Editors’ note: When The Closing of the American Mind appeared in the spring of 1987, it was an immediate sensation—a source of jubilation and consternation in more or less equal measure. Allan Bloom’s book spawned a small cataract of books about the university, some extending Bloom’s criticisms, some taking issue with them. Unlike many polemical works, however, Closing nimbly transcended its moment. Love it or hate it—or love it and hate it—Bloom’s book was an unavoidable document: a reflection that anyone concerned with the fate of American culture could accept or reject, but could not in good conscience ignore. We were therefore delighted to collaborate with the Manhattan Institute’s Center for the American University—itself a recent legacy of Bloom’s pioneering work—in a conference examining The Closing of the American Mind at 20. The conference, which took place in New York on October 3, began with some introductory remarks by John Leo, presentations by James Piereson, John Tomasi, Roger Kimball, Mark Steyn, and Heather Mac Donald, and additional commentary by James Miller, James Ceasar, John McWhorter, Robert P. George, Patrick Deneen, Brian Anderson, Peter Berkowitz, David DesRosiers, and Gary Rosen. What follows are revised versions of a selection of the presentations. James Piereson outlines the historical context of the book, Roger Kimball discusses Bloom’s attack on unanchored “openness,” Mark Steyn extends Bloom’s criticism of pop culture, and Heather Mac Donald offers a critical analysis of Bloom’s understanding of democracy and American civilization.

It has now been twenty years since the late Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, his bestselling broadside against the ideas and conceptions that animate the contemporary university. The general theme of Bloom’s book is encapsulated in the subtitle: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. Bloom’s thesis was striking precisely because it ran against the grain of conventional commentary on the academy. Following the upheavals of the 1960s, educators prided themselves on the degree to which they had reformed the American university in the direction of democracy, equality, and openness. They sought, as they said, to create an academic environment in which students might explore various ways of thinking and living in order to find their authentic selves. Those academic leaders were convinced that they had served democracy and enriched the educational experience of students by all the reforms—curricular and non-curricular—that they had engineered in response to the student revolts of that era. Now here was Bloom bluntly saying that they had actually done something quite the reverse: in the quest for “openness” and democracy, the academics had closed off genuine thought and intellectual exploration, and in so doing had compromised the case for democratic institutions.

Bloom’s book appeared at a propitious time when the turmoil of the 1960s had fully run its course but when the academic and political causes of that period—the open curriculum, diversity and affirmative action, feminism and racial studies, coeducation, and the deregulation of student life—had been fully institutionalized in the major colleges and universities of the nation. The radical leaders of the 1960s were now coming into their own as tenured professors, deans, and, in some cases, as college presidents. The Closing of the American Mind represented the first serious attack, from a philosophical point of view, on everything brought into the university by the student upheavals.

Many readers bought the book with the sense that some of the reforms of that period had gone too far, thus compromising the educational and research purposes of the university. Others may have picked it up under the misconception that “the closing of the American mind” referred to the baleful effects of the Reagan administration on American life. Naturally, those who had been active in the student movements of the 1960s and remained in the academy did not take kindly to Bloom’s assault against what they regarded as justified and needful reforms on the campus. Opening up opportunities for women and minorities, eliminating old-fashioned course requirements, and replacing traditional works by white men with those representing oppressed groups were steps toward a more democratic and intellectually stimulating university. Their fury was amplified by Bloom’s suggestion that the radicals of the 1960s resembled nothing so much as the Nazis and their sympathizers who used threats of violence to seize control of German universities in the 1930s.

The Closing of the American Mind has been interpreted as one of those influential salvos in the cultural wars of recent decades between reformers and traditionalists on the campus and between conservatives and liberals in the society at large. Bloom’s book has also been heard as a call for curricular change in the direction of a core curriculum focused on the study of the great books—a cause which Bloom certainly favored. A recent article by Rachel Donadio in The New York Times Book Review commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the publication of the book was titled “Revisiting the Canon Wars”—suggesting with that title that the main target of Bloom’s attack was the college curriculum and the books students are assigned to read.

