Few thinkers have undergone as tumultuous a reception as Friedrich Nietzsche. In 1889, Nietzsche collapsed into madness after years spent mostly alone and unknown. Yet within a few years of his passing he was already exercising an enormous influence on the broader culture. This included inspiring Fascist and Nazi acolytes, who delighted in repurposing his arguments for breeding and aristocracy into ultranationalist banalities. By the end of World War II, many were convinced Nietzsche was a Nazi thinker, with Bertrand Russell even calling it “Nietzsche’s war.”

This was unfair, and after the war some began to reassess the political thrust of Nietzsche’s work. First, writers like Walter Kaufmann and Albert Camus presented him as a largely apolitical existential psychologist. Later, an array of French postmodern thinkers, most famously Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, read Nietzsche as offering important philosophical resources for the Left. He was the ultimate countercultural figure, they argued, deconstructing systems of power and repression avant la lettre.

Things have since come full circle, as many on today’s right, especially the hard right, claim Nietzsche as a major influence. After torturous self-reflection inspired by Nietzsche’s thought, plenty of hard-right personalities have come to the conclusion they are a kind of super-duper man, to quote John Ganz. This includes alt-right personalities like Richard Spencer, the self-described Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), and most recently the white supremacist turned “liberal Nietzschean” Richard Hanania.