The man who took the stage looked like he’d stepped out of the darkness and into some great light.In part, that’s a physical description of Allan Bloom one evening in the winter of 1988 at Harvard. No sooner had Harvey Mansfield, a professor of government and the event’s moderator, concluded his introduction than Bloom awkwardly squeezed his way past Mansfield, seized the podium with both hands, as if to regain his balance, stood there for a moment with his shoulders hunched, fumbled for his glasses, peered at his papers, squinted, and, finally, lifted his eyes to the audience and delivered his first words. “Fellow elitists,” he greeted a room packed with students and faculty.They hooted and applauded wildly.
It was just the sort of performance they had come that evening hoping to see. There were other celebrated intellectuals on the panel, but none was more notorious than the bald, bespectacled University of Chicago professor who, less than a year before, had written “The Closing of the American Mind,” in which he argued that contemporary universities were failing students by plying them with relativism and historicism rather than feeding them the true manna of civilization, the Great Books. He had published it with difficulty. It took a promise of an introduction by Bloom’s friend Saul Bellow to convince Simon and Schuster to pay even a humble advance of $10,000 to an academic known primarily as a translator of Plato and Rousseau.
But obscurity never bothered Allan Bloom. “Bloom,” Mansfield said in his wry introduction, “has always behaved as if he were famous. And now that he actually is famous, you’ll see that fame hasn’t spoiled him a bit.” It hasn’t. He inhabited the Harvard stage the same way he had his own seminars: gentle and jovial, but so intense that, as one of his former students recalled, “there were moments of tension in the seminar when he would smoke the lighted end of a cigarette.” A minute or two after beginning his talk, the intensity and the humor were both on full display. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Allan Bloom at Harvard, a Lesson Reverberating through the Years
Chris Augusta
Marrion West, June 28, 2000
Fellow elitists,” thus began philosopher Allan Bloom’s lecture before a packed audience at Harvard University in 1988. The audience hooted and applauded. Bloom’s opening salutation was a tongue-in-cheek evocation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s own ironic opening of “fellow immigrants” before The Daughters of the American Revolution in 1938. (1) Bloom, the bald, bespectacled professor, seemed to be enjoying himself.
The publication of his “The Closing of the American Mind” the previous year had struck a cultural nerve. A highly respected but obscure academic, Bloom never expected his book to create a cultural firestorm. Bloom’s lecture touched on ideas evoked in the book that concerned the emergence and dominance of certain ideas in academia. The most elite people on the planet were now all committed to an egalitarian, anti-elitism. The new true way was to recognize that there was no one true way.
I suspect “The Closing of the American Mind” may well be one of the most bought but least read books of our time.
Living in the area, I happened to attend Bloom’s Harvard lecture. Bloom’s speech was indeed colorful and, at times, even mocked his audience. But I must admit that most of it went over my head. Intrigued by the controversy Bloom had generated, I had begun reading “The Closing of the American Mind.” I found the book provocative but also daunting. Much of the book was not simply a description of the current state of higher education but, rather, an intellectual history of how we got where we were. Only after spending years reading many classic thinkers did I feel comfortable following Bloom’s arguments.
“The Closing of the American Mind” would sell hundreds of thousands of copies. It seemed most well-educated people and most academics, particularly in the humanities, felt a need to be familiar with the book. Over the years in my interactions with such people, Bloom’s name would come up often. He was almost always referred to as a “conservative,” which was interesting as this was a label he specifically rejected. Over time, I began to realize that few people actually had read the book. I suspect “The Closing of the American Mind” may well be one of the most bought but least read books of our time. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Allan Bloom’s Guide to College
Matt Feeney
New Yorker, Apr. 12, 2012
For the conservative of 1987, Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” struck many deserving targets—rock music, sexual promiscuity, the sixties, Black Power, divorce, feminism. Its most distinctive villain, though, was more abstract, a word: “relativism.” This term was already in the air, but Bloom’s huge best-seller both popularized it and gave it philosophical ballast as an accusation, though his own lament was more narrow.
Relativism, he said, makes students conformist and incurious. Their supposed open-mindedness closes their actual minds.
Conservatives, though, turned the accusation onto a fatter academic target: postmodern professors, whose domination of literary studies was changing the very language of academic conversation. Conservatives began to closely monitor this conversation, which proved to be a deeply rewarding exercise, because some professor was always uttering an even weirder version of Derrida’s “There is nothing outside the text,” and because the right likes its partisan fights to implicate great ideas. Even Sean Hannity is defending Western culture. No term draws a tighter link between demotic political anger and professorial chin-stroking than “relativism.” Today’s conservatives, who are keen to portray partisan conflict as a cultural struggle, use it more indiscriminately than ever. For example, David Horowitz attacked President Obama for conceding, in 2009 remarks on American exceptionalism, that other countries take themselves to be exceptional, too. “This,” Horowitz thundered, “is moral relativism of the worst kind.”
It’s ironic that this terminology would be used to inject a rigid, pseudo-philosophical moralism into all areas of political dispute, because Bloom’s lament about relativism belongs to a supple, skeptical, and hedonistic vision of university life, which is itself based on a psychology of sex and culture taken straight from Nietzsche. For Bloom and other Straussians (followers of the German-émigré philosopher Leo Strauss), the ideal student is morally earnest and sexually naive, a young man brimming with unspent eros, which the teacher can help him sublimate—that is, transform into an erotic attraction to the sublime objects of philosophical reflection. Bloom dangles the promise of an arousing and dangerous philosophical quest, which will take the student far from his (and his friends’ and parents’ and other professors’) settled opinions about what is good and decent. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Re-Encountering Allan Bloom
Joseph Horowitz
The American Interest, Jan. 19, 2020
Looking for another book not long ago, I stumbled upon Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind.” In 1987, it was a national sensation, a trigger-point for debate over the legacy of the sixties and its “counter-culture.”
