the ignorance of our cultivated circles with respect to Nietzsche today. In a normal social organization, the employing and commercial classes would in his view be subject to control as well as the workers. The unhappy thing in the modern world is that they have more or less emancipated themselves from control. This is the meaning of laisser faire—a doctrine of liberty in the interests of the employing and commercial classes. Nietzsche finds it working injuriously on the morality of modern peoples.[1] The unrestrained egoism of individuals as of peoples is pushing them into mutually destructive struggles, and it is the most covetous who have the supreme place.[2] Once a restraining influence was exercised by the Church, but the Reformation was obliged, in order to get a foothold, to declare many things adiaphora (i.e., not subject to the control of religious considerations), and economical activity was one of them, with the result that "the coarsest and most evil forces" have come to be the practically determining things almost everywhere.[3] Educated classes and states alike are carried away by pecuniary ambitions, at once grandiose and contemptible. He speaks repeatedly of "the selfishness of the business class,""the brutal money-greed of the entrepreneurs."[4] It is "a period of atoms, of atomistic chaos," into which we have passed.[5]
Particularly after the Franco-Prussian war did Nietzsche notice the unchaining of this vulgar egoism in Germany. Rapacious striving, insatiable accumulating, selfish and shameless enjoying were characteristic marks of the time.[6] "When the war was over, the luxury, the contempt of the French, the nationalism (das Nationale) displeased me. How far back had we gone compared with Goethe! Disgusting sensualism!"[7] The new spirit perverted the aims of culture. Now forsooth education was to be for practical purposes; the kind that looked beyond money and gain, that consumed much time and separated one from society, was questioned—or stigmatized as
