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Allan Bloom, "The Closing of the American Mind"

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

From Publishers Weekly

Plato said that music was a barbaric art form, and Bloom, translator of Plato's Republic, charges that rock 'n' roll's sole attraction is a "barbaric appeal to sexual desire." This University of Chicago professor claims that racial segregation among today's students is largely due to the fact that "blacks have become blacks" and stick together. He brands Margaret Mead as a "sexual adventurer" whose call for cultural diversity betrayed her indifference to American ideals embodied in th Declaration of Independence. Marred by the author's biases, this jeremiad laments the decay of the humanities, the decline of the family and students' spiritual rootlessness and unconnectedness to traditions. Bloom traces what he sees as as an anti-Enlightenment attitude in our society that dates back to Rousseau. He calls for a "Great Books" educational program that would teach students the unity of the sciences, social sciences and arts.

From Library Journal

Bloom is angry about college students--tolerant of everything, they cannot appreciate the virtues of Lockean democracy and often abandon the great questions about God and man. Meanwhile, the humanities are like "a refugee camp where all the geniuses driven out of their jobs and countries . . . are idling." The reason is partly relativism in the social sciences but largely German philosophers since Nietzsche, especially Heidegger, who "put philosophy at the service of German culture." Bloom's case about the humanities and German philosophy deserves an ear, but his students from "the twenty or thirty best U.S. universities" are nothing like my recent American students, who pursue the old questions with vim and vigor. Perhaps they do not belong to Bloom's elite.

Contents

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Foreword by Saul Bellow Preface Introduction: Our Virtue Part One: Students  The Clean Slate  Books  Music  Relationships   Self-Centeredness   Equality   Race   Sex   Separateness   Divorce   Love   Eros Part Two: Nihilism, American Style  The German Connection  Two Revolutions and Two States of Nature  The Self  Creativity  Culture  Values  The Nietzscheanization of the Left or Vice Versa  Our Ignorance Part Three: The University  From Socrates' Apology to Heidegger's Rektoratsrede   Tocqueville on Democratic Intellectual Life   The Relation Between Thought and Civil Society   The Philosophic Experience   The Enlightenment Transformation   Swift's Doubts   Rousseau's Radicalization and the German University  The Sixties  The Student and the University   Liberal Education   The Decomposition of the University   The Disciplines   Conclusion Index About the Author

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Tags: Philosophy, HigherEducation, CriticalThinking, Politics

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