Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Friedrich Nietzsche might seem unlikely bedfellows, but Richard A. Posner's striking suggestion that Holmes is “the American Nietzsche” contains more than a grain of truth. Posner, for example, identifies several affinities between the two thinkers, including their putative proto-existentialism (their “taking seriously the definite possibility that man is the puny product of an unplanned series of natural shocks having no tincture of the divine” [Essential Holmes xviii]) and their alleged view that force and the “will to power” are the determining features of human existence, so that, in Holmes's words, morality is “only a check for varying intensity upon force, which seems to me likely to remain the ultimate” factor in human affairs (Holmes to Laski, 23 July 1925, quoted in Essential Holmes 140).

Although these views clearly resonate with certain widespread (if superficial) images of Nietzsche, the overall picture is deeply flawed. The proto-existentialism, for example, sits uneasily with Nietzsche's more clearly expressed fatalism and naturalism. Similarly, the emphasis on the centrality of the “will to power” to Nietzsche's thought – an emphasis laid by both Posner and David Luban, as well as many Nietzsche scholars – is not supported by recent scholarship, which establishes a less prominent role for both the concept of “will to power” and the text The Will to Power in a proper understanding of Nietzsche's philosophy.