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Unlike Nietzsche or Heidegger, Max Weber actually possessed some firsthand knowledge of the United States. In August 1904 he and his wife Marianne departed on a nearly three-month American journey that took them (together and, occasionally, separately) from New York City to Niagara Falls, Chicago, St Louis, Oklahoma and Indian Territory, New Orleans, Tuskegee, Knoxville, Asheville, Mount Airy, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, and back to New York City before returning home to Heidelberg. The primary destination of their trip was the St Louis Congress of Arts and Science, where Max had been invited to give a paper on rural communities. But they also wanted to use the opportunity to study the effects of rapid capitalist development on a dynamic immigrant society. Wherever they went, they visited colleges, schools, and settlement houses; met with government officials and trade union representatives; and tried to soak up as much information as they possibly could. They also sought to accomplish a piece of personal business—to reestablish contact with a branch of the family that had immigrated to the United States several decades earlier.

The timing of their trip was significant. It lay at the beginning of Max Weber's emergence from a deep depression, and at the mid-point in his writing of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. As Lawrence Scaff notes, Weber had already formulated a “fully developed theme” for The Protestant Ethic before departing: the “elective affinity” between particular forms of Protestant religiosity and an attitude toward work conducive to modern capitalism (190). But Weber's American journey did not serve simply to confirm hypotheses he had previously formed. It was in the United States, Scaff argues, that Weber first realized that “the moral personality of the Berufsmensch, the person committed to a calling or identified through vocation,” a personality type central to modern capitalist society, was “made possible only by a particular form of civil society, in which voluntaristic associational activity involves the self-governing selection and moral testing of group members” (ibid.). Everywhere they went on their travels, Max and Marianne Weber discerned the persisting forms—and profound social consequences—of this kind of civil society in modern American life.

To begin with, Max Weber marveled over the high degree of church participation he observed in the United States, and he began to wonder what accounted for the discrepancy between American and German forms of religiosity. From conversations with Americans he met at gatherings, on trains, and at backwoods baptisms, Weber learned that membership in a voluntaristic church community was a desideratum of the American businessman. Church membership had important significance for social self-legitimation: one of the best ways for an entrepreneur to convince strangers of his creditworthiness, it seemed, was to demonstrate that he had been vetted for membership in a selective church. As Scaff reveals, Max and Marianne Weber also detected a peculiarly American preoccupation with voluntary associations and character formation in liberal-arts colleges, Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute, and settlement houses for Eastern European Jewish immigrants. The historical prototype of the ubiquitous American voluntary association, Max determined, was the Protestant sect, a self-selecting religious association whose members were required to prove their personal qualification for membership. As he came to understand it, the social form of the sect established the template for American economic and political culture, and thus “the basic dynamic of American social life: on the one hand the drive toward exclusivity, toward purposive goals and distinctive individual achievements; and on the other hand the commitment to inclusiveness, to social democratization and a common, shared fate” (135–6). Much of Weber's later criticism of German political culture built on these American observations. It was in the United States that Weber also began to frame the central question of his mature sociology, which he later announced at the 1910 congress of the German Sociological Society: “How does a certain associational membership influence the inner workings of the individual members or the personality as such?” Max Weber in America makes a profound contribution to our understanding of Weber's development by showing how his American journey catalyzed his transformation from a political economist into a self-described sociologist.

