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Summary: Read this book and find out how uneducated you are
Review: I read this book and did a review for a college government class in the late 80's, right after it was published. Like other reviewers have said, this is an extremely difficult read, unless of course, your education included what Bloom argues has been left out now for a generation (or more).While I'm not sure the book's title explains the content of the book, Bloom goes through (sometimes painfully) the ideas of the great philosophers and explains how current higher education (which is void of these ideas) is not up to speed with the curriculum of the past. Specifically, that curriculum is one of the great books which Bloom is fond of. The old University of Chicago had it; now it can be found at schools like St. Johns College (not the University in New York) and St. Thomas Aquinas. But the bottom line is that you should read this book. If you struggle with the content (like I did) perhaps you need to get a great books reading list (at St. Johns web site) and go book by book through that. Only then can we be truly educated. Detractors of this book (and review) might suggest that the ideas are antiquated and doesn't take into account modern social issues. Well, if you think one is better off getting the ideas of radical feminests, multi-culturalist militants, etc., that's fine. But at least do what you would tell me to do: introduce yourself to new ideas. These are ideas that, for centuries, have been studied and discussed.
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Summary: Diagnosis of a Diseased Culture
Review: As a college student in the mid eighties I rarely felt at home with my fellow students. Bloom does an admirable job of explaining the cultural vacancy of the MTV generation, and isn't afraid to skewer sacred cows on the left and the right in his quest for answers. This book was embraced by a number of talking heads on the right, and I can't help but wonder if they read it all the way through. While Bloom correctly implicates the leftist ideology of 'liberation' in the erosion of intellectual standards and all around American aesthetic sensibility, he also points out the irony of a 'conservative' movement that holds as one of its heroes America's first divorced president. The only major flaw in his analysis is his underestimation of the responsibilty that mass media, "television", holds.
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Summary: Makes me realize how uneducated we all are
Review: I have always been a misanthrope, critical of the great unwashed masses with the same disparaging attitude as, say, Edmund Wilson. But now I have real fodder for my criticsm. Alan Bloom says we don't read and have lost our way culturally speaking. I checked up on what he says about education in Europe. He says the Italians still read Machievelli and Dante and the French read Rosseau, Descartes, and Pascal. But the dim-witted American's don't hardly even read the Bible anymore--this is the one book that we all use to read. So it gave us a common place from which to draw fables and other lessons to guide us in our lives. The discussion of the history of political philosophy from Aristotle to Hegel was difficult to understand. Not because it was poorly written--this stuff is just difficult to understand period. But having read it I understand somewhat that the German thinkers have postulated ideas that we all now take for granted. In other words, the thinkers in their ivory towers do really impact the course of our lives so we should pay attention. Anyway, Alan Bloom has made we want to go back and read Aristotle et al. In higschool English all I did was leer at the blond across the room. I realize now that I did have a poor education when compared with my Europeans counterparts. But you might argue that those folks over there no longer dominate the culture. That is true but I would prefer an aestethic culture to the television culture that is endemic to our McDonald's American culture. I for one will not let my mind close up with the rest. I read Ravelstein as well which is a must companion to "The Closing of the American Mind"
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Summary: Good book for the time, but now outdated
Review: Thankfully the attitudes and philosophies that Bloom outlined in this book are no longer of predominant concern in the beginning of the 21st century, full as it is with optimism and exuberance. The philosophical relativism and aversion for analytical thinking of the 20th century has give way to the enlightened pragmatism of the 21st. This book should be viewed now as more of a history book. It gives great insight into what it was like to work and teach in the universities in the later half of the 20th century. But now the marketplace, with its entrepunerial spirit and its need for highly technical innovation, have replaced the university as an educational arena; as one where individuals must not only be receptive or "open" to new ideas, but where such ideas take a concrete form in new products and technologies. The methodologies and discipline needed to make ideas work in today's marketplace are a complete antithesis to the moods and despair that Bloom outlines in his book.
