“Admirers of the ‘purified’ Nietzsche have been hard put to unite his sanctioning of barbarity with an often subtle and rarefied cultural critique. But we can easily dispose of this dichotomy. In the first place, the union of ultra-refinement and brutality was by no means a personal quirk requiring psychological elucidation, but a universal, psychical-moral distinguishing mark of imperialist decadence.”

The Destruction of Reason, Chapter 3, “Nietzsche as Founder of Irrationalism in the Imperialist Period” § 3

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György Lukács12

Marxist philosopher and literary critic 1885–1971

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