Scaff, who has previously authored an acclaimed book on Max Weber and his fin de siècle German milieu, brings remarkable archival skills and historical knowledge to bear on the Webers’ transatlantic voyage.Footnote ⁹ He meticulously reconstructs every station of their journey using unpublished correspondence and a wealth of primary and secondary sources. Since he continuously compares Max and Marianne's letters with other contemporary accounts, we do not have to take them at their word about what they saw; if their reports were judicious or tellingly slanted, Scaff tells us so. Max Weber in America contains many surprising narrative episodes, such as Max's solo excursion into Oklahoma and Indian Territory, where the German professor caused a minor sensation by declining to meet with a newspaper editor who had recently drawn a gun on a colleague. (According to distorted reports that subsequently appeared in the German press, Weber narrowly avoided being killed in a Wild West shoot-out.) It also sheds light on Max's brief meetings with W. E. B. Du Bois and William James, the two American scholars whose interests and sensibilities most closely paralleled his own. Du Bois, whom Weber would later call “the most important sociological scholar anywhere in the Southern States in America” (113), participated in Gustav Schmoller's seminar in Berlin in the early 1890s and even attended some of Weber's lectures. Scaff draws intriguing comparisons between Du Bois's and Weber's respective studies of the American South and the Prussian frontier, both of which used empirical data to examine social structure and labor dependency in agrarian societies riven by ethnic difference. Of all the scholars whom Weber solicited for articles for the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik during his American journey, Du Bois was the only one who actually came through with a contribution—a fact that testifies to their mutual respect and common intellectual background. With James, Du Bois's former teacher, Weber shared a pragmatic attitude toward the possibility of “objective” truth in the empirical sciences. Citing the work of James Kloppenberg, Scaff identifies Weber as an “antifoundationalist avant la lettre” who insisted that “science can do its work perfectly well without the burden of metaphysics—that is, without the quest for absolutes or the search for universals” (59). Scaff calls attention to the similarities between Weber's Protestant Ethic and James's Variety of Religious Experience—“a similar formulation of the categories of asceticism and mysticism, an unwavering focus on practical conduct and the pragmatic effects of religious beliefs, and insightful portrayals of the types of spiritual life or ‘personality’ formed by religious experience” (152)—as well as a key difference, Weber's emphasis on the autonomous power of religious ideas.

None of the people Max Weber met in the United States appear to have played a significant role in his posthumous reception. As a result, his American success depended largely on a lucky confluence of idiosyncratic economists, sociologists, and German émigrés. The second, shorter part of Max Weber in America begins by surveying the institutional “clusters” where American and émigré scholars cultivated Weber's reputation in the 1930s and 1940s: the University of Chicago, Harvard University, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Columbia University. Among the key members of these institutions—Frank Knight, Edward Shils, Talcott Parsons, Hans Gerth, and C. Wright Mills—bitter rivalries as well as cooperation flourished. Mimeographed translations were passed from hand to hand, and the first attempts to “institutionalize” Weber in the undergraduate curriculum took place, most notably in Shils's Social Science Survey course at the University of Chicago.Footnote ¹⁰ Scaff then focuses his attention on the construction of what he calls the “sacred text” of American Weber studies, Parsons's 1930 translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. He explains how Parsons, often operating under the pressure of “social forces and relationships” beyond his control, managed to produce a text that was “widely authoritative and deeply flawed” (212). While acknowledging the infelicities in Parsons's rendering of German concepts, Scaff argues that the first draft of his translation was nonetheless superior to the version that was ultimately published. In his effort to remain faithful to Weber's original typography, Parsons initially maintained the use of italics and scare quotes, and inserted page references to facilitate cross-referencing with the German text. All these features were subsequently removed at the request of the supervisory editor, R. H. Tawney, who found them confusing or stylistically grating. Scaff's intention is not simply to defend Parsons against some of his critics, but also to show how the Weber that generations of American readers came to know was a “socially constructed artifact” (227).

Why did Americans take so strongly to Weber? Scaff offers an overarching explanation for the resonance of The Protestant Ethic:

When Americans read Weber's historical essay, they saw first and foremost a genealogy of their own cultural sensibilities, and “for that reason the cultural narrative was the deepest source of attachment to Weber's words and of fascination for his work” (198). The Protestant Ethic fired Americans’ imaginations because it offered them the possibility of self-recognition and self-explanation. This is a powerful hypothesis, though Scaff offers only one piece of evidence to substantiate it. Parsons was so gripped by The Protestant Ethic that he once likened it to reading a “detective story” (214)—a cliffhanger whose denouement, Scaff suggests, revealed the cultural origins of his familial sensibility: in the margins of his copy of The Protestant Ethic, next to one of Benjamin Franklin's maxims about the value of frugality and punctuality, Parsons penciled the words “Uncle Frank.”

