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The Closing of the American Mind

Allan Bloom

3.76 · Rating details · 4,898 ratings · 497 reviews

The Closing of the American Mind, a publishing phenomenon in hardcover, is now a paperback literary event. In this acclaimed number one national best-seller, one of our country's most distinguished political philosophers argues that the social/political crisis of 20th-century America is really an intellectual crisis. Allan Bloom's sweeping analysis is essential to understa ...more

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Paperback, 392 pages

Published May 15th 1988 by Simon & Schuster (first published December 1987)

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Jul 02, 2011 W. rated it really liked it

Perhaps this book deserves five stars -- it did, after all, shake me up a bit, the way the best books do. Bloom is rightly concerned with a problem I see in my own classrooms: the assumption that, since all views are to be tolerated in our modern liberal democracy, all views are equally valuable; furthermore, since all ideas are equally worthy of consideration, none of them are worthy of consideration. It is difficult to say anything of real importance about poetry, literature, art, religion, ph ...more

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Jun 08, 2008 booklady rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: any college bound student

Shelves: books-on-books, literature, philosophy, history, classic, 2005, education

Bloom's 1987 bestseller is still relevant today. In it he critiques the American education system for removing the Great Books from the required reading in most colleges. Booklady that I am, I couldn't agree with him more. The Great Books should be read and in the originals, not in watered down or abridged versions--however much modern students complain about Dickens being repetitive, etc. If they absolutely cannot force their eyes to follow the words on the page, then get the audio versions of ...more

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Jun 10, 2010 Andrew rated it liked it

Shelves: philosophy-science, spirituality

This is the best argument for conservatism I've ever read. To be fair, it's also the only one I've ever read, outside of the occasional David Brooks column. And let's be honest: Bloom is about as elitist and conservative as you can get. But he makes the position seem very enticing with his brilliant argumentation and his penetrating logic as he delves into the state of the late 20th century American citizen. It doesn't hurt that he has a staggering breadth of knowledge on just about every single ...more

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Feb 02, 2008 Trevor rated it liked it

Shelves: social-theory

I know nothing about American Universities and so when Bloom says things about the lowering of standards to accommodate black students who have been admitted without the requisite standard of education to succeed I just assume this is standard racist crap. But I’m really not in any position to argue one way or the other.

He certainly doesn’t waste time supporting any of his arguments with facts, mostly just vitriol. In fact, this book is so full of bile that after a while the need to spit become I know nothing about American Universities and so when Bloom says things about the lowering of standards to accommodate black students who have been admitted without the requisite standard of education to succeed I just assume this is standard racist crap. But I’m really not in any position to argue one way or the other.

He certainly doesn’t waste time supporting any of his arguments with facts, mostly just vitriol. In fact, this book is so full of bile that after a while the need to spit becomes part of the amusement that gets you through.

The stuff about rock music being symptomatic of America’s decline at the start was quite amusing. He does tend to seriously over state his case and this distracts from some of the often very insightful things he has to say.

His critique of love among American youth is a case in point. The thesis runs a bit like this. The woman’s movement has taken away the ground for ‘possessing’ a woman. Divorce and the ‘high turn over rates’ of sexual partners devalue sex to the point where it is no longer able to sustain ‘love’. Because people do not feel it is appropriate to possess another they feel it would be wrong to feel jealous if their partner had sex with someone else – but if this is the case then love itself is impossible, as we have no means of valuing our partners at all – you can only feel nothing over the infidelity of your partner if you feel nothing for your partner. No fault divorce and the women’s movement are the great villains here as they have removed the fairytale and thus removed all capacity to love.

Bloom, however, does not appear to be asking for a return to traditional family values – this seems to be gone forever and not even something he would want. He offers no solutions here, just feels that all he needs to do is identify the problem and the solution should be obvious. It wasn’t obvious for me, so, if he is offering a solution to this problem, I missed it.

Clearly, he has also overstated the problem – divorce and the women’s movement probably are guilty of ending lots of relationships that in the past would have grinded on to death – in a kind of living death – but I’m struggling here with the negative implication of that. I think his critique of lovelessness is less relevant to the young, when one is more likely to confuse love with sex anyway, as it might be to those in mid-life who find themselves questioning the value or even possibility of meaningful sexual relationships or of relationships generally that can be places where both people are able to grow and not whither in the dark shadows they cast upon each other.

