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“... to all but the meanest citizens of the republic of letters, the novel is an obelisk for the late Allan Bloom, author of the 1987 shocker, The Closing of the American Mind. This book, which was a late product or blooming of the University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought, argued that the American mind was closed because it had become so goddamned ...”

“... Xenophon’s Hiero’. The revised and enlarged paperback edition of Strauss’s On Tyranny, which Allan Bloom brought out in 1963, reprints the entire debate for the benefit of students on the initiation courses that Strauss’s followers run in a number of American universities. It was again Allan Bloom, the ...”

“... about their potential consequences, and mostly vague recommendations regarding their reform. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, described on the New York Times best-seller list as ‘a critique of liberal arts education during the past twenty-five years’, has been widely considered as a distinguished part of this broad critical ...”

“... prevail by virtue of the demands of differential recognition. Identity politics lets every faction bloom while patriotism, now seen as the snare of subordination, perishes. During the Sixties, when the Vietnam War was raging, many young Americans made sure that they stayed in school in order to enjoy the draft deferment that kept them out of the war. During ...”

“... and values embodied in an unchanging canon. It’s like looking at twins: Steiner as a European Allan Bloom, Bloom as an American George Steiner. Such an observation will not sit well with Steiner’s claim that ‘Europe and North America are, in crucial ways, increasingly distant from each other.’ His ...”

“... by representatives of ‘the human potential movement’) nor knock it (in the manner of Lasch and Allan Bloom). Instead, we should ‘fight over the meaning of authenticity’. In particular, we should keep reminding people that the selves to which they hope to be true are ‘dialogical selves’ – that we are what we are because of the people, real or ...”

“... student could enter after the sophomore year of high school; precocious philosophical peers like Allan Bloom (born 1930) and Richard Rorty (born 1931) were educated on the same programme. ‘I’ll really know what to do in Chicago when I get there,’ Sontag writes after recounting more adventures in the bars of San Francisco and Sausalito. ‘I’ll ...”

“... William Bennett. Bennett and his fellow conservative intellectuals would like to persuade us that Allan Bloom was right in suggesting that the universities are under the control of a ‘Nietzscheanised left’, and that the life of the mind in America survives only in conservative think-tanks. There is, to be sure, such a Left; though it has managed to ...”

“... of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, the author of The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom. According to Atlas, Bellow is ‘unsparing about his friend’s self-destructive bent, his oblivious devotion to fine wine and rich food’. The fact is that as early as Augie March many of the characters Bellow most admires share a ...”

“... tradition. In fact, his defence of the French mind, originally published at the same time as Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, is a plea for Culture, not Reason – explicitly, it defines literature in opposition to science, and implicitly, the intellectual in opposition to the academic. Lévy and Finkielkraut’s insistence on the ...”

“... education’ (Dinesh D’Souza in 1991), dedicated to ‘the closing of the American mind’ (Allan Bloom in 1987). The sense of embattlement is palpable in a recent anthology of articles from the New Criterion, whose editor, Hilton Kramer, gazes back on the founding of the magazine in 1982: The ‘long march through the institutions’ that had ...”

“... age of 85, he brought out Ravelstein, its protagonist modelled on Bellow’s friend and colleague Allan Bloom, whose twilight lament The Closing of the American Mind, endorsed with a foreword by Bellow (though what a snoozer of stale seminar hem-hawing that was: ‘It would be a pity if intelligent adversaries were not to read Professor ...”

“... read detective stories than those who attend only to magazines, to serious self-help books, or to Allan Bloom! But Disney studios made a mess out of trying to make a film about Sara Paretsky’s heroine, as they could not really believe in or approve of her. Television in the United States is almost universally under the control of advertisers, and the ...”

“... customarily loved their socially superior, clubbish, intellectually high-minded ‘college’. See Allan Bloom, who from the safety of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago mocks mass education in The Closing of the American Mind. That is, no one would love the multiversity in and for itself were it not for intercollegiate ...”

“... professors walked by, chatting loudly on their way to lunch. The man doing most of the talking was Allan Bloom, who much later published a bestseller called The Closing of the American Mind, a rather fascinating and even intimidating figure. Unashamedly effeminate, and clearly favouring his male over his female students, he was nonetheless a charismatic ...”