Abstract

Though there may be very little consensus over what modernism is or means, there is considerable agreement that Nietzsche was one of its founders. At the dawn of the 20th century, Nietzsche dominated the intellectual life of German speaking Europe in a way similar to how Darwin had ruled the English speaking world just a few decades earlier and his understanding of contemporary morality impressed in particular many of the members of the first generation of German sociologists. His deepest impact was on the most gifted of that group, Max Weber and this study traces how Weber assimilated Nietzsche's thought and spirit and transmitted it through his own leading ideas. Indeed, many of the perplexing aspects of Weber's work can only by clarified if one sees them as engaged in an intellectual struggle with Nietzsche's claims. The study argues, for example, that "Science as a Vocation," one of Weber's most famous essays and a major modernist tract in its own right, has profoundly Nietzschean underpinnings, and that the essay represented Weber' s attempt to translate Nietzsche's conception of virtue into an idiom that scholars could adopt and use. The study aims as well, however, to illuminate the understanding of Nietzsche through close readings of such major works of his as The Birth of Tragedy, On The Genealogy of Morals, The Gay Science and The Antichrist