Editing Allan Bloom (section)

==''The Closing of the American Mind''==
{{main|The Closing of the American Mind}}''The Closing of the American Mind'' was published in 1987, five years after Bloom published an essay in ''[[National Review]]'' about the failure of universities to serve the needs of students.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.nationalreview.com/2006/09/our-listless-universities-williumrex/|title=Our Listless Universities|accessdate=September 1, 2021|date=September 25, 2006|publisher=[[National Review]]|last=Bloom|first=Allan|archive-date=September 1, 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210901163945/https://www.nationalreview.com/2006/09/our-listless-universities-williumrex/|url-status=live}}</ref> With the encouragement of [[Saul Bellow]], his colleague at the [[University of Chicago]], he expanded his thoughts into a book "about a life I've led",<ref name=atlas/> that critically reflected on the current state of higher education in American universities. His friends and admirers imagined the work would be a modest success, as did Bloom, who recognized his publisher's modest advance to complete the project as a lack of sales confidence. Yet on the momentum of strong initial reviews, including one by [[Christopher Lehmann-Haupt]] in ''[[The New York Times]]'' and an op-ed piece by syndicated conservative commentator [[George Will]] titled, "A How-To Book for the Independent",<ref>{{cite news|last=Will|first=George F.|date=July 30, 1987|title=A How-To Book for the Independent|newspaper=The Washington Post|url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1987/07/30/a-how-to-book-for-the-independent/5dd0f510-81cb-4d4b-a0ba-8fe599b1d41f/|access-date=August 8, 2020|archive-date=May 2, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200502010721/https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1987/07/30/a-how-to-book-for-the-independent/5dd0f510-81cb-4d4b-a0ba-8fe599b1d41f/|url-status=live}}</ref> it became an unexpected best seller, eventually selling close to half a million copies in hardback and remaining at number one on ''[[The New York Times Bestseller List]]'' for nonfiction for four months.<ref>Goldstein, William. "The Story behind the Best Seller: Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind." Publishers Weekly. July 3, 1987.</ref>

The book is a critique of the contemporary university and how Bloom sees it as failing its students. In it, Bloom criticizes the modern movements in philosophy and the humanities.  Philosophy professors involved in [[ordinary language philosophy|ordinary language analysis]] or [[logical positivism]] disregard important "humanizing" ethical and political issues and fail to pique the interest of students.<ref>Bloom, Allan. 1987. ''The Closing of the American Mind'', p. 278. New York: Simon & Schuster.</ref>  Literature professors involved in [[deconstructionism]] promote irrationalism and skepticism of standards of truth and thereby dissolve the moral imperatives which are communicated through genuine philosophy and which elevate and broaden the intellects of those who engage with them.<ref>Bloom, Allan. 1987. ''The Closing of the American Mind'', p. 279. New York: Simon & Schuster</ref>  To a great extent, Bloom's criticism revolves around his belief that the "great books" of [[Western thought]] have been devalued as a source of wisdom. Bloom's critique extends beyond the university to speak to the general crisis in American society. ''The Closing of the American Mind'' draws analogies between the [[United States]] and the [[Weimar Republic]]. The modern liberal philosophy, he says, enshrined in the [[Age of Enlightenment|Enlightenment]] thought of [[John Locke]]—that a just society could be based upon self-interest alone, coupled by the emergence of relativism in American thought—had led to this crisis.

For Bloom, this created a void in the souls of Americans, into which demagogic radicals as exemplified by 1960s student leaders could leap. (In the same fashion, Bloom suggests, the [[Nazism|Nazi]] brownshirts once filled the gap created in German society by the Weimar Republic.) In the second instance, he argued, the higher calling of philosophy and reason understood as [[freedom of thought]], had been eclipsed by a pseudo-philosophy, or an [[ideology]] of thought. [[Relativism]] was one feature of modern liberal philosophy that had subverted the Platonic–Socratic teaching.

Bloom's critique of contemporary [[social movements]] at play in universities or society at large is derived from his classical and philosophical orientation. For Bloom, the failure of contemporary [[liberal education]] leads to the sterile social and sexual habits of modern students, and to their inability to fashion a life for themselves beyond the mundane offerings touted as success. Bloom argues that commercial pursuits had become more highly valued than love, the philosophic quest for truth, or the civilized pursuits of honor and glory.

