The closing of American mind

years ago, Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind stunned academia and predicted our present day.

By JACK HOWARD BURKE • April 9, 2018

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Credit: David Gould/Flickr

In the summer of 1987, a relatively unknown University of Chicago political science professor and philosopher named Allan Bloom published an academic book entitled The Closing of the American Mind. It was a surprise hit that unexpectedly thrust him into the national spotlight and earned him, among other distinctions, a nationally broadcast interview on William F. Buckley Jr.’s Firing Line.

Bloom’s book, whose principal focus was the deeply worrying state of higher education in America—and which he and his colleagues only forecast would be a modest success—remained atop The New York Timesnonfiction bestseller list for four continuous months. This professorial account from the inside, a “Notes from the Underground” on how the American university had been intellectually corrupted over the past 25 years, had clearly struck a chord. It was a work that held, and continues to hold, lessons for every thinking American citizen.

In 380 unrelenting pages, citing examples from philosophy, history, religion, and politics, Bloom argued that the American university had rejected the tradition of academic integrity dating back to Plato and Aristotle, capitulated to the demands of the ideologically aggressive student organizers of the 1960s, and replaced its basic pursuit of intellectual truth with a self-serving and quasi-fascist belief in moral relativism. This, he argued, was having grave ramifications for society at large.

Bearing the evocative subtitle “How higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today’s students,” the book was angrily condemned by several voices on the left (perhaps most notoriously by William Greider in his October 1987 Rolling Stone article), and sparked a high-profile public debate on the vitality of American culture, the philosophical atmosphere at the American university, the moral character of post-1960s American youth, and just where, exactly, the United States as a society was headed.

Thanks to the quiet diffusion of the ideas of philosophical radicals such as Nietzsche and Heidegger across Western—and especially American—society over the previous half-century, Bloom argued that our civilization was losing any sense of its philosophical and moral compass. We were forgetting, Bloom argued, not merely the political ideas of the American Founding Fathers, but the very foundation of Western and Judeo-Christian civilization itself. We had moved beyond even Marxism—which at least asserted an overarching view of man and his historical destiny—to Friedrich Nietzsche’s relativism, where no action was good or evil, and any set of values was conceivably as good as any other.

In short, Bloom said, the mob was becoming the absolute, and the stupid cliché “be yourself” a greater imperative than “do the right thing.” The social subscript carrying the book to national prominence probably had something to do with the fact that many Americans, conservative or otherwise, had recognized that the Reagan years—while a time of conservative resurgence in many ways—had largely failed to deliver the sort of socially conservative restoration that many had hoped they would.

Thirty years later, it’s become apparent that Bloom’s book is just as valid as it was when it went to press—probably even more so.

Trained at the University of Chicago in the halcyon 1950s, when the intellectual boom fostered by the flight of the post-war European intellectuals to the United States was still in full flower (“The fact is,” Bloom wrote, “that the fifties were one of the great periods of the American university”), Bloom received his Ph.D. in 1955 under the tutelage of Dr. Leo Strauss himself. He went on to teach for numerous years at his own alma mater, in addition to Cornell University, Yale University, the University of Toronto, Tel Aviv University, and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, winning the admi