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Allan Bloom

The Closing of the American Mind Paperback – May 15 1988

by Allan Bloom (Author), Saul Bellow (Foreword)

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The Closing of the American Mind, a publishing phenomenon in hardcover, is now a paperback literary event. In this acclaimed number one national best-seller, one of our country's most distinguished political philosophers argues that the social/political crisis of 20th-century America is really an intellectual crisis. Allan Bloom's sweeping analysis is essential to understanding America today. It has fired the imagination of a public ripe for change.

Print length

400 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Simon & Schuster
Publication date

May 15 1988
Dimensions

13.34 x 2.54 x 20.96 cm
ISBN-10

0671657151
ISBN-13

978-0671657154
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The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

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Product description

From Publishers Weekly

This work by a University of Chicago professor was a bestseller in cloth. According to PW, "marred by the author's biases, this jeremiad laments the decay of the humanities, the decline of the family and students' spiritual rootlessness and unconnectedness to traditions."
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Allan Bloom was Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College and co-director of the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy at the University of Chicago. He taught at Yale, University of Paris, University of Toronto, Tel Aviv University, and Cornell, where he was the recipient of the Clark Teaching Award in 1967. He died in 1992.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; First Edition (May 15 1988)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0671657151
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0671657154
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 340 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.34 x 2.54 x 20.96 cm

Best Sellers Rank: #1,189,894 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,543 in College & University Education (Books)
- #22,671 in Sociology (Books)
- #46,824 in Philosophy (Books)

Customer Reviews:
751 ratings

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Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5

751 global ratings

5 star		74%
4 star		14%
3 star		6%
2 star		3%
1 star		3%

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Top reviews from Canada

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Richard Tweney

Poor quality edition

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 14, 2022

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Great book. I ordered a new copy when my earlier one finally fell apart through many re-readings. Unfortunately, the new copy is printed on toilet paper, so not only will it not last, it has very low contrast, even under bright light. This is a Simon and Schuster print. I shall avoid them in future.

Helpful

hein

Most urgent: Must improve education.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on September 6, 2020

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Philosophy, history, state of US and Canadian education

One person found this helpful

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Chris Leckenby

A Must Read

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 13, 2013

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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.

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Art Booklover

I lost my previous copy and re-reading this replacement continued ...

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 24, 2018

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I lost my previous copy and re-reading this replacement continued my belief that Bloom will continue to be a lodestone.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on September 19, 2018

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Excellente qualité. Répond à mes attentes.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on August 3, 2016

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Amazing book -- still very current. Every college grad (especially Arts and Social Sciences) should read this book!

One person found this helpful

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james r clapp

Heavy and ponderous, not easily readable.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on November 14, 2017

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Difficult read! the Concept is timely for an older book, but perhaps too scholarly, too dense, language is too convoluted.
Needs to be trimmed down and sharped up, so....cannot recommend it.

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Shanti

34 years later Education is now Indoctrination....

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on March 24, 2021

No matter the Intelligence of a child, they go off to school with a wild and vivid Imagination, Dreams and with an Excitement for Adventure and come out Dumb about pretty much everything to do with the Living of Life.

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Top reviews from other countries

Eratosthenes

The slow death of liberal education in so-called liberal democracies

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 18, 2016

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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.

19 people found this helpful

Martin Ternouth

Surprisingly modern

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 7, 2013

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Allan Bloom's thesis is that a University was historically a place where universal (hence the name) truths about human life were debated in the departments of humanities (hence the name) between various protagonists of opposed ideas in order to differentiate the merely fashionable from the moral concepts that are applicable in all ages and cultures, and under all political regimes. He claims that this is no longer the case, and that a surrender in the 1960s and 70s to fashionable liberal (left-wing in a European context) relative moralities has left the humanities as a poor relation in the pursuit of truth to the natural sciences (mathematics, physiscs, chemistry, biology) and science's dependent technological professions - engineering, medicine, and the law. He compares this surrender to a similar surrender in German universities to the right-wing views of the Nazis in the 1930s.

I found his ideas surprisingly modern, and feel that they have travelled better than other ideas that were around at the time of its gestation: the inevitability of world Communist domination, for example.

His central and passionate argument is for a return of civilised debate between political opponents to identify absolute moral truths, instead of mud-slinging between left and right and between those with no religious beliefs (atheists) and those for whom religion is central to their lives - Muslims, Christians, Jews, and others. He says that an increasing trading of insults and a refusal to engage in such debates is evidence of The Closing of the American Mind.

Some of the adverse reviews of this book twenty-five years on seem to confirm his worst fears.

"the book is a disgrace and an outrage . . .

meandering, incoherent, rambling babble . . .

ranting and raving on paper . . .

a bitter, hate filled man . . .

personal-grudge-filled . . ."

34 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Mandatory, apart from Mindblowing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 4, 2019

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This book summarizes in excellent, near poetic prose the decline of the West as understood by modern conservatives, but extending to all thinking (and feeling) men of our times. The subchapter on the decline of “Eros” in the lives of our young was heartbreaking as it was enlightening. Love it or not, one has to read it.

5 people found this helpful

ALAN F

An important book now, as it was in the late '80's

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 3, 2021

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A book full of information and argument, whose subject is still central to today's cultural debate. Its logic seems to imply the coming of Trump! I found it rather long and the debate could have been a bit more concise, but worth the time and attention required. A book to return to more than once.

2 people found this helpful

Ruth

Must read book!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 12, 2018

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Allan Bloom puts the tyranny of liberalism in its uneducated place. This book was a best seller when it was first published. Today when it is needed most it is largely forgotten.

8 people found this helpful

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From Publishers Weekly

About the Author

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About the author

Allan Bloom

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