In one chapter, in a style of analysis which resembles the work of the [[Frankfurt School]], he examined the philosophical effects of [[popular music]] on the lives of students, placing pop music, or as it is generically branded by record companies "rock music", in a historical context from Plato's ''Republic'' to [[Nietzsche]]'s [[Dionysian]] longings. Treating it for the first time{{citation needed|date=September 2019}} with genuine philosophical interest, he gave fresh attention to the industry, its target-marketing to children and teenagers, its top performers, its place in the late-capitalist bourgeois economy, and its pretensions to [[Liberty|liberation]] and [[Freedom (political)|freedom]].  Some critics, including the popular musician [[Frank Zappa]], argued that Bloom's view of pop music was based on the same ideas that critics of pop "in 1950s held, ideas about the preservation of 'traditional' white American society".<ref>{{Citation|last=Zappa |first=Frank |title=On Junk Food for the Soul |journal=New Perspective's Quarterly |year=1987 |url=http://home.online.no/~corneliu/npq.htm |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061208153310/http://home.online.no/~corneliu/npq.htm |archive-date=2006-12-08 }}</ref>

Bloom, informed by [[Socrates]], [[Aristotle]], [[Rousseau]], and Nietzsche, explores music's power over the human soul. He cites the [[soldier]] who throws himself into battle at the urging of the [[Drum and bugle corps (modern)|drum corps]], the pious believer who prays under the spell of a religious [[hymn]], the lover seduced by the romantic [[guitar]], and points towards the tradition of philosophy that treated musical education as paramount. He names the pop-star [[Mick Jagger]] as a cardinal representative of the hypocrisy and erotic sterility of pop-rock music. Pop music employs sexual images and language to enthrall the young and to persuade them that their petty rebelliousness is authentic politics, when, in fact, they are being controlled by the money-managers whom successful performers like Jagger quietly serve. Bloom claims that Jagger is a [[hero]] to many university students who envy his fame and wealth but are really just bored by the lack of options before them.<ref>Bloom, Allan. "Music" pp. 68–81. ''The Closing of the American Mind''. New York: Simon & Schuster.</ref>

Along with the absence of literature in the lives of the young and their sexual but often unerotic relationships, the first part of ''The Closing'' tries to explain the current state of education in a fashion beyond the purview of an [[economist]] or psychiatrist—contemporary culture's leading umpires.

===Critical reception===
The book met with early critical acclaim including positive reviews in ''The New York Times'', ''[[Time (magazine)|Time]]'', ''[[Newsweek]]'', the ''[[Chronicle of Higher Education]]'', and ''[[The Washington Post]]''. A second round of reviews was generally more critical.<ref name="weeklystandard.com">{{citation | last = Ferguson | first = Andrew | title = The Book That Drove Them Crazy | journal = The Weekly Standard | date = April 9, 2012 | access-date = May 19, 2013 | url = http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/book-drove-them-crazy_634905.html?nopager=1 | archive-date = August 20, 2013 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20130820215932/http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/book-drove-them-crazy_634905.html?nopager=1 | url-status = dead }}</ref>

[[Martha Nussbaum]], a [[political philosopher]] and classicist, and [[Harry V. Jaffa]], a conservative, argued that Bloom was deeply influenced by 19th-century European philosophers, especially [[Friedrich Nietzsche]].  Nussbaum wrote that, for Bloom, Nietzsche had been disastrously influential in modern American thought.<ref name = "Nussbaum">Nussbaum, Martha. [https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1987/11/05/undemocratic-vistas/ "Undemocratic Vistas"], ''The New York Review of Books'' 34, no. 17 (November 5, 1987).</ref>

In a passage of her review, Nussbaum wrote: "How good a philosopher, then, is Allan Bloom? The answer is, we cannot say, and we are given no reason to think him one at all."<ref name="Nussbaum" /> The criticism of the book was continued by impassioned reviews of political theorist [[Benjamin Barber]] in ''[[Harper's]]''; [[Alexander Nehamas]], a scholar of ancient philosophy and Nietzsche, in the ''[[London Review of Books]]''; and [[David Rieff]] in ''[[The Times Literary Supplement]]''.<ref name="NYT2">{{cite news | last = Atlas | first = James | title = Chicago's grumpy guru | work = The New York Times | access-date = 2008-05-08 | date = 1988-01-03 | url = https://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/03/magazine/chicago-s-grumpy-guru.html?pagewanted=all | archive-date = 2018-07-27 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20180727125943/https://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/03/magazine/chicago-s-grumpy-guru.html?pagewanted=all | url-status = live }}</ref> David Rieff called Bloom "an academic version of [[Oliver North]]: vengeful, reactionary, antidemocratic". The book, he said, was one that "decent people would be ashamed of having written." The tone of these reviews led [[James Atlas]] in ''[[The New York Times Magazine]]'' to conclude that  "the responses to Bloom's book have been charged with a hostility that transcends the usual mean-spiritedness of reviewers."<ref name=atlas/> One reviewer, the philosopher [[Robert Paul Wolff]] writing in the scholarly journal ''[[Academe]]'', satirically reviewed the book as a work of fiction: he claimed that Bloom's friend Saul Bellow, who had written the introduction, had written a "coruscatingly funny novel in the form of a pettish, bookish, grumpy, reactionary complaint against the last two decades", with the "author" a "mid-fiftyish professor at the University of Chicago, to whom Bellow gives the evocative name 'Bloom.'"<ref name = "NYT2" /> Yet some reviewers tempered that criticism with an admission of the merits of Bloom's writing: for example, Fred Matthews, an historian from [[York University]], began an otherwise relatively critical review in the ''[[American Historical Review]]'' with the statement that Bloom's "probes into popular culture" were "both amusing and perceptive" and that the work was "a rich, often brilliant, and disturbing book".<ref>{{Citation | journal = The American Historical Review | author = Matthews, Fred | title = The Attack on 'Historicism': Allan Bloom's Indictment of Contemporary American Historical Scholarship  |volume = 95 | number = 2 |date=Apr 1990 | pages = 429–447 | doi=10.2307/2163758| jstor = 2163758 }}</ref>

