allan bloom

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</div><div>jane che</div><div>IF THE OLIN FOUNDATION was less than transparent about its mission, it was not for the first time. Between 1958 and 1966, it secretly served as a bank for the Central Intelligence Agency. During these eight years, the CIA laundered $1.95 million through the foundation. Olin, according to Miller, regarded his undercover role as part of his patriotic duty. Many of the government funds went to anti-Communist intellectuals and publications. But in 1967, the press exposed the covert propaganda operation, triggering a political furor and causing the CIA to fold the program. The CIA money at the Olin foundation, which was not publicized at the time, disappeared as quietly as it had arrived. The idea of using the private foundation to fund ideologically aligned intellectuals, however, persisted.The Olin foundation invested in William F. Buckley Jr., whose television show, Firing Line, the foundation supported. It also funded Allan Bloom, author of the best-selling slam from the right at American higher education, The Closing of the American Mind (in which Bloom also lashed out at rock music as a "nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbation fantasy"). The foundation also supported Dinesh D'Souza, author of Illiberal Education, which blasted "political correctness," castigating rules requiring sensitivity to women and minorities as the overreaching of liberal thought police.</div><div>=
<div>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom</div><div>
</div><div>Allan David Bloom (September 14, 1930 – October 7, 1992) was an American <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosopher" title="Philosopher" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">philosopher</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classicist" class="mw-redirect" title="Classicist" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">classicist</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academician" title="Academician" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">academician</a>. He studied under <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Grene" title="David Grene" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">David Grene</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss" title="Leo Strauss" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Leo </a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss" title="Leo Strauss" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Strauss</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_McKeon" title="Richard McKeon" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Richard McKeon</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Koj%C3%A8ve" title="Alexandre Kojève" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Alexandre Kojève</a>. He subsequently taught at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_University" title="Cornell University" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Cornell University</a>, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Toronto" title="University of Toronto" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">University of Toronto</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_University" title="Yale University" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Yale University</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_Normale_Sup%C3%A9rieure" title="École Normale Supérieure" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">École Normale Supérieure</a> of Paris, and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Chicago" title="University of Chicago" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">University of Chicago</a>. Bloom championed the idea of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books" class="mw-redirect" title="Great Books" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Great Books</a> education and became famous for his criticism of contemporary American <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education" title="Higher education" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">higher education</a>, with his views being expressed in his bestselling 1987 book, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind" title="The Closing of the American Mind" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">The Closing of the American Mind</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-2" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[2]</a> Characterized as a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative" class="mw-redirect" title="Conservative" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">conservative</a> in the popular media,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-sleeper-3" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[3]</a> Bloom denied that he was a conservative, and asserted that what he sought to defend was the 'theoretical life'.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-4" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[4]</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Bellow" title="Saul Bellow" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Saul Bellow</a> wrote <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravelstein" title="Ravelstein" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Ravelstein</a>, a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman%C3%A0_clef" title="Roman à clef" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">roman à clef</a> based on Bloom, his friend and colleague at the University of Chicago.
<div id="toc" class="toc" style="border: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); background-color: rgb(248, 249, 250); padding: 7px; display: table; zoom: 1;"><div class="toctitle" style="direction: ltr; text-align: center;"> </div><ul style="list-style-type: none; margin: 0.3em 0px; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none;"><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-1" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#Early_life_and_education" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">1Early life and education</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-2" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#Career_and_death" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">2Career and death</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-3" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#Philosophy" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">3Philosophy</a><ul style="list-style-type: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none;"><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-4" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#The_Republic_of_Plato" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">3.1The Republic of Plato</a></li></ul></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-5" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">4The Closing of the American Mind</a><ul style="list-style-type: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none;"><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-6" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#Critical_reception" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">4.1Critical reception</a></li></ul></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-7" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#Love_and_Friendship" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">5Love and Friendship</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-8" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#Selected_works" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">6Selected works</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-9" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#Bibliography_on_Allan_Bloom" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">7Bibliography on Allan Bloom</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-10" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#See_also" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">8See also</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-11" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#Notes" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">9Notes</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-12" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#External_links" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">10External links</a></li></ul></div><h2 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); line-height: 1.3;">Early life and education[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Allan_Bloom&action=edit&section=1" title="Edit section: Early life and education" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h2>Allan Bloom was born in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indianapolis" title="Indianapolis" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Indianapolis, Indiana</a> in 1930 to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-generation_immigrants_in_the_United_States" title="Second-generation immigrants in the United States" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">second-generation</a> Jewish parents<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-5" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[5]</a> who were both <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_workers" class="mw-redirect" title="Social workers" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">social workers</a>. The couple had a daughter, Lucille, two years earlier. As a thirteen-year-old, Bloom read a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readers_Digest" class="mw-redirect" title="Readers Digest" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Readers Digest</a> article about the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Chicago" title="University of Chicago" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">University of Chicago</a> and told his parents he wanted to attend; his parents thought it was unreasonable and did not encourage his hopes.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-atlas-6" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[6]</a> Yet, when his family moved to Chicago in 1944, his parents met a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychiatrist" title="Psychiatrist" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">psychiatrist</a> and family friend whose son was enrolled in the University of Chicago’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanities" title="Humanities" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">humanities</a> program for gifted students. In 1946, Bloom was accepted to the same program, starting his degree at the age of fifteen, and spending the next decade of his life enrolled at the University in Chicago’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyde_Park,Chicago" title="Hyde Park, Chicago" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Hyde Park</a> neighborhood.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-atlas-6" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[6]</a> This began his lifelong passion for the 'idea' of the university.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-7" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[7]</a>In the preface to Giants and Dwarfs: Essays, 1960–1990, he stated that his education "began with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freud" class="mw-redirect" title="Freud" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Freud</a> and ended with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato" title="Plato" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Plato</a>". The theme of this education was self-knowledge, or self-discovery—an idea that Bloom would later write, seemed impossible to conceive of for a Midwestern American boy. He credits <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss" title="Leo Strauss" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Leo Strauss</a> as the teacher who made this endeavor possible for him.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-8" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[8]</a>Bloom graduated from the University of Chicago with his <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor%E2%80%99s_degree" class="mw-redirect" title="Bachelor’s degree" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Bachelor's Degree</a> at the age of 18.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-independent.co.uk-9" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[9]</a> One of his college classmates was the classicist Seth Benardete.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-10" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[10]</a> For post-graduate studies, he enrolled in the University of Chicago's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Social_Thought" title="Committee on Social Thought" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Committee on Social Thought</a>, where he was assigned <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classicist" class="mw-redirect" title="Classicist" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Classicist</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Grene" title="David Grene" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">David Grene</a> as tutor, and went on to write his thesis on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isocrates" title="Isocrates" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Isocrates</a>. Grene recalled Bloom as an energetic and humorous student completely dedicated to studying classics, but with no definite career ambitions.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-atlas-6" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[6]</a> The Committee was a unique <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interdisciplinary" class="mw-redirect" title="Interdisciplinary" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">interdisciplinary</a> program that attracted a small number of students due to its rigorous academic requirements and lack of clear employment opportunities after graduation.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-atlas-6" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[6]</a> Bloom earned his Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought in 1955. He subsequently studied under the influential <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegelian" class="mw-redirect" title="Hegelian" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Hegelian</a> philosopher <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Koj%C3%A8ve" title="Alexandre Kojève" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Alexandre Kojève</a> in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris" title="Paris" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Paris</a>, whose lectures Bloom would later introduce to the English-speaking world. While teaching philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, he befriended <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Aron" title="Raymond Aron" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Raymond Aron</a>, amongst many other philosophers. Among the American expatriate community in Paris his friends included leftist writer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Sontag" title="Susan Sontag" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Susan Sontag</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-11" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[11]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-12" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[12]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-13" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[13]</a><h2 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); line-height: 1.3;">Career and death</h2><table class="toccolours" cellspacing="4" style="border: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); background-color: rgb(248, 249, 250); padding: 5px; float: right; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; width: 32em; max-width: 48%;"><tbody><tr><td>"I am not a conservative — neo or paleo. Conservatism is a respectable outlook... I just do not happen to be that animal."