About this title: In this widely acclaimed number-one national bestseller, one of America's most distinguished political philosophers argues that the social/political crisis of 20th-century America is really an intellectual crisis.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: SIMON & SCHUSTER
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9780671657154ISBN:0671657151
Description: Published by Simon & Schuster in 1988. Paperback. Number of pages: 400. Condition: Good. Used book but in Good Condition for sensible price. Shipped from UK. Delivery is usually 2-3 working days from order by Royal Mail, International Delivery is by Airmail. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: PENGUIN BOOKS LTD
Date Published: 1993
ISBN-13:9780140146820ISBN:0140146822
Description: Published by Penguin Books Ltd in 1993. Paperback. Number of pages: 400. Condition: Good. Used book but in Good Condition for sensible price. Shipped from UK. Delivery is usually 2-3 working days from order by Royal Mail, International Delivery is by Airmail. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9780671657154ISBN:0671657151
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 392 p. Audience: Children/juvenile. Sticker residue on front cover. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9780671657154ISBN:0671657151
Description: Good. 35-V-Add Books rated "Good" may have some notes, underlining, or highlighting. These books also may contain the previous owner's name, stamp, sticker, or gift inscription, or may be library discards. read more
""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)"
"I finally got around to reading this last year after having heard about it since I first entered into graduate school. It's actually not as bad as I figured it would be (Bloom really gets under the skin of liberals). It's still pretty bad, though. Even worse, it set off a windfall of copycat books decrying the decline of great Western values. Damn, guys, if those values were so great then how is it that ragtag groups of immigrants, communists, relativists, and devil worshipers (known to sane people as Muslims) so easily destroyed them? Or, we could surmise that those great Western values (of race, sexual, and gender privilege) are still around, because in the America I inhabit the leftist mutineers and Muslim fifth columns still don't run the place."
"I remember being fascinated by this book for much of 1997. I read it with a highlighter and a pen, writing notes in the margins and outlining each chapter. I read hundreds of pages, but then I just never bothered to finish. The trouble is that the material is exceptionally dense, with too little payoff.
Certainly I agree with Bloom about the problems in American education. But I don't agree with his position on what an ideal education would look like. Having been an actor and an English teacher, I love Shakespeare and quote him when possible. But Bloom has a personal love of Shakespeare and Plato that seems to elevate the two beyond reasonable proportion.
While Bloom's analysis and diagnosis is largely accurate, I much prefer the prescription provided by E.D. Hirsch in his CULTURAL LITERACY. The difference is that Hirsch has a more objective model, based not on his own taste but on a systematic review of what has been regarded as worthy of study be the previous generation."
"When it comes to the contemporary study of Western decline, there is hardly a tome that compares with Allan Bloom's tour de force, "The Closing of the American Mind." Writing in the mid 1980s, he skillfully unravels the knot of factors that have contributed to the current malaise. Nothing escapes his scalpel: feminism, narcissism, affirmative action, cultural relativism, and the collapse of academia are all sliced and diced, exposed in their entire historical and ideological depth.
Bloom (1930-1992) fought on the cultural front lines, teaching in the social sciences at some of the most prestigious American universities, including Cornell, Yale, and the University of Chicago. His testimony regarding the transformation of the student body is sobering:
"Today's select students know so much less, are so much more cut off from the tradition, are so much slacker intellectually, that they make their predecessors look like prodigies of culture. The soil is ever thinner, and I doubt whether it can now sustain the taller growths."
The students he dealt with at those elite institutions were the opinion-makers of the future, who would later set the tone for the nation's cultural life. His "today's students" are, in 2008, entrenched in academia, the arts, industry, the media, etc. They justify Bloom's pessimism; it is now clear that the "taller growths" could not be sustained.
A theme that runs through the book is the evaporation of the critical spirit. Academics have distanced themselves from evaluation of ideas based on timeless, universal criteria derived from man's faculty of reason. In the past, Western thinkers were open to discussing diverse ideas and cultures, but with the intent of criticizing them. They sifted and compared and appraised, in order to separate the good from the bad.
