Allan Bloom and the Critics
Dannhauser, Werner J.
Werner J. Dannhauser ALLAN BLOOM AND THE CRITICS In the eighteen months since the release of The Closing of the American Mind, reactions to the book have increasingly come to confirm its...
...Barber is right in thinking of him as a Straussian, but his line of reasoning is too clever by half...
...One might argue that by giving Rousseau his due, Bloom had also given compassion its due, but a more fitting response to Pattison's analysis is: fair enough...
...on nothing more substantial than rumors spread by her many lovers...
...Unfortunately, I am not a poet or a novelist so I cannot do justice to this theme...
...What is more, those who write about our present discontent seem above all to be tired, tired, tired...
...The gravest of the various grave deficiencies Kesler thinks he discerns in The Closing of the American Mind is a failure to appreciate the grandeur of the American regime, above all of its Founding...
...Before the nineteenth century, and even later if one counts Nietzsche, that view was held by thinkers of the stature of Cicero, Thomas More, Rousseau, and Pascal...
...Indeed, Cornell would be a fine place to test my hypotheses, because here Bloom draws fire not only because he has recently become famous but for the previous crime of having been a great teacher of Great Books...
...What's happened here...
...Roger Kimball in the New York Times Book Review "The Closing of the American Mind is that rarest of documents, a genuinely profound book...
...Some of these are simply ridiculous, as when she illustrates Bloom's "startling ignorance" of the critical and rationalist tradition of Classical Indian Thought, by referring to a piece of work Bloom could not have read because it has not yet been published—a work co-authored by Martha Nussbaum...
...Elitism is a necessary feature of pluralism...
...Now in the book Bloom mentions Strauss only once and in passing, but that is, I think, due to modesty and a wish to stand on his own two feet amidst controversy...
...I have previously had occasion to refer to Bloom's personal tone or voice: whoever touches this book touches a man, and that man has warts...
...Write to: THE TENTH AMENDMENT FOUNDATION PO Box 1072 Covington, VA 24426 10...
...Many cynics have told me that in response to his detractors Bloom must be laughing all the way to the bank...
...Choice words, these, especially since their authors include a college president, and a distinguished professor of classics and history...
...8. T he assumed superiority to The 1 Closing of The American Mind was trans-ideological, but it was hardly trans-academic...
...Such an estimation, however, in no way precludes patriotism...
...That happened, but requires elucidation in our vale of tears...
...It is a far cry from identifying students as the victims of higher education, which Bloom does, to blaming the victims, which he does not do...
...W riting about "Allan Bloom and His Critics" I have been less than just to The Closing of the American Mind...
...That description may be based14...
...His denigration of the latter bases itself on a Deweyan historicism and relativism...
...Throughout most of May last year, a chorus of acclaim greeted the book...
...But one must assume this line of reasoning if one is to account for Nussbaum's beginning with a long quotation from Musonius Rufus, "the distinguished Roman Stoic philosopher...
...Then, even while the American reading public forced Bloom's book into the limelight, the nation was preparing for the confirmation hearings of Robert Bork...
...It is a last resort, not, as in Barber's case, a first or second resort...
...Show me a professor and I'll show you somebody who wants to write a best-seller...
...He also perpetrates a prodigious number of errors for one review, some of which deserve mention here if only to document the depths to which the Old Left has descended...
...Instead Bloom has taken seriously "the unbridled metaphysician, Heidegger...
...He found it a worthy object of opposition as "one of the most profoundly anti-democratic books ever written for a popular audience," and he advanced a complicated explanation for the fact that Bloom seemed to be defending democracy instead of attacking it...
...Two condemnations of Bloom must be noted for the record...
...His irresponsibility was brilliantly exposed in letters to the Chronicle by Werner J. Dannhauser and Arthur Kruger, but by that time the damage had been done...
...Bloom has been repeatedly accused of (1) idealism, (2) sexism, (3) racism, (4) elitism, (5) Straussianism, (6) esoteric writing, (7) sloppy writing, (8) absolutism, (9) making scapegoats of students, (10) ignorance of professional philosophy, (11) un-Americanism, (12) failure to understand rock music, (13) pessimism, (14) uncritical advocacy of The Great Books, (15) bad scholarship, and (16) neglect of religion...