— Allan Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-Bloom_1991-14" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[14]</a></td></tr></tbody></table>Bloom studied and taught in Paris (1953–55) at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_Normale_Sup%C3%A9rieure" title="École Normale Supérieure" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">École Normale Supérieure</a>,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-15" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[15]</a> and Germany (1957). Upon returning to the United States in 1955, he taught adult education students at the University of Chicago with his friend Werner J. Dannhauser, author of Nietzsche's View of Socrates. Bloom went on to teach at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_University" title="Yale University" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Yale</a> from 1960 to 1963, at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_University" title="Cornell University" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Cornell</a> until 1970, and at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Toronto" title="University of Toronto" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">University of Toronto</a> until 1979, when he returned to the University of Chicago. Among Bloom's former students are prominent journalists, government officials and political scientists such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Fukuyama" title="Francis Fukuyama" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Francis Fukuyama</a>, Robert Kraynak, Pierre Hassner, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Orwin" title="Clifford Orwin" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Clifford Orwin</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Ajzenstat" title="Janet Ajzenstat" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Janet Ajzenstat</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ibbitson" title="John Ibbitson" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">John Ibbitson</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Milligan-Whyte" title="John Milligan-Whyte" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">John Milligan-Whyte</a>.In 1963, as a Professor at Cornell, Allan Bloom served as a faculty member of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_Branch_of_the_Telluride_Association" class="mw-redirect" title="Cornell Branch of the Telluride Association" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Cornell Branch</a> of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telluride_Association" title="Telluride Association" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Telluride Association</a>, an organization focused on intellectual development and self-governance. The students received free room and board in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telluride_House" title="Telluride House" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Telluride House</a> on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_University" title="Cornell University" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Cornell University</a> campus and assumed the management of the house themselves. While living at the house, Bloom befriended former U.S. Secretary of Labor <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Perkins" title="Frances Perkins" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Frances Perkins</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-16" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[16]</a> Bloom's first book was a collection of three essays on Shakespeare's plays, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_Politics" class="mw-redirect" title="Shakespeare's Politics" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Shakespeare's Politics</a>; it included an essay from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_V.Jaffa" title="Harry V. Jaffa" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Harry V. Jaffa</a>. He translated and commented upon Rousseau's "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_to_M.D%27Alembert_on_Spectacles" title="Letter to M. D'Alembert on Spectacles" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Letter to M. D'Alembert on the Theater</a>", bringing it into dialogue with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_Republic" class="mw-redirect" title="Plato's Republic" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Plato's Republic</a>. In 1968, he published his most significant work of philosophical translation and interpretation, a translation of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato" title="Plato" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Plato</a>'s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic(Plato)" title="Republic (Plato)" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Republic</a>. Bloom strove to achieve "translation... for the serious student". The preface opens on page xi with the statement, "this is intended to be a literal translation".<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-17" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[17]</a>[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources" title="Wikipedia:Citing sources" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">page needed</a>] Although the translation is not universally accepted, Bloom said he always conceptualized the translator's role as a matchmaker between readers and the texts he translated.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-18" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[18]</a>[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources" title="Wikipedia:Citing sources" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">page needed</a>] He repeated this effort as a professor of political science at the University of Toronto in 1978, translating <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau" title="Jean-Jacques Rousseau" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Jean-Jacques Rousseau</a>'s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emile:Or,On_Education" class="mw-redirect" title="Emile: Or, On Education" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Emile</a>. Among other publications during his years of teaching was a reading of Swift's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulliver%27s_Travels" title="Gulliver's Travels" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Gulliver's Travels</a>, titled "Giants and Dwarfs"; it became the title for a collection of essays on, among others, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Aron" title="Raymond Aron" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Raymond Aron</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Koj%C3%A8ve" title="Alexandre Kojève" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Alexandre Kojève</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss" title="Leo Strauss" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Leo Strauss</a>, and liberal philosopher <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rawls" title="John Rawls" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">John Rawls</a>. Bloom was an editor for the scholarly journal <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Theory(journal)" title="Political Theory (journal)" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Political Theory</a> as well as a contributor to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Political_Philosophy" title="History of Political Philosophy" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">History of Political Philosophy</a> (edited by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Cropsey" title="Joseph Cropsey" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Joseph Cropsey</a> and Leo Strauss).After returning to Chicago, he befriended and taught courses with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Bellow" title="Saul Bellow" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Saul Bellow</a>. In 1987 Bellow wrote the Preface to The Closing of the American Mind, the book that made Bloom famous and wealthy.Bloom's last book, which he dictated while in the hospital dying, and which was published posthumously, was Love and Friendship, an offering of interpretations on the meaning of love. There is an ongoing controversy over Bloom's semi-closeted homosexuality, possibly culminating—as in Saul Bellow’s thinly fictionalized account in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravelstein" title="Ravelstein" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Ravelstein</a>—in his death in 1992 from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS" title="HIV/AIDS" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">AIDS</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-19" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[19]</a> Bloom's friends do not deny his homosexuality, but whether he actually died of AIDS remains disputed.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-20" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[20]</a><h2 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); line-height: 1.3;">Philosophy[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Allan_Bloom&action=edit&section=3" title="Edit section: Philosophy" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h2><table class="toccolours" cellspacing="5" style="border: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); background-color: rgb(248, 249, 250); padding: 5px; float: right; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 2em; width: 30em; max-width: 40%;"><tbody><tr><td>"The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-21" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[21]</a></td></tr></tbody></table>Bloom's work is not easily categorized, yet there is a thread that links all of his published material. He was concerned with preserving a philosophical way of life for future generations. He strove to do this through both scholarly and popular writing. His writings may be placed into two categories: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholarly" class="mw-redirect" title="Scholarly" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">scholarly</a> (e.g., <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_Republic" class="mw-redirect" title="Plato's Republic" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Plato's Republic</a>) and popular political commentary (e.g., The Closing of the American Mind). On the surface, this is a valid distinction, yet closer examinations of Bloom’s works reveal a direct connection between the two types of expression, which reflect his view of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy" title="Philosophy" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">philosophy</a> and the role of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosopher" title="Philosopher" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">philosopher</a> in political life.[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed" title="Wikipedia:Citation needed" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">citation needed</a>]<h3 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">The Republic of Plato[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Allan_Bloom&action=edit&section=4" title="Edit section: The Republic of Plato" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3>Bloom's translation and essay on the Republic is radically different in many important aspects from the previous translations and interpretations of the Republic. Most notable is Bloom's discussion of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_irony" class="mw-redirect" title="Socratic irony" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Socratic irony</a>. In fact, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony" title="Irony" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">irony</a> is the key to Bloom’s take on the Republic (see his discussion of Books II–VI of the Republic.) Allan Bloom says a philosopher is immune to irony because he can see the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragic" class="mw-redirect" title="Tragic" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">tragic</a> as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic" class="mw-redirect" title="Comic" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">comic</a> and comic as tragic. Bloom refers to Socrates, the philosopher par excellence, in his Interpretative Essay stating, "Socrates can go naked where others go clothed; he is not afraid of ridicule. He can also contemplate sexual intercourse where others are stricken with terror; he is not afraid of moral indignation. In other words he treats the comic seriously and the tragic lightly".<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-22" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[22]</a> Thus irony in the Republic refers to the "Just City in Speech", which Bloom looks at not as a model for future <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society" title="Society" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">society</a>, nor as a template for the human <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul(spirit)" class="mw-redirect" title="Soul (spirit)" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">soul</a>; rather, it is a city presented ironically, an example of the distance between philosophy and every potential philosopher. Bloom follows Strauss in suggesting that the "Just City in Speech" is not <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature" title="Nature" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">natural</a>; it is man-made.<h2 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); line-height: 1.3;">The Closing of the American Mind</h2><div role="note" class="hatnote navigation-not-searchable" style="font-style: italic; padding-left: 1.6em; margin-bottom: 0.5em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Main article: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind" title="The Closing of the American Mind" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">The Closing of the American Mind</a></div><table class="toccolours" cellspacing="5" style="border: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); background-color: rgb(248, 249, 250); padding: 5px; float: right; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 2em; width: 30em; max-width: 40%;"><tbody><tr><td>"Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it."— Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind</td></tr></tbody></table>The Closing of the American Mind was published in 1987, five years after Bloom published an essay in National Review about the failure of universities to serve the needs of students. With the encouragement of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Bellow" title="Saul Bellow" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Saul Bellow</a>, his colleague at the University of Chicago, he expanded his thoughts into a book "about a life I've led",<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-atlas-6" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[6]</a> that critically reflected on the current state of higher education in American universities. His friends and admirers imagined the work would be a modest success, as did Bloom, who recognized his publisher’s modest advance to complete the project as a lack of sales confidence. Yet on the momentum of strong initial reviews, including one by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Lehmann-Haupt" title="Christopher Lehmann-Haupt" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Christopher Lehmann-Haupt</a> in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times" class="mw-redirect" title="New York Times" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">New York Times</a> and an op-ed piece by syndicated conservative commentator <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Will" title="George Will" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">George Will</a> titled, "A How-To Book for the Independent"<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-23" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[23]</a> it became an unexpected best seller, eventually selling close to half a million copies in hardback and remaining at number one on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list for four months.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-24" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">[24]</a>Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind is a critique of the contemporary university and how Bloom sees it as failing its students. In it, Bloom criticizes the modern movements in philosophy and the humanities. Philosophy professors involved in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_language_philosophy" title="Ordinary language philosophy" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">ordinary language analysis</a> or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism" title="Logical positivism" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">logical positivism</a> disregard important "humanizing" ethical and political issues and fail to pique the interest of students.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-25" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[25]</a> Literature professors involved in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstructionism" class="mw-redirect" title="Deconstructionism" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">deconstructionism</a> promote irrationalism and skepticism of standards of truth and thereby dissolve the moral imperatives which are communicated through genuine philosophy and which elevate and broaden the intellects of those who engage with them.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-26" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[26]</a> To a great extent, Bloom's criticism revolves around his belief that the "great books" of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_thought" title="Western thought" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Western thought</a> have been devalued as a source of wisdom. Bloom's critique extends beyond the university to speak to the general crisis in American society. The Closing of the American Mind draws analogies between the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States" title="United States" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">United States</a> and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic" title="Weimar Republic" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Weimar Republic</a>. The modern liberal philosophy, he says, enshrined in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment" title="Age of Enlightenment" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Enlightenment</a> thought of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke" title="John Locke" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">John Locke</a>—that a just society could be based upon self-interest alone, coupled by the emergence of relativism in American thought—had led to this crisis.For Bloom, this created a void in the souls of Americans, into which demagogic radicals as exemplified by 1960s student leaders could leap. (In the same fashion, Bloom suggests, that the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism" title="Nazism" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Nazi</a> brownshirts once filled the gap created in German society by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic" title="Weimar Republic" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Weimar Republic</a>.) In the second instance, he argued, the higher calling of philosophy and reason understood as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_thought" title="Freedom of thought" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">freedom of thought</a>, had been eclipsed by a pseudo-philosophy, or an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology" title="Ideology" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">ideology</a> of thought. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativism" title="Relativism" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Relativism</a> was one feature of modern liberal philosophy that had subverted the Platonic–Socratic teaching.Bloom's critique of contemporary <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_movements" class="mw-redirect" title="Social movements" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">social movements</a> at play in universities or society at large is derived from his classical and philosophical orientation. For Bloom, the failure of contemporary <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_education" title="Liberal education" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">liberal education</a> leads to the sterile social and sexual habits of modern students, and to their inability to fashion a life for themselves beyond the mundane offerings touted as success. Bloom argues that commercial pursuits had become more highly valued than love, the philosophic quest for truth, or the civilized pursuits of honor and glory.In one chapter, in a style of analysis which resembles the work of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School" title="Frankfurt School" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Frankfurt School</a>, he examined the philosophical effects of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_music" title="Popular music" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">popular music</a> on the lives of students, placing pop music, or as it is generically branded by record companies "rock music", in a historical context from Plato’s Republic to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzsche" class="mw-redirect" title="Nietzsche" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Nietzsche</a>’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysian" class="mw-redirect" title="Dionysian" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Dionysian</a> longings. Treating it for the first time with genuine philosophical interest, he gave fresh attention to the industry, its target-marketing to children and teenagers, its top performers, its place in our late-capitalist bourgeois economy, and its pretensions to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty" title="Liberty" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">liberation</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom(political)" class="mw-redirect" title="Freedom (political)" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">freedom</a>. Some critics, including the popular musician <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Zappa" title="Frank Zappa" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Frank Zappa</a>, argued that Bloom's view of pop music was based on the same ideas that critics of pop "in 1950s held, ideas about the preservation of 'traditional' white American society".<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-27" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[27]</a> Bloom, informed by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates" title="Socrates" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Socrates</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle" title="Aristotle" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Aristotle</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rousseau" class="mw-redirect" title="Rousseau" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Rousseau</a>, and Nietzsche, explores music’s power over the human soul. He cites the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier" title="Soldier" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">soldier</a> who throws himself into battle at the urging of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum_and_bugle_corps(modern)" title="Drum and bugle corps (modern)" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">drum corps</a>, the pious believer who prays under the spell of a religious <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymn" title="Hymn" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">hymn</a>, the lover seduced by the romantic <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar" title="Guitar" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">guitar</a>, and points towards the tradition of philosophy that treated musical education as paramount. He names the pop-star <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mick_Jagger" title="Mick Jagger" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Mick Jagger</a> as a cardinal representative of the hypocrisy and erotic sterility of pop-rock music. Pop music employs sexual images and language to enthrall the young and to persuade them that their petty rebelliousness is authentic politics, when, in fact, they are being controlled by the money-managers whom successful performers like Jagger quietly serve. Bloom claims that Jagger is a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero" title="Hero" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">hero</a> to many university students who envy his fame and wealth but are really just bored by the lack of options before them.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-28" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[28]</a> Along with the absence of literature in the lives of the young and their sexual but often unerotic relationships, the first part of The Closing tries to explain the current state of education in a fashion beyond the purview of an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economist" title="Economist" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">economist</a> or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychiatrist" title="Psychiatrist" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">psychiatrist</a>—contemporary culture's leading umpires.<h3 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">Critical reception[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Allan_Bloom&action=edit&section=6" title="Edit section: Critical reception" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3>The book met with early critical acclaim including positive reviews in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times" title="The New York Times" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">The New York Times</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time(magazine)" title="Time (magazine)" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Time</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsweek" title="Newsweek" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Newsweek</a>, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronicle_of_Higher_Education" class="mw-redirect" title="Chronicle of Higher Education" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Chronicle of Higher Education</a>, and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Post" class="mw-redirect" title="Washington Post" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Washington Post</a>. A second round of reviews was generally more critical.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-weeklystandard.com-29" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[29]</a>Liberal commentator <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Nussbaum" title="Martha Nussbaum" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Martha Nussbaum</a>, a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_philosopher" class="mw-redirect" title="Political philosopher" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">political philosopher</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classicist" class="mw-redirect" title="Classicist" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">classicist</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_V.Jaffa" title="Harry V. Jaffa" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Harry V. Jaffa</a>, a conservative, both argued that Bloom was deeply influenced by 19th-century European philosophers, especially <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche" title="Friedrich Nietzsche" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Friedrich Nietzsche</a>. Nussbaum wrote that, for Bloom, Nietzsche had been disastrously influential in modern American thought.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-Nussbaum-30" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[30]</a>In a passage of her review, Nussbaum wrote: "How good a philosopher, then, is Allan Bloom? The answer is, we cannot say, and we are given no reason to think him one at all."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-Nussbaum-30" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[30]</a> The criticism of the book was continued by impassioned reviews of political theorist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Barber" title="Benjamin Barber" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Benjamin Barber</a> in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper%27s" class="mw-redirect" title="Harper's" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Harper's</a>; <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Nehamas" title="Alexander Nehamas" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Alexander Nehamas</a>, a scholar of ancient philosophy and Nietzsche, in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Review_of_Books" title="London Review of Books" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">London Review of Books</a>; and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Rieff" title="David Rieff" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">David Rieff</a> in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Times_Literary_Supplement" title="The Times Literary Supplement" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">The Times Literary Supplement</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-NYT2-31" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[31]</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Rieff" title="David Rieff" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">David Rieff</a> called Bloom "an academic version of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_North" title="Oliver North" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Oliver North</a>: vengeful, reactionary, antidemocratic". The book, he said, was one that "decent people would be ashamed of having written." The tone of these reviews led James Atlas in the New York Times Magazine to conclude "the responses to Bloom's book have been charged with a hostility that transcends the usual mean-spiritedness of reviewers."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-atlas-6" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[6]</a> One reviewer, the philosopher <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Paul_Wolff" title="Robert Paul Wolff" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Robert Paul Wolff</a> writing in the scholarly journal <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academe" class="mw-redirect" title="Academe" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Academe</a>, satirically reviewed the book as a work of fiction: he claimed that Bloom's friend <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Bellow" title="Saul Bellow" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Saul Bellow</a>, who had written the introduction, had written a "coruscatingly funny novel in the form of a pettish, bookish, grumpy, reactionary complaint against the last two decades", with the "author" a "mid-fiftyish professor at the University of Chicago, to whom Bellow gives the evocative name 'Bloom.'"<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-NYT2-31" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[31]</a> Yet some reviewers tempered that criticism with an admission of the merits of Bloom's writing: for example, Fred Matthews, an historian from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/York_University" title="York University" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">York University</a>, began an otherwise relatively critical review in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Historical_Review" class="mw-redirect" title="American Historical Review" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">American Historical Review</a> with the statement that Bloom's "probes into popular culture" were "both amusing and perceptive" and that the work was "a rich, often brilliant, and disturbing book".<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-32" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[32]</a>Some critics embraced Bloom's argument. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Podhoretz" title="Norman Podhoretz" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Norman Podhoretz</a> noted that the closed-mindedness in the title refers to the paradoxical consequence of the academic "open mind" found in liberal political thought—namely "the narrow and intolerant dogmatism" that dismisses any attempt, by Plato or the Hebrew Bible for example, to provide a rational basis for moral judgments. Podhoretz continued, "Bloom goes on to charge liberalism with vulgarizing the noble ideals of freedom and equality, and he offers brilliantly acerbic descriptions of the sexual revolution and the feminist movement, which he sees as products of this process of vulgarization."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-33" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[33]</a>In a 1989 article, Ann Clark Fehn discusses the critical reception of the book, noting that it had eclipsed other titles that year dealing with higher education—Ernest Boyer's College and E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy—and quoting Publishers Weekly which had described Bloom's book as a "best-seller made by reviews."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-34" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[34]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Paglia" title="Camille Paglia" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Camille Paglia</a>, a decade after the book's release, called it "the first shot in the culture wars".<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-35" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[35]</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky" title="Noam Chomsky" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Noam Chomsky</a> dismissed the book as "mind-bogglingly stupid" for its <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_canon" title="Western canon" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">canonistic</a> approach to education.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-36" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[36]</a> On the other hand, an early <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times" class="mw-redirect" title="New York Times" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">New York Times</a> review by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Kimball" title="Roger Kimball" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Roger Kimball</a> called the book "an unparalleled reflection on the whole question of what it means to be a student in today's intellectual and moral climate."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-37" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[37]</a>In an article on Bloom for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Republic" title="The New Republic" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">The New Republic</a> in 2000, conservative commentator <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Sullivan" title="Andrew Sullivan" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Andrew Sullivan</a> wrote that "reading [Bloom]...one feels he has not merely understood Nietzsche; he has imbibed him. But this awareness of the abyss moved Bloom, unlike Nietzsche, toward love and political conservatism. Love, whether for the truth or for another, because it can raise us out of the abyss. Political conservatism because it best restrains the chaos that modernity threatens".<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-Longing_2000-38" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[38]</a> More recently, Bloom's book also received a more positive re-assessment from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Sleeper" title="Jim Sleeper" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Jim Sleeper</a> in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times" title="The New York Times" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">New York Times</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-sleeper-3" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[3]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Botsford" title="Keith Botsford" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Keith Botsford</a> would later argue:<blockquote class="templatequote" style="overflow: hidden; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px 40px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Bloom was writing vigorous polemic at a time when America sought to ensure that the intellect could not (and would not be allowed to) rise above gender and race; the mind was to be defined by its melanin and genetic content, and by what lay between our legs; or, in the academe, the canon was to be re-read and re-defined so that it fitted the latest theorem of gender or race. Bloom would have none of it. He loved people who were first-rate with real love... Many profited. Others, mainly dwellers in the bas fonds of 'social studies', or those who seek to politicise culture, resented and envied.