The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students

Allan Bloom (1930-1992) taught philosophy and literature at Cornell University, Yale University, the University of Toronto, Tel Aviv University, École Normale Supérieure of Paris, and the University of Chicago during an academic career of nearly 40 years. At the age of 15, he entered a humanities program for gifted students at the University of Chicago, receiving a bachelor’s degree at 18. Bloom pursued post-graduate studies at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, writing a doctoral thesis on the Greek philosopher and rhetorician Isocrates. His education instilled a passion for the classics and the “Great Books” tradition taught at the University of Chicago and other American liberal arts institutions in the middle of the 20th century; the purpose of such education was the Socratic goal of self-knowledge.

During his post-doctoral work, Bloom studied in Paris with the celebrated Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève, whose seminars on Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind influenced many of the structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers of the succeeding era. Looking back at his early academic career in The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom remarks that he entered the university when the new language of value relativism, derived from German philosophy and transmitted to America largely by intellectuals fleeing the Nazi regime, was beginning to be assimilated into American academic circles. He was astonished to see the widespread dissemination of the Nietzschean vocabulary and concepts over the next few decades throughout American society, from the elite universities to the working man in the street, and, in particular, the peculiar Americanization of German pathos and anxiety as these became popularized in society. Bloom notes that his book was written to explain how the “self-understanding of hippies, yippies, yuppies, panthers, prelates and presidents has unconsciously been formed by German thought of a half-century earlier” (147). We must know this history, Bloom argues, “in order to understand ourselves and provide ourselves with real alternatives [to the] most ambiguous intellectual, moral, and political consequences” of value relativism (147).

In addition to The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom published an acclaimed translation and interpretation of Plato’s Republic (1968), a translation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile (1979), and a collection of essays on intellectual figures, Giants and Dwarfs: Essays 1960-1990 (1991), among other works.