If this were all Bloom had to say, his book would have added little to what had already been said more than a generation before by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, two of Bloom’s predecessors at the University of Chicago who were advocates of an education in the great books. Indeed, many aspects of the debate over The Closing of the American Mind were prefigured by a debate in the 1930s over Hutchins’s book The Higher Learning in America, in which he attacked the academy for its emphasis on vocational training, disciplinary research, and its generally anti-intellectual culture: “The people think that democracy means that every child should be permitted to acquire the educational insignia that will be helpful in making money. They do not believe in the cultivation of the intellect for its own sake.” According to the educational reformer John Dewey, Hutchins’s mistake was to suggest that there are fixed truths applicable at all times and in all places. An education in the great books, Dewey said, is one that relies on an “authoritarian” approach in which students are told that a few writers possess the answers to the great questions of life and society. Such an education is divorced from actual experience and the movement of history. Dewey said that a real education is not one that relies on Plato and Aristotle or on other authorities, but on the knowledge and society of our own time. Hutchins and Adler lost this argument in the 1930s, much as their successors would lose it in the 1960s and thereafter.

Bloom, however, understood that trying to change the curriculum without addressing the more fundamental ideas that have shaped it would be like trying to cure a sick man simply by changing his diagnosis. Bloom claimed that the West faces an intellectual crisis because no one any longer can make a principled defense of its institutions or way of life. This is most evident in the university, which has reformed itself according to the ideas of openness, tolerance, relativism, and diversity—all of which claim that no political principles, institutions, or way of life can be affirmed as being superior to any others. This is the near-universal view among students and faculty at our leading institutions of higher learning. The tragedy here, according to Bloom, is that relativism has extinguished the real motive behind all education, which is “the search for the good life.” If all ideas and ideals are equal, there is little point in searching for the best ones.

This open-mindedness, as Bloom said, is thought to be a moral virtue that counters a dangerous vice called “absolutism,” which involves the affirmation of any set of principles or morals as objectively true. The operative assumption here is that if someone or some group affirms something to be true they will be led to oppress those who disagree. Tolerance and openness are thus the virtues required for democracy and freedom. Hitler, as it is believed, was an absolutist; his crimes followed from his absolute conviction that he was right and Germans a superior people. Democracy thus seems to rely on the belief that no one has access to the truth.

The curriculum and the organization of the academy are merely operational reflections of these ideas. This is why there is no required core curriculum at most leading institutions, why contemporary authors have replaced the great thinkers of the past on academic reading lists, why there is no structure to the curriculum, why there is no clear body of ideas that students are expected to master before graduation, why language requirements have disappeared, why students and faculty often express outrage when a speaker appears on campus to express a view that contradicts their politically correct notions of tolerance and openness. Bloom sought to challenge the philosophy—such as it is—that has shaped the academy, and only incidentally to reform the curriculum. This was the conversation that Bloom wished to ignite. From the perspective of two decades, it seems plain—notwithstanding the spectacular success of his book—that he failed to do so.

For Bloom, the great question was whether a political order founded on principles believed to be true here and everywhere (as expounded in the Declaration of Independence) can survive when they are no longer believed to be true or when they have been reinterpreted in the form of vague notions like openness and tolerance. This is one of the ways by which the academy has failed democracy, according to Bloom. Students and teachers believe fervently in democracy, but cannot tell us why.

A related failing of the academy is that, instead of acting as a check against the extreme impulses of a democratic order, it is spurring them on by its embrace of relativism, equality, and diversity. Bloom argues that the university in a democratic society should be a refuge from democratic impulses, a place where excellence is encouraged and pursued, where students consider ideas that run against the grain of democracy and equality, where for a short period of time they step outside our democratic regime to consider the best that has been thought and written through the ages. In this way the academy might elevate democratic life instead of merely pandering to it. By seeking to shape society in ever more democratic and egalitarian ways, the academy has betrayed its true function in a free society.

Bloom suggested that beneath this outlook is a coherent philosophical doctrine that arose in Germany in the nineteenth century which asserts that the culture and institutions of any society are entirely man-made and lack any objective anchors in nature, truth, or God. The most important figure here (according to Bloom) was Nietzsche, known for his doctrine of nihilism and his attack on Christianity as a religion for the weak. Though Nietzsche’s thought is usually associated with the political right, Bloom claims that the contemporary left has seized selectively on his writings as an instrument to discredit the institutions of liberal societies. Yet because such writers do not really take ideas seriously, they are untroubled by the moral implications of nihilism—that there is no moral compass by which to guide the life of society. Americans, given their optimism and native cheerfulness, are “easy-going nihilists.”