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-independent.co.uk-9" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[9]</a></blockquote><h2 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); line-height: 1.3;">Love and Friendship[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Allan_Bloom&action=edit&section=7" title="Edit section: Love and Friendship" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h2>Bloom's last book, which he dictated while partially paralyzed and in hospital, and which was published posthumously, was Love and Friendship. The book offered interpretations on the meaning of love, through a reading of novels by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stendhal" title="Stendhal" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Stendhal</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Austen" title="Jane Austen" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Jane Austen</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Flaubert" title="Gustave Flaubert" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Flaubert</a>; <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Tolstoy" title="Leo Tolstoy" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Tolstoy</a> in light of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau" title="Jean-Jacques Rousseau" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Rousseau's</a> influence on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_movement" class="mw-redirect" title="Romantic movement" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Romantic movement</a>; plays by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare" title="William Shakespeare" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">William Shakespeare</a>; <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne" title="Michel de Montaigne" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Montaigne's</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essays(Montaigne)" title="Essays (Montaigne)" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Essays</a>; and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato" title="Plato" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Plato</a>'s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symposium(Plato)" title="Symposium (Plato)" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Symposium</a>.Describing its creation, Bellow wrote:<blockquote class="templatequote" style="overflow: hidden; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px 40px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Allan was an academic, but he was a literary man too — he had too much intelligence and versatility, too much humanity, to be confined to a single category... He didn't like these helpful-to-the-sick cliches or conventional get-well encouragements... [S]till partially paralyzed and unable even to sign his name, he dictated a book... I mention this because it was a remarkable thing for a sick man and a convalescent to do and because it was equally remarkable that a political philosopher should choose at such a moment in his life to write about literature... I like to think that his free and powerful intelligence, responding to great inner impulses under the stimulus of life-threatening sickness, turned to the nineteenth-century novel, to Shakespeare's love plays, and to the Platonic Eros, summoning us to the great poetry of affects and asking us to see what has happened to our own deepest feelings in this age of artificial euphorias.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-39" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[39]</a></blockquote>Of the work, Andrew Sullivan wrote "you cannot read [Bloom] on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romeo_and_Juliet" title="Romeo and Juliet" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Romeo and Juliet</a> or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_and_Cleopatra" title="Antony and Cleopatra" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Antony and Cleopatra</a> without seeing those works in a new light. You cannot read his account of Rousseau's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie,or_the_New_Heloise" title="Julie, or the New Heloise" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">La nouvelle Heloise</a>without wanting to go back and read it—more closely—again...Bloom had a gift for reading reality—the impulse to put your loving face to it and press your hands against it".<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-Longing_2000-38" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[38]</a> Recollecting his friend in an interview, Bellow said "Allan inhaled books and ideas the way the rest of us breathe air...People only want the factual truth. Well, the truth is that Allan was a very superior person, great-souled. When critics proclaim the death of the novel, I sometimes think they are really saying that there are no significant people to write about. [But] Allan was certainly one."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#cite_note-40" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[40]</a><h2 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); line-height: 1.3;">Selected works[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Allan_Bloom&action=edit&section=8" title="Edit section: Selected works" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h2><ul style="margin: 0.3em 0px 0px 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(" data:image="data:image" svg="svg" xml="xml" c="C" fxml="Fxml" version="version" d="D" encoding="encoding" utf-8="UTF-8" f="F" e="E" a="A" csvg="Csvg" http="http" fwww.w3.org="Fwww.w3.org" f2000="F2000" fsvg="Fsvg" width="width" height="height" ccircle="Ccircle" cx="cx" cy="cy" r="r" fill="fill" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" xmlns="xmlns" xmlns:data="data"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Bloom, Allan, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_V.Jaffa" title="Harry V. Jaffa" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Harry V. Jaffa</a>. 1964. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_Politics" class="mw-redirect" title="Shakespeare's Politics" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Shakespeare's Politics</a>. New York: Basic Books.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Bloom, Allan. 1968 (2nd ed 1991). The Republic of Plato. (translated with notes and an interpretive essay). New York: Basic Books.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Bloom, Allan, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Butterworth(philosopher)" title="Charles Butterworth (philosopher)" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Charles Butterworth</a>, Christopher Kelly (Edited and translated), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 1968. Letter to d’Alembert on the theater in politics and the arts. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press; Agora ed.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Bloom, Allan, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau" title="Jean-Jacques Rousseau" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Jean-Jacques Rousseau</a>. 1979. Emile (translator) with introduction. New York: Basic Books.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Alexandre Kojève (Raymond Queneau, Allan Bloom, James H. Nichols). Introduction to the reading of Hegel. Cornell, 1980.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Bloom, Allan. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number(identifier)" class="mw-redirect" title="International Standard Book Number (identifier)" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">ISBN</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/5-551-86868-0" title="Special:BookSources/5-551-86868-0" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">5-551-86868-0</a>.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Bloom, Allan, and Steven J. Kautz ed. 1991. Confronting the Constitution: The challenge to Locke, Montesquieu, Jefferson, and the Federalists from Utilitarianism, Historicism, Marxism, Freudism. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Bloom, Allan. 1991. Giants and Dwarfs: Essays, 1960–1990. New York: Touchstone Books.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Bloom, Allan. 1993. Love and Friendship. New York: Simon & Schuster.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Bloom, Allan. 2000. Shakespeare on Love & Friendship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Plato, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Benardete" title="Seth Benardete" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Seth Benardete</a>, and Allan Bloom. 2001. Plato's Symposium: A translation by Seth Benardete with commentaries by Allan Bloom and Seth Benardete. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.</li></ul><h2 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); line-height: 1.3;">Bibliography on Allan Bloom[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Allan_Bloom&action=edit&section=9" title="Edit section: Bibliography on Allan Bloom" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h2><ul style="margin: 0.3em 0px 0px 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(" data:image="data:image" svg="svg" xml="xml" c="C" fxml="Fxml" version="version" d="D" encoding="encoding" utf-8="UTF-8" f="F" e="E" a="A" csvg="Csvg" http="http" fwww.w3.org="Fwww.w3.org" f2000="F2000" fsvg="Fsvg" width="width" height="height" ccircle="Ccircle" cx="cx" cy="cy" r="r" fill="fill" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" xmlns="xmlns" xmlns:data="data"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Atlas, James. “Chicago’s Grumpy Guru: Best-Selling Professor Allan Bloom and the Chicago Intellectuals.” New York Times Magazine. January 3, 1988.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">"The Constitution in Full Bloom". 1990. Harvard Law Review 104, no. 2 (Dec90): 645.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Bayles, Martha. 1998. "Body and soul: the musical miseducation of youth." Public Interest, no. 131, Spring 98: 36.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Beckerman, Michael. 2000. "Ravelstein Knows Everything, Almost". New York Times (May 28, 2000).</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Bellow, Adam. 2005. "Opening the American Mind". National Review 57, no. 23 (12/19/2005): 102.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Bellow, Saul. 2000. Ravelstein. New York, New York: Penguin.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Butterworth, Charles E., "On Misunderstanding Allan Bloom: The Response to The Closing of the American Mind." Academic Questions 2, no. 4: 56.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Edington, Robert V. 1990. "Allan Bloom's message to the state universities". Perspectives on Political Science; 19, no. 3</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Fulford, Robert. "Saul Bellow, Allan Bloom, and Abe Ravelstein." Globe and Mail, November 2, 1999.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Goldstein, William. “The Story behind the Best Seller: Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind.” Publishers Weekly. July 3, 1987.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Hook, Sidney. 1989. "Closing of the American Mind: An Intellectual Best Seller Revisited". American Scholar 58, no. Winter: 123.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Iannone, Carol. 2003. "What's Happened to Liberal Education?". Academic Questions 17, no. 1, 54.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Jaffa, Harry V. "Humanizing Certitudes and Impoverishing Doubts: A Critique of Closing of the American Mind." Interpretation. 16 Fall 1988.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Kahan, Jeffrey. 2002. "Shakespeare on Love and Friendship." Women's Studies 31, no. 4, 529.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Kinzel, Till. 2002. Platonische Kulturkritik in Amerika. Studien zu Allan Blooms The Closing of the American Mind. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Matthews, Fred. "The Attack on 'Historicism': Allan Bloom's Indictment of Contemporary American Historical Scholarship." American Historical Review 95, no. 2, 429.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Mulcahy, Kevin V. 1989. "Civic Illiteracy and the American Cultural Heritage." Journal of Politics 51, no. 1, 177.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Nussbaum, Martha. "Undemocratic Vistas," New York Review of Books 34, no.17 (November 5, 1987)</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Orwin" title="Clifford Orwin" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Orwin, Clifford</a>. "Remembering Allan Bloom." American Scholar 62, no. 3, 423.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Palmer, Michael, and Thomas Pangle ed. 1995. Political Philosophy and the Human Soul: Essays in Memory of Allan Bloom. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Pub.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Rosenberg, Aubrey. 1981. "Translating Rousseau." University of Toronto Quarterly 50, no. 3, 339.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Schaub, Diana. 1994. "Erotic adventures of the mind." Public Interest, no. 114, 104.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><cite id="CITEREFSlater2005" class="citation" style="font-style: inherit; word-wrap: break-word;">Slater, Robert O (2005), "Allan Bloom", in Shook, John, <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20070710225628/http://www.robertowenslater.info/AllanBloomessay.pdf" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: url(" upload.wikimedia.org="upload.wikimedia.org" wikipedia="wikipedia" commons="commons" icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif="Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif" right="right" center="center" no-repeat="no-repeat" padding-right="padding-right" px="px">The Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers</a> (PDF), 1, Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press, archived from <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.robertowenslater.info/AllanBloomessay.pdf" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: url(" upload.wikimedia.org="upload.wikimedia.org" wikipedia="wikipedia" commons="commons" icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif="Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif" right="right" center="center" no-repeat="no-repeat" padding-right="padding-right" px="px">the original</a> (PDF) on 2007-07-10</cite><span title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fen.wikipedia.org%3AAllan+Bloom&rft.atitle=Allan+Bloom&rft.aufirst=Robert+O&rft.aulast=Slater&rft.btitle=The+Dictionary+of+Modern+American+Philosophers&rft.date=2005&rft.genre=bookitem&rft.place=Bristol%2C+England&rft.pub=Thoemmes+Press&rft_id=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.robertowenslater.info%2FAllanBloomessay.pdf&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook" class="Z3988">.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Sleeper, Jim. 2005. "Allan Bloom and the Conservative Mind". New York Times Book Review (September 4, 2005): 27.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Wrightson, Katherine M. 1998. "The Professor as Teacher: Allan Bloom, Wayne Booth, and the Tradition of Teaching at the University of Chicago." Innovative Higher Education 23, no. 2, 103.</li></ul><h2 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); line-height: 1.3;">See also</h2><ul style="margin: 0.3em 0px 0px 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(" data:image="data:image" svg="svg" xml="xml" c="C" fxml="Fxml" version="version" d="D" encoding="encoding" utf-8="UTF-8" f="F" e="E" a="A" csvg="Csvg" http="http" fwww.w3.org="Fwww.w3.org" f2000="F2000" fsvg="Fsvg" width="width" height="height" ccircle="Ccircle" cx="cx" cy="cy" r="r" fill="fill" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" xmlns="xmlns" xmlns:data="data"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_philosophy" title="American philosophy" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">American philosophy</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_philosophers" title="List of American philosophers" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">List of American philosophers</a></li></ul></div><div></div><div>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind</div><div>
</div><div><div id="mw-content-text" lang="en" dir="ltr" class="mw-content-ltr" style="direction: ltr; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="mw-parser-output">The Closing of the American Mind is a 1987 book by the philosopher <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom" title="Allan Bloom" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Allan Bloom</a>, in which the author argued that "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education" title="Higher education" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">higher education</a> has failed <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy" title="Democracy" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">democracy</a> and impoverished the souls of today's students." He focused especially upon the "openness" of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativism" title="Relativism" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">relativism</a> as leading <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox" title="Paradox" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">paradoxically</a> to the great "closing" referenced in the book's title. In Bloom's view, "openness" and absolute understanding undermine <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking" title="Critical thinking" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">critical thinking</a> and eliminate the "point of view" that defines cultures. Bloom's book became an unexpected best seller, eventually selling close to half a million copies in hardback, but drew divided reactions from reviewers.<div id="toc" class="toc" style="border: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); background-color: rgb(248, 249, 250); padding: 7px; display: table; zoom: 1;"><div class="toctitle" style="direction: ltr; text-align: center;">
