Closing of the American Mind

“IT MAY BE THE MOST IMPORTANT WORK OF ITS KIND BY AN AMERICAN SINCE WORLD WAR II.”

—Chicago Tribune

THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND

Allan Bloom

“Commands one's attention and concentrates one's mind more effectively than any other book I can think of in the past five years.”

—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt,
The New York Times

“A penetrating look at the state of modern American society . . . filled to overflowing with trenchant insights into American life. . . . Required reading for every thoughtful citizen concerned with the decline of American society. . . . It will challenge you to think.”

—
The New American

“Essential reading for anyone concerned with the state of liberal education in this society.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

“Important and controversial . . . could—and should—serve as a major resource in the effort to rethink the very nature and purpose of American higher education.”

—San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

“Every chapter, if not every page, offers something delightful, something puzzling, something outrageous.”

—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Elegant, passionate, wide-ranging. . . . His prose is rhapsodic, compelling, personal and reassuring. He writes from a deep love of history and intellectual tradition.”

—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Graceful and grave . . . a serious-minded, sinewy and wise work.”

—Virginia Pilot & The Ledger-Star

“Has the density of fiction, the sting of satire, the lucidity of philosophy . . . all the compact fluidity and dazzle of Emerson's essays.”

—
The Christian Science Monitor Book Review

 

How Higher Education Has
Failed Democracy and
Impoverished the Souls of
Today's Students

Foreword by Saul Bellow

Preface

Introduction: Our Virtue

PART ONE. STUDENTS

The Clean Slate

Books

Music

Relationships

Self-Centeredness

Equality

Race

Sex

Separateness

Divorce

Love

Eros

PART TWO. NIHILISM, AMERICAN STYLE

The German Connection

Two Revolutions and Two States of Nature

The Self

Creativity

Culture

Values

The Nietzscheanization of the Left or Vice Versa

Our Ignorance

PART THREE. THE UNIVERSITY

From Socrates'
Apology
to Heidegger's
Rektoratsrede

Tocqueville on Democratic Intellectual Life

The Relation Between Thought and Civil Society

The Philosophic Experience

The Enlightenment Transformation

Swift's Doubts

Rousseau's Radicalization and the German University

The Sixties

The Student and the University

Liberal Education

The Decomposition of the University

The Disciplines

Conclusion

Afterword

About the Author

Index

To My Students

Professor Bloom has his own way of doing things. Writing about the higher education in America, he does not observe the forms, manners and ceremonies of what is called (usually by itself) the community of scholars. Yet his credentials are irreproachable. He is the author of an excellent book on Shakespeare's politics, and has translated Plato's
Republic
and Rousseau's
Emile
. It will be difficult for nettled colleagues to wave him away, and many will want to do just that, for he is shrewd and mettlesome, as well as learned, and a great observer of what Mencken would call, when he was being mean, “the higher learning.”

But Professor Bloom is neither a debunker nor a satirist, and his conception of seriousness carries him far beyond the positions of academia. He is not addressing himself primarily to the professors. They are welcome to listen—and they will listen because they come under heavy fire—but he places himself in a larger community, invoking Socrates, Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau and Kant more often than he does our contemporaries: “The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers … of all men to the extent they desire to know. But in fact, this includes only a few, the true friends, as Plato was to Aristotle at the very moment they were disagreeing about the nature of the good. … They were absolutely one soul as they looked at the problem. This, according to Plato, is the only real friendship, the only real common good. It is here that the contact people so desperately
seek is to be found. … This is the meaning of the riddle of the improbable philosopher-kings. They have a true community that is exemplary for all the other communities.”

A style of this sort will seem to modern readers marred by classical stiffness—“Truth,” “Knowers,” “the Good,” “Man”—but we can by no means deny that behind our objection to such language is a guilty consciousness of the flimsiness, and not infrequently the trashiness, of our modern talk about “values.”

The sentences above are taken from the conclusion of Bloom's book. Parting from his readers, he is at his most earnest. He writes in a different vein when he is discussing the power of professional economists, the separation of modern science from the “natural philosophy” that preceded it, the phenomenon called “cultural relativism,” or the real, the bottom-line, significance of an M.B.A. degree. He often flashes out provocatively and wickedly. Speaking of the place of the humanities in the universities, he calls them a “submerged old Atlantis,” to which we turn again to try to “find ourselves now that everybody else has given up.” “The humanities are like the great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst masses of junk, people with a good eye found cast away treasures. …” Or else, “They are like a refugee camp where all the geniuses driven out of their jobs and countries by unfriendly regimes are idling: … The other two divisions of the university have no use for the past …” When he is not busy with the nature of the Good, he can hit, with the best (or should I say the worst) of them, very hard. As a scholar he intends to enlighten us, and as a writer he has learned from Aristophanes and other models that enlightenment should also be enjoyable. To me, this is not the book of a professor, but that of a thinker who is willing to take the risks more frequently taken by writers. It is risky in a book of ideas to speak in one's own voice, but it reminds us that the sources of the truest truths are inevitably profoundly personal. Bloom tells us: “Throughout this book I have referred to Plato's
Republic
, which is for me
the
book on education, because it really explains to me what I experience as a man and a teacher.” Academics, even those describing themselves as existentialists, very seldom offer themselves publicly and frankly as individuals, as persons. So Professor Bloom is a front-line fighter in the mental wars of our times, and as such, singularly congenial to me. (If he can be personal, I see no reason why I should remain the anonymous commentator.)