In addition to the “cultural narrative,” Scaff acknowledges some of the other reasons why American readers were drawn to Weber's work. The deployment of Weber's ideas for “addressing contested topics not his own . . . as much as anything helped create social ‘carriers’ for his ideas and intellectual environments in which those ideas could be restated, criticized, reinterpreted, and thus renewed” (244). During the 1930s and 1940s, Weber's academic admirers saw him as an “interdisciplinary” figure who could connect the various social sciences and demystify the workings of the Soviet bureaucracy (209, 243–4). The sociologist C. Wright Mills mobilized Weber's writings to advance a “critique of social class, status, power, and organization in modern America” (232), while German émigrés were drawn to Weber because he provided them with “a bridge to the new, to the world of capitalist modernity,” as well as with a “road to an acceptable cosmopolitan ‘liberal’ historical past” (239). Beyond these brief comments, however, Max Weber in America does not delve into the variety of Weber interpretations available in the United States, nor does it explain how Weber's memorable phrases and arguments found their ways into the mouths of nonacademic Americans. The “contested topics” that Weber's work was mobilized to address between the 1930s and 1960s—such as totalitarianism, Cold War liberalism, modernization theory, decolonization, academic freedom, and the end of ideology—receive little discussion. One looks forward to reading a sequel by Scaff that investigates the further dissemination of Weber's ideas through American culture and society.

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Social scientists, émigré and native-born, constituted Weber's core of early admirers in the United States. Nietzsche, however, was welcomed by a very different kind of audience. As Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen shows, Nietzsche first found a foothold among political activists, literary radicals, journalists, artists, and bohemians—a milieu that included luminaries such as Randolph Bourne, Max Eastman, Kahlil Gibran, Emma Goldman, Hubert Harrison, H. L. Mencken, and Upton Sinclair. Anarchists appreciated Nietzsche's individualism and rejection of bourgeois moral norms; creative writers imitated his aphoristic style and synthesis of poetry and philosophy; and cultural critics adopted his genealogical method to unmask how “modern-day Christians and laissez-faire capitalists used words as strongholds to defend or justify their religious traditions and aggrandized wealth” (177). Equally important in spreading Nietzsche's reputation were the theologians and pastors who responded to his challenge of the death of God. Many conservative Protestants and Catholics interpreted Nietzsche's biography as a warning about where the “slippery slope of modern thought” (78) might lead. Proponents of the Social Gospel movement regarded Nietzsche's Übermensch ethos as the epitome of the modern capitalist egotism they reviled. Yet there were liberal Protestants who appreciated his “experimental” approach to ethics, which offered a way of testing, as one Unitarian minister put it, “How far are the old, stock dogmas of the churches morally or socially useful?” (98).

Ratner-Rosenhagen makes the “somatic experience of ideas” a central focus of her book (24). She devotes careful study to the emotional reactions of Nietzsche's readers, and examines how their longings were activated in response to reading his texts. A specific kind of sensuality was often associated with the encounter, something almost sublime or erotic. Early twentieth-century readers reported experiencing “the old fatal intoxication” of Nietzsche's prose, or confessed, as Isadora Duncan did, that “the seduction of Nietzsche's philosophy ravished my being” (149). They were dazzled by Nietzsche's poetic language, “the flashing insight of his aphorisms, the melodic sound of his verse, the taut logic of his critical essays, and the dithyrambic play of his prose-poetry” (155). But they were also startled by Nietzsche's prophetic voice, and by the sense that his words were addressed to them and them alone. Ratner-Rosenhagen shows that Nietzsche's appeal was never simply a cognitive one; it frequently encompassed the senses and sentiments as well. “What made Nietzsche a genius, the young radicals claimed, was that his language enabled the reader to feel his ideas” (155, original emphasis).

Nietzsche's persona was another attractive feature for early twentieth-century readers. At a time when anxieties about imperialism, gender roles, and decadence roiled and swirled, a wide range of readers could look to Nietzsche as the exemplar of a strenuous and manly habitus. Committed Christians hoped that a homeopathic dose of Nietzsche might reinvigorate their flaccid religiosity. Dissident intellectuals, scribbling away on Grub Street or in underheated garrets, looked to Nietzsche for the courage to persevere in their struggles against repressive institutions. For the latter group, in particular, Nietzsche became something of a patron saint. He made their mental exertions, their endurance of loneliness and privation, seem comparable to contemporary feats of polar exploration. “Into what new and at first terrible environment do inspired men like Nietzsche, insane with truth, plunge and return gasping?” mused one contemporary. “In lonely rooms in the cities of men some souls have entered regions more desolate and unadapted to life than the high Arctic—facing there a battle beside which freezing to death is peace . . . The Nietzsches know the danger, yet go, and perish” (171). Yet Nietzsche's American interpreters remained divided, at least up until the First World War, over a fundamental question: what would the Übermensch do? The conventional view was that the Übermensch represented “the perfectly sovereign individual who asserts his (or her) will to power against the mediocre masses.” But other readers, like the philosopher Josiah Royce, arrived at the conclusion that the Übermensch was “a being striving for self, rather than social, transcendence” (115, 116). The outbreak of war saw the Übermensch increasingly associated with a militaristic will to power. Many years would pass before Nietzsche and his ideas were rehabilitated.