...Unafraid to take risks by being personal, he compels admiration for his lavish expenditure of effort...
...Then Ayer listed six people to whom Heidegger "cannot hold a candle," including a world-historical figure like Roderick Chisholm...
...By this time the left had smelled blood, and it rushed on to one of its most unsavory victories...
...in fact, it is a part of the self-reflective kind of patriotism a democracy like ours ought to cherish...
...IN ITS FIGHT TO PRESERVE THE FEDERAL SYSTEM For a tax-deductible contribution of $30 or more you will receive free, while supplies last, a copy of The Constitution of the United States of America: A Primer, and a subscription to the bimonthly newsletter, The State of the States...
...Wharton went so far as to state that Bloom's views made "ordinary garden variety racism seem almost benign...
...Today the charges of racism and sexism are easy enough to refute but next to impossible to erase, having become the most obvious tools with which scoundrels can bludgeon those who see through them...
...3. C ince nobody quite knows what causes books to sell, one can simply say that for once a fine book got the recognition it deserved...
...Perhaps Bloom's audience includes a whole army of "unlikely" readers, people who take to the book because of its tone, its voice...
...For example, he graciously wrote "Bloom the teacher is always astute and scrupulously fair," scored some minor points, but consistently took the higher road of claiming Bloom lacked "a sense of compassion" as apposed to a sense of justice...
...The most pervasive one of them all concerns Allan Bloom's absolutism...
...Moreover, as a professor there he witnessed the shenanigans of 1969...
...He claims to have read The Closing of the American Mind "syllable for syllable—and more than once," but when he insists that Bloom never mentions Tocqueville's conviction that the price for democracy was worth paying he must have missed some syllables on page 227...
...She is far too certain of her ground when she maintains quite erroneously that Bloom's and Strauss's view is "bizarre and not accepted by any major nonStraussian interpreter" of The Republic...
...They scar a man and they poison the wells of honest controversy...
...Now Bloom does hold this view, but no such passage exists in The Closing of the American Mind...
...Get it...
...He does severely criticize the idea of Black Power and affirmative action for their part in bringing about this lamentable state of affairs, but if one is unable to do that without incurring the ugliest of epithets, "racist"—and it begins to look like that—public discourse should close up shop...
...That labeling, however, was done more effectively a bit later by critics like Benjamin Barber...
...The answer, of course, is that the intellect affects not only the intellect, but a lot more...
...The two men do, to be sure, have different understandings of the true nature of democracy, with Barber favoring direct participatory democracy, as opposed to liberal, representative democracy...
...Confronted by the above list of accusations, one naturally wonders about which of them are true, and to what extent...
...Now it is true that Bloom finds flaws in the founding principles—Lockeian in a decisive sense—of our country, which are decisively modern and thus partake of the problematic modern lowering of standards in order to guarantee actualization...
...The footnote asserts that the same view is asserted in Bloom's notes to his translation of The Republic...
...He seems to think that because Strauss rediscovered the art of esoteric writing, Strauss himself wrote esoterically and taught Allan Bloom to do so...
...A closing mind is not yet closed, and the young used Bloom's book to catch a'glimpse of themselves...
...As a result the universities, where these terms are bandied about recklessly, have become far less free than the surrounding society...
...The fulminations of David Rieff, in the Times Literary Supplement, easily match the vituperation anybody else has leveled against The Closing of the American Mind, though Rieff has stiff competition in the race to defame my friend...
...Bloom's "offense" has been to note, with sadness and regret, that relations between the races in the universities have deteriorated...
...The 1980s, with the election of Ronald Reagan, unquestionably dealt a blow to the suffocating left-wing orthodoxy that has dominated our intellectual life for much of this century...
...Some weeks ago, on a plane, as I was looking through The Closing of the American Mind again in preparation for writing these words, the young man sitting next to me volunteered: "That's a good book...
...Richard Rorty also opts for de- mocracy, but without Benjamin Barber's genuine wit...
