The Allan Bloom Project

2007 marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (TCAM). This has not gone unnoticed in the blogosphere or elsewhere. In some ways it is a sad spectacle. Bloom is trotted out by some on the right like a favored old war-horse that has been spending most of its more recent days at pasture, while those on the left frown as the despised old bugbear shakes itself off from a long hibernation. It is sort of quaint to hear all the long buried truisms about the book return to the land of the living like a zombie in a George Romero flick. Yes, it is true that many more people bought the book than actually read it. Yes, many of those who started the book probably left off early in Part Two. These sorts of things are brought up in an attempt to make the book look irrelevant. As if the true measure of any book is based upon those who read little or none of it. For myself, I'd prefer to stick with those who did read all of it. Those are the only ones who can speak intelligently about the book anyway.

I was a sophomore at the University of Missouri at St. Louis when TCAM was published. I was technically a Computer Science major at the time, after having abandoned a major in Psychology the year before. (My junior year would see me switch one last time to Political Science. Ah, the joys of indecision.) I was a member of the honors college at UMSL, which afforded me the luxury of small classes with professors who were a bit more "chatty" than you generally found in regular lecture courses. At some point during the spring of 1988 Bloom's book was mentioned twice in one week, by two different professors in two very different courses. I felt like an idiot. I'd never heard of the man or his book which was common knowledge everywhere, or so it seemed. After the second of these references I went to the library to relieve myself of my ignorance and checked TCAM out.

In some whys it is hard to say what I thought of the book the first time I read it. Obviously, there were sections of it that were very accessible for an undergraduate student though untrained in philosophy in any way. Bloom was speaking about students. Hell, I was one of those, even if I wasn't exactly a student in an expensive liberal arts college with a sparkling reputation. I was a student at an urban branch campus of a large state university...but I was in the honors college, so I didn't consider myself totally alien. So when Bloom talked about what students were like and what he felt their weaknesses were and how they viewed the world, etc., it was easy to join in the conversation as it were. Blooms discussion of relativism in the introduction was also easily accessible to me as I had been struggling with similar ideas, though I hadn't been able to crystallize my thoughts very clearly. I had felt that I was against what I was calling at the time "pragmatism." What I meant by that had something to do with my dissatisfaction with the expediencies of life. I felt too many deals were being made that undercut the "truth" or any sense of "ideals." It wasn't that I was unaware of the basic imperfections of the world (I was raised too good a Catholic to fall down there), but I felt something in the way we were being encouraged to view the world was denying the chance for improvement. (The irony of much of this is today I consider myself a pragmatist, or to say more precisely a Peircian pragmatist or pragmaticist.) In Bloom's discussion of "Our Virtue" I found a compelling vocabulary that brought together the disparate strands of my thinking and bunched them together into something far more coherent. In many ways it was my first knowledgeable step into the world of philosophy.

I was such a neophyte when it came to philosophy at the time I read the second half of Bloom's book with little in the way of understanding. But my incomprehension inspired me. I wanted to know what was going on in this book. What was out there that I had missed out on. What new ideas could I be exposed to, and what arguments could I throw myself into the middle of. TCAM basically inspired the rest of my journey in higher education. Because of this book I changed my major to Political Science and I added a minor in Philosophy. It had much to do with my going to graduate school in Political Science. For, although Bloom gave me the vocabulary and theoretical framework of relativism that I felt was right on the mark, there was still a lot in his book that I wanted to argue with. I wanted to know how strong a case Bloom was making. How much of what he said would I have to concede to and how much could I rationally stand against.

So it was that, while I went off and studied other thinkers in far greater detail, I found myself returning to Bloom's book routinely. In 1997 I had a paper/poster (with a co-author) at the Midwest Political Science Association meeting in Chicago entitled "The Misunderstood Teaching of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind," that presented some of my thinking to that point. It was in many ways a measuring stick for myself. It showed me how much my understanding had grown over the previous ten years worth of reading, studying and arguing about ideas. All of Bloom's book was open to me by that time. There were more things I could argue with Bloom about, but simultaneously, there were more things Bloom had the ability to teach me.

Now, ten years later, I feel it is worthwhile to measure myself against The Closing of the American Mind once again. In the next couple of weeks I will be looking at all of the book's sections, and writing about how I view them now. This will be done taking into account what other people are saying about the book today and what the critiques in the past have stated. The reaction to TCAM has the tendency to say a lot about a person, and it seems this will never change.

So what will my reactions say about me?

Wait and see.