The stuff on Nietzsche – particularly Nietzsche’s attraction for the left – is something I’ve been more or less arguing for years. I’ve always been surprised at how readily the left have adopted Friedrich as one of their own, when he is anything but. The injection of irrationalism into the left that Nietzsche represented is precisely the kind of dreadful error that has made the left the near complete irrelevance that it has become today, perhaps when we need it most.

The most abhorrent aspects of Nietzsche are not the little lines he drops in to shock – “Are you visiting woman, bring your whip” – but the obsessive focus on the individual and the adolescent, masturbatory gaze he casts over ‘the artist’ as the creator of new values.

And how teenage boys just love this crap – all of whom know their ‘will to power’ and that their proper place is supermen.

I figured before I started reading this I would disagree with much of it – in the end I was surprised by some of the things I ended up agreeing with. I don’t think rock music is really just ‘the rhythm of sex’ or needs be as blandly crap as Bloom makes out – but much of it is crap. I’ve no idea how many American kids read books – there certainly do seem to be a lot of Americans on this site, but I guess that could just be an aberration.

I was talking to a friend of mine about this book the other day and told him some of the themes and tried to explain Bloom’s tone – he was appalled and told me off for bothering to read such rubbish. And that is the problem, this stuff is written with such hysteria that it is likely to alienate people immediately. I believe this is a book that is adored by the rightwing in America – but I’m not totally sure why they would feel they get such comfort from it. I did not get the impression that this book was calling for a return to traditional values – just complaining about where the loss of these values (and there loss forever) has so far brought us.

I hadn’t realised that Allan was a different person to Harold, although, in so far as they both believe in the importance of ‘the canon’ and reading ‘great books’ I guess they might as well be the same person. It would certainly save time if they were…

...more

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Nov 15, 2012 Joshuacitrak rated it it was ok

Shelves: america-is-fucked-but-it-will-all-b, phil-o-sophy

Allan Bloom is a hysterical, raving, reactionary lunatic. he and his academia ilk are exactly the reason why education teaches kids nothing, because they know absolutely zero about the children they're supposed to teach. mostly, this book is little more than a "get off my lawn" diatribe against any and all (race, sex, drugs, rock music) youth fascinations, blaming each of them in turn for the "Closing of the American Mind."

Bloom continually condescends in the most irritating manner of the Americ ...more

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Feb 06, 2013 Scott Rhee rated it it was amazing

Shelves: sociology, nonfiction, literary-criticism, philosophy

I was in eighth grade when the late Allan Bloom's 1987 seminal classic "The Closing of the American Mind" was published. I remembered it because my parents, like thousands of other parents across the country, bought it and put it on the bookshelf proudly. And there it sat, unread, for almost two decades.

I wish that I had read it before I had gone off to college, but I will be honest, I probably wouldn't have understood it. I don't pretend to completely understand everything in it now, at age 40 ...more

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Mar 28, 2008 Paul Rhodes rated it it was ok

Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind was published twenty years ago this month. Parents gave this book to their kids upon graduation from high school to warn them against the moral rot they would encounter at the modern university. I received this book from my uncle (may God rest his soul!) when I was graduated in 1986 but did not read it until after I suffered through the collegiate moral rot from which this book was supposed to rescue me.

Of course, I did not need Allan Bloom to tell me t ...more

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Jan 06, 2020 Amy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommended to Amy by: Samuel Tran

Shelves: mind-blown, made-me-think, books-i-wouldn-t-mind-owning, recommended-to-me

At times it feels like listening to your Republican grandpa at dinner. He begins by bewailing the modern tastes of young people (rock music and walkmans!) and how no one cares about getting a real education these days. The word curmudgeon comes to mind.
Unless you keep reading. Suddenly he begins to lay the groundwork for his complaints. It is rambling, to be sure, but profound and thought-provoking. It begins to shift the way you think. Then he is off on another tangent...Plato...Great Books...a ...more

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Jul 24, 2010 Mark rated it did not like it

They say you should write about something you know. Mr. Bloom knows more about closed minds than most, but I think he should have kept it to himself.