Some critics embraced Bloom's argument. [[Norman Podhoretz]] noted that the closed-mindedness in the title refers to the paradoxical consequence of the academic "open mind" found in liberal political thought—namely "the narrow and intolerant dogmatism" that dismisses any attempt, by Plato or the Hebrew Bible for example, to provide a rational basis for moral judgments. Podhoretz continued, "Bloom goes on to charge liberalism with vulgarizing the noble ideals of freedom and equality, and he offers brilliantly acerbic descriptions of the sexual revolution and the feminist movement, which he sees as products of this process of vulgarization."<ref>Podhoretz, Norman. "Conservative Book Becomes a Best-Seller." ''Human Events'' July 11, 1987: 5–6.</ref>

In a 1989 article, Ann Clark Fehn discusses the critical reception of the book, noting that it had eclipsed other titles that year dealing with higher education—[[Ernest Boyer]]'s ''College'' and [[E. D. Hirsch]]'s ''Cultural Literacy''—and quoting ''Publishers Weekly'' which had described Bloom's book as a "best-seller made by reviews."<ref>{{Citation | author = Fehn, Ann Clark | journal = The German Quarterly | volume = 62 | number = 3 | title = Focus: Literature since 1945 |date=Summer 1989}}</ref>

[[Camille Paglia]], a decade after the book's release, called it "the first shot in the culture wars".<ref>{{cite news
|url=http://www.salon.com/july97/columnists/paglia2970722.html
|title=Ask Camille
|date=July 1997
|work=[[Salon.com]]
|access-date=2008-05-09
|last=Paglia |first=Camille
| archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20080411071450/http://www.salon.com/july97/columnists/paglia2970722.html| archive-date= 11 April 2008}}</ref> An early ''New York Times'' review by [[Roger Kimball]] called the book "an unparalleled reflection on the whole question of what it means to be a student in today's intellectual and moral climate."<ref>{{Citation | newspaper = The New York Times | author = Kimball, Roger | title = The Groves of Ignorance | access-date = May 19, 2013 | date = April 5, 1987 | url = https://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/05/books/the-groves-of-ignorance.html | archive-date = November 13, 2013 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20131113004348/http://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/05/books/the-groves-of-ignorance.html | url-status = live }}</ref>

In an article on Bloom for ''[[The New Republic]]'' in 2000, conservative commentator [[Andrew Sullivan]] wrote that "reading [Bloom] ... one feels he has not merely understood Nietzsche; he has imbibed him. But this awareness of the abyss moved Bloom, unlike Nietzsche, toward love and political conservatism. Love, whether for the truth or for another, because it can raise us out of the abyss. Political conservatism because it best restrains the chaos that modernity threatens".<ref name = "Longing 2000">''Longing: Remembering Allan Bloom'', The New Republic, April 17, 2000.</ref> More recently, Bloom's book also received a more positive re-assessment from [[Jim Sleeper]] in ''[[The New York Times]]''.<ref name="sleeper"/>

[[Keith Botsford]] would later argue:

{{blockquote|Bloom was writing vigorous polemic at a time when America sought to ensure that the intellect could not (and would not be allowed to) rise above gender and race; the mind was to be defined by its melanin and genetic content, and by what lay between our legs; or, in the academe, the canon was to be re-read and re-defined so that it fitted the latest theorem of gender or race. Bloom would have none of it. He loved people who were first-rate with real love ...  Many profited. Others, mainly dwellers in the bas fonds of 'social studies', or those who seek to politicise culture, resented and envied.<ref name = "independent.co.uk" />}}