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Summary: Still Relevant After All These Years
Review: While Professor Bloom's study is now over ten years old, the issues and subjects on which he holds forth are, as he shows, essentially timeless and transcend our views on past ages. While some have commented that Professor Bloom's analysis of texts is less than original, he himself states that he is an interloper in a great debate that has occurred over the centuries between philosophers. This is not a system a la John Rawls or a technical treatise, nor does Professor Bloom have an all-encompassing cure for our maladies. What he does do is put into focus our time and its complexities with clarity-this being harder to do than some would like to admit. Yes, the book is iconoclastic, and yes, it is controversial to some who become comfortable disregarding all the thinkers who came before them as stodgy, obsolete products that our wonderous social and natural sciences have eclipsed (or who simply cannot digest them for fear of having their conclusions challenged). Professor Bloom simply intends to shake up our lax sensibilities and show us that the debate on life (especially love and death, more greatly connected to politics than many care to admit) and its possibilities isn't quite as finished as we would have it. He is certainly not mainstream in our definition, but only is so because we have forgotten what it takes to long for anything in our self-satisfied stupor. The ideas raised in the book and the debates these bring about are what one used to go to the university for, before they became technical training grounds. Anyone not lying to themselves and having been through it should at the very least recognize this. Professor Bloom wonders what has happened to the longing in our souls (as did Nietzsche, but with different conclusions) that has driven mankind to greater and greater levels of civilization-and as one reads on, one realizes that his quest is our quest, even if we have turned our faces from it.
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Summary: School Stinks!
Review: Going to grade school or high school in America can be problematic; but going to college is positively awful. Allan Bloom contends that the university - whose roots are in a tradition based on reason - has been undermined by its very faculty and students, who subscribe to a tradition based on feeling (ie. "if it feels good, do it"). Professor Bloom sets up the argument as follows: reason derives from the Greeks (Plato, Socrates and Aristotle); it was used by Locke and the Founders to promote republican ideals and thus becomes the foundation of our society. The University's role is to preserve the continuity of thought which brought about those ideals and, in so doing, enrich students' lives and lead them to think independently. But the University has strayed from this role in order to tackle issues such as justice and equality, and in so doing, has embraced a line of thought derived from Marx and Nietzsche, which is directly opposed to the principles on which the republic and the University was founded. This book takes a long time to read and an even longer time to fully understand. The argument is solid, bur problematic in places (if you're not a Straussian, you'll see why immediately). That's why, if you're short on time, just read part three, where Bloom covers the sixties and his personal experience with what has changed in the University since he started teaching. You'll be outraged and enlightened, and want to read the rest of the book.
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Summary: Allan Bloom, Confessor and Writer
Review: In the late 1970's when diversified conglomerates were all the rage, a particularly high flying and short-lived one acquired a publisher of children's books, and, seeking to maximize its revenues, rushed a children's encyclopedia to press. Since time to market was an overriding concern, some of the smaller niceties one expects from a reference work were neglected, most notably accuracy and coherence. The entry for "Gordian Knot", to pick an example at random, stated the knot took its name from Charles George Gordon, who tied it during the siege of Khartoum in 1885. But the company soon collapsed, and few copies were actually sold. How then to explain the success of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind? Whether it is praised or damned, the depth of Bloom's scholarship is always a given. Yet The Closing of the American Mind contains more than a few howlers that should be obvious to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the authors and works Bloom cites. The first part of the book, entitled 'Students' is an absurdly superficial piece of cultural criticism cum sociology whose purpose seems to be to lull reactionary philistines into believing that the author is a good egg, one of them, who wrings his hands at moral relativism, dislikes rock music, and mourns the passing of amour propre. In fact, he is anything, but that, and he shows his true stripes in the second part of the book. But at the beginning, he is stultifying, traditional, and commits no egregious sins--until he tries to actually engage one of the great texts he so promotes, in this case, Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Here is Professor Bloom's gloss on Emma Bovary at the ball given by the Marquis