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Aug 09, 2014 John David rated it really liked it

Shelves: history-of-ideas, literacy, philosophy, political-science, curiosities, politics

Unless you were attending a university when this book was published, or have a special interest in the general ongoing dialogue we call the culture wars, "The Closing of the American Mind" may not be on your radar. When it first came out in 1987, it caused quite a fracas and became, I'm sure to everyone's (including Allan Bloom’s) surprise, a bestseller. It's difficult for me to imagine a book by an unprepossessing University of Chicago professor on the debilitating effects of Heidegger and Niet Unless you were attending a university when this book was published, or have a special interest in the general ongoing dialogue we call the culture wars, "The Closing of the American Mind" may not be on your radar. When it first came out in 1987, it caused quite a fracas and became, I'm sure to everyone's (including Allan Bloom’s) surprise, a bestseller. It's difficult for me to imagine a book by an unprepossessing University of Chicago professor on the debilitating effects of Heidegger and Nietzsche on higher education becoming a bestseller today. This may only serve to bolster Bloom's case that the "liberal" attitude of openness has gone a few steps too far.

Or it might be the direct effect of Bloom's "voice" - which is, despite what any of his intellectual confreres say, by turns elitist, rankly unegalitarian, and possibly anti-democratic in content; in tone, he often comes off as the curmudgeonly old grandfather shaking his newspaper at you and telling you to get off of his lawn. I personally have no problem with the elitism or anti-democratic attitudes when it comes to teaching. There are, quite simply, some books that are better than others, and some ideas that are better than others, and having to pretend otherwise is simply to play the ostrich's game of sticking our heads in the sand. The better books should be taught for the moral education of the student body while inferior books should be set aside (surely to be picked up by many people who, after graduating from university and having been introduced to the greats, choose to eschew them and read pulp instead.) I, like Bloom, regret that recent American culture has lost the sense of education as a kind of moral training. Bloom's critics, however, also do him the grave disservice of hitching his tone onto the wagon that is the content of his intellectual argument. Who's going to take this cranky old man seriously - who sees an uncontrollable sexual release in a young teenage boy unashamedly gyrating his hips to rock 'n' roll, who unabashedly and unashamedly blames affirmative action as one of the contributing factors in the decadence of the contemporary American university, and whose explanation of the breakdown of the American family (if there indeed has been such a thing) is, quite charitably, described as "old-fashioned."

Bloom's argument is large and multifaceted; no review of a few hundred words could deal with it in all its complexity. What it claims at its base, though, is that certain attitudes popular in the sixties and seventies - universal acceptance, universal tolerance, the slow erosion of critical faculties - which eventually came to shape the minds of university students and even how university are administered. He claims, after Nietzsche, that we live in a time "beyond good and evil" - that is, where we have ceased not only looking for the differences in good versus bad (he archly points out that we describe nothing as "evil" anymore), but that we don't even know how to discern those differences. For Bloom, the moral education must consist of "a vision of the moral universe, reward for good, punishment for evil, and the drama of moral choices." That is, at the very least, an education in critical moral discernment. He argues that this is all but gone.

He claims - dubiously, I think - that he noticed a steep drop in the number of students who were interested in the "Great Books" from the time when he first started teaching in the United States in the early sixties to the time of writing this book. At many stages in his argument, Bloom seems to have counterfactually reimagined a world in which students walked into the university already well-versed in Plato, Homer, Stendahl, and Hegel, Aristotle, eager to be filled to the brim with The Wisdom Of The Masters. I think everyone was exposed to Homer in high school, but how many of us took it "seriously" - what Bloom would call seriously? Were they familiar with the importance of “xenia” and the “oikos” in Homer? (And no, you don’t get translations of those words.) I can speak from personal experience that many of teachers themselves didn't have the intellectual background to teach Homer this rigorously.

Richard Heffner, one of Bloom’s interlocutors following the popular press cavalcade after the release of the book, suggested during his interview with the professor that being an elitist might mean “thinking some questions are better answered by Hegel than by Joyce Brothers.” By that measure, I would imagine the vast majority of intelligent people are in fact elitists. Knowledge properly used and appropriately fostered quite simply makes you a better person. I think even the most obnoxious paladins of popular culture would admit that there is intellectual territory that Oprah’s Book Club hasn’t yet broached.