Now, with the critical spirit in ruins, one is pressured to be open to all ideas and cultures equally. The evaluation stage is omitted. This has had a disastrous effect:
"Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason's power. The unrestrained and thoughtless pursuit of openness, without recognizing the inherent political, social, or cultural problem of openness as the goal of nature, has rendered openness meaningless....Openness to closedness is what we teach."
Bloom observed that the students had become detached from the great works of literature. These works, based as they are on the critical spirit, have no relevant message in the new amorphous intellectual environment. The students are intelligent, they can read, they can analyze a text, but their upbringing and early education leave them without the experience of strong attachment to a great book.
A person who has had such an experience can re-experience it many times during a lifelong quest for cultural enrichment. But without it, the great books (as well as the great works of art) become virtually inaccessible. A generation earlier, writes Bloom, students were at least familiar with the Bible, which provided some ground on which an appreciation of literature could be constructed. When families ceased to transmit this basic heritage, not to speak of the great works in the arts and sciences, a cornerstone of the intellectual edifice crumbled.
"The cause of the decay of the family's traditional role as the transmitter of tradition is the same as that of the decay of the humanities: nobody believes that the old books do, or even could, contain the truth. So books have become, at best, "culture," i.e., boring. As Tocqueville put it, in a democracy tradition is nothing more than information. With the 'information explosion,' tradition has become superfluous....In the United States, practically speaking, the Bible was the only common culture, one that united simple and sophisticated, rich and poor, young and old, and--as the very model for a vision of the order of the whole of things, as well as the key to the rest of Western art, the greatest works of which were in one way or another responsive to the Bible--provided access to the seriousness of books. With its gradual and inevitable disappearance, the very idea of such a total book and the possibility and necessity of world-explanation is disappearing."
Bloom's deconstruction of feminism includes an interesting analysis of how it interacted with the sexual revolution of the 1960s. The sexual revolution liberated nature, whereas feminism attempted to crush and manipulate nature for its own ends. It constituted a return (with a vengeance) to the old regime of repression and restrictions, but of course with a new twist:
"Male sexual passion has become sinful again because it culminates in sexism. Women are made into objects, they are raped by their husbands as well as by strangers, they are sexually harassed by professors and employers at school and at work, and their children, whom they leave in day-care centers in order to pursue their careers, are sexually abused by teachers. All these crimes must be legislated against and punished. What sensitive male can avoid realizing how dangerous his sexual passion is? Is there perhaps really original sin? The new interference with sexual desire is more comprehensive, more intense, more difficult to escape than the older conventions, the grip of which was so recently relaxed. The July 14 of the sexual revolution was really only a day between the overthrow of the Ancien Régime and the onset of the Terror."
A good chunk of the book is a voyage through the history of Western thought, to determine the roots of the eventual collapse of the intellect in general, and the study of the humanities and social sciences in particular. Bloom does a masterful job of treating complex themes in a coherent and readable manner. This includes a discussion of the problems peculiar to liberal democracies, with their tendency to venerate equality and utility. This poses a terrible difficulty for the university, which must struggle to preserve detached pursuit of the truth, carried out by the scholar, or "theoretical type," as Bloom calls him. This is someone who can see across time and space, offering us insights that are not tainted by the ebb and flow of public opinion and political expediency.
Today, the theoretical type is on the brink of extinction, especially--irony of ironies--in the university, the one place established to protect and nurture it. There has been an "egalitarian resentment against the higher type...deforming and interpreting it out of existence." The man of reason, the true scholar, is under siege:
"Marxism and Freudianism reduce his motives to those all men have. Historicism denies him access to eternity. Value theory makes his reasoning irrelevant. If he were to appear, our eyes would be blind to his superiority, and we would be spared the discomfort it would cause us."
I conclude with a passage on the relationship between freedom of thought and tyranny, which rings true in our day, as the vise of politically-correct thought control tightens its grip:
"Freedom of mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.""
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