This link to German thought was again one of the original and creative aspects of Bloom’s book, and a thesis that few critics attempted seriously to confront. Bloom’s book, admittedly, can be somewhat confusing on this point as he seems to say at different times that the troubles of the academy are due primarily to the upheavals of the 1960s, to the long-run influence of German thought, or to our native doctrine of liberalism with its emphasis on individual rights, self-interest, and political process. To make matters somewhat more confusing, Bloom occasionally refers to Plato’s observation that democracy itself tends to promote relativism on the conviction that, since all people are equal, so must all ideas be equal as well. Thus it is that liberal societies, based upon assumptions of equality, are vulnerable to doctrines like Nietzsche’s which assert that all claims to truth are equally invalid and are but expressions of self-interest or of the “will to power” of creative individuals.

Before the publication of his book, Bloom was all but unknown outside a small circle of devoted students who knew him as an inspiring teacher, as the author of works on Shakespeare and Rousseau, and as the translator of modern editions of Plato’s Republic and Rousseau’s Emile. Bloom studied both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, where he received his doctorate in 1955 in the Committee on Social Thought. There he came into close contact both with a curriculum focused on the great books and with the teachings of Leo Strauss, who had recently joined the Chicago faculty and who had generated a following in Hyde Park with his attacks on historicism and relativism from the standpoint of ancient philosophy. Bloom then began his teaching career at Yale before moving to Cornell in the early 1960s, where he watched at close hand as the life of the campus was brought to a halt in 1969 by radical students who seized the student union, brandishing weapons in the process and threatening violence unless their demands were met. The capitulation of the faculty to those threats had a shattering effect on Bloom, compromising his faith in the university and suggesting that some intellectual disorder had overtaken Cornell and the American academy at large. After the disorders in Ithaca, Bloom soon resigned his position at Cornell, moving first to the University of Toronto before returning in 1977 to the University of Chicago.

Among his students, Bloom was viewed as something of a Johnsonian figure, an unusual mixture of brilliance and eccentricity in the manner by which he taught the classics of political philosophy. His classroom lectures were presented in a rapid-fire manner, his thoughts punctuated by tics, stutters, and unpredictable gestures and expressions. He was known to lecture with unusual intensity, so much so that he sometimes lost track of time and the planned subjects of his lectures. There were moments of tension in the classroom, as one student recalled, when Bloom would light the filtered end of a cigarette. Bloom was not to every student’s taste, but for those with a philosophic bent he was a luminous figure on campuses where he taught. Bloom encouraged his students to follow a philosophic life, to address the great questions of life and politics through the study of the great works of Western civilization. Before 1987, when his book appeared, Bloom had a well-earned reputation as a teacher, not as an author or writer, least of all as a popular writer.

All of that changed when The Closing of the American Mind turned the little-known teacher into an international celebrity. Between March 1987, when the book was published, and December of that year, The Closing of the American Mind sold more than 500,000 copies. The book maintained a place on the bestseller list for nearly a year after it first appeared there on April 26, 1987. During the summer of 1987, Bloom’s book was number one on the New York Times list for ten weeks. A paperback edition, which was published in 1988, also spent several months on that list. Bloom was now in demand on the college lecture circuit; journalists followed him around the Chicago campus, crashing his lectures, trying to figure out what in fact he was trying to say and asking themselves and anyone who would listen why such an obscure and idiosyncratic book should have become a national and international sensation. Bloom, chronically in debt because he could not underwrite his expensive tastes with his professor’s salary, became a millionaire many times over.

Bloom’s book had its origins in 1982 in a short essay in National Review titled “Our Listless Universities,” in which he developed the key themes that would form the basis for his book. “I begin with my conclusion,” he wrote, “students in our best universities do not believe in anything, and those universities are doing nothing about it, nor can they. An easy-going American kind of nihilism has descended upon us, a nihilism without terror of the abyss. The great questions—God, freedom, and immortality—hardly touch the young. And the universities, which should encourage the quest for the clarification of such questions, are the very source of the doctrine which makes that quest appear futile.” Under pressure from this doctrine, colleges and universities have gradually gotten rid of their traditional liberal arts curricula and have largely abandoned the study of great books in favor of books that represent the thought of different cultures or groups.