d'Andervilliers, where Emma is enthralled by the superannuated Duc de Laverdiere, whose bloodshot eyes and poor motor control ("...letting drops of gravy trickle from his mouth") suggest a stroke: -------------------- Others see only a repulsive old man, but Emma sees the ancien regime. Her vision is truer, for there once really was an ancien regime, and in it there were great lovers. The constricted present cannot teach it to us without the longing that makes us dissatisfied with the present. (p. 135, hardcover edition) -------------------- Emma Bovary, an untimely woman, longing for the ancien regime to which she truly belongs? Perhaps a corrective opinion from an untimely man with impeccable credentials as such is in order. The objects of his ire are Wagner's heroines, but Emma does appear, and in a quite different light: -------------------- "But the _content_ of the Wagnerian texts! their mythic content! their eternal content!"--Question: how can we test this content, this eternal content?--The chemist replies: translate Wagner into reality, into the modern--let us be even crueler--into the bourgeois! What becomes of Wagner then?--Among ourselves, I have tried it. Nothing is more entertaining, nothing to be recommended more highly for walks, than retelling Wagner in _more youthful_ proportions...What surprises one encounters in the process! Would you believe it? All of Wagner's heroines, without exception, as soon as they are stripped of their heroic skin, become almost indistinguishable from Madame Bovary!...All of them entirely modern, entirely _metropolitan_ problems. Don't doubt it. (Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, sec. 9, Kaufmann translation) -------------------- Don't doubt it, indeed: Bloom would have us think he is profound but he is not even superficial--merely wrong, and not only about Flaubert, but almost everything in this silly, overrated book . All of philosophy from Plato to the present day turns to Heidegger at his touch and a superficial version of Heidegger at that. The value relativism which plagues our society--but which, as Bloom confesses in the second part, is at the bottom of all philosophy (all philosophy being his Cliff-notes version of Heidegger)--is only the product of Nietzsche's and Max Weber's (Heidegger's) influence, against which the only cure is Plato (Heidegger by other means). It is in the second part and third parts of the book, the former lugubriously titled "Nihilism, American Style," the latter, portentously, "The University" that these and other absurd theses are put forth. For The Closing of the American Mind isn't a polemic against academic fads or moral lassitude; it is the confession of its author's inability to think with the works and authors he praises, an autobiography of a man looking into the abyss, and, finding it so much like the self he thinks so highly of, falling in love with nothing. For Bloom, unlike Nietzsche, delights in the void, and is ever anxious to find nothing where anyone else might find accident at least: -------------------- The one writer who does to appeal at all to Americans...is Louis-Ferdinand Celine...Robinson, the hero he admires in _Journey to the End of the Night is an utterly selfish liar, cheat, murderer for pay. Why does Ferdinand admire him? Partly for his honesty, but mostly because he allows himself to be shot and killed by his girlfriend rather than tell her he loves her. He believes in something... (p. 239, hardcover edition) -------------------- How many errors can be packed into such a brief passage? Celine certainly appealed to Americans, unless the Beats and Jim Morrison weren't American; admiration is certainly the wrong word for Ferdinand Bardamu's feelings towards Robinson, even if Bardamu does keep watch as Robinson dies; Robinson is a murderer, but not for pay, and one of Journey to the End of the Nights more sinister pleasures is the reader's delight in Madame Henrouille's death; and Robinson's fatal shooting at his lover's hands is not a deliberate embrace of fate, but instead what another novelist of a similar, special breed embraced as "the unswerving punctuality of chance." But more interesting is what can be known of the man from the errors he makes, and Bloom is nothing if not consistent in his errors. At the close of the play Inherit the Wind, E.J. Hornbeck upbraids Henry Drummond as "the atheist who believes in God"; what is Bloom but a philosopher who values belief over reason, and who values belief because reason only shows us the abyss? -------------------- (Prophets, kinds, and poets) are clearly benefactors of mankind at large...Philosophy does no such good. All to the contrary, it is austere and somewhat sad because it takes away many of men's fondest hopes. It certainly does nothing to console men in their sorrows and their unending vulnerability. Instead, it points to their unprotectedness and nature's indifference to their individual fates (p. 273) -------------------- and again, less than five pages away: -------------------- Very few men are capable of coming to terms with their own extinction. It is not so such stupidity that closes men to philosophy but love of their own, particularly love of their own lives, but also love of their own children, and their own cities. It is the hardest task of all to face the lack of cosmic support for what we care about. (p. 277) -------------------- So