The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students Paperback – April 3, 2012

I would recommend this book highly. It is interesting as a well-written polemic by someone who is not a mere, crass political commentator. It is a fascinating discussion of the history of Western philosophy. It is also an engaging discussion of what Bloom sees as the problems with modern higher education.I was introduced to Bloom as a masterful translator of Plato's Republic. Bloom's thesis is that university's don't teach well anymore, because of what he describes as vulgar and lazy form of Nietzschian relativism. To make this point he first describes the symptoms of modern students. He then traces the development of Western philosophy that brought us to Nietzsche. He ends by explaining how a vulgarization of Nietzsche bred the sort of vague academic doctrines, most neatly described as various forms of critical theory, which he thinks do not serve the students of Universities.What this work is, is a refreshing polemic against relativism. What this work is not, is a work of political commentary, though some have described it as such. There is nothing here approaching doctrinaire Left- or Right-wing thought (even of the late eighties, when it was written). Bloom deals with politics but does not move too much beyond Tocqueville's Democracy in America.The analysis of students is not particularly original and would read like a diatribe of an old-fashioned guy but Bloom's ability to explain this with philosophy. The history of philosophy section is the middle of the book is also its intellectual center. One might not agree with all of his characterizations (of Nietzsche, especially), but it makes for a good analysis and will at least inspire one to read and re-read those older works. The final part deals with the university, and partially rehashes the history with special application to the development of the modern university. This is perhaps the weakest part of the book, only because the arguments had already been built up, and are fairly implicit in the first two thirds of the book.Some have commented on the book as being difficult to follow because Bloom swerves off topic. I do not think that is fair: Bloom never forgets what he is writing, though he often adopts an ironical tone to illustrate a point, and since this can go one for a few pages, one might forget whether one is reading Bloom's exposition or his mocking of some theory of which he does not approve.The bigger issue is that he sets up the history of Western philosophy as battles between art-as-creation and science-as-reason. He associates the former with the classical Greeks through to the thinkers of the enlightenment, and the latter with Nietzsche and his influences. He seems to believe that we have gone too far in the direction of the latter. However he never reconciles the two or even suggests such a reconciliation. This is a shame.The university is not all of life and if one believes that one might still learn and philosophize outside the university, one wants to hear Bloom talk about the art/science dichotomy, rather than throw up his hands in frustration that no one in the modern university appreciates it.As for a recommendation: if you like reading Nietzsche, you will like this. If you want a political diatribe (Wikipedia says that some people have described this book as starting the American "Culture Wars" -- yeah only for those people who did not actually rad the book) look elsewhere.Kindle version worked great.

In Bloom's 1987 masterpiece, the scholar ably demonstrates how the decline of a liberal education has negatively impacted the student, family, and culture. He eloquently describes his love of the university, and how its decay-- which according to him-- started in the 1960s, damaged humane learning.My favorite aspect of the work is the readability of the text, as it is not written in a pretentious style. (OK, maybe a little.) Here are a few memorable excerpts:"Nietzsche said the newspaper had replaced the prayer in the life of the modern bourgeois, meaning that the busy, the cheap, the ephemeral, had usurped all that remained of the eternal in his daily life.""The Bible is not the only means to furnish a mind, but without similar gravity, read with the gravity of the potential believer, it will remain unfurnished.""Students do not date anymore. Dating is a petrified skeleton of courtship.""Women's careers today are qualitatively different from what they were 20 years ago, and such conflict is now inevitable. The result is that both marriage and career are devalued.""Dogmatic atheism culminates in the paradoxical conclusion that religion is the only thing that counts."I read Bloom as a classical liberal/conservative, though I know he was not fond of labels. As Western Civilization continues to decline due to reasons that the reader knows, it is important to read Professor Bloom's book to see how the USA was an active participant in its avoidable yet predictable downfall.This work was prescient and so far ahead of its time. I am happy I finally read it.