</div><ul style="list-style-type: none; margin: 0.3em 0px; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none;"><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-1" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#Summary" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">1Summary</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-2" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#Publication" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">2Publication</a><ul style="list-style-type: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none;"><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-3" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#Critical_reception" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">2.1Critical reception</a></li></ul></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-4" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#References" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">3References</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-5" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#External_links" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">4External links</a></li></ul></div><h2 style="background: none; font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); line-height: 1.3;">Summary</h2><table class="toccolours" cellspacing="5" style="border: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); background-color: rgb(248, 249, 250); padding: 5px; float: right; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 2em; width: 30em; max-width: 40%;"><tbody><tr><td>"Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion."- Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind</td></tr></tbody></table>Bloom critiques the contemporary American university and how he sees it as failing its students, criticizing modern movements in philosophy and the humanities. Philosophy professors involved in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_language_philosophy" title="Ordinary language philosophy" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">ordinary language analysis</a> or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism" title="Logical positivism" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">logical positivism</a> disregard important "humanizing" ethical and political issues and fail to pique the interest of students.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_note-1" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[1]</a> Literature professors involved in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstructionism" class="mw-redirect" title="Deconstructionism" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">deconstructionism</a> promote irrationalism and skepticism of standards of truth and thereby dissolve the moral imperatives which are communicated through genuine philosophy and which elevate and broaden the intellects of those who engage with these imperatives.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_note-2" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[2]</a> To a great extent, Bloom's criticism revolves around his belief that the "great books" of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_thought" title="Western thought" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Western thought</a> have been devalued as a source of wisdom. Bloom's critique extends beyond the university to speak to the general crisis in American society. He draws analogies between the United States and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic" title="Weimar Republic" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Weimar Republic</a>. The modern liberal philosophy, he says, enshrined in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment" title="Age of Enlightenment" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Enlightenment</a> thought of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke" title="John Locke" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">John Locke</a>—that a just society could be based upon self-interest alone, coupled by the emergence of relativism in American thought—had led to this crisis.For Bloom, this created a void in the souls of Americans, into which demagogic radicals as exemplified by '60s student leaders could leap. (In the same fashion, Bloom suggests, that the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism" title="Nazism" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Nazi</a> brownshirts once filled the gap created in German society by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic" title="Weimar Republic" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Weimar Republic</a>.) In the second instance, he argued, the higher calling of philosophy and reason understood as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_thought" title="Freedom of thought" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">freedom of thought</a>, had been eclipsed by a pseudo-philosophy, or an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology" title="Ideology" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">ideology</a> of thought. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativism" title="Relativism" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Relativism</a> was one feature of modern liberal philosophy that had subverted the Platonic–Socratic teaching.Bloom's critique of contemporary <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_movements" class="mw-redirect" title="Social movements" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">social movements</a> at play in universities or society at large is derived from his classical and philosophical orientation. For Bloom, the failure of contemporary <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_education" title="Liberal education" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">liberal education</a> leads to the sterile social and sexual habits of modern students, and to their inability to fashion a life for themselves beyond the mundane offerings touted as success. Bloom argues that commercial pursuits had become more highly valued than love, the philosophic quest for truth, or the civilized pursuits of honor and glory.Examining the philosophical effects of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_music" title="Popular music" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">popular music</a> on the lives of students, Bloom placed pop music, or as it is generically branded by record companies "rock music", in a historical context from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato" title="Plato" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Plato</a>’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic(Plato)" title="Republic (Plato)" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Republic</a> to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche" title="Friedrich Nietzsche" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Friedrich Nietzsche</a>’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysian" class="mw-redirect" title="Dionysian" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Dionysian</a> longings. Treating it for the first time with genuine philosophical interest, he gave fresh attention to the industry, its target-marketing to children and teenagers, its top performers, its place in our late-capitalist bourgeois economy, and its pretensions to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty" title="Liberty" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">liberation</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom(political)" class="mw-redirect" title="Freedom (political)" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">freedom</a>. Bloom, informed by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates" title="Socrates" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Socrates</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle" title="Aristotle" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Aristotle</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rousseau" class="mw-redirect" title="Rousseau" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Rousseau</a>, and Nietzsche, explores music’s power over the human soul. He cites the soldier who throws himself into battle at the urging of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum_and_bugle_corps(modern)" title="Drum and bugle corps (modern)" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">drum corps</a>, the pious believer who prays under the spell of a religious hymn, the lover seduced by the romantic <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar" title="Guitar" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">guitar</a>, and points towards the tradition of philosophy that treated musical education as paramount. He names the pop-star <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mick_Jagger" title="Mick Jagger" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Mick Jagger</a> as a cardinal representative of the hypocrisy and erotic-sterility of pop-music. Pop music employs sexual images and language to enthrall the young and to persuade them that their petty rebelliousness is authentic politics, when, in fact, they are being controlled by the money-managers whom successful performers like Jagger quietly serve. Bloom claims that Jagger is a hero to many university students who envy his fame and wealth but are really just bored by the lack of options before them.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_note-3" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[3]</a> Along with the absence of literature in the lives of the young and their sexual but often unerotic relationships, Bloom tries to explain the current state of education in a fashion beyond the purview of an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economist" title="Economist" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">economist</a> or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychiatrist" title="Psychiatrist" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">psychiatrist</a>—contemporary culture's leading umpires.<h2 style="background: none; font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); line-height: 1.3;">Publication[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind&action=edit&section=2" title="Edit section: Publication" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h2>The Closing of the American Mind was published in 1987, five years after Bloom published an essay in The National Review about the failure of universities to serve the needs of students. With the encouragement of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Bellow" title="Saul Bellow" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Saul Bellow</a>, his colleague at the University of Chicago, he expanded his thoughts into a book "about a life, I've led"<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_note-atlas-4" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[4]</a> that critically reflected on the current state of higher education in American universities. His friends and admirers imagined the work would be a modest success, as did Bloom, who recognized his publisher’s modest advance to complete the project as a lack of sales confidence. Yet on the momentum of strong initial reviews, including one by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Lehmann-Haupt" title="Christopher Lehmann-Haupt" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Christopher Lehmann-Haupt</a> in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times" title="The New York Times" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">The New York Times</a> and an op-ed piece by syndicated conservative commentator <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Will" title="George Will" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">George Will</a> entitled "A How-To Book for the Independent"<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_note-5" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[5]</a> it became an unexpected best seller, eventually selling close to half a million copies in hardback and remaining at number one on the New York Times Non-fiction Best Seller list for four months.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_note-6" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[6]</a><h3 style="background: none; margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;">Critical reception[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind&action=edit&section=3" title="Edit section: Critical reception" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3>The art critic <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Kimball" title="Roger Kimball" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Roger Kimball</a>, writing in The New York Times, called The Closing of the American Mind "an unparalleled reflection on the whole question of what it means to be a student in today's intellectual and moral climate."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_note-7" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[7]</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Nussbaum" title="Martha Nussbaum" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Martha Nussbaum</a>, a liberal philosopher, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_V.Jaffa" title="Harry V. Jaffa" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Harry V. Jaffa</a>, a conservative historian, both argued that Bloom was deeply influenced by 19th-century European philosophers, especially Nietzsche. Nussbaum wrote that, for Bloom, Nietzsche had been disastrously influential in modern American thought.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_note-Nussbaum-8" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[8]</a> Jaffa noted that while Bloom discusses contemporary social movements, particularly those that gained ascendancy in the 1960s, he was virtually silent on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_rights_movement" class="mw-redirect" title="Gay rights movement" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">gay rights movement</a> and the role it played in the lives of students at the time.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_note-9" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[9]</a> The popular musician and cultural critic <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Zappa" title="Frank Zappa" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Frank Zappa</a> argued that Bloom's view of pop music was based on the same ideas that critics of pop "in 1950s held, ideas about the preservation of 'traditional' white American society."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_note-10" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[10]</a>In her review, Nussbaum questioned whether Bloom deserved to be considered a philosopher.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_note-Nussbaum-8" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[8]</a> The criticism of the book was continued by impassioned reviews by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Barber" title="Benjamin Barber" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Benjamin Barber</a> in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper%27s" class="mw-redirect" title="Harper's" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Harper's</a>; by the scholar of ancient philosophy and Nietzsche <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Nehamas" title="Alexander Nehamas" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Alexander Nehamas</a> in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Review_of_Books" title="London Review of Books" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">London Review of Books</a>; and by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Rieff" title="David Rieff" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">David Rieff</a> in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Times_Literary_Supplement" title="The Times Literary Supplement" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">The Times Literary Supplement</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_note-NYT2-11" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[11]</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Rieff" title="David Rieff" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">David Rieff</a> called Bloom "an academic version of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_North" title="Oliver North" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Oliver North</a>: vengeful, reactionary, antidemocratic." The book, he said, was one that "decent people would be ashamed of having written." The tone of these reviews led James Atlas in the New York Times Magazine to conclude "the responses to Bloom's book have been charged with a hostility that transcends the usual mean-spiritedness of reviewers."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_note-atlas-4" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[4]</a> The philosopher <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Paul_Wolff" title="Robert Paul Wolff" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Robert Paul Wolff</a>, writing in the scholarly journal <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academe" class="mw-redirect" title="Academe" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Academe</a>, reviewed the book as a work of fiction: he claimed that Bloom's friend Saul Bellow, who had written the introduction, had written a "coruscatingly funny novel in the form of a pettish, bookish, grumpy, reactionary complaint against the last two decades", using as the narrator a "mid-fiftyish professor at the University of Chicago, to whom Bellow gives the evocative name 'Bloom.'"