With the encouragement of Saul Bellow, Bloom’s friend and colleague at the University of Chicago, and Erwin Glikes, then an editor at Simon & Schuster, he was persuaded to turn the essay into a full-length book on the contemporary university. The publisher paid a modest advance of $10,000 on the outside chance that the book might sell enough copies to recoup the investment. By the time Bloom finished the manuscript, however, Glikes had departed for another publishing house (The Free Press), thus placing final editorial revisions in the hands of another editor, Robert Asahina.

By all accounts, Asahina performed indispensable editorial services in turning Bloom’s manuscript into the compelling document that was released for public sale. It was Asahina who suggested to Bloom that he should abandon his original title, “Souls Without Longing,” in favor of a more captivating one—and thus was born The Closing of the American Mind. He also encouraged Bloom to begin the book with his discussion of contemporary students, with his unsparing comments on their relationships, the books they read, and the music they like to hear—rather than with his more difficult and obscure discussion of German philosophy. Perhaps as the editor anticipated, Bloom’s attack on rock music as a narcotic that diverts the energy of young people away from learning and toward tactile pleasures was an aspect of the book that attracted the attention of readers and reviewers alike, some of whom said that Bloom was an old fuddy-duddy who did not understand rock music or who did not appreciate the fact that (as Jean Bethke Elshtain wrote) “The Pop Culture that Bloom despises is one of America’s great original contributions.”

The early reviews of the book were surprisingly favorable and encouraging, which certainly played a role in launching it on a track to the bestseller lists. Roger Kimball, writing in The New York Times Book Review, described the book as “essential reading for anyone concerned with the state of liberal education in this society.” In the same review he wrote that it is “that rarest of documents, a genuinely profound book.” The editors, unwittingly helping Bloom’s cause, assigned as the title to Kimball’s review “The Groves of Ignorance.” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, reviewing the book in the daily Times, wrote that “it commands one’s attention and concentrates one’s mind more effectively than any book I can think of in the last five years.” William Kristol wrote in The Wall Street Journal that “No other recent book so brilliantly knits together such astute perceptions of the contemporary scene with such depth of scholarship and philosophical learning.” The Washington Post also weighed in early with a favorable review by S. Frederick Starr, President of Oberlin University.

The critics soon entered the fray, too late however to blunt the momentum given to the book by these early reviews. Many were harsh, indeed, though none rose to the high level of Bloom’s argument. David Rieff, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, compared Bloom to Colonel Oliver North, who had recently testified to Congress on the Iran-Contra scandal, called him a reactionary, and said that his book was one that “decent people would be ashamed of having written.” He also asserted, more than a little foolishly (at least to anyone who had ever known Allan Bloom), that Bloom was a front for corporate interests because his research center at the University of Chicago was underwritten by grants from the John M. Olin Foundation. Benjamin Barber, a political science professor from Rutgers, said that Bloom was a “philosopher despot” whose ideas were elitist and anti-democratic. Martha Nussbaum, in an essay in The New York Review of Books, challenged Bloom’s interpretation of ancient thought and suggested, contrary to Bloom, that ancient thinkers were in fact far more sympathetic to the ideals of democracy and equality than Bloom suggested. “The Right Absolute Allan Bloom” was the title given to an article in The Washington Post on the bestselling author—thus unwittingly confirming Bloom’s thesis about relativism and absolutism. The feminist Betty Friedan even got into the act, challenging Bloom’s portrayal of feminism as “anti-family and anti-man.” Bloom’s book ignited a fierce debate over the intellectual foundations of democracy and equality that continued for months and even years—and cannot be said to have abated down to the present day.