for Bloom, philosophy is a charnel house, and the bleached bones of those who willed themselves to believe in the face of the abyss are beautiful relics: Socrates, because he believed in law; Emma Bovary, because she believed in love; Celine's Robinson, because he believed in...well, something. After saying this, already I hear Bloom's defenders rising up and crying, "But he was a man of real conviction!" and their shouts are almost loud enough to drown out, a softer, more reasonable, yet charmingly malicious whisper: "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of the truth than lies." And those with ears to still hear Nietzsche's enchanting but deadly aphorism against the convinced know that reason has music of its own, and the death of metaphysics--what Bloom calls "lack of cosmic support"--does not entail a collapse of all experience and thought into being-towards-death. As Nietzsche knew, what followed from the end of metaphysics and religion was an emphasis on life and becoming, not their opposites. At least the publishers of the children's encyclopedia had greed and carelessness to explain their errors. What could Bloom's be? He decries his student's value relativism, but on his account, since philosophy shows there is no metaphysical foundation for values, relativism is the logical consequence. He inveighs against commitment for its own sake in his attacks on the student radicals of the sixties, but whenever he finds it in an approved part of the Western canon, he can't praise it highly enough. He mocks the au courant French thinkers, but pens an encomium to Alexandre Kojeve, the charlatan at whose feet both Bloom and those he ridicules studied. Could it be that, in his inability to write a work of real scholarship, his lack of notoriety among youngsters who crave the same nonsense he serves up but only when it's stamped "PAR AVION", and his reduction
Rating: 
Summary: Who needs attacks from the radical left?
Review: I understand where the conservatives are coming from. I, too, deplore the postmodern notion that all ideas are equal and that no expression is more worthy of study or esteem than any other. But that's not all that Bloom's attacking; there are some vicious, reactionary streaks here that make me wonder how the conservative intelligentsia could ever have taken this book as seriously as they did. Bloom asserts, for example, that rape is wrong "because modesty and purity should be protected, not because women have rights."(It's not an exact quote, but a close paraphrase -- email me for citations if you really want; I don't have my copy at hand.) Bloom is as obsessed with sex as the most radical gender feminists -- and in doing so, he presents the left with a target too tempting to miss. In places, Bloom starts propounding, then defending, the notion that "enlightened", Platonic, ideal education *relies* on the exclusion of women and their relegation to subordinate roles, including prostitution. This is the same point that Andrea Dworkin and Mary Daly would be proving -- that Western culture rests on the oppression of women. Except that Bloom's supposed to be on the side of conservatism. With friends like this, who needs enemies?
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Summary: Bloom stands alone, outside of modern thought
Review: Allan Bloom's work will most likely evoke feelings of detest and discomfort from the reader, as he, in typical iconoclastic form, unrelentlessly attacks modern america, thought, and metaphysical mindlessness. Bloom stands in the vein of Kierkegaard; his melancholic discussion of the dissipated need for authority and cultural direction places him among the great moral thinkers, who have ardently attempted to place the individual within the context of a community -- while he searches for an eternal teleology and heirarchy. Bloom, unfortunatley, will appear excessively erudite to most of his readers; the reader, trapped within the fetters of modern scepticism and over-analytic thought, will be unable to accurately assess his place WITHIN Bloom's criticism. Is the book void of relevance? Certainly not. Consider this text a barometer of both heart and conviction. There is anything but a paucity of implications, and this book provokes an insurgency of conversation about the permanent possibilities of man and his role within the eternal.
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Summary: Not terribly "objective"- but maybe that was the point.
Review: Alan Bloom articlated masterfully the incohate rumblings of my heart and mind. One reviewer accuses him of using 'weighty words" to elicit emotional responses. Yes, it's true Bloom repeatedly talks of soul, heart and moral without defining them, but it's tragic if one cannot undestand their meaning intuitively, from context. His brave critique of the 'liberal' and pop culture hit home even to someone who'd never set foot on US soil. Then again, maybe it was because I was privvy to two civilizations that I found so much meaning in what his words. Yes, he overgeneralizes, and yes, he fails to see the good that is born even of reactionary pop culture, but the kernel of his thesis is as true and as important as any political philosophy I have read. I found the book particularly helpful, as someone on the border of two civilizations, one blindly accelerating toward the other.
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