After exploring the early milieus in which Nietzsche was read and debated, Ratner-Rosenhagen considers the career of Walter Kaufmann, the German émigré who turned Nietzsche into a serious academic philosopher in the United States. During the interwar period Nietzsche was widely regarded as a dubious figure, the literary incarnation of Prussian aggression or Nazi barbarism. In Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, first published in 1950, Kaufmann sought to acquit Nietzsche of the charge of anti-Semitism, and to argue that his oeuvre “made sense” as a whole. A victim of his own success, Kaufmann would eventually face criticism for having distorted Nietzsche in the process of domesticating him, but Ratner-Rosenhagen is determined to give Kaufmann a fair hearing by recontextualizing and reinterpreting his efforts. Kaufmann was not simply trying to hitch Nietzsche to the rising star of French existentialism, she argues. Instead, his achievement was to articulate an intellectual context in which Nietzsche could become a canonical thinker. Kaufmann tried to show that Nietzsche was no “aberration from the Western tradition” (222), but rather a philosopher deeply preoccupied with Enlightenment themes of autonomy and liberation. By portraying Nietzsche as a thinker supremely concerned with individual freedom, Kaufmann enabled Cold War liberals to enlist him as an ally against totalitarianism. By insisting that Nietzsche placed “emphasis on individual authenticity and a commitment to the true truth—and not the official morality—of bankrupt institutions” (257), Kaufmann forged a Nietzsche who was highly congenial to the young radicals of the 1960s. Finally, by showing that Nietzsche could serve as a bridge between analytic and continental philosophy, Kaufmann enabled mainstream philosophy departments—and not just literary radicals and bohemians—to take Nietzsche seriously.

Ratner-Rosenhagen illuminates the rich variety of Nietzsches in circulation among American readers, but she also ties them together with two very compelling theses. First, she argues that Nietzsche mattered because “confrontations with Nietzsche laid bare a fundamental concern driving modern American thought: namely, the question of the grounds, or foundations, for modern American thought and culture itself” (23, original emphasis). Confronting Nietzsche meant coming to terms with “antifoundationalism,” the challenge of finding one's place in a world where universal truth and morality had been dethroned (22). Second, Ratner-Rosenhagen contends that Nietzsche found a place in the United States because he enabled Americans to understand their personal and cultural potentialities. Like Scaff, she suggests that German thought appealed to Americans because it could be used to answer long-standing questions about themselves: was American society hospitable to radical philosophical thought? Did democracy and industrial capitalism stifle cultural excellence? Nietzsche helped ordinary Americans articulate their own selfhood, Ratner-Rosenhagen argues, just as he helped intellectuals contemplate what American culture might mean in a pluralistic society shorn of European foundations.

Through a close reading of early twentieth-century “fan letters” sent to Nietzsche and his sister, Ratner-Rosenhagen shows how Americans were drawn to Nietzsche because he encouraged them to “become who you are.” They found in him a maieutic teacher who did not legislate a lifestyle, but rather helped them craft the selves they wanted to achieve. These heartfelt attempts by marginal, oftentimes lonely people to make contact with an author who anticipated their longings are fascinating to read, and Ratner-Rosenhagen interprets them with sympathy and humor. (Nietzsche and his sister, we learn, received missives from impassioned readers as well as autograph hounds, not to mention the odd Minnesotan who claimed to be the Übermensch himself.) In a celebration of self-creation that resonates with Nietzsche's own ideals, Ratner-Rosenhagen emphasizes how his fans participated in “collaborative meaning-making” through their distant devotions: “Nietzsche's readers weren't consumers, and their uses of his ideas demonstrate that the ideas were not ready-made but, rather, made-to-order. Nietzsche's ideas not only made something possible for them, they made something possible in Nietzsche's text and image” (199).

