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The Closing of the American Mind

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The Closing of the American Mind

By: Allan Bloom
Narrated by: Christopher Hurt
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In one of the most important books of our time, Allan Bloom, a professor of social thought at the University of Chicago and a noted translator of Plato and Rousseau, argues that the social and political crisis of 20th-century America is really an intellectual crisis. Bloom cites everything from the universities' lack of purpose to the students' lack of learning, from the jargon of liberation to the supplanting of reason by so-called creativity. Furthermore, he shows how American democracy has unwittingly played host to vulgarized Continental ideas of nihilism and despair, of relativism disguised as tolerance, while demonstrating that the collective mind of the American university is closed to the very principles of spiritual heritage that gave rise to the university in the first place.(P)1992 by Blackstone Audiobooks; ©1987 by Alan Bloom Democracy Ideologies & Doctrines Politics & Government Thought-Provoking Socialism Social justice

Critic reviews

"With clarity, gravity, and grace, Bloom makes a convincing case for the improbable proposition that reading old books about the permanent questions could help to reestablish reason and restore the soul." (Mary Ann Glendon, Harvard University)
Prescient Insights • Thought-provoking Analysis • Pitch Perfect Narration • Scholarly Depth • Philosophical Richness
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This was an excellent listen. Every American should listen to this a couple times. Great understanding of what happened before the "60's revolution" and what drove that cultural revolution.

Excellent...Must Listen

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Excellent and spot on. This book some 30 years ago predicted the results we are seeing now in the universities.

Worth the time

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Fantastic book and amazingly prescient. Well written and argued. He was like an oracle to the present day.

Not a great narrator.

Refreshing.

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So smart and intertwined with other valuable learning. Should be added to all reading lists.

Intelligent and straightforward.

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Timeless with info on where were and hopefully where we are going, as a culture.

Slightly dated book, that still works for now 2020 reading

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Bloom absolutely knows his subject and his audience. This is not a windbag polemic, this is an erudite and precision analysis of higher education in the US in 1980. 40 years later (now) you will recognize the sources of the carnage in college and public discourse proving Bloom was exactly right.

This is particularly valuable because we think our current problems the worst. we forget about public violence in the 70's and in colleges. This completely proves Bloom's principle assumption: humans always face the same problems and we should "learn" to address these fundamental issues through liberal education which, at least since 1980, we no longer have access too.

MUST read!

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It's always a joy seeing the world through another's eyes. Our author takes us on a journey through a world I never experienced, and I thank him for it.

Crisp thought, crisp delivery.

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Allen Bloom's THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND is monumentally important, especially in regard to its central assertion that the surface American education's first principle has for some time now been: "To avoid discrimination [particularly in regard to class, culture, race, and religion or lack thereof], one must be indescriminate in all. The one exception, and the thing to be hated, is the man who asserts otherwise." I am always just utterly amazed at how absolutely relativistic (parodox intended) 99% of my college students have become in their judgements (or rather lack of them) regarding lit and art. I push them to extremes. They will proclaim (as though programmed to say so--and Bloom says they are) that Brittney Spears "music" is every bit as good as Mozart's "for the person who hears it that way." I actually ask them if a pile of dog dung on a paper plate is as much art as Michalangelo's David, and you would not believe how many will, without a twitch, say that it is "if someone thinks it is," as though putting forth an opinion in regard to any obvious difference in quality will lead directly to the acceptance of Hitler's race policies--or, at least, they don't want to be viewed as having any "dangerous" opinions, whether or not they really have them. And this is Bloom's brilliant argument--"absolute freedom" (everything is equally good) has supplanted real freedom (the ability to say the truth or even think it). In another class, in which we study different models of morality, many students will assert with an absolute straight face (get ready!) that baby-torturing, if accepted by a given cultural as moral, would be a moral activity to take part in. What can one even say to such things?!--but Bloom saw this type of non-thinking and warned of the extremes to which it could, and would be taken.

VERY IMPORTANT WORK!

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I was struck by how little of this book was not familiar. I'm 38 years old, and I read a lot. The fact that I've heard almost all the arguments contained in this book, even though it's now 27 years since it was written, tells me that it has been very influential. Everything in it has been amplified by repetition.

So, it was not a book that "made me think," because I've heard it all before- from Bloom's description of conviction-less Gen X students to the influence of the Frankfurt School on American intellectuals. If you've glanced at National Review sometime in the last two decades you've seen it all.

That's not a hit on Bloom, because he's the original compiler. These ideas were all floating around, but he put them all in one place.

Honestly, the best part for me was early on. There's a good discussion of rock music, which will seem quaint to readers who've lived their entire lives in the era since the 1950s. Bloom is still right- the influence of music on the lives of the young is underrated. Much attention remains focused on other external influences such as video games or movies when it is music that matters. I think this part of the book has the deepest bite. People seem very defensive about their music, and music has an undue influence on their thinking. My coworkers spend hundreds of dollars on car stereos. I buy new tires instead. I get Bloom's point.

Overall, if you want to understand the intellectual side of the conservative movement this is a very good place to start. If you have a background in the liberal arts, especially in 19th and 20th century philosophy, that will help a lot. Otherwise it can be very hard going.

This isn't an anti-liberal screed so much as a Platonic defense of absolute truth, and the pursuit of the good. The extent to which this criticism falls on liberals is a result of their own abdication of the responsibility that they once took seriously- to educate the young in the service of building a better society. They don't even know what that is anymore, to their cost. Creating a blasted nihilistic world of the mind for our best and brightest is not a plan designed to produce an elite with the common good foremost in their minds.

The education of our elite is the subject of this book. Looking around, it's obvious that whatever education our current elite received it was sorely lacking in moral direction. If that's a conservative message, what happened to the liberals?

A digest of the intellectual conservitive movement

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This book should be required reading at all universities. Bloom’s powerful argument is resonates today more than ever.

WOW

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