking in racial purity after the manner of Ezra, armed “with ideas about the ‘chosen people.’” In Hitler, Levy claimed to see the values of the Jewish people—their grave Old Testament pathos, ideas of election, their will to purification of the blood—arriving at a historical summit just as the Roman gaiety he revered went into eclipse. Germany of 1938, he wrote, retained no Romans but only the romantic kind—Hitler’s own allies:

The lictor who accompanies us has no axe in his bundle of rods, but he has a sharp, deadly weapon: our lictor is laughter. No more crucifixions of gods or lambs, saints or sinners.

By the fin de siècle the most consequential arguments had turned from economy and empire toward the arts, symbolism, and poetry, and here Levy’s case grows more interesting than his polemics against Christianity or Judaism alone would suggest. As Nietzsche’s own work already showed, there were deeper problems than the social-Darwinist concern with sterilizing weak bloodlines, eliminating deformed specimens, and administering mating and marriage: the eugenic project was decadent on its own terms, since its technical cleansing threatened to yield only a sterile, mediocre society, and the war on the “weak” might extinguish precisely what mattered in the name of efficiency. Max Nordau, also a physician but, unlike Levy, an important Zionist and a friend of Herzl’s, made the opposing case in 1895 with his influential pamphlet Degeneration, arguing that the Parisian fin de siècle’s artistic ferment was a movement toward dissolution and the loss of higher types. Nietzsche himself was numbered among the symptoms, characterized as a nervous dreamer of pathological tendency. Levy spent much of his career contesting Nordau’s book, which had soured Nietzsche’s English reception and anticipated, almost to the word, the conservative hostility to modern art that the National Socialists would later stage in their exhibitions of Degenerate Art.

Nietzsche’s anti-Christian passages, more than his advocacy for eugenics, made him a demon to the English press. A prominent newspaper wrote, during the First World War, “Read the devil, in order to fight him the better.” Against this reception the magazine Notes for Good Europeans had been founded in London in 1903, laying the groundwork for what Nietzsche called an “assassination of Christianity” on English soil. Levy’s “Good European” was to be the product of métissage aimed at reinvigoration. He pledged himself to something “over-German, over-Protestant, and over-Judeo-Christian,” inveighing against national mysticism lest such loyalties consign Nietzsche’s thought “to obscurity with derisive laughter from the coming youth.” Nihilism, as he most explicitly constructed it in Revival, sprang not from decadent life but from the reigning Judeo-Christian values of the age; against them he summoned an antinihilism drawn from Greek religion, Renaissance magnificence, and the permanent beauty of art and nature.

None of this is offered to relitigate the exegetical disputes of early-twentieth-century Nietzsche scholarship. It opens a window instead onto a spiritual situation whose range of argument—on eugenics, degeneration, the conscious direction of human evolution, the foundations of states and creeds—was, by any honest measure, wider than anything permitted since 1945, when certain doctrines hardened into a settled orthodoxy. Oscar Levy’s mission to generate a new Renaissance, his “Nietzscheanism”—what his friend H. L. Mencken called the making of “a correlative Nietzschean literature in English”—stands as an extreme antipode to the narrowed field of our own discourse. There is, of course, a Nietzsche apart from Levy’s, one available to cosmopolitan, “masculine-liberal,” antinationalist, and merely Old European readings; Levy’s Nietzsche is a partisan construction, defined as much by what it repudiates—the pan-German and neo-pagan readings of Bäumler, Stefan George, and other National Socialist–adjacent interpreters—as by what it affirms.

What these projects share, Levy’s included, is the recognition that human beings require some weight to their existence once unmoored from religious anchors. Beyond his general assault on Christian or Jewish doctrines, Levy singled out one concrete target: the Germans, whom he charged with being the worst kind of Christians for their literal-mindedness, their inability to hear a sous-entendu, their habit of taking everything au pied de la lettre. Where the English trust blindly in Providence, he held, the Germans must always assist it with their own systems and programs. “It is a characteristic failing of the Germans to look in the clouds for what lies at their feet,” lamented Schopenhauer; they could not take religion simply, but struggled endlessly with the feeling of spiritual election. Levy traced that exceptionalism through the idealisms of Fichte and Hegel into Fascism and Marxism alike—the notion of a Chosen People, he argued, invisibly permeates all these ostensibly secular political philosophies, and could culminate in something more fanatical than anything that had come before. The predicament was especially perverse, on his account, because the Platonic project of Christianity was ill suited to Germanic tribes civilized at a relatively late date: it corrupted, stunted, and tamed a people who lived on thought and theory. Whether elected by the Christian God or by Hegel’s Geist, German scholars of the nineteenth century proclaimed themselves the true Semites even as they professed to hate them—the Germans, unlike the English, never having had the luck of a stable synthesis between their national project and their own borrowed Judaism.

