Editing Allan Bloom (section)

===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" />}}