One major consequence of the American encounter with Nietzsche, Ratner-Rosenhagen argues, was a late twentieth-century revival of scholarly interest in “antifoundationalism on native grounds,” namely in that part of the American intellectual tradition—epitomized by Ralph Waldo Emerson and his pragmatist successors—that concerned itself with the nature of selfhood and commitment in a world without absolutes (274). Between the 1970s and 1990s, Harold Bloom, Richard Rorty, and Stanley Cavell called attention to the affinities between Nietzsche, Emerson, William James, and John Dewey, with the goal of demonstrating that “antifoundationalism had formed an important part of American thought” (ibid.). Bloom believed that Emerson, like Nietzsche, “gave voice to the terrors and the joys of a self without God, meaning without absolutes, a present without a past, a shot at transcendence without eternity” (283). Rorty admitted that Nietzsche shared none of Dewey's social progressivism, but insisted that their shared epistemology entitled both philosophers to be considered members of a “cosmopolitan conversation of pragmatism” (289). Through reading Nietzsche, Cavell came to appreciate that Emerson had been seeking “a philosophy without an inheritance, without a past—a philosophy that conceives itself not as a body of knowledge but rather as a way of life” (298). Emerson and Nietzsche presented Cavell with an alternative vision of philosophy, one that stood in contrast to the analytic mode of philosophy that dominated most American faculties at the time.

Nietzsche was able to resonate with American antifoundationalists, Ratner-Rosenhagen argues, because he himself was heir to Emerson's philosophy. The young Nietzsche particularly admired Emerson's writings, which served as his first real introduction to philosophy, and he continued to appropriate Emerson's motifs and phrases throughout his career. What impressed Nietzsche most about Emerson was “his notion that a philosopher without foundations works by provocation, not instruction, as an ‘exemplar,’ not as a guide . . . The philosopher is useful insofar as he helps carry one to one's self” (18). By underscoring Nietzsche's indebtedness to American philosophy, American Nietzsche takes on the characteristics of a double-reception history, where Nietzsche's engagement with Emerson sets the stage for American readers’ later engagements with Nietzsche. Emerson's problematic—how to forge an American culture in the shadow of its Old World antecedents—in turn becomes the preoccupation of those American thinkers who matured in the shadow of his greatest European pupil.

If Americans already had their own indigenous antifoundationalist thinkers, what use was Nietzsche to them? What did he enable them to do that their American analogues could not? In the case of pragmatism, Ratner-Rosenhagen provides a clear-cut answer. The problem with pragmatism was that it “failed to provide an animating image of the good life” for early twentieth-century cultural critics. Notably absent was the revaluation of values that Nietzsche promised:

Though Nietzsche's early American readers often drew comparisons to pragmatism, they were unable or unwilling, Ratner-Rosenhagen argues, to see parallels between his philosophy and Emerson’s. “Despite the traces of Emerson in Nietzsche's philosophy, most American commentators either failed to notice the connection or, when they perceived similarities, stressed differences” (21). American Nietzsche does the reverse, drawing attention to the similarities between Emerson and Nietzsche, but without devoting comparable space to considering the nature of the differences. Ratner-Rosenhagen never explicitly answers the question posed by the artist Charles Gray Shaw in 1914: “We Americans have our Emerson; why, then, should we dote on Nietzsche?” (ibid.). Elsewhere in the book, she suggests that Americans may have doted on Nietzsche because they failed to adequately remember their Emerson (295–6). But she might also have considered an alternative explanation, namely that Americans were drawn to Nietzsche because they could not have experienced the destructive thrill of wielding his hammer with anyone else.

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Heidegger's first American audience did not report such feelings of untrammeled enthusiasm. The few American students who encountered “the little magician from Meßkirch” while studying in Germany during the late 1920s and early 1930s “remained ambivalent at best, and viciously critical at worst,” toward his thought, as Martin Woessner shows (18). Though some of them could appreciate what all the fuss was about, they were mostly put off by Heidegger's philosophical neologisms or disgusted by his support for National Socialism. It would take decades before these early readers—Marvin Farber, Marjorie Grene, Charles Hartshorne, Sidney Hook, Paul Weiss, and John Wild—began to write and teach about him in earnest. Heidegger's German “children” and “stepchildren,” such as Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, were equally indisposed to communicate his thought to American intellectuals. While they may have adopted elements of Heidegger's style, or worked behind the scenes to get his works published in English, these former students did not play a major role in explaining or popularizing their teacher's work in the United States. During the 1950s Heidegger's gospel emanated from an otherwise unlikely source—theology departments.

