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The Closing of the American Mind

Allan Bloom

Straussian conservatism

The surprise bestseller that opened the modern culture war over the university. Bloom argues that American higher education, in the name of openness and tolerance, has embraced a corrosive relativism that denies the existence of truth and so closes students' minds to the great questions. A passionate, learned defense of the classical liberal-arts ideal and a foundational text of the intellectual right's critique of the academy.

About the author

American philosopher and classicist (1930–1992), a translator of Plato and Rousseau and a professor at the University of Chicago. A student of Leo Strauss, Bloom became famous beyond the academy with The Closing of the American Mind, a defense of classical education that made him a central figure of the intellectual right.

Synopsis

Bloom contends that the dogma of relativism — the belief that all values are equally valid and that truth is merely 'true for you' — has hollowed out American education and the souls of the young. Tracing this to a misreading of European philosophy (Nietzsche, Weber) and to the upheavals of the 1960s, he calls for a return to the great books and the Socratic pursuit of truth as the heart of a real education.

Core passage idea

Paraphrase · Modern copyrighted work

Bloom argues that the one belief almost every student arrives with — that truth is relative — is not a moral virtue but the closing of the mind, foreclosing the very questions a liberal education exists to open.

Bloom inverts the self-image of the open, tolerant campus: what passes for open-mindedness, he argues, is a relativism that makes serious inquiry into the good impossible. The provocation made the book a manifesto for conservative critics of the modern university.

To avoid a bubble

Pair with defenders of the curricular changes Bloom attacks — those who argue the traditional canon excluded women, minorities, and non-Western thought — and with critics who find his nostalgia elitist and his account of student culture a caricature.

Reading note

Erudite and combative; the opening chapters on relativism and the closing sections on the university are the core. Read it against defenders of curricular reform to see the whole canon-wars debate in stereo.

Best paired with

Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History; Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality.

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