Does anyone among our readership know anything about the history of American uses of the term “nihilism” in the 19th century? I know that the German philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi is said to have coined the term in the late 18th century. And by the late 19th century, American intellectuals like William Graham Sumner and Lester Frank Ward are using it: “Then we have socialism, communism, and nihilism; and the fairest conquests of civilization, with all their promise of solid good to man, on the sole conditions of virtue and wisdom, may be scattered to the winds in a war Read more