I'll start by saying that this book seems to be often lost on people who lack the proper background to grasp the frame of reference Bloom himself was operating from. That is to say, those lacking a handle on the formal tradition behind the problems hes trying to solve. It is easy enough to conclude, between it's polemical diatribe against music, it's commentary on the sexes and race relations, and it's general conservative tone that this is simply a partisan work resisting the contemporary forces of the late 20th century. While there is certainly an element of resistance, it does not do justice to bloom or his writing to simply cast it aside with the plethora of trashy pundit pieces we've seen from the likes of 21st century populist personalities. Bloom's work is of a serious academic stripe, and it offers an intriguing window into the transformations of the period, as well as attempts to trace between them a unifying principle which is remarkably credible.In order to really understand the work itself one really needs an understanding of 20th century and late 19th century German metaphysics, particularly Nietzsche and Weber. The crux of bloom's argument, is that in the wake of WWII a significant transformation occurred in the intellectual work of high academics in America. Namely that our intellectual tradition was pollinated by a migration of German thinkers. This is neither good nor bad, but it had consequences and introduced a plethora of imbalances. Bloom indicates that the potent critiques of these thinkers along with their own proscriptions introduced an internal contradiction within the american psyche, that formally we remained an enlightenment liberal democracy, but that the intellectual supporting structure of our institutions was supplanted by a new system of rationalizations built around Nietzschean and Weberian lines. Bloom argues that this set loose a wave of effects and injected a dose of nihilism into not only our academic discourse but also our popular culture and self conception. That proliferated throughout our political, entertainment, familial, normative, ect spheres is a pervasive blended sort of disillusionment and detachment which is almost doxic to late modernity. This manifests itself in a pervasive general relativism, and historicist intuition. Bloom's commentary on the social movements of the 60s highlights how these intellectual transformations have introduced a tactical usage of the enlightenment/classically liberal language, which has exhausted their potency or even credibility. While his rhetoric might draw criticism from the left it is important to note that he could have just as easily been talking about the tea party, defenders of corporate political advertising, modern politicians themselves, political advisers (karl rove) or any other contemporary political entity which fails to transcend it's time and disingenuously indulges rhetorically in the employment of natural rights from the position of machiavellian nihilism.What bloom seeks to connect is that the wave of social change in the 60s was essentially the product of human migration, and that much of what we value in modernity along with much of what we despise, originates from the same wellspring. That Neitschean insights have enabled both our most cherished social changes, but also our most crippling social and political pathologies. He concludes that these insights are essentially incompatible with liberal democratic institutions and while he optimistically believes that it can be reversed (that we can return to an enlightenment innocence), the point he drives home is that we cannot have our cake and eat it too- that one must choose between liberal democratic institutions or german metaphysical conclusions. That to choose one is to desiccate and eventually destroy the other.It's worth noting that in this dichotomy he isn't original, the same conclusion is drawn in any work that grapples with this problem of 'the last man'. What this book does well, and what is original, is that he studies this problem in a very close accessible way with a particular focus on the United States. In this it is comprehensive and worthwhile contribution to the literature.

Une analyse pertinente de la société américiane des années 60. Une lecture agréable et prenante, à lire absolument!

本の状態は説明通りでした。配達日も予定通りに届きました。

A superb book. No political correctness, just a direct and original approach. One of the best books I have read.

There has been increasing concern expressed within many liberal democracies recently about whether the very concept of free speech in universities is under threat from those of a left-liberal position who think that any individual who holds a view of the world that somebody might disagree with, find challenging, disturbing, or might even just cause them to reflect on their own view of the world, should be prevented from speaking within the university, or sacked if they are employed by the university. Bloom explores, in considerable detail, the roots of all this in Amercan universities and shows how they were capitulating to student demands to control the curriculum, and even who should, or should not, be employed, some fifty years ago. Alongside this capitulation to student demands, Bloom details how the left-liberal movement gradually rejected all texts, knowledge and learning from the past as being no longer of any relevance or value. This began to sow the seeds of a powerful movement which has been, and remains, determined to undermine and discredit all the institutions, traditions, and even the culture of liberal democracy in a cleverly disguised attempt to create a permanent, and ongoing, state of revolutionary political struggle. (Other writers have identified the roots of this movement as arising from a gradual realisation by the extreme left, during the 20th century, that the hope of proletarian revolution, in order to overthrow the capitalist system, was forlorn, and that therefore what was required was a systematic determination to discredit, and even overthrow, the institutions and traditions which the capitalist system, according to the extreme left, uses to perpetuate its oppression of humankind). Bloom shows how the result of all this has been the slow death of any concept of liberal education, often encouraged and given credence, tragically, by those who regard themselves as being liberal-minded individuals. Rather than opening people's minds, universities have increasingly become places which are actually closing people's minds, as the entire corpus of thousands of years of scholarship are rejected, and more and more debates about all sorts of issues are closed down, using political correctness, or safe space arguments, as a defence. In effect Bloom seems to think that what we are witnessing in liberal democracies is not just a relentless dumbing down, and even silencing, of intellectual enquiry and debate but, even more fundamentally, a process of self-destruction which we appear to be largely blind to. Meanwhile those sounding the alarm bells increasingly find themselves facing ridicule, denigration, or even dismissal from their employment, simply for having raised their concerns. Having witnessed the relentlessly catastrophic consequences of totalitarianism during the 20th century, and of ISIS in the early 21st century, what Bloom describes strongly suggests that we are largely blind to the creeping totalitarianism in our own back yards, as so many societies have been in the past, and that our blindness will be our undoing, in the same way that it has been the undoing of earlier societies which failed to realise what was unfolding in their midst. If Bloom is right we urgently need to wake up to the reality of the very serious threat which we face, namely the threat to freedom of thought and speech and, by implication, the threat to freedom itself, in what we like to think is liberal democracy. Bloom clearly thinks that our universities are relentlessly being hijacked to become centres of a political struggle which is characterised by increasing levels of intolerance, aggression, and even violence, in its attempts to achieve its goals. Critics of Bloom clearly see him as being out of touch, out of date, and irrelevant. If you find yourself concerned about what appears to be unfolding in liberal democracies, and particularly in universities in so-called liberal democracies, read this book and decide for yourself. Whilst Bloom is writing entirely about American universities in the last fifty years, its relevance to what appears to be going on in universities within all liberal democracies in the 21st century is abundantly clear.

A well written and fantastically thought provoking book that's bound to have an instant effect on all who read it. Each sentence is more intriguing than the last, and by the end of it all you'll be seriously re-examing all of you values and belief systems. While that may sound daunting, it's a thought experiment that's fully worth the time and effort and which will ultimately make a better person out of the reader.