After the Second World War, American intellectuals began to embrace a new moral vocabulary imported by German academic refugees who had fled the Nazi regime. Embodying an entirely different worldview, this language marks an epochal shift in how we view morality, politics, and the self. The philosophical wellspring of value relativism lies in the intellectual culture of late-19th-century Germany and the Weimar Republic of the 1930s. Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God and the nihilism that would afflict Western civilization as a result of this discovery rippled through the German cultural consciousness at the turn of the century, influencing Freud, Max Weber, Martin Heidegger, and other intellectuals and artists preoccupied with the experience of existential despair forecast by Nietzsche.

The loss of belief in the Christian God, who provided the theological foundation for a system of morality defining good and evil in absolute terms, results in an emptying out of moral categories and a loss of meaning in life. The collapse of traditional values, Nietzsche claims, heralds nihilism, since the motivation for human behavior, once stripped of the regulating influence of established norms, becomes the unrestrained will to power.