<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_note-NYT2-11" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[11]</a>Fred Matthews, a historian from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/York_University" title="York University" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">York University</a>, tempered his criticism with an admission of the merits of Bloom's writing, beginning a review in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Historical_Review" class="mw-redirect" title="American Historical Review" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">American Historical Review</a> with the statement that Bloom's "probes into popular culture" were "both amusing and perceptive" and that the work was "a rich, often brilliant, and disturbing book".<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_note-12" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[12]</a>The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism" title="Neoconservatism" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">neoconservative</a> writer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Podhoretz" title="Norman Podhoretz" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Norman Podhoretz</a> embraced Bloom's argument, noting that the closed-mindedness in his title refers to the paradoxical consequence of the academic "open mind" found in liberal political thought—namely "the narrow and intolerant dogmatism" that dismisses any attempt, by Plato or the Hebrew Bible for example, to provide a rational basis for moral judgments. Podhoretz continued, "Bloom goes on to charge liberalism with vulgarizing the noble ideals of freedom and equality, and he offers brilliantly acerbic descriptions of the sexual revolution and the feminist movement, which he sees as products of this process of vulgarization."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_note-13" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[13]</a> In a 1989 article (The German Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 3, Focus: Literature since 1945 (Summer, 1989)), Ann Clark Fehn discussed the critical reception of the book, noting that it had eclipsed other titles that year dealing with higher education (College, by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_L.Boyer" title="Ernest L. Boyer" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Ernest L. Boyer</a>, and Cultural Literacy, by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.D.Hirsch" title="E. D. Hirsch" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">E. D. Hirsch</a>), and quoting Publishers Weekly, which had described Bloom's book as a "best-seller made by reviews." The poet <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Turner(poet)" title="Frederick Turner (poet)" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Frederick Turner</a> described The Closing of the American Mind as, "The most thoughtful conservative analysis of the nation's cultural sickness."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_note-14" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[14]</a>The critic <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Paglia" title="Camille Paglia" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Camille Paglia</a> called The Closing of the American Mind "the first shot in the culture wars", writing of Bloom that she was "confident that in the long run he will be vindicated and his critics swallowed in obscurity".<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_note-15" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[15]</a> The jurist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Posner" title="Richard Posner" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Richard Posner</a> compared Bloom's book to Paglia's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_Personae" title="Sexual Personae" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Sexual Personae</a> (1990), finding both books to be examples of "difficult academic works that mysteriously strike a chord with a broad public."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_note-16" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[16]</a> The linguist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky" title="Noam Chomsky" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Noam Chomsky</a> dismissed Bloom's book as "mind-bogglingly stupid" for "basically saying... you just march the students through a canon of 'great thoughts' that are picked out for everybody" when "the effect of that is that students will end up knowing and understanding virtually nothing."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_note-17" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[17]</a><h2 style="background: none; font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); line-height: 1.3;">References[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind&action=edit&section=4" title="Edit section: References" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h2><div class="reflist" style="margin-bottom: 0.5em; list-style-type: decimal;"><div class="mw-references-wrap mw-references-columns" style="column-width: 30em;"><ol class="references" style="margin: 0.3em 0px 0px 3.2em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none; list-style-type: inherit;"><li id="cite_note-1" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; break-inside: avoid-column;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_ref-1" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="user-select: none; top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up^{</a> }Bloom, Allan. "The Student and the University", p. 378. Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster.</li><li id="cite_note-2" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; break-inside: avoid-column;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_ref-2" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="user-select: none; top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up^{</a> }Bloom, Allan. "The Student and the University", p. 379. Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster.</li><li id="cite_note-3" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; break-inside: avoid-column;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_ref-3" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="user-select: none; top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up^{</a> }Bloom, Allan. “Music” p. 68-81. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster.</li><li id="cite_note-atlas-4" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; break-inside: avoid-column;">^ <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_ref-atlas_4-0" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="user-select: none; top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up to:a</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_ref-atlas_4-1" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">b</a> Atlas, James. “Chicago’s Grumpy Guru: Best-Selling Professor Allan Bloom and the Chicago Intellectuals.” New York Times Magazine. January 3, 1988. 12.</li><li id="cite_note-5" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; break-inside: avoid-column;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_ref-5" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="user-select: none; top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up^{</a> }<cite class="citation news" style="font-style: inherit; word-wrap: break-word;">Will, George F. (July 30, 1987). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/washingtonpost/access/73836608.html?dids=73836608:73836608&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&date=Jul+30%2C+1987&author=George+F.+Will&pub=The+Washington+Post+(pre-1997+Fulltext)&edition=&startpage=a.19&desc=A+How-To+Book+for+the+Independent" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) right center no-repeat, url(" data:image="data:image" svg="svg" xml="xml" c="C" fxml="Fxml" version="version" d="D" encoding="encoding" utf-8="UTF-8" standalone="standalone" no="no" f="F" e="E" csvg="Csvg" http="http" a="A" fwww.w3.org="Fwww.w3.org" f2000="F2000" fsvg="Fsvg" width="width" height="height" cpath="Cpath" fill="fill" fff="fff" stroke="stroke" m1.5="M1.5" h5.982v10.5h1.5z="h5.982V10.5H1.5z" m5.765="M5.765" h11v5.39l9.427="H11v5.39L9.427" l-1.31-1.31l5.393="l-1.31-1.31L5.393" l-2.69-2.688="l-2.69-2.688" l4.2="L4.2" z="z" m9.995="M9.995" l.022="l.022" l8.2="L8.2" l2.882-2.88-1.85-1.852z="l2.882-2.88-1.85-1.852z" padding-right="padding-right" px="px" xmlns="xmlns" xmlns:data="data">"A How-To Book for the Independent"</a>.</cite><span title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fen.wikipedia.org%3AThe+Closing+of+the+American+Mind&rft.atitle=A+How-To+Book+for+the+Independent&rft.aufirst=George+F.&rft.aulast=Will&rft.date=1987-07-30&rft.genre=article&rft_id=https%3A%2F%2Fpqasb.pqarchiver.com%2Fwashingtonpost%2Faccess%2F73836608.html%3Fdids%3D73836608%3A73836608%26FMT%3DABS%26FMTS%3DABS%3AFT%26date%3DJul%2B30%252C%2B1987%26author%3DGeorge%2BF.%2BWill%26pub%3DThe%2BWashington%2BPost%2B%28pre-1997%2BFulltext%29%26edition%3D%26startpage%3Da.19%26desc%3DA%2BHow-To%2BBook%2Bfor%2Bthe%2BIndependent&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal" class="Z3988" /></li><li id="cite_note-6" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; break-inside: avoid-column;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_ref-6" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="user-select: none; top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up^{</a> }Goldstein, William. “The Story behind the Best Seller: Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind.” Publishers Weekly. July 3, 1987.</li><li id="cite_note-7" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; break-inside: avoid-column;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_ref-7" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="user-select: none; top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up^{</a> }New York Times. Arts. "The Groves of Ignorance". April 5, 1987. url: <a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE4DC1131F936A35757C0A961948260" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) right center no-repeat, url(" data:image="data:image" svg="svg" xml="xml" c="C" fxml="Fxml" version="version" d="D" encoding="encoding" utf-8="UTF-8" standalone="standalone" no="no" f="F" e="E" csvg="Csvg" http="http" a="A" fwww.w3.org="Fwww.w3.org" f2000="F2000" fsvg="Fsvg" width="width" height="height" cpath="Cpath" fill="fill" fff="fff" stroke="stroke" m1.5="M1.5" h5.982v10.5h1.5z="h5.982V10.5H1.5z" m5.765="M5.765" h11v5.39l9.427="H11v5.39L9.427" l-1.31-1.31l5.393="l-1.31-1.31L5.393" l-2.69-2.688="l-2.69-2.688" l4.2="L4.2" z="z" m9.995="M9.995" l.022="l.022" l8.2="L8.2" l2.882-2.88-1.85-1.852z="l2.882-2.88-1.85-1.852z" padding-right="padding-right" px="px" word-wrap="word-wrap" break-word="break-word" xmlns="xmlns" xmlns:data="data">https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE4DC1131F936A35757C0A961948260</a></li><li id="cite_note-Nussbaum-8" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; break-inside: avoid-column;">^ <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_ref-Nussbaum_8-0" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="user-select: none; top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up to:a</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_ref-Nussbaum_8-1" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">b</a> Nussbaum, Martha. "Undemocratic Vistas," New York Review of Books 34, no.17 (November 5, 1987)</li><li id="cite_note-9" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; break-inside: avoid-column;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_ref-9" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="user-select: none; top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up^{</a> }Jaffa, Harry V. "Humanizing Certitudes and Impoverishing Doubts: A Critique of Closing of the American Mind". Interpretation. 16 Fall 1988.</li><li id="cite_note-10" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; break-inside: avoid-column;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_ref-10" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="user-select: none; top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up^{</a> }Zappa, Frank. "On Junk Food for the Soul." New Perspective's Quarterly. 1987. Available online at: <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://home.online.no/_{corneliu/npq.htm}" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) right center no-repeat, url(" data:image="data:image" svg="svg" xml="xml" c="C" fxml="Fxml" version="version" d="D" encoding="encoding" utf-8="UTF-8" standalone="standalone" no="no" f="F" e="E" csvg="Csvg" http="http" a="A" fwww.w3.org="Fwww.w3.org" f2000="F2000" fsvg="Fsvg" width="width" height="height" cpath="Cpath" fill="fill" fff="fff" stroke="stroke" m1.5="M1.5" h5.982v10.5h1.5z="h5.982V10.5H1.5z" m5.765="M5.765" h11v5.39l9.427="H11v5.39L9.427" l-1.31-1.31l5.393="l-1.31-1.31L5.393" l-2.69-2.688="l-2.69-2.688" l4.2="L4.2" z="z" m9.995="M9.995" l.022="l.022" l8.2="L8.2" l2.882-2.88-1.85-1.852z="l2.882-2.88-1.85-1.852z" padding-right="padding-right" px="px" xmlns="xmlns" xmlns:data="data">"On Junk Food for the Soul"</a></li><li id="cite_note-NYT2-11" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; break-inside: avoid-column;">^ <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_ref-NYT2_11-0" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="user-select: none; top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up to:a</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_ref-NYT2_11-1" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">b</a> <cite class="citation news" style="font-style: inherit; word-wrap: break-word;">Atlas, James (1988-01-03). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE5DB153EF930A35752C0A96E948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) right center no-repeat, url(" data:image="data:image" svg="svg" xml="xml" c="C" fxml="Fxml" version="version" d="D" encoding="encoding" utf-8="UTF-8" standalone="standalone" no="no" f="F" e="E" csvg="Csvg" http="http" a="A" fwww.w3.org="Fwww.w3.org" f2000="F2000" fsvg="Fsvg" width="width" height="height" cpath="Cpath" fill="fill" fff="fff" stroke="stroke" m1.5="M1.5" h5.982v10.5h1.5z="h5.982V10.5H1.5z" m5.765="M5.765" h11v5.39l9.427="H11v5.39L9.427" l-1.31-1.31l5.393="l-1.31-1.31L5.393" l-2.69-2.688="l-2.69-2.688" l4.2="L4.2" z="z" m9.995="M9.995" l.022="l.022" l8.2="L8.2" l2.882-2.88-1.85-1.852z="l2.882-2.88-1.85-1.852z" padding-right="padding-right" px="px" xmlns="xmlns" xmlns:data="data">"CHICAGO'S GRUMPY GURU"</a>. New York Times. Retrieved 2008-05-08.</cite><span title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fen.wikipedia.org%3AThe+Closing+of+the+American+Mind&rft.atitle=CHICAGO%27S+GRUMPY+GURU&rft.aufirst=James&rft.aulast=Atlas&rft.date=1988-01-03&rft.genre=article&rft.jtitle=New+York+Times&rft_id=https%3A%2F%2Fquery.nytimes.com%2Fgst%2Ffullpage.html%3Fres%3D940DE5DB153EF930A35752C0A96E948260%26sec%3D%26spon%3D%26pagewanted%3Dall&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal" class="Z3988" /></li><li id="cite_note-12" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; break-inside: avoid-column;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_ref-12" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="user-select: none; top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up^{</a> }The American Historical Review, Vol. 95, No. 2 (Apr., 1990), pp. 429–447. url: <a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="https://www.jstor.org/pss/2163758" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) right center no-repeat, url(" data:image="data:image" svg="svg" xml="xml" c="C" fxml="Fxml" version="version" d="D" encoding="encoding" utf-8="UTF-8" standalone="standalone" no="no" f="F" e="E" csvg="Csvg" http="http" a="A" fwww.w3.org="Fwww.w3.org" f2000="F2000" fsvg="Fsvg" width="width" height="height" cpath="Cpath" fill="fill" fff="fff" stroke="stroke" m1.5="M1.5" h5.982v10.5h1.5z="h5.982V10.5H1.5z" m5.765="M5.765" h11v5.39l9.427="H11v5.39L9.427" l-1.31-1.31l5.393="l-1.31-1.31L5.393" l-2.69-2.688="l-2.69-2.688" l4.2="L4.2" z="z" m9.995="M9.995" l.022="l.022" l8.2="L8.2" l2.882-2.88-1.85-1.852z="l2.882-2.88-1.85-1.852z" padding-right="padding-right" px="px" word-wrap="word-wrap" break-word="break-word" xmlns="xmlns" xmlns:data="data">https://www.jstor.org/pss/2163758</a> (Accessed May 16, 2008)</li><li id="cite_note-13" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; break-inside: avoid-column;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_ref-13" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="user-select: none; top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up^{</a> }Podhoretz, Norman. “Conservative Book Becomes a Best-Seller.” Human Events July 11, 1987: 5–6.</li><li id="cite_note-14" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; break-inside: avoid-column;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_ref-14" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="user-select: none; top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up^{</a> }<cite class="citation book" style="font-style: inherit; word-wrap: break-word;">Turner, Frederick (1995). The Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit. New York: The Free Press. p. 277. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number" title="International Standard Book Number" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">ISBN</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0-02-932792-X" title="Special:BookSources/0-02-932792-X" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">0-02-932792-X</a>.