Closing of the American Mind

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Simon and Schuster, Jun 30, 2008 - Social Science - 400 pages
The brilliant, controversial, bestselling critique of American culture that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times)—now featuring a new afterword by Andrew Ferguson in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition.

In 1987, eminent political philosopher Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, an appraisal of contemporary America that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times) and has not only been vindicated, but has also become more urgent today. In clear, spirited prose, Bloom argues that the social and political crises of contemporary America are part of a larger intellectual crisis: the result of a dangerous narrowing of curiosity and exploration by the university elites.

Now, in this twenty-fifth anniversary edition, acclaimed author and journalist Andrew Ferguson contributes a new essay that describes why Bloom’s argument caused such a furor at publication and why our culture so deeply resists its truths today.
 

Contents

Foreword by Saul Bellow
19
Our Virtue
25
The Clean Slate
47
Music
62
PART TWO NIHILISM AMERICAN STYLE
139
Two Revolutions and Two States of Nature
157
The Self
168
Creativity
180
Values
194
The Nietzscheanization of the Left or Vice Versa
217
Our Ignorance
227
From Socrates Apology to Heideggers Rektoratsrede
243
The Sixties
313
The Student and the University
336
Copyright

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About the author (2008)

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

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