Four centuries of German theology and philosophy, in Levy’s verdict, stultified exceptional individuals in the name of altruism. Egalitarian-humanitarian doctrines denied the artist the egoism his sublime visions required; sin, he wrote, “had been uprooted as the minds and bodies of the humans are now too weak to transgress.” Germany had grown too servile and “democratic” to host artists, and its classical and Romantic generations died without worthy heirs, leaving only unremarkable epigones. This distaste is sharpest in Revival’s fifth chapter, “On Southerners and Northerners,” where Levy is at his most Latinophile, loving the European south’s passionate temperament as Helen Zimmern did, in sharp contrast to what he took for the bloodless, mechanistic character of northern life—a north whose dominance he anticipated would set the direction of modernity. A revived ersatz-Christianity and a harsher climate let the northern genius fully translate its ideals into fact; the dearest wish of England and Germany alike was an art for all, which is to say industry, while the Italian regarded his southern genius as too lofty for the petty study of steelmaking or pottery. The northern spirit commands servile masses through discipline; the southern spirit commands the few through mastery. Levy was no monomaniacal Italophile, however, nor simply hostile to Protestant Christianity: he credited England’s greatness to “the new faith,” holding English Protestantism and the civilization of machines to be natural allies, even as he insisted that the prosperity such nations prize “may also be a sign of the lack of higher qualities, because these conditions are unfavorable to genius.” Levy took a pessimistic view of the northern spirit’s direction because he thought it would inevitably concretize into a form of socialism. The Puritan revolution in England, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution were, in his historical narrative, all carried by retrograde “jüdisch-christlich” ideas of revolt against what is strong and great. He drew this directly from Nietzsche, who described the people of the nineteenth century as half-hearted and gauche for denying the radical seriousness of Christianity while clinging to its old moral habits, reducing it purely to a one-dimensional religion of “empathy.”

Levy attempted to publish his last book, The Idiocy of Idealism, in America in 1938, fearing that publication in England would invite blasphemy charges. Even with the help of Mencken, one of his generation’s most influential social critics, no American publisher agreed to take it. English publishers, previously wary, eventually insisted on issuing this “truly offensive tract” once they saw its commercial potential—and it succeeded as one, helped by a foreword from George Bernard Shaw, who praised Levy as “an entirely tactless Nietzschean Jew”—meaning that tactlessness was necessary if one wished to be useful as a Nietzschean.

Idiocy traces the religious and political preachers of salvation, from the Old Testament to Marx, and argues for a common cultural logic underlying both the Jewish religion and National Socialist idealism. Levy read Fascism, communism, and National Socialism in particular as little more than old myths of racial salvation inherited from the Old Testament. That the Germans adopted a foreign, Eastern pagan symbol as their flag alongside Hebraic racial motifs was, for Levy, further evidence that the European monotheist tradition had lost command of men’s consciences; socialism and communism, similarly, were meta-narratives of collective salvation inherited unreconstructed from the Old Testament. In the case of communism, the sanctity of race or nation was merely supplanted by the sanctity of class. Idiocy is a polemical tract, not a rigorous study in intellectual history or Begriffsgeschichte: it opens with a sweeping account of Jewish history and interprets the Protestant Reformation and French Revolution as a reemergence of the “Jewish spirit,” with Cromwell and Robespierre as its quintessential figures. Beyond this somewhat simple genealogy, Levy claimed an opponent beyond any particular historical doctrine: the timeless human tendency toward utopianism and messianism—which culminated in National Socialism. Interestingly, Levy maintains this German idealist “idiocy” found its institutional beginning in the Second Reich of Bismarck. This view avoids portraying National Socialism as a radical anomaly and sees it in a continuum with modern and ancient ideas. War is not just a result of militarism whipped up by harmful demagogues, but is founded in an essentially religious nationalism with deep historical roots.

To a reader steeped in postwar conservative and liberal polemic none of this will feel new at a cursory glance. The intellectual bankruptcy that accompanies the end of apocalyptic narratives coincides with a widespread disbelief that meaningful stories remain to be told. Without discipline and mission, individuals and nations alike fall into ruin. Technical mastery and scientific conquest of nature have lost their enchanting force. Modern society, Levy argued, cannot handle the luxury it has created because it effaced the great individuals that could undertake the Herculean endeavor required to sustain it. The pacification of intellect, ambition and imagination at the foundation of modern Western regimes, continually informed in the negative sense by past civil wars and by inhuman or superhuman evil—what Judith Shklar called the “liberalism of fear”—cannot ever give way to a truly life-affirming social order. The moral play-acting of the present is shallow, amounting to what Nietzsche called tartuffery—vain and hypocritical piety for something essentially dead. Universal claims, especially from contemporary ideologists, require a homogenized audience to carry any force at all.

His mission was meant to produce a new, unprejudiced intellectual aristocracy and renaissance, not a mass-training totalitarian scheme: the best part of a nation should keep its distance from the necessarily vulgar public, resisting equalization, so that the desire for superiority, present in any healthy period, might remain within every national community. All his polemics and offenses can charitably be read in that key. None of this amounts to a case one can accept, and Levy’s own method—a sweeping genealogy in which two ancient religions and three centuries of German philosophy collapse into a single explanatory idea—repeats the very totalizing move he condemns in his opponents. But the case is worth considering precisely because of that overreach. It shows an antifascism, if the word applies to Levy at all, built entirely on hierarchical and aristocratic premises: a man who despised Hitler not for excluding but for leveling. Read against postwar accounts that treat hierarchical organization of society as inherently proto-fascist, Levy’s case is an inconvenient exhibit. His life’s genuine achievement— the eighteen-volume Nietzsche, and the labor of Ludovici, Common, Zimmern, and the rest that made it possible—survives its author’s crankier ambitions and remains the reason English readers today have Nietzsche at all. A reader interested in following this further might turn to the sympathetic recent commentary of Leila Kais, Dan Stone, and Steffen Dietzsch, the last of whom credits Levy with a “nomadic reason” set against the “sedentary reason” of his contemporaries — an image Dietzsch borrows from Friedrich Kittler, who observed that the opposite of democracy is not barbarism but nomadism. It captures something true of Levy: a mentality bent always toward the new, mistrustful of the fixed and the long settled, closer in temperament to the men who discovered continents than to the men who governed them once found.