...After the professional reviewers had their say, professors tookover, gleefully picking at nits, flaunting their contempt, very often for no other apparent reason than the book's sales...
...I can only urge those who doubt my description to come to Cornell, where I would be happy to offer documentation...
...In Harper's Magazine of January 1988, Benjamin Barber began with a barbed question: "Why are liberal critics and egalitarian educators beside themselves with admiration for what can only be called a raging assault on liberal tolerance and democratic education...
...In between, he vents his bile not only on Bloom, but on Saul Bellow, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Bernard Lewis, Mary Ann Glendon, and Walter Berns for praising the book...
...Here and there he exaggerates...
...As far as I can tell, this -particular slur was first publicized in the Chronicle of Higher Education of January 20, 1988, reporting a speech given by Clifton R. Wharton, Jr., former chancellor of the State University of New York...
...Some of the criticisms can't be tied to any one source because they pervade many reviews...
...Leo Strauss discussed esoteric writing, akinto writing between the lines, in Persecution and the Art of Writing, but there he maintains that "reading between the lines is strictly prohibited in all cases where it would be less exact than not doing so...
...Friendship does not preclude difference...
...Moreover, when he says that Bloom "despises Locke," he simply doesn't know what he's talking about...
...Wrong again: it is asserted in the interpretive essay accompanying the translation, which, by the way, all by itself attests to Bloom's competence to deal with classical texts...
...Menand also charges Bloom with idealism...
...He viewed Bloom as teacher, politician, and philosopher and found him a worthy adversary...
...9. W hile it is true that both the right and the left have poured out their wrath on The Closing of the American Mind, it is also true that the heavy preponderance of the venom emanates from the left...
...The assignment fell to Martha Nussbaum, a classical scholar...
...Moreover, he decried Bloom's reference to Margaret Mead as a "sexual adventurer...
...In various books cherished and taught by Bloom, that question is debated with a profundity unreached by Menand, who thinks he has trapped Bloom by conceding that the intellect affects history but asking "What affects the intellect...
...in fact Bloom praises Locke on, among other places, page 293, in one of the paragraphs containing an awkward sentence Rosenberg holds up to ridicule...
...Why couldn't she come up with a similar quotation from Epictetus and/or Cicero...
...The Closing of the American Mind promised to tell it as it is, and delivered on its promise...
...I have been unable to convey a true sense of its splendors, and above all of the delights one experiences in following the author's attempts not to change the world, but to understand it...
...Bloom makes all this clear enough, but necessity excuses my kindergarten recapitulation...
...what was understood—or, rather, misunderstood—as the anti-Americanism suffusing it...
...1. W hen discussing Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, I bring to my task not the dirty hands of feigned objectivity but the clean hands of a friendship generously acknowledged in the book...
...But slanders like racism and sexism are no laughing matter...
...Relativism and absolutism are the two varieties of dogmatism opposed by Bloom...
...veryone I know predicted that the New York Review of Books would trash The Closing of the American Mind, but who would do the trashing...
...By contrast, Bloom manifests a prodigious mental energy and a flamboyance that keeps us on our toes...
...Bloom has succeeded in presenting us with what he sets out to present, a genuine "meditation on the state of our souls...
...He contends that according to Strauss "every philosopher wrote only between the lines"—whose lines did he use to write between...
...Bloom and his friends, however, can find a bit of solace in the fact that the tirades against The Closing of the American Mind prove something about the closing of the American mind...
...By the end of May, then, a consensus in favor of The Closing of the American Mind seemed to be emerging...
...Everybody knows, or ought to know, about the role of luck, or chance...
...What happened here...
...Professor Nussbaum's review (November 15, 1987) bore the title "Undemocratic Vistas," and Bloom was denounced not as un-American, but as undemocratic simply, an opponent to rule of the many, an elitist...
...According to a kindred criticism of the author, he was far too gloomy...
...We have pondered the crisis of our time so long and so helplessly that we welcome a new investigator on the scene, one who pays little attention to the usual suspects—TV, technology, bureaucracy—and instead casts suspicion on Machiavelli, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Heidegger...
