The Closing of the American Mind

Bloom’s charge is that the American university replaced the pursuit of truth with a dogma of relativism, so that students arrive already certain nothing can be known and are therefore unable to read a great book as a claim about how to live. The argument runs through the students’ inner lives — their music, their eros, their friendships, the flatness of their ambitions — and then back to the provenance of the ideas, tracing a German inheritance in which Nietzsche, Weber and Heidegger arrived in America stripped of their gravity and repackaged as easygoing openness. It ends as a defence of the great-books curriculum and of philosophy as a way of life. An unexpected bestseller in 1987, and one of the founding documents of the argument about the university that has not stopped since.

Bloom is present on this list twice more as a translator: his editions of Plato’s Republic and Rousseau’s Emile are the ones McCord specifies.

Why it’s on the list: It opens the curriculum’s section on ethics and personal growth, ahead of MacIntyre, Cicero, Aurelius and Frankl — the argument for why a reading list like this one is worth making at all.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the section on Pursuing the Good Life: Ethics and Personal Growth. The full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Connections

• Higher Education — the institution the book holds responsible.
• Education — the broader subject.
• Academia — the professional culture Bloom holds responsible.
• Reading — the practice the book is a defence of.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.