You may vehemently disagree with much of what Bloom has to say, or at least how he says it (it would put you in good company), but this comes highly suggested for anyone who thinks that answers to life’s “higher and deeper” questions deserve our most serious consideration. It serves as an honest refutation against the idea a few easy shibboleths of our times: that all answers are equally good, all educations are equally fulfilling and worthy, and all truths are equally valid. ...more

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Apr 10, 2011 Angela rated it did not like it

Shelves: didnt-finish, bookcrossed-or-otherwise-set-free, 2006

I steadily read this book a few pages, sometimes even a few paragraphs, at a time for about two months. On page 160, I decided to give it up.

Mr. Bloom's politics and mine are totally incompatible.

At the risk of oversimplifying his thesis, I fail to see how short skirts, rock & roll, and encouraging college students to have open minds has (to quote the subtitle) "...Failed Democracy And Impoverished The Souls Of Today's Students." I believe one of the purposes of a liberal arts education is to in ...more

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Apr 15, 2018 Mehrsa rated it it was ok

Bloom was so sure a few decades that we fixed racism and sexism that people were complaining for no reason. College campuses are segregated, he says, and it's not at all the fault of white students. Women are also still bitching even though every door is opened to them and we got rid of sexual harassment. I believe he spoke too soon. Still, reading this made we nostalgic for Bloom's sober and curmudgenly conservatism--so sure were they that the left would destroy American civilization that they ...more

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Mar 08, 2020 Kris rated it really liked it

Shelves: politics, audiobooks, read-write-think

I was enthralled with Part I and Bloom’s remarks on student habits, the purpose of universities, and the significant paradigm shift in academics in recent decades. Though written in 1987, his thoughts here are incredibly perceptive and relevant, perhaps even more so in today’s landscape. The race piece of all this has become even more charged than Bloom could have seen.

In Part II he lapses into a big section on philosophers and loses the attachment to the everyday lives of students on campus. Be ...more

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Oct 09, 2007 Andrew Morton rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: People interested in education (or why they're in education)

The Closing of the American Mind is a thoughtful book, if somewhat overwrought at times. With that in mind, it's fair to say that the late professor Bloom's comments on education had some impact on reinvigorating my own interest in academics.

Professor Bloom examines the educational development taking place (then in the 1980s) taking place particularly in elite higher education in the US. While some argue that his appreciation for classical literature and education is antiquated and out of date, ...more

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Nov 28, 2014 sologdin rated it did not like it

Shelves: dilectio-sapientiae

was expecting this to be a more charming version of Kimball's awful Tenured Radicals, but it is rather much more rigorous and thoughtful. that said, am still reading it as 'wrong.'

author reveals his major malfunction late in the text, which occurred during a campus altercation wherein certain left activists occupied university buildings and apparently took hostages of university personnel. this event, and university's failure to discipline, soured author on entire left project in the '60s, if i ...more

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Apr 06, 2008 Gerard rated it it was amazing

One of the most influential books I've read in the last five years. The presentation of a brilliant mind. From a man that is an atheist, homosexual, and conservative. Not conservative in the Ronald Reagan sense. Conservative in that he admires Nietzsche and longs for ancient Athens. A very brilliant analysis of modern culture. ...more

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May 06, 2016 MM rated it it was amazing

Shelves: re-read, society, philosophy, favourites, science, education

After reading this book, I was inspired to write the following:

___

On Graduating

I have been wondering for a while now what I have gained from the past four years at University. When I refused a practical, career-driven Accounting program at [University] for the sake of studying Cognitive Science at [my University], I thought I was making the right choice. I wanted to be educated. Cognitive Science promised something beyond rote office learning, manmade laws to accommodate white collar workers' de ...more

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Jul 26, 2011 Teri rated it it was amazing

I haven't actually read this - but it's on my list. However, I couldn't just share the review below unless I listed this book as having been read. So... here is the review that has me watering at the mouth to read this book. I got the review off Amazon. Enjoy! - - Teri
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When The Closing of The American Mind was published in 1987, it instantly ignited a firestorm of praise and condemnation. Conser ...more

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Jul 09, 2017 robin friedman rated it really liked it

Education, Democracy, And Soul

The late Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" was an unexpected bestseller when it appeared in 1987. It is an outstanding work combining polemic against the diminution of American standards with serious thought about how we came to this impasse. Bloom's book is a testament to the power of ideas.