</cite><span title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fen.wikipedia.org%3AThe+Closing+of+the+American+Mind&rft.au=Turner%2C+Frederick&rft.btitle=The+Culture+of+Hope%3A+A+New+Birth+of+the+Classical+Spirit&rft.date=1995&rft.genre=book&rft.isbn=0-02-932792-X&rft.pages=277&rft.place=New+York&rft.pub=The+Free+Press&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook" class="Z3988" /></li><li id="cite_note-15" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; break-inside: avoid-column;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_ref-15" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="user-select: none; top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up^{</a> }<cite class="citation web" style="font-style: inherit; word-wrap: break-word;">Paglia, Camille (July 1997). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://web.archive.org/web/19991128143344/http://www.salon.com/july97/columnists/paglia2970722.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) right center no-repeat, url(" data:image="data:image" svg="svg" xml="xml" c="C" fxml="Fxml" version="version" d="D" encoding="encoding" utf-8="UTF-8" standalone="standalone" no="no" f="F" e="E" csvg="Csvg" http="http" a="A" fwww.w3.org="Fwww.w3.org" f2000="F2000" fsvg="Fsvg" width="width" height="height" cpath="Cpath" fill="fill" fff="fff" stroke="stroke" m1.5="M1.5" h5.982v10.5h1.5z="h5.982V10.5H1.5z" m5.765="M5.765" h11v5.39l9.427="H11v5.39L9.427" l-1.31-1.31l5.393="l-1.31-1.31L5.393" l-2.69-2.688="l-2.69-2.688" l4.2="L4.2" z="z" m9.995="M9.995" l.022="l.022" l8.2="L8.2" l2.882-2.88-1.85-1.852z="l2.882-2.88-1.85-1.852z" padding-right="padding-right" px="px" xmlns="xmlns" xmlns:data="data">"Ask Camille"</a>. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salon.com" class="mw-redirect" title="Salon.com" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Salon.com</a>. Retrieved 2008-05-09.</cite><span title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fen.wikipedia.org%3AThe+Closing+of+the+American+Mind&rft.aufirst=Camille&rft.aulast=Paglia&rft.btitle=Ask+Camille&rft.date=1997-07&rft.genre=unknown&rft.pub=Salon.com&rft_id=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%2F19991128143344%2Fhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.salon.com%2Fjuly97%2Fcolumnists%2Fpaglia2970722.html&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook" class="Z3988" /></li><li id="cite_note-16" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; break-inside: avoid-column;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_ref-16" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="user-select: none; top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up^{</a> }<cite class="citation book" style="font-style: inherit; word-wrap: break-word;">Posner, Richard A. (2001). Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 103. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number" title="International Standard Book Number" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">ISBN</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0-674-00633-X" title="Special:BookSources/0-674-00633-X" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">0-674-00633-X</a>.</cite><span title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fen.wikipedia.org%3AThe+Closing+of+the+American+Mind&rft.au=Posner%2C+Richard+A.&rft.btitle=Public+Intellectuals%3A+A+Study+of+Decline&rft.date=2001&rft.genre=book&rft.isbn=0-674-00633-X&rft.pages=103&rft.place=Cambridge%2C+Massachusetts&rft.pub=Harvard+University+Press&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook" class="Z3988" /></li><li id="cite_note-17" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; break-inside: avoid-column;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#cite_ref-17" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="user-select: none; top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up^{</a> }Chomsky, Noam. "Understanding Power." Ed. Mitchell, Peter R. and John Schoeffel. New York: The New Press, 2002. pg. 233.</li></ol></div></div><h2 style="background: none; font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); line-height: 1.3;">External links</h2><table role="presentation" class="mbox-small plainlinks sistersitebox" style="clear: right; float: right; margin: 4px 0px 4px 1em; box-sizing: border-box; width: 238px; line-height: 1.25em; background-color: rgb(249, 249, 249); border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170);"><tbody><tr><td class="mbox-image" style="border: none; padding: 2px 0px 2px 0.9em; text-align: center;"><img alt="" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Wikiquote-logo.svg/34px-Wikiquote-logo.svg.png" width="34" height="40" class="noviewer" srcset="//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Wikiquote-logo.svg/51px-Wikiquote-logo.svg.png 1.5x, //upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Wikiquote-logo.svg/68px-Wikiquote-logo.svg.png 2x" data-file-width="300" data-file-height="355" style="border: 0px; 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</div><div>Much ink has been spilt of late on the role played by philosopher Leo Strauss (d. 1973) on the education of a number of prominent neoconservative ideologues who now occupy key intelligence and advisory positions in the Bush administration. It is ironic to see the mainstream press and culture be so willing to lodge causal continuity and blame on a foreign intellectual for homegrown extremism. The mainstream outlets are usually far more expressive in the garb worn to downplay any direct influence intellectuals might have on daily life. More typical is the trail of recycling and simplification features from which the American mainstream press no longer seems able to wean itself. Intellectual influence may not be easy to understand, but when the trace is blurred through sensationalism it merely dissipates into irrelevance.In the English-speaking world, Seymour Hersh is credited with having ferreted out this distant connection between the neo-cons and Strauss in a May 5 article on high-level intelligence manufacturing, published in the New Yorker. A day earlier the New York Times published an attack on Strauss’s philosophy as it took aim against some of his students, such as Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense. The piece makes only a distant reference to the work done by two French journalists who had covered the subject for Le Monde. In these days of cowardly journalism, it would be far too normal to let credit not lie where it is due.The fact remains that the most extensive study of the background to the neoconservative Project, their New American Century Project, was indeed published in France’s Le Monde on April 15, 2003. It has been pillaged with scarce credit given to its original authors. More important is what has been left out of its findings. The piece not only examines the formative role of Leo Strauss on the Project, but also that of the late Albert Wohlstetter, strategy guru at the RAND Corporation and professor at the University of Chicago, and especially that of Allan Bloom, the late author of The Closing of the American Mind. Like Wolfowitz, Bloom had studied under Leo Strauss. Among his own students was William Kristol. And the view Bloom espoused in his massive best-seller has had a profound impact on the way Americans now view the intellectual contributions of other countries and cultures with the exception of Israel’s.That this key Le Monde article was not entirely published in translated form by the New York Times or the New Yorker raises perennial questions regarding American arrogance towards the cultural and journalistic productions of other countries. Academia is thirsting through a translation drought of international social science research. The publishing moguls have shifted the market away from political economic criticism toward the child’s fantasy world of Harry Potter incorporated in which even adults are begging to enter. Since postmodernism struck hard in the artistic realm, culturally attuned English-speakers seem to have become obsessed with end-points and limits, of the universe curving onto its own content as if outside the English-language there is a desert from which only the void is to be uttered. Angst with the mother tongue has rung in concert with American expansionism.Time and time again the question is raised abroad as to why Americans show an ever decreasing mastery of foreign languages. The matter here is not that the encroachment of American English threatens the demise of many foreign local cultures. Nor is it the troubling prospect that by the end of this century the vast majority of the world’s languages risks disappearing. The scandal is that “native English-speakers are becoming less competent at other languages: only nine students graduated in Arabic from universities in the United States [in 2002], and the British are the most monoglot of all the peoples in the EU,” according to a study on the triumph of English published in The Economist, December 22, 2001.No one is fool enough to overlook how this has everything to do with how world power is concentrated in the USA (the foreign view) or that America is the “business center” of the world (the domestic view). Both lead to the conclusion that a general lack of interest on the part of Americans lies behind this state of things. Its cultural variant is expressed in the self-declared triumph of English.The fact is that American corporate-controlled media, and its arms extending deep within the university, promotes general simplification of thought to the point of ignorance of all things foreign. In recent months, we’ve seen that ignorance shift quite naturally to fear, misunderstanding and contempt for things foreign. This is a generalization, of course. But consider this point: every weekend in countless foreign language newspapers there is no end to translated articles from the foreign and especially American press. Needless to say, the very of idea of publishing translated articles in any of America’s major dailies, including the New York Times, is enough to trigger a scoff.What we gain in return are confused sources, fragmented paraphrasing and general ignorance on what the intelligent folk of the world think of the USA in its most recent avatar. Could it be so simple as to slot the whole lot of them into an anti-American straightjacket? Let those be satisfied who zap from Fox News to CNN (domestic or international), believing that al-Jazeera is merely al-Quaeda’s propaganda weapon.Here then is a translation of “The Strategist and the Philosopher” by Alain Franchon and Daniel Vernet as it appeared in Le Monde. It’s an insightful study of those un-elected technocrats who have infiltrated Washington DC to steer US policy according to an original plan slowly metabolized over the decades and drafted well before September 11 ever resounded with dial emergency. But for them dial it did, and this group of a dozen or so intellectuals has profoundly affected the American federal political structure in the most dubious of ways.What the legacy of Leo Strauss most pertinently poses in terms of problems for American political life is his conviction that democracy is only functional if it is a militant, indeed military democracy. ‘Tyranny’ is what hovers close to its institutions, literally a specter away, capable of seizing its blood and duplicating its genetic structure imperceptibly. All means necessary should be deployed to fight this fate. The mystery of philosophy itself is shorn of its critical skin in a not unfamiliar attempt, historically speaking, at claiming how in the abstract world of thought opposites tend to meet. Democracy becomes authoritarian, just like progressive philosophies putatively turn into concrete terror…For the record, and though the pages of CounterPunch are perhaps not the most appropriate place to lead a debate on philosophical texts, Professor Gary Leupp’s recent characterization of the neo-cons as “philosopher-kings” throws in the towel far too easily to a Straussian send up of an infamous concept (see Gary Leupp, “Philosopher Kings: Leo Strauss and the Neo-Cons”, May 24, 2003.) If Strauss’s thought can be legitimately rooted in Plato’s philosophy, Leupp’s association by namesake amounts to surrendering on one of antiquity’s most profound thinkers and a cornerstone of Islamic, Judaic, Christian and Atheist civilizations. Moreover, in pointing out the tension between Socrates, as supposedly incarnating an individualist freedom, and Plato as the contemptor of democracy, Leupp, in the manner of John Ralston Saul, completely elides mentioning the fact that the little we do actually know about Socrates largely comes from Plato’s writings and the mise-en-scene in which his mentor is cast.When they did not found scientific domains, Plato’s contributions touched on beauty, love, ontology, ethics, mathematics, criticism of mythology and state religion, education, transmigration of the soul, and the list goes on. Plato gave philosophy one of its defining forms. It was at once instrumental in ushering in monotheism while also providing all the tools to undermine future dogma in any religion. And prior to becoming the source of ‘Western’ philosophy, Plato was quite a part of the East and of Islam, though to a lesser degree than was Aristotle. Most papyrus manuscripts of Plato’s vast work, including perhaps the enigmatic ‘esoteric’ texts, would have already been damaged or destroyed when Athens was sacked and Aristotle’s library looted by the Romans in 86 B.C. It is said to have been the greatest library of its time in Greece.One thing Plato was not is a historian. Only a bare minimum of his texts, many of them formally reflecting the dialectical method of philosophical debate, are philosophical tracts. His early writings are a form of thought-theatre. Non-narrative and non-dramatic, they point to an attempt at transmitting what, in all aspects, seems to have been a very active intellectual scene in Athens in the fifth century B.C. Once contemporary readers free themselves from the hegemony of the OxBridge stranglehold on translated classical texts, they will plunge into the banterng world of political conceptual invention.At the center of that world lives Socrates, the man of night, the obsessive debater, the lover of thought. Socrates may have been condemned to death for corrupting the youth, among other things, but Plato embraced the man he barely knew in an attack against the restored Athenian democracy that forced him to drink hemlock. It was only in the twilight of Plato’s life, in The Laws, that he indirectly acknowledged the danger of the Socratic social stimulant. Until then, Socrates was the main actor on Plato’s mind stage, whose role was to smash tepid trials in political rhetoric and bind justice to political organization.As many scholars have pointed out, Athens was a far cry from contemporary democracies. Let the stress be placed on contemporary because it’s only in the decades since WWII, and mainly in the decade of the 1960s so despised by Allan Bloom and his proto-neocon students, that full voting rights were finally achieved in Western democracies. Athens was only a semblance of democracy according to contemporary standards. Still, historical knowledge assures us of its complexity. It was a budding experiment: “it is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few” notwithstanding the fact that citizenship, even under Pericles’s so-called reforms, granted voting rights only to men, but by no means to all of them. These fragmentary beginnings of democracy should not leave us resting on our laurels in our own sense of superiority. After all, European and American civilizations grew ever so slowly in their democratic evolution given the historical knowledge its thinkers had already acquired on freer political systems. Bringing democracy to the state we now know it as came about through people’s militias not foreign invading armies.Was Plato profoundly anti-democratic or even totalitarian? A cursory reading of Karl Popper’s extremely influential The Open Society and its Enemies would certainly suggest that. But one of the great failures of Anglo-American scholarship has been the historical omissions involved in not making sense of Plato’s attention to the political collectivities from which our individualist passions repel us as if from what is most contrary to our essence. To put it bluntly, if Plato diminished democracy as a valid form of government, he was rejecting the failure of Athenian democracy as based on its real history, and the irreparable damage it wrought on the city.Recall that Athens, despite its political experimentation, was an expansionist, imperialist city-state, almost permanently at war. It had colonies along the modern-day Turkish coast of the Aegean. It strove to gain hegemony over the Greek city states. And it drove itself into economic collapse through a fratricidal war against Sparta. Before its fall, pestilence had filled the city to claim hundreds of lives, including that of Pericles who was at once the spirit of greater democracy and a relentless wager of war. The belligerent democracy then went belly up with a coup d’etat led by oligarchic families. Democracy did indeed lead to tyranny, but from its own internal undoing.Plato came from one of the stakeholding families in the dictatorship that ensued. There is no evidence he ever legitimized the short rule of the Council of Thirty. From his letters, scholars have been able to speculate that his rejection of democracy in The Republic on the grounds that it only leads to tyranny is precisely a reaction to the belligerence and unending warfare that characterized the short existence of Athen’s first democratic experiment in the Classical Age. The construction of the ideal state, governed by the so-called philosopher-kings along an aristocratic model, i.e. rule by the “best” as the Greek word echoes, is a dismantling of the failures of both types of regimes.The world had not yet known the possibilities of 19th century democracy. Yet we still swim so very far as the current national security state proves from the shores of a fuller, non-belligerent version of ‘rule of the people by the people’. Despite the rights gained by all citizens to vote, many democracies, including that of the US, are faltering. Is it therefore legitimate to keep the term sacrosanct merely for want of having to accept ordinary language philosopher John Austin’s verdict that “democracy for instance [is among] a few notorious words the uses of which are always liable to leave us in real