It was the postwar religious revival that first enabled Heidegger to enter American culture. “In truth, Heidegger was first read in theological terms because no other framework for interpreting his work existed at the time,” Woessner argues. “Discourses other than theology simply did not have the resources with which to properly confront Heidegger's work” (129). At the forefront was the émigré theologian Paul Tillich, whose 1952 book The Courage to Be introduced Heidegger's existential vocabulary of “nonbeing,” “finitude,” and “resoluteness” into mainstream Christian discourse. The first English edition of Sein und Zeit, co-translated by the Scottish Protestant theologian John Macquarrie, was published in 1962 by the Student Christian Movement Press in London and by the religious division of Harper & Row in New York. The following year, a Jesuit priest, William Richardson, published the first major English monograph surveying Heidegger's career. When the philosopher Hans Jonas took the stage at a 1964 theological conference to denounce his former teacher's politics and philosophy, he precipitated the first major dust-up over Heidegger's thought in the United States. Woessner traces Heidegger's shifting place in American religious life up through the rise of postmodern theology in the 1970s and 1980s, noting an element of “secularization” at work along the way. As Heidegger scholars rebranded themselves as “continental philosophers,” or sought other inspiration (such as Jacques Derrida) for their postmodern theology, the reception of Heidegger's writings increasingly “slipped out of the exclusive domain of expressly theological thought” (ibid.).

Woessner underscores the delicious irony that Heidegger, a thinker so dismissive of “idle talk,” was carried to fame in the United States in large part by popular culture. Starting in the late 1950s, “paperback existentialism” (170), a genre that included best sellers such as William Barrett's Irrational Man and Walter Kaufmann's Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, transformed Heidegger into a “cultural” figure who could be ranked alongside the classic authors of European and American literature. By the early 1960s enough popular interest had been generated for Being and Time to merit a long review in the pages of the New York Times. The rising cultural cachet of existentialism also meant that Heidegger's name became known to undergraduates, activists, and counterculture participants. In an excursus, Woessner traces the “less reverent exposition” (161) of Heidegger's works all the way up to the present, focusing in particular on the burgeoning genre of “Heidegger for Beginners” books. (Several specimens are published by the aptly named Totem Books, an indication of the iconic status that Heidegger eventually achieved in the United States.) The existence of a market for nontechnical distillations testifies to Heidegger's status as a cultural commodity. But the characteristic tropes and motifs of these introductory works—their swastika-bedecked covers and morbid fascination with Heidegger's political entanglements—hint at his deeper, totemic significance for many American readers. “The relationship of Heidegger's life to his work and his work to his life became the basis of a parable that dramatized philosophy in a way that made it relevant far beyond the seminar room,” Woessner notes toward the end of his book (279). It was, in other words, a Faustian story updated for modern times.

For many American philosophers who came of age under the star of logical positivism, Heidegger's work remained anathema. In his classic essay “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language,” Rudolf Carnap had famously declared that Heidegger was worse than wrong—he was utterly meaningless. Heidegger came to function as a watershed between so-called continental and analytic schools of philosophy in the United States. Reading and assigning his books, or refusing to do so, signaled allegiance to one school or the other. Woessner focuses attention on those American philosophers who felt a “strong antipathy toward the logicization of philosophy” and constructively engaged with Heidegger in search of an alternative (195). Most notable among them was John Wild, who assembled a circle of students with an affinity for Heidegger's philosophy at Harvard University and Northwestern University. Their mimeographed translations of Sein und Zeit provided many American philosophers, including the young Richard Rorty, with a head start until Macquarrie and Robinson's edition appeared. One of Wild's most famous students, Hubert Dreyfus, initially appropriated Heidegger's philosophy to formulate an original and widely discussed critique of artificial intelligence. By presenting Heidegger as a thinker who could address the problems of mind and meaning that were central to mainstream American philosophy, Dreyfus showed that Heidegger could be brought into dialogue with thinkers from outside the continental tradition as it was conventionally understood. Dreyfus's act of recontextualization helped pave the way for a partial reconciliation of the analytic and continental traditions on the terrain of Heidegger's philosophy. This development, Woessner suggests, may herald a return to an earlier and more ecumenical period in the history of twentieth-century philosophy, a time when analytic stalwarts such as Gilbert Ryle could profess to review Sein und Zeit “with humility,” and Ludwig Wittgenstein could unabashedly express his appreciation for Heidegger to members of the Vienna circle (188).