If "The Closing of the American Mind" captures Bloom's thought, his friend Saul Bellow's novel, "Ravelstein" (1996) captures much of Bloom the man. I think Bloom' Education, Democracy, And Soul

The late Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" was an unexpected bestseller when it appeared in 1987. It is an outstanding work combining polemic against the diminution of American standards with serious thought about how we came to this impasse. Bloom's book is a testament to the power of ideas.

If "The Closing of the American Mind" captures Bloom's thought, his friend Saul Bellow's novel, "Ravelstein" (1996) captures much of Bloom the man. I think Bloom's book and Bellow's novel will be permanently intertwined in the history of American thought and literature. It is difficult to think of one without reflecting on the other.

The themes of Bloom's study are stated in its title and, more explicitly, in the subtitle of the book: "How Higher Education has failed Democracy and Impoverished the Soul's of Today's Students." I tried to capture these themes in the title of this review: Education, Democracy, and Soul.

The first theme of the book is education. Bloom argues that American higher education has lost its sense of purpose and direction. He finds this due to an emphasis on relativism and toleration and a reluctance to focus on questions of purpose and meaning. Similarly, Bloom finds American education has become overly politicized and attuned to the concerns of the moment. He urges that liberal education return to its initial function of searching for wisdom and for self-knowledge. While not every student need pursue the liberal arts (in fact, it is a rare enterprise), Bloom finds that these studies must be available for those interested, and honored, if University education is to produce thoughtful human beings and an informed community holding values and the pursuit of truth in common. Bloom finds the source of liberal studies in ancient Greece with Socrates and his great student, Plato.

The second theme of the book is democracy, and American constitutionalism. American democracy remains a precious experiment and Bloom traces its roots to enlightenment thought, particularly in John Locke. The basic values of our system are liberty and equality. Bloom ties democratic values into a society devoted to the pursuit of empirical knowledge rather than superstition. He returns frequently in his book to Alexis de Toqueville's "Democracy and America" which captured a great deal of the promise of our country while warning of the leveling and conformity that would result from an unchecked, uncritical approach to a society in which each person's opinions counted as much as each other person's. There is much fascinating but difficult material in this book about German anti-rationalists beginning with Nietzsche and proceeding through Max Weber and Heidegger. These thinkers espoused theories, Bloom argues, fundamentally at odds with American democracy. Their theories have been vulgarized and watered-down and form the basis, Bloom argues, for the preoccupations of modern America with "life-styles" and "commitments" rather than reason. Bloom's historical discussions are difficult and move rather too quickly at times, but they are thoughtful and rewarding.

The third theme of the book is soul. For Bloom, soul is what our young people and our country are in danger of losing. Soul is at first blush exemplified by the Socratic pursuit. It is a conviction that some things are worth knowing and pursuing and it is an attempt to find them through serious enterprise. Soul is a matter of love, passion and effort. Bloom finds "soul" compromised by an attitude of relativism, of too easy commitments, and of a desire to compromise somewhat too easily in matters of love to attain the necessity of sex. Lack of soul, for Bloom, is exemplified in the pursuit of rock music by the young and not-so-young as an attempt to find an emotional high without the attendant spiritual and intellectual effort.

This book is difficult reading and there are moments when the polemics get in the way of the thought. This notwithstanding, the book is a passionate and deeply informed treatment of the life of the mind and spirit.

Robin Friedman ...more

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Jul 02, 2009 Mike rated it it was amazing

This is a challenging (read: worthwhile) book for anyone who has any interest in defining, experiencing, or achieving education. Bloom's discussion of campus politics and the newly arrived student's hopes and frustrations cut too close to the bone for the general criticisms to hold much water; Noam Chomsky, as usual almost impossibly dismissive, called it mind-bogglingly stupid, and Lawrence Levine devoted an entire book to an argument that Bloom accepts and places in context in a few short page ...more

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Jun 13, 2007 Richard rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: anyone

an analylitical look at the culture that is modern western society. our society as seen through the eyes of his 40+ years as a professor at an elite university and the degradation of mankind in the west (with plenty to say about the rest of the world, too). doesn't sound too compelling, but unlike the other half-million books on this subject, bloom's insights are at once intellectually honest, relevant and, at times, stunning. bloom dares you to reason with him. here he had placed political corr ...more

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Aug 09, 2010 Julie rated it it was amazing

This author is right on! What an amazing statement about how our society and its education have deteriorated. Allan Bloom points the finger at the families that have not taught morals or religion. New students coming to the universities from broken homes and broken morals cannot relate to the classical education wherein lies the meaning of life and the portrait of human nature. They end up seeking only a general or specialized training in a career and forego the real education from the great min ...more

