Looking for another book not long ago, I stumbled upon Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. In 1987, it was a national sensation, a trigger-point for debate over the legacy of the sixties and its “counter-culture.”
Subtitled “How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students,” Bloom’s salvo attacked from the right. It was less a polemic than a closely reasoned argument, fortified with lofty philosophic learning and grounded classroom experience. A New York Times reviewer wrote that “it commands one’s attention and concentrates one’s mind more effectively than any other book I can think of in the past five years.” The Chicago Tribune said “it may be the most important work of its kind by an American since World War II.” Saul Bellow, in a gripping introduction, summarized: “It makes an important statement and deserves careful study. What it provides, whether or not one agrees with its conclusions, is an indispensable guide for discussion . . . a completely articulated, historically accurate summary, a trustworthy resume of the development of the higher mental life in the democratic U.S.A.”
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