...The attack from the right included,sad to say, a review in these very pages by Charles Kesler (August 1987...
...and if they presented the appearance of speaking of a great matter, it was because they knew that the madmen, to whom they spoke, thought they were kings and emperors...
...now and then he paints with too broad a brush...
...The Closing of the American Mind contains not one shred of evidence for the charge of racism, a term with only one viable definition: the evil of inflicting injustice on other people for the sole reason of race...
...One claims to know all the true answers...
...That sounds right...
...The effect of the Reagan years began to seem shallow and transient...
...Ironically, at times the dismay with the book on the right seemed to stem from the same source as delight on the left...
...Having tartly noted Bloom's general failure to provide "precise references" for his interpretations of classical philosophy, Nussbaum makes an imprecise exception for a definite interpretation Bloom presents at the length of "about a page and a half," in which he "alleges that The Republic does not seriously propose the ideal city, the rule of philosophers, or the equal education of women...
...Donald Kagan THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 17 in the Washington Times: "This is an amazing and wonderful book that penetrates the encrusted surface of American intellectual life, reveals the confusion and emptiness that lies beneath it and explains how things got this way...
...it also appealed to students themselves...
...The same curdled energy focused now on Bloom, who was hitting the left where it lived, the universities, the stronghold it has always taken for granted, and with good reason (show me a professor and I'll show you someone who mocks Ronald Reagan...
...Thus when Bloom writes about democracy he does not mean what he says or say what he means...
...For Kesler, Bloom is something of a Buckley-come-lately who confirms the diagnosis of God and Man at Yale thirty-five years later but who lacks Buckley's credentials as a conservative...
...Rorty, to be sure, does not directly charge Bloom with elitism...
...Astonishingly enough, the earliest serious review from the left turned out to be as good as an honorable man of the right (that is my description of Bloom, not his own) could expect from an honorable man of the left...
...Thus, Barber's contention that Bloom is anti-democratic goes against the grain of common sense...
...Moreover, a true patriot must come to terms not only with the vulnerabilities of his country, but with the force and strength of the principles that would undermine it—hence Bloom's entirely justified insistence on giving a thinker like Rousseau his due...
...That at least is what many students have told me...
...Soon I will be heaping contempt on certain specimens of this virulence, especially on those beneath contempt, but the reader may be helped by an overview...
...T he first really negative review 1 came not from the Far Left but the Near Left...
...A t the end of his review of The Closing of the American Mind, Bernard Rosenberg, in the spring 1988 issue of Dissent, finds it hard to think of a more expendable book...
...A friend of Bloom's aptly remarked that Bloom has "bottled himself" in this book, so what he says comes pouring forth with an exuberance making him vulnerable...
...No doubt the book appealed to parents, college-educated or not, who knew in an inchoate way that something was wrong with higher education...
...I have nurtured such dreams myself...
...None of the above wholly explains what happened...
...The Republic, he writes, ironically undercuts itself and actually teaches to those in the know the impossibility of what it seems to advocate...
...These strictures carry weight because they come from more or less friendly sources who found things to esteem in The Closing of the American Mind...
...5. T hen the fall-out began to hit the 1 fan...
...Both Time and Newsweek hedged their bets, mixing snideness and obtuseness with their wonder at the work's success, but the articles were of the kind that elicits gratitude: they publicized the book and they spelled the author's name right...
...This does not mean that ambition should live unchecked, but the general rule for business and culture has been the one stated by Madison for politics: let ambition counteract ambition...
...Going his own way, Bloom startles one with a fresh perspective...
...Nussbaum introduces an issue Bloom raises elsewhere in order to find him and "his teacher, Leo Strauss" incompetent as interpreters of classical philosophy...
...He garbles quotations about Margaret Mead and John Dewey that he ascribes to Bloom...
...So do his critics, but they use cosmetics...
...The rest of his observations are somewhat less coherent, since he loses control on account of his "hate filled self-regarding spleen," one of his more pleasant descriptions of The Closing of the American Mind...
...But as time passed that blow proved to be far less fatal than the right hoped and the left feared...