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Sep 13, 2009 Robert rated it did not like it

I can't understand what I was thinking all those years ago, when I read this the first time. The author is obviously massively well read, and has a broad range of exposure and experience in arts, music, and literature. I have to wonder how a person with so much exposure to the best of western culture could author such a narrow, biased, sneering, elitist, and hateful rant. I'm so sorry that i wasted my time the first time, and doubly sorry now all these years later. ...more

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Feb 13, 2008 Matt rated it did not like it

Shelves: worst-of-the-worst, philosophy

It is as if Bloom believes he has divined the totality of meaning in the last 200 years and he alone has the right to judge where the world is failing. He comes across as a grumpy old man who is angry at his students and refuses to believe things he does not like have any value.

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Jun 16, 2009 Thomas Dineen rated it it was amazing

This book is a cautionary tale for those who consider themselves 'educated.' Allan Bloom's erudite, fluently written reflection on the parlous state of the American mind laments the intellectual and moral complacency of today's university students. It also outlines the academic trends that have contributed to our country's growing Philistinism and decadence.

Bloom almost entitled this controversial, surprise best-seller 'Souls Without Longing.' He devotes several chapters to diagnosing the condi This book is a cautionary tale for those who consider themselves 'educated.' Allan Bloom's erudite, fluently written reflection on the parlous state of the American mind laments the intellectual and moral complacency of today's university students. It also outlines the academic trends that have contributed to our country's growing Philistinism and decadence.

Bloom almost entitled this controversial, surprise best-seller 'Souls Without Longing.' He devotes several chapters to diagnosing the condition of students' inner lives--their vulgar taste in music and other arts, coarse romantic sensibility, immersion in pop culture, and unabashed self-centeredness.

Below is a famous passage--much castigated by the Left--in which Bloom captures the effect of rock music on the young. As you read it, you'll realize that this kind of blithe hedonism permeates the lives of many Americans long after their pubescence and higher education have ended...sometimes exsequor exequor:

"Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over the centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms...life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy."

While many conservatives have bemoaned the decline of literacy, lower test scores, etc., among the general population, Bloom focuses mostly on elite students--our best raw material and most likely candidates for attaining cultural refinement. Beginning in the 1960s, he finds undergraduates at our top universities to be increasingly ignorant--before and after graduation--of the classical learning that is taken for granted among their European counterparts:

"European schoolchildren had a vastly more sophisticated knowledge of the human heart than we were accustomed to in the young or, for that matter, the old...Their books had a substantial existence in everyday life and constituted much of what their society as a whole looked up to. It was commonplace for children of what they called good families to fill their imaginations with the hopes of serious literary or philosophic careers, as do ours with hopes of careers in entertainment or business."

Bloom writes not in a tone of moral outrage but rather with the sardonic disappointment of a sophisticate among naïfs. To him, Americans simply don't know what they're missing by not taking time to understand Plato and Nietzsche, listen attentively to Mozart, or view Raphael. They also lack heroic ideals:

"...I began to ask students who their heroes are. Again, there is usually silence, and most frequently nothing follows. Why should anyone have heroes?...[I:]n America we have only the bourgeoisie, and the love of the heroic is one of the few counterpoises available to us. In us the contempt for the heroic is only an extension of the perversion of the democratic principle that denies greatness and wants everyone to feel comfortable in his skin without having to suffer unpleasant comparisons...Liberation from the heroic only means that [students:] have no resource whatsoever against conformity to the current 'role models'...Instead of being overwhelmed by Cyrus, Theseus, Moses or Romulus, they unconsciously act out the roles of the doctors, lawyers, businessmen or TV personalities around them. One can only pity young people without admirations they can respect or avow, who are artificially restrained from the enthusiasm for great virtue."

In Part Two, Bloom expands his argument to explain how German and Austrian thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries (Freud, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Weber) first articulated the themes that continue to dominate American intellectual discourse. He critiques this phenomenon, as well as the pernicious influence of the culturally Marxist Frankfurt School (Adorno, Marcuse, et al.):

"Who in 1920 would have believed that Max Weber's technical sociological terminology would someday be the everyday language of the United States, the land of the Philistines...? The self-understanding of hippies, yippies, panthers, prelates and presidents has unconsciously been formed by German thought of a half-century earlier; Herbert Marcuse's accent has been turned into a Middle Western twang; the 'echt Deutsch' label has been replaced by a 'Made in America label'; and the new American life-style has become a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic for the whole family."