With but few exceptions, the views of Bloom’s book broke down predictably into liberal and conservative camps—the former attacking him for his elitism and negative view of the 1960s, the latter endorsing his criticisms of equality and relativism and his calls for a return to a traditional liberal arts curriculum. Strangely enough, liberals like Nussbaum, Barber, and Rieff, who frequently criticize American culture on egalitarian grounds, attacked Bloom for his supposed anti-Americanism, which they said was reflected in his attacks on the young and American popular culture. They did not credit Bloom with the attempt to look at America “from the outside.” While it is true that Bloom was sufficiently sui generis as a thinker to defy attempts to pigeon-hole him into any contemporary political camp, reviewers were in little doubt as to the generally conservative drift of his book—and rightly so. There can be little doubt, after all, as to the political allegiances of an author who attacks relativism, diversity, egalitarianism, multiculturalism, affirmative action, feminism, the open curriculum, free sex, rock and roll music, the 1960s, and our general cultural obsession with the here and now. If Bloom was not a conservative, in the sense that he did not endorse market capitalism or evangelical religion, still in many areas he spoke like one.

This latter point represents a sign of the great change that has overtaken intellectual life in the United States over the last half-century. When Hutchins and Dewey debated the great books, they did so from within the perspective of liberal thought—Dewey appealing to democracy and experience in his rejection of the great books and Hutchins appealing to the ideals of liberal culture with its emphasis on rational principles as alternatives to revealed religion. In 1964, Richard Hofstadter was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in history for his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which criticized American culture in general and the university in particular for their practical emphasis and disdain for intellect. In that volume, Hofstadter singled out conservatives for the role they have played in lowering the sights of cultural life in the United States, with fundamentalist ministers, businessmen, and anti-communists assigned much of the blame. Following the upheavals of the 1960s, it could no longer be said that popular culture was shaped exclusively by conservative forces. Thus, by the time Bloom published his book, it was possible to launch a broad attack on America’s intellectual culture from a conservative point of view, while it was left to Hofstadter’s heirs to defend it from a liberal or democratic standpoint.

The editors of The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial on the meaning of the Bloom phenomenon, wondered whether his bestseller might make a permanent difference in American life or if “the United States will display its remarkable ability to absorb both serious ideas and silly fads without being changed by them.” The editors at that time were rather optimistic that Bloom had touched a nerve that might spur fresh thinking in the university. Now, from the perspective of two decades, we can see that trends have moved even further in the directions that Bloom criticized—which makes all the more urgent the efforts taking place on campuses across the country to restore programs in Western Civilization or in the great books so that students may at least be given a choice whether to embrace those trends or to pursue the kind of education in the classics that Bloom prescribed in The Closing of the American Mind.

In his biography of Samuel Johnson written fifty years after the poet’s death, Macaulay commented on the ironic change that had overcome Johnson’s literary reputation as a consequence of Boswell’s biography. Johnson, Macaulay said, assumed he would be remembered for his luminous writings, but the influence of Boswell’s biography had caused successive generations to remember him more for his manners and conversation. As Macaulay wrote, “The reputation of [Johnson’s] writings, which he expected to be immortal, is every day fading; while those peculiarities of manner and that careless table talk, the memory of which he probably thought would die with him, are likely to be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe.

In his novel Ravelstein, written in 2000 and based loosely on Bloom’s character, Saul Bellow writes about his protagonist:

Well, his friends, colleagues, pupils, and admirers no longer had to ante up in support of his luxurious habits. All of that was a thing of the past. He was now very rich. He had gone public with his ideas. He had written a book—difficult but popular—a spirited, intelligent, warlike book, and it had sold and was still selling in both hemispheres and on both sides of the equator. The thing had been done quickly but in real earnest: no cheap concessions, no popularizing, no mental monkey business, no apologetics, no patrician airs. His intellect had made a millionaire of him. It’s no small matter to become rich and famous by saying exactly what you think—to say it in your own words, without compromise.

This was indeed what Bloom had done—but in doing so he brought about a reversal in his reputation that was every bit as striking as that which had overcome Johnson’s. Following the publication of his book, his premature death, and the influence of Bellow’s biographical novel, the inspiring teacher with unusual style and manners, known through most of his career to but a small circle of dedicated students, will henceforth be remembered by a vast reading public as the author not simply of a popular book, but of a book that is gradually taking its place as an American classic.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 26 Number 3, on page 4
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