...The gloomy hoped only for a respectable reception...
...His opposition honors Bloom...
...One can only hope that this rant made the folks at Dissent feel better...
...Astonishingly enough, the earliest serious review from the left turned out to be as good as an honorable man of the right could expect from an honorable man of the left...
...The question is whether materialism can provide a coherent account of the world...
...Feminism is one of Bloom's "central targets" and Bloom also alleges that Plato is not serious about the equal education of women in The Republic...
...Yet, in spite of his exasperation, Barber paid some handsome tributes to The Closing of the American Mind, even while, or especially when, calling it "a most enticing, a most subtle, a most learned, a most dangerous tract...
...Wrong...
...Bloom easily emerges as the more sinister of the two: he "takes no notice of the beauty of the American landscape" and he "has contempt for the senses...
...All those who carp against Bloom's elitism and conception of democracy should ponder the following statement by Mansfield which I quote because I cannot hope to match it: A liberal democracy such as ours is the kind of democracy that makes room for outstanding people—for a "natural aristocracy" in Jefferson's phrase...
...DEFEND FEDERALISM...
...Leaving foundation garments aside, I take Professor Nussbaum's argument to run as follows...
...The accolades kept coming in, as when George Will stated that "Bloom's best seller is a . . . sign of the high level at which many Americans an be addressed," but at the same time the reaction to the book began to descend to low levels boggling the mind, including a comparison to Mein Kampf...
...Bloom is guilty, believing as he does in "the primacy of ideas," but so what...
...In no way does it follow from the fact that America is not heaven that it can't be the best place on earth...
...Let a quotation from Pascal suffice to make my point, because unlike Nussbaum, he does not differentiate at all in this respect be tween Plato and Aristotle: If they [Plato and Aristotle] wrote on politics, it was as if laying down rules for a lunatic asylum...
...More nearly novel is Professor Nussbaum's depiction of Bloom as a sexist...
...6. T oward the end of his life, Captain 1 Dreyfus reportedly said about charges leveled at yet another innocent French officer, "Where there's smoke, there's fire...
...The book's subtitle-J'How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Werner J. Dannhauser is professor of government at Cornell University...
...How this chain hangs together beats me, for why shouldn't somebody who detests excessive feminism and who doubts Socrates' seriousness in Book V of The Republic nevertheless preach and practice the equal education of women in today's world, as Bloom does...
...Bloom loves Reason a bit more than I do, and I love Revelation a bit more than he does...
...S we come to the present year of 1. 3 Bloom-bashing...
...A prior question thus surfaces again: What happened here...
...If she failed in writing the world's most devastating put-down it was not for lack of trying, but because, as my unscientific survey reveals, so many people had difficulty coping with her tiresome prose...
...No issue of higher education could possibly be discussed or resolved without comment by Fred Hechinger, the leading "expert" on the topic for the New York Times, who rendered judgment in its pages on October 6, 1987...
...Eva Brann, who cannot be called a member of the left, assured readers of the St...
...What did he like about the book...
...John's Review, that if Bloom had looked away from the modern university to "more or less obscure little schools" he would have discovered that "the spirit lives in the sticks...
...Almost nobody cares for a pessimist, especially if he speaks about his country's crisis or decline...
...According to the Stoics, who were correct, philosophical education should be practical, active, and "broadly distributed" (emphasis hers), which is to say that both men and women can "do" philosophy...
...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 I return to the specific criticisms 1 of The Closing of the American Mind...
...But what Menand found there is not what exists there, as when he declares that "the most notable feature of the book is its attack on youth . . ." The notion that Bloom makes a scapegoat of students entails a serious misreading...
...On May 25, 1987, Louis Menand picked on the book in the New Republic and thus began that journal's veritable obsession with Bloom, "a man who knows his own mind, and who thinks well of what he finds there...
...The result is the pluralism we take pride in...
...Barber's Bloom is a philosopher—something Bloom never calls himself—and a disciple of Leo Strauss...
...The IQ's of academics may exceed the national average, but when it comes to character we fall way below the norm...
...He compares Bloom with 011ie North, both dangerous figures