Bloom goes on to describe, brilliantly, the rise of value relativism, the growth of political extremism in Europe, the concept of the 'Last Man' (the bourgeois), the decline of religion among the intelligentsia, and other complex topics that remain vital for all Westerners who want to understand their culture.

Those who enjoy this book will want to track down Bloom's other less popular but still superb works of cultural and literary criticism: 'Giants and Dwarfs,' 'Love and Friendship,' and 'Shakespeare's Politics' (with Harry V. Jaffa). Bloom's translations of Plato's 'Republic' and Rousseau's 'Emile' are also excellent. ...more

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Jul 21, 2014 Gary Beauregard Bottomley rated it did not like it

It's easy to mock the author. Rock music leads to promiscuous sex, sex is bad when it has no consequences, blacks stick together, "no fault insurance, no fault divorce, and no fault sex" leads to lessening of our values, romantic love is dead, and so on, but that's not the reason he wrote the book and I won't mock him for those silly statements.

He does state that "tradition and myths even if they are not real" help us determine our real nature and develop our soul. Our individual values and valu It's easy to mock the author. Rock music leads to promiscuous sex, sex is bad when it has no consequences, blacks stick together, "no fault insurance, no fault divorce, and no fault sex" leads to lessening of our values, romantic love is dead, and so on, but that's not the reason he wrote the book and I won't mock him for those silly statements.

He does state that "tradition and myths even if they are not real" help us determine our real nature and develop our soul. Our individual values and valuing others opinions lessen our souls and anything that makes us see our world in relativistic terms instead of absolute values leads to the closing of the American mind for the student. There's nothing wrong with developing a thesis like this, but the author is such a poor writer it's hard to follow his line of thought and why it could be true. I, for one, wrestle with absolute verse relative truth and what does it mean.

"Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds". The author must have a very large mind and never tires in showing it by quoting philosophers but never putting them in a context such that the listener can follow the author's points. Here's how the author approaches one of his typical points, "materialism leads to reductionism which gives you determinism". He leaves it at that. He never tells you why. I only can get the impression that he must be a dualist and doesn't like science but I get no reason why that's relevant. He says dignity originally only refereed to God, and science won't give it to us and creativity lies outside of the realm of science. I have no idea what he means, but I get the feeling that he doesn't like science.

He's got some muddled theory that is hard to decipher that the beginning of the end of the university happened because of the enlightenment, and it's really hard to figure out what he means since he is such a poor writer who loves to name drop and never let the reader know what he is really trying to say. It's something to do with valuing others diversity is very bad. Empathy, seeing from others point of view, is the downfall of everything. Fine, go ahead and write a coherent book that supports that viewpoint. The author doesn't.

He's most proud of reintroducing prejudice into his students (his words, not mine). Prejudice is what the fool uses instead of reason. He really seems to not to like science. The enlightenment is okay but went too far. I stopped listening after about three fourths of the book at the point he quoted Swift to support his view that the enlightenment had gone too far. I finally figured out that he meant those things he was trying to say. It is really hard to comprehend what he is saying. He seems to think democracy is very bad and aristocracy is the ideal we should strive for. But, I'm not sure since he is such a poor writer and it's hard to figure out what he is saying.

There is one good thing about this book it's that he clearly shows how not to approach critical reasoning. He challenges his student to name a great book, a hero, and asks does evil exist. I would have answered, "the best book ever on critical reasoning is "Origin of Species". Darwin is my hero (or sometimes I would say Abraham Lincoln, isn't it amazing my two heroes were born on the exact same day Feb 12,1809), and evil are people like you who want to tear us apart instead of bringing us together".