Subtitled “How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students,” Bloom’s salvo attacked from the right. It was less a polemic than a closely reasoned argument, fortified with lofty philosophic learning and grounded classroom experience. A New York Timesreviewer wrote that “it commands one’s attention and concentrates one’s mind more effectively than any other book I can think of in the past five years.” The Chicago Tribunesaid “it may be the most important work of its kind by an American since World War II.” Saul Bellow, in a gripping introduction, summarized: “It makes an important statement and deserves careful study. What it provides, whether or not one agrees with its conclusions, is an indispensable guide for discussion . . . a completely articulated, historically accurate summary, a trustworthy resume of the development of the higher mental life in the democratic U.S.A.”
My copy of “The Closing of the American Mind” is a paperback with scant evidence of close scrutiny. Some three dozen pages are heavily marked with dismissive marginalia. Bloom took aim at my own generation (I was born in 1948), and its political complexion was anathema.
But times have changed and so have I. Re-opening “The Closing of the American Mind,” I discovered that Allan Bloom was prophetic. Even Bellow’s introduction reads as if it were written yesterday: “The heat of dispute between Left and Right has grown so fierce in the last decade that the habits of civilized discourse have suffered a scorching. Antagonists seem no longer to listen to one another.”
Taking aim at “cultural relativism,” Bloom attacked what we now call identity politics and a linked discourse stigmatizing “cultural appropriation”—a discourse that, to many my age, seems more impoverishing than nourishing for the “souls of today’s students.” For Bloom, a mounting failure to appreciate Western traditions of culture and thought was eviscerating the academy. He deplored a tendency to ecumenically equalize all cultural endeavors, old and new, East and West. In effect, he foresaw today’s all-purpose denunciations of the “misappropriation” of victimized cultures. As for “identity politics,” the term isn’t there, but the concept is, extrapolated from an exaggerated regard for the “other” and otherness—for Bloom, a force fracturing democratic community. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Allan Bloom, or Figment of Saul Bellow’s Imagination?
Andrew Hartman
Society for U.S. Intellectual History, Feb. 28, 2012
I finally got around to reading Saul Bellow’s novel Ravelstein, a memoir-style rendering of his friendship with Allan Bloom, the conservative University of Chicago philosopher who specialized in Plato and Rousseau. I’ve been meaning to read it for some time, since Bloom figures large in my research. Bloom, as you all know, was the author of the 1987 mega-hit, The Closing of the American Mind, which signified the culture wars unlike any other book, a surprising event given that the it’s no easy slog. A book with a 70-page chapter titled “From Socrates’ Apology to Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede” is hardly designed to be a bestseller.
One of the recurring themes I’ve come across during my Bloom research is his larger-than-life-ness. Although he was relatively obscure until Closing made him famous, and rich, Bloom’s students were apparently devoted to him with apostle-like fervor. In other words, building off of recent posts from Ben and L.D., he embodied ideas, much like his mentor Leo Strauss. Or, put another way: like pre-mechanically reproduced art, as Walter Benjamin had it, Bloom emitted aura.
But reading Ravelstein compels me to ask: Is the larger-than-life Bloom familiar to us as Bloom? Or as Ravelstein? Where does the real Bloom end and Bellow’s fictional Bloom begin? Of course, given that Bloom was known to be larger than life well before the publication of Bellow’s paean to Bloom’s eclectic form of genius—Ravelstein was published in 2000, 13 years after Closing, and eight years after Bloom died of AIDS—this might seem like a silly question. But Bellow contributed to Bloom’s lore well before he wrote Ravelstein. Bellow wrote the foreword to Closing, where his first sentence told of how “Professor Bloom has his own way of doing things.” Namely, rather than stoop to engage his contemporaries, “Bloom places himself in a larger community, invoking Socrates, Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau and Kant…”
I’m far from the first person to playfully suggest that the Bloom known to posterity is, in fact, a figment of Saul Bellow’s imagination. As I learned in reading a fantastically scathing review of Ravelstein written by Christopher Hitchens, Robert Paul Wolff, a professor of philosophy at Amherst, reviewed Closing for Academe, where he prophesized the following: … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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FOR FURTHER REFERENCE:
Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: YouTube, Feb. 3, 2017 –– Episode S0735, Recorded on April 15, 1987, Interview with Alan Bloom.
The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom: Context with Brad Harris, YouTube, May 2, 2019 — Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, published in 1987, became one of the most influential books of the last 50 years by instigating a battle over the soul of the American University that’s been raging ever since.
CONTEMPORARY THINKERS: Allan Bloom. Includes short video interview with Bloom.
With Friends Like Saul Bellow: D.T. Max, The New York Times Magazine, Apr. 16, 2000 — There is a videotape of Saul Bellow’s 75th birthday party, held in 1990.
The Wordly Mystic’s Late Bloom: James Wood, Apr. 15, 2000 — He is one of our greatest novelists and has a Nobel prize to prove it. Married five times, he describes himself as a serial husband. Now, at 84, after a near-fatal illness, he has produced a vibrant novel and a baby daughter.
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This week’s Communiqué Isranet is Communiqué:Vingt ans apres la seconde intifada (23 Octobre,2020)
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