doubt about what is meant”?What the neo-cons are not are philosopher-kings. Had they learnt anything from Plato and ancient Greece it would have been that waging an unending string of wars was a paranoid compulsion whose end is only to destroy democracy. Moreover, prior to the pre-emptive strike doctrine they espouse, many neo-cons were active in establishing dictatorships to crush the ‘Marxist-inspired’ popular uprisings during the 1970s a legacy well described in various articles published by CounterPunch, and whose ‘defensive’ character is highly contestable to say the least.So before dumping one of our greatest political teachers, Plato, we should realize that it is as important as ever to read his work, and read it in the historical context established by French thinkers such as Paul Veyne, Francois Chatelet and Jacques Ranciere.It should also be recalled that Allan Bloom in the Closing of the American Mind put special blame for the shift in American ways toward radical popular and democratic civic demands upon an entire generation of German Jewish intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany to finally find their abode at the New School for Social Research and Princeton, among other universities.These Jews were clearly brought up in reading Kant, Weber, Freud and especially Marx. Many of them were Marxists, or, like Adorno and Marcuse, would soon be redrawing the entire landscape of Marxist thought and radical political philosophy. The crisis depicted by Bloom can of course be seen as one pitting conservatives against Marxists. But given the backdrop of Israeli expansionist policies, the context of a settling of scores within the American Jewish community itself should not be ruled out. The vehemence of Bloom’s attack on Arendt and Marcuse is peculiar only to a deep desire to cleanse. He stamps them as foreign to the American way which in reality was only a more recent form to what his ancestors had embraced as immigrants.The German Jewish intellectuals were only the latest stream of émigrés to arrive in North America, but few such streams have had as explosive an effect on political and cultural life. The youth Bloom was educating consisted of the young Jewish lions ready to undo the teachings of their forefathers, though not to distance themselves from their explosive method. Whereas grandfather Strauss was their perfect guide, parting a space in thought as intellectuals are prone to do, it appears as though Wolfowitz long ago decided to transfigure him through power politics.Neoconservatism is the final conquest of the Republican Party movement begun with Barry Goldwater uttering in 1964: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” He was the leading light of the Protestant Fundamentalist movement being ushered into political adolescence whose self-righteous ambitions felt no need for euphemisms. They resound like distant thunder when faced with today’s newspeak.Conversely, neoconservatism spells victory against Jewish intellectuals who were instrumental in the movement that shaped the policies of Itzak Rabin and the Oslo peace accord. Since Rabin’s assassination, the neo-cons have sealed their dominance over progressive forces in Israel, those inclined to stop and reverse the illegal settling of the Occupied Territories and give Palestinians the right to an independent homeland.It has not been repeated enough how important a role the neo-cons have played in the Israeli rightwing. Their battle against Palestinian self-determination has aimed specifically at Jewish progressives, and Bloom’s book performed the archeological re-writing of the importance the German Jewish émigrés had for the greatest period in American art and intellectual culture perhaps since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Due in large part to their contributions, that period was infinitely freer because infinitely more egalitarian than the USA of today. It was a time in which people strove for more democracy and greater equality. Under fictitious pretexts, we are now living the opposite under the same names. The so-called freedom and democracy Bush’s neo-cons are pumping is something that both America and the world can live without.These are some of the reasons why the Strauss/Bloom background has to be spread about some more both within the university walls and from without. Large parts of the American population have been spruced by religion to listen to the neo-con message in order to soothe their impending nightmares. That its power is a perverted outgrowth from social science theory is given an outstanding portrayal in the following article. Giving proper credit is but a pittance in exchange for deeper knowledge of the advancing plan to redesign the Middle East and reinforce Israeli extremism, as Iraq slides further into confusion.NORMAN MADARASZ teaches and writes on philosophy and international relations in Rio de Janeiro. He welcomes comments at <a href="mailtto:/nmphdiol2@yahoo.ca" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;">nmphdiol2@yahoo.ca</a>.</div><div>
</div><div><div>=</div><div><a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2003/08/01/the-university-of-chicago-is-a-moral-cesspool/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2003/08/01/the-university-of-chicago-is-a-moral-cesspool/</a></div><div>
</div><div>It is now a matter of public record that immediately after the terrible tragedy of September 11, 2001, U.S. Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld and his pro-Israeli “Neoconservative” Deputy Paul Wolfowitz began to plot, plan, scheme and conspire to wage a war of aggression against Iraq by manipulating the tragic events of September 11th in order to provide a pretext for doing so. Of course Iraq had nothing at all to do with September 11th or supporting Al-Qaeda . But that made no difference to Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the numerous other pro-Israeli Neo-cons in the Bush Jr. administration.These pro-Israeli Neo-cons had been schooled in the Machiavellian/Nietzschean theories of Professor Leo Strauss, who taught political philosophy at the University of Chicago in their Department of Political Science. The best expose of Strauss’s pernicious theories on law, politics, government, for elitism, and against democracy can be found in two scholarly books by the Canadian Professor Shadia B. Drury: The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (1988); Leo Strauss and the American Right (1999). I entered the University of Chicago in September of 1968 shortly after Strauss had retired. But I was trained in Chicago’s Political Science Department by Strauss’s foremost protege, co-author, and literary executor Joseph Cropsey. Based upon my personal experience as an alumnus of Chicago’s Political Science Department (A.B., 1971, in Political Science), I concur completely with Professor Drury’s devastating critique of Strauss. I also agree with her penetrating analysis of the degradation of the American political process by Chicago’s Straussian cabal.Chicago routinely trained me and numerous other students to become ruthless and unprincipled Machiavellians. That is precisely why so many neophyte Neo-con students gravitated towards the University of Chicago or towards Chicago Alumni at other universities. The University of Chicago became the “brains” behind the Bush Jr. Empire and his Ashcroft Police State. Attorney General John Ashcroft received his law degree from the University of Chicago in 1967. Many of his “lawyers” at the Department of Injustice are members of the right-wing, racist, bigoted, reactionary, and totalitarian Federalist Society (aka “Feddies”), which originated in part at the University of Chicago.Although miseducated at Yale and Harvard Business School, the “Ivies” proved to be too liberal for Bush Jr. and his fundamentalist Christian supporters, whose pointman and spearcarrier in the Bush Jr. administration was Ashcroft, a Fundie himself. The Neo-cons and the Fundies contracted an “unholy alliance” in support of Bush Jr. across the board. For their own different reasons, both groups also worked hand-in-hand to support Israel’s genocidal Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, an internationally acknowledged war criminal. Strange bedfellows indeed.According to his own public estimate and boast before the American Enterprise Institute, President Bush Jr. hired about 20 Straussians to occupy key positions in his administration, many holding offices where they could push American foreign policy in favor of Israel and against its chosen enemies such as Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the Palestinians. It was the Chicago Straussian cabal of pro-Israeli Neo-cons who set up a separate “intelligence” unit within the Pentagon that was responsible for manufacturing many of the bald-faced lies, deceptions, half-truths, and outright propaganda that the Bush Jr. administration then disseminated to the lap-dog U.S. news media in order to generate public support for a war of aggression against Iraq for the benefit of Israel and in order to steal Iraq’s oil. To paraphrase something Machiavelli once advised his Prince in Chapter XVIII of that book: Those who want to deceive will always find those willing to be deceived. As I can attest from my personal experience as an alumnus of the University of Chicago Department of Political Science, the Bible of Chicago’s pro-Israeli Neo-con Straussian cabal is Machiavelli’s The Prince.As for the University of Chicago overall, its Bible is Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987). Of course Bloom was another protege of Strauss, as well as a mentor to Wolfowitz. In his latest novel Ravelstein (2000) Saul Bellow, formerly on the University of Chicago Faculty, outed his self-styled friend Bloom as a hedonist, pederast, and most promiscuous homosexual who died of AIDS. All this was common knowledge at the University of Chicago, where Bloom is still worshipped and his elitist screed against American higher-education still revered. In Ravelstein Wolfowitz appeared as Bloom’s protege Philip Gorman, and Strauss as Bloom’s mentor and guru Professor Davarr. Strauss/Davarr is really the eminence grise of the novel. With friends like Bellow, Bloom did not need enemies.Just recently the University of Chicago officially celebrated its Bush Jr. Straussian cabal, highlighting Wolfowitz Ph.D. ’72, Ahmad Chalabi, Ph.D. ’69, Abram Shulsky, A.M. ’68, Ph.D. ’72, Zalmay Khalilzad, Ph.D. ’79, together with faculty members Bellow, X ’39 and Bloom, A.B. ’49, A.M. ’53, Ph.D. ’55. According to the June 2003 University of Chicago Magazine, Bloom’s book “helped popularize Straussian ideals of democracy.” It is correct to assert that Bloom’s rant helped to popularize Straussian “ideas,” but they were blatantly anti-democratic, Machiavellian, Nietzschean, and elitist to begin with. Only the University of Chicago would have the unmitigated Orwellian gall to publicly claim that Strauss and Bloom cared one whit about democracy, let alone comprehended the “ideals of democracy.”Does anyone seriously believe that the Chicago/Strauss/Bloom product Wolfowitz cares one whit about democracy in Iraq? Or the Bush Jr. administration itself, after having stolen the 2000 presidential election from the American People in Florida and before the Republican-controlled U.S. Supreme Court, some of whom were Feddies? Do not send your children to the University of Chicago where they will grow up to become warmongers like Wolfowitz or totalitarians like Ashcroft! Chicago is an intellectual and moral cesspool.Francis A. Boyle, Professor of Law, University of Illinois, is author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0822323273/counterpunchmaga" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;">Foundations of World Order</a>, Duke University Press, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0932863337/counterpunchmaga" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;">The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence</a>, and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/093286337X/counterpunchmaga" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;">Palestine, Palestinians and International Law</a>, by Clarity Press. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:FBOYLE@LAW.UIUC.EDU" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;">FBOYLE@LAW.UIUC.EDU</a></div><div>=</div><div><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://mapper.nndb.com/maps/712/000001709/">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://mapper.nndb.com/maps/712/000001709/</a></div><div>
</div><div>NeoCon: University of Chicago, PNAC, CFR, & Hudson Institute<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" width="100%"><tbody><tr><td colspan="2" valign="top" align="left">CONTRIBUTED MAP

<table cellpadding="3" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td class="key" style="text-align: right; vertical-align: middle;"> AUTHOR:</td><td class="value" style="vertical-align: middle;">Anonymous</td></tr><tr><td class="key" style="text-align: right; vertical-align: middle;"> CREATED:</td><td class="value" style="vertical-align: middle;">20-Jun-2008</td></tr><tr><td class="key" style="text-align: right; vertical-align: middle;"> TAGS:</td><td class="value" style="vertical-align: middle;">neocon newtwork chicago pnac cfr hudson institute</td></tr><tr><td class="key" style="text-align: right; vertical-align: middle;"> CATEGORY:</td><td class="value" style="vertical-align: middle;">Government, Organizations</td></tr></tbody></table><tt>NeoCon Newtwork: U of Chicago, PNAC, CFR, & Hudson Institute</tt>    PEOPLE
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/326/000024254/" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Elliott Abrams</a> Asst. Secy. of State involved in Iran-Contra
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/416/000045281/" target="blank" style="">Lewis Libby</a> Cheney's former Chief of Staff
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/880/000129493/" target="blank" style="">Vin Weber</a> Congressman from Minnesota, 1981-93
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/426/000048282/" target="blank" style="">John Podhoretz</a> Conservative columnist
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/598/000022532/" target="blank" style="">Dick Cheney</a> Dubya's VP, ex-CEO of Halliburton
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/401/000048257/" target="blank" style="">Bill Kristol</a> Editor of The Weekly Standard
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/046/000164551/" target="blank" style="">George Weigel</a> Ethics and Public Policy Center
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/932/000031839/" target="blank" style="">Gary Bauer</a> Family Research Council
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/201/000023132/" target="blank" style="">Robert Bork</a> Fired Archibald Cox, later got himself borked
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/493/000022427/" target="blank" style="">William Bennett</a> Former Drug Czar and gambling man
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/646/000022580/" target="blank" style="">Jeb Bush</a> Governor of Florida, 1999-2007
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/376/000052220/" target="blank" style="">Midge Decter</a> Neoconservative maven
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/452/000024380/" target="blank" style="">Steve Forbes</a> Owner and publisher of Forbes magazine
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/423/000048279/" target="blank" style="">Leo Strauss</a> Patron saint of Neoconservatism
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/870/000048726/" target="blank" style="">Frank Gaffney</a> Prominent neocon
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/402/000048258/" target="blank" style="">Norman Podhoretz</a> Prominent neocon author
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/427/000129040/" target="blank" style="">Eliot A. Cohen</a> Prominent neoconservative
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/920/000116572/" target="blank" style="">Francis Fukuyama</a> The End of History and the Last Man
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/937/000159460/" target="blank" style="">Donald Kagan</a> The Great Dialogue
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/327/000049180/" target="blank" style="">John Yoo</a> Thinks Geneva Conventions are obsolete
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/059/000120696/" target="blank" style="">Zalmay Khalilzad</a> US Ambassador to the UN
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/634/000023565/" target="blank" style="">Donald Rumsfeld</a> US Secretary of Defense, 2001-06
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/906/000024834/" target="blank" style="">Clarence Thomas</a> US Supreme Court Justice
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/273/000044141/" target="blank" style="">Viet Dinh</a> USA PATRIOT Act mastermind
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/781/000024709/" target="blank" style="">Dan Quayle</a> Vice President under George H.W. Bush
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/290/000023221/" target="blank" style="">Paul Wolfowitz</a> World Bank president, 2005-07

    
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/031/000010001/" target="blank" style="">

    ORGANIZATION
    </a><a href="http://www.nndb.com/org/339/000048195/" target="blank" style="">American Enterprise Institute</a> 
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/org/514/000042388/" target="blank" style="">Bilderberg Group</a> 
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/org/505/000042379/" target="blank" style="">Council on Foreign Relations</a> 
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/org/689/000051536/" target="blank" style="">Hudson Institute</a> 
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/org/207/000134802/" target="blank" style="">Pilgrims Society</a> 
    <a href="http://www.nndb.com/org/821/000043692/" target="_blank" style="">Project for the New American Century</a> 
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