If I can save just one person from listening to this book, it was worth me suffering through it. (Oh, yeah, there are background conversations going on during the recording of the story. I found it quaint, but some could find it obnoxious. Another reason not to listen to this book!). ...more

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Sep 12, 2009 Kyle rated it it was amazing

"There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative." So begins Allan Bloom's outstanding analysis of American universities and, more broadly, American culture. Published over 20 years ago, it remains relevant. His thesis is that universities have abandoned their callings to be refuges for the pursuit of truth (although make no mistake--Bloom is no Christian); academic freedom no longer e "There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative." So begins Allan Bloom's outstanding analysis of American universities and, more broadly, American culture. Published over 20 years ago, it remains relevant. His thesis is that universities have abandoned their callings to be refuges for the pursuit of truth (although make no mistake--Bloom is no Christian); academic freedom no longer exists in any meaningful sense. The causes of this decline include the pop-Americanization of European intellectuals like Freud and Weber; making preparation for careers the main purpose of university education; the inability to postulate unity between the three academic branches--natural science, social science, and humanities--with the natural sciences the unquestioned king; and the universities' cowardly capitulation to student unrest in the 1960s. Bloom is particularly bitter on this last point. He was a professor at Cornell in the 60s when armed students virtually held the campus hostage. His solution is rather simple--return to philosophy. Along the way Bloom offers penetrating cultural analysis and demanding philosophical reflection on Socrates, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and the like. Here are a few of my favorite quotes:

"For a long time middle-class women, with the encouragement of their husbands, had been pursuing careers. It was thought that they had a right to cultivate their higher talents instead of being household drudges. Implicit in this view was, of course, the view that the bourgeois professions indeed offered an opportunity to fulfill the human potential, while family and particularly the woman's work involved in it were merely in the realm of necessity, limited and limiting." (127)

"When one looks at the earnest, middle-class proponents of birth control, abortion and easy divorce--with their social concern, their humorless self-confidence and masses of statistics--one cannot help thinking that all this serves them very well. This is not to deny the reality of the problems presented by too many children for the poor, the terrible consequences of rape and battered wives. However, none of these problems really belong to the middle classes, who are not reproducing themselves, are rarely raped or battered, but who are the best-rewarded beneficiaries of what they themselves propose. . . . I fear that the most self-righteous of Americans nowadays are precisely those who have most to gain from what they preach." (236)

"The effort to read books as their writers intended them to be read has been made into a crime, ever since 'the intentional fallacy' was instituted. There are endless debates about methods--among Freudian criticism, Marxist criticism, New Criticism, Structuralism and Deconstructionism, and many others, all which have in common the premise that Plato or Dante had to say about reality is unimportant." (375) ...more

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Sep 14, 2018 Roseanna White rated it really liked it

Some really good insights in here on how the new motto of American higher education is oxymoronic and ultimately devalues what education is meant to be...and also a whole lot of words that made my eyes glaze over as Bloom explores themes of philosophy in general that seemed to have little to do with his thesis. I listened to the audio and would have preferred reading it in paper, I think, so I could skim sections that I didn't find as interesting. (Hate confessing to the desire to skim, but ther ...more

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Aug 25, 2007 Ben Crosby rated it liked it

Recommended to Ben by: college students (former and current), college graduates, and fa

On balance, this book is a disappointment. It is an important idea (a still much needed polemic against the American aversion to real learning), but it seems deployed with a level of arbitrariness. I was with Bloom for the first few chapters. I applauded his frankness when discussing race in the academy, and how the culture studies ideology is poisonous. I responded with appropriate indignation when he decried the disappearance of a reading culture and the emergence of professional "training." I ...more

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Feb 12, 2011 Bryan Smith rated it it was amazing

Shelves: philosophy, sociology, education

Hands down one of the most challenging (and illuminating) books I've read yet. With an astonishing combination of insight, erudition, and philosophical richness, Bloom (in a nutshell) carefully traces the decline of educational standards within the university (especially with regards to the humanities), which he ultimately holds responsible for the anti-intellectual relativism and culture of self-interest that dominates the American mind to this day. Although the book is well written on par, Blo ...more

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About Allan Bloom

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Allan David Bloom was an American philosopher, essayist and academic. Bloom championed the idea of 'Great Books' education, as did his mentor Leo Strauss. Bloom became famous for his criticism of contemporary American higher education, with his views being expressed in his bestselling 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind. ...more

Books by Allan Bloom

Confronting The Constitution: The Challenge To Locke, Montesquieu, Jefferson And The Federalists From Utilitarianism, Historicism, Marxism, Freudianism, Pragmatism, Existentialism

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“The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency -- the belief that the here and now is all there is.” — 297 likes

“Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.” — 34 likes

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