In his concluding pages, Bloom tells of a student who, after a reading of the
Symposium
, said that it was hard today to imagine the magic Athenian atmosphere, “in which friendly men, educated, lively, on a footing of equality, civilized but natural, came together and told wonderful stories about the meaning of their longing. But [adds Bloom] such experiences are always accessible. Actually, this playful discussion took place in the midst of a terrible war that Athens was destined to lose, and Aristophanes and Socrates at least could foresee that this meant the decline of Greek civilization. But they were not given to culture despair, and in these terrible political circumstances, their abandon to the joy of nature proved the viability of what is best in man, independent of accidents, of circumstance. We feel ourselves too dependent on history and culture…. What is essential about … any of the Platonic dialogues is reproducible in almost all times and places…. This thinking might be what it is all for. That's where we are beginning to fail. But it is right under our noses, improbable but always present.”

I take this statement very seriously and am greatly moved by it, seeing in it the seed from which my life grew. For as a Midwesterner, the son of immigrant parents, I recognized at an early age that I was called upon to decide for myself to what extent my Jewish origins, my surroundings (the accidental circumstances of Chicago), my schooling, were to be allowed to determine the course of my life. I did not intend to be wholly dependent on history and culture. Full dependency must mean that I was done for. The commonest teaching of the civilized world in our time can be stated simply: “Tell me where you come from and I will tell you what you are.” There was not a chance in the world that Chicago, with the agreement of my eagerly Americanizing extended family, would make me in its image. Before I was capable of thinking clearly, my resistance to its material weight took the form of obstinacy. I couldn't say why I would not allow myself to become the product of an
environment
. But gainfulness, utility, prudence, business, had no hold on me. My mother wanted me to be a fiddler or, failing that, a rabbi. I had my choice between playing dinner music at the Palmer House or presiding over a synagogue. In traditional orthodox families small boys were taught to translate
Genesis
and
Exodus
, so I might easily have gone on to the rabbinate if the great world, the world of the streets, had not been so seductive. Besides, a life of pious observance was not for me. Anyway, I had begun at an early age
to read widely, and I was quickly carried away from the ancient religion. Reluctantly, my father allowed me at seventeen to enter the university, where I was an enthusiastic (wildly excited) but erratic and contrary student. If I signed up for Economics 201, I was sure to spend all my time reading Ibsen and Shaw. Registering for a poetry course, I was soon bored by meters and stanzas, and shifted my attention to Kropotkin's
Memoirs of a Revolutionist
and Lenin's
What Is to Be Done?
My tastes and habits were those of a writer. I preferred to read poetry on my own without the benefit of lectures on the caesura. To rest my book-strained eyes I played pool and Ping-Pong at the men's club.

I was soon aware that in the view of advanced European thinkers, the cultural expectations of a young man from Chicago, that center of brutal materialism, were bound to be disappointed. Put together the slaughterhouses, the steel mills, the freight yards, the primitive bungalows of the industrial villages that comprised the city, the gloom of the financial district, the ballparks and prizefights, the machine politicians, the prohibition gang wars, and you had a solid cover of “Social-Darwinist” darkness, impenetrable by the rays of culture. Hopeless, in the judgment of highly refined Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans and Italians, the spokesmen for art in its most advanced modern forms. For some of these foreign observers, America had many advantages over Europe, it was more productive, more energetic, more free, largely immune from pathogenic politics and ruinous wars, but as far as art was concerned it would be better, as Wyndham Lewis put it, to have been born an Eskimo than a Minnesota Presbyterian who wanted to be a painter. Civilized Europeans, often exceptionally free from the class prejudices of their own countries, were able conveniently to lodge their not fully mastered biases in the free-for-all U.S.A. What no one was able to foresee was that all civilized countries were destined to descend to a common cosmopolitanism and that the lamentable weakening of the older branches of civilization would open fresh opportunities and free us from our dependency on history and culture—a concealed benefit of decline. There would be barbarous manifestations certainly, but there would be also the possibility of new kinds of independence.