Praise for

Power and Purity

“Those seeking to understand the contemporary Social Justice Warrior phenomenon blighting the public square often turn to Karl Marx. But Mark T. Mitchell points us to another epochal nineteenth-century thinker: Friedrich Nietzsche, whose teachings are far more influential than many grasp. Power and Purity is a vital key unlocking the mysterious forces behind today’s revolutionary challenges to a decaying democratic order. This book’s brevity and its razor-sharp clarity make it accessible to both students and ordinary readers, who desperately need to grapple with the ideas that increasingly dominate our post-Christian peoples.”

—Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option

“Nearly everyone has a theory on the rise of identity politics and illiberalism on the left, but no one has seen further and more deeply than Mark Mitchell. Recognizing its root causes in the caustic wedding of Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ and a Puritanism without Christian grace, Mitchell weaves a compelling and frightening story of a new philosophy informing the intolerant tactics of the ‘woke.’ More frightening still, these currents arise from within currents of Western civilization itself, meaning that any remedy to this pathology requires a self-cure. Reading Mitchell’s book is an indispensable first step.”

—Patrick Deneen, professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame and author of Why Liberalism Failed

“After several decades in which identity politics has grown ever stronger, we are converging on the true account of its causes and of the immense damage it is doing. Identity politics is the ghost of Christianity, stripped of its capacity to redeem and to renew. In the late nineteenth century, Nietzsche anticipated the rough outlines of this spiritual disease that would befall us. Drawing from Nietzsche’s life and writings, Mark Mitchell’s Power and Purity is the twenty-first-century guide we need to understand the spiritual disease of identity politics in full.”

—Joshua Mitchell, professor of political theory at Georgetown University

“Why is it that postmodernists, who believe there are no moral absolutes, are so moralistic? Why have universities replaced rational discourse with silencing and punishing those who hold dissident ideas? Why is identity politics so vicious? Having read Mark Mitchell’s Power and Purity, now I know. The seminal thinker for our day is Friedrich Nietzsche, who reduces all of culture, ideas, and life itself to the will to power. Mitchell unpacks both Nietzsche’s influence and his predictions. And yet few people—for now—follow his moral nihilism, with even the hard left upholding values Nietzsche despised, such as equality and compassion. The Christian influence remains, even for those who believe with Nietzsche that God is dead. In fact, the left is employing a mash-up of Nietzsche and a secularized Puritanism, which has rejected God while cultivating self-righteousness and the zeal to censor, control, and punish. This book, which combines scholarly depth and a lively, readable style, will help readers navigate the strange paradoxes of contemporary politics, academia, and culture.”

—Gene Edward Veith, provost and professor of literature emeritus at Patrick Henry College