Outside theology departments and a few philosophy departments, Heidegger also found a warm reception among avant-garde architects and architecture critics. Taking their cue from his 1951 lecture “Bauen Wohnen Denken,” left-leaning architectural theorists who rejected “routinized corporate modernism” (233) availed themselves of Heidegger's later philosophy to articulate an architecture of concrete “place” as opposed to abstract “space.” During the 1970s and 1980s, Kenneth Frampton, Christian Norberg-Schulz, Karsten Harries, and Daniel Libeskind popularized a “Heideggerian idiom” (253) for critiquing the anonymity and ubiquity of modernist architecture. Through this intervention, Woessner argues, Heidegger's intellectual profile in the United States was transformed. By invoking the need for architecture to respond to the dangers posed by rampant technology and ecological degradation, architectural theorists turned Heidegger into “an ethical voice amidst a chorus of engineers and technocrats,” something that was “no small feat of creative re-appropriation since Heidegger was a philosopher who, infamously, never wrote an ethics—at least not in any traditional sense” (235).

Heidegger in America is a fascinating, witty, and wide-ranging study of intellectual attraction and repulsion. Awareness of Heidegger's politics—which, as Woessner shows, was present in the United States long before the Farías and de Man affairs—kept those who were otherwise drawn to his critique of technological society at a certain distance. Unlike Heidegger, many of his most accomplished American interlocutors tended to arrive at an optimistic assessment of the possibility of progressive social change. J. Glenn Gray, general editor of Heidegger's American translations, remained a “reluctant Heideggerian” (158), unable to accept that technology was a force beyond human mastery. As a young professor of architecture, Daniel Libeskind took a page from Heidegger and encouraged his students to embrace poetry as an antidote to “the sway of instrumental reason over modern life” (256). But as he grappled with the demands of memory in his design for the Jewish Museum Extension in Berlin, he rejected Heidegger's hermeticism and embraced “the ethical importance of forward-looking public exchange” (261). Richard Rorty waffled in his estimation of Heidegger and failed to complete a long-planned monograph on his later philosophy. Woessner argues that Rorty's inability or unwillingness to finish his Heidegger book was part and parcel of his exodus from philosophy itself. As he came to see Heidegger as a “guide to private edification,” Rorty gave up his hope that philosophy was capable of contributing to “the larger concerns of public dialogue” (221). Rorty was not the only person on whom Heidegger had this curious effect. Terrence Malick studied philosophy with Stanley Cavell at Harvard and then set off for Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar to work on Heidegger, but after publishing a translation of Heidegger's Essence of Reasons he chose to leave philosophy and enroll in film school instead.

While Woessner's profiles of these and other figures are deft and insightful, his frequent use of the epithet “Heideggerian” sometimes substitutes for a detailed demonstration that it was in fact Heidegger whom these authors were appropriating. Occasionally Woessner's reception history lapses into a kind of comparative intellectual history, where similarities between Heidegger and other authors are discerned, but no direct link between them is conclusively demonstrated. For example, Woessner claims that J. Glenn Gray had “become a Heideggerian, even if only a reluctant one,” by the time he published his book The Promise of Wisdom in 1968. “Heidegger is referred to only twice in The Promise of Wisdom,” Woessner observes, “but his influence suffuses the entire project.” Heidegger's influence can be ascertained, Woessner argues, because “Gray's Heideggerian distrust of technology and the sciences frames the entire work.” Though Woessner goes on to quote a passage from The Promise of Wisdom to show “how deeply he [Gray] shared Heidegger's fears of technology,” he does not make the case that Gray's concepts, rhetoric, or “distrust” could only have been derived from Heidegger's writings (148). If Gray merely “shared” Heidegger's fears, why should we count The Promise of Wisdom as an instance of reception?

A related difficulty occurs when Woessner asserts that “intellectual transference takes place not simply at the conceptual level but at a deeper, more existential level, one that molds not only textual discourses but scholarly personalities as well.” Emigré German intellectuals, he argues, “took from Heidegger not just a body of knowledge that could be passed on to others, but a whole outlook or methodology, an approach to reading, writing, and teaching that reflected the new philosophical persona Heidegger sought to embody” (10). Woessner believes that the philosopher Leo Strauss should be counted among those “stepchildren” who inherited Heidegger's “style of thinking” (44), “‘destructive’ approach to the history of philosophy,” and “unique re-reading of Western thought” (54). Strauss's approach to the reading and analysis of texts, he argues, was modeled on Heidegger's example:

Woessner's conjecture that Strauss learned from Heidegger is certainly plausible, but his account of their relationship does not provide sufficient evidence to show that Strauss took something from Heidegger that he could not have found elsewhere. A high level of proof is needed to demonstrate that Heidegger's contribution to Strauss's intellectual development can be disentangled from the tuition he received from other teachers and sources. Without additional textual, biographical, or archival evidence, it is a stretch to say that doing “something similar” or manifesting a “strong resemblance” constitutes an act of “intellectual transference.”

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American Nietzsche, Heidegger in America, and Max Weber in America offer diverse and nuanced explanations for the surprising popularity of these German thinkers, but on two important points they concur. First, they underscore the importance of a preexisting intellectual climate that made Americans amenable to German thought. The United States was home to “indigenous” philosophical and social movements that shared basic concerns with their modern German counterparts, and thus provided a substrate onto which German thought could be grafted and enabled to grow.Footnote ¹¹ Antifoundationalism, in broadest terms, was a transatlantic phenomenon—a fact that enabled American readers to use more familiar resources, such Emerson, James, and Dewey, to help make sense of Nietzsche and Heidegger. It is true that Weber's early American admirers were more likely to compare him to English-speaking economists, such as Alfred Marshall, than to pragmatist philosophers.Footnote ¹² Nonetheless, the pragmatist sensibility of American social scientists may have made them not only highly receptive to Weber's work, but also better placed than their German colleagues to appreciate what the émigré scholar Franz Neumann identified as Weber's distinctive traits, “his demand for empirical studies” and “his insistence upon the responsibility of the scholar to society.”Footnote ¹³

In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom portrayed his Chicago teachers of the mid-1940s as oblivious or indifferent to the political contexts of modern German thought. “It was not problematic to any of them that these ideas were German,” he recalled. They considered Freud and Weber “part of that great pre-Hitlerian German classical tradition,” and while Nietzsche was “not at that time very respectable because his thought seemed to have some discomfiting relation to fascism,” the fact that he and Heidegger had effected an “antirational and antiliberal turn” in German philosophy was “simply repressed.”Footnote ¹⁴ If Bloom's reminiscences were not faulty, they were certainly unrepresentative. In the wider field of mid-century American intellectual life, Nietzsche and Heidegger's German contexts and political views made them profoundly embattled and contested figures; even Weber, a proponent of German democracy, came under scrutiny for allegedly harboring an affinity for fascism.Footnote ¹⁵ For intellectuals in the aftermath of fascism, it took some daring to assert that the German cultural tradition was not immediately reducible to Nazi ideology.Footnote ¹⁶ But that is precisely what the American popularizers of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Weber did. American Nietzsche, Heidegger in America, and Max Weber in America help us understand—this is the second major argument they share—that individual personalities played an inordinate role in establishing or rehabilitating the reputation of German thinkers in the United States. Despite the existence of a potentially receptive audience, Walter Kaufmann, J. Glenn Gray, Talcott Parsons, and others had to struggle uphill to make a favorable name for Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Weber; their success was never predetermined. The idiosyncratic perspectives of these (mostly socially progressive) American mediators helped expand—and oftentimes restrict—the range of possibilities that readers could extract from German texts. Even those who, looking back at the history of American engagements with German thinkers, might be tempted to agree with Bloom's diagnosis of a “peculiarly American way of digesting Continental despair,” namely “nihilism with a happy ending,” have good reason to refrain from ascribing this outcome to cultural determinism.Footnote ¹⁷ The creation of American Nietzsches, American Heideggers, and American Webers entailed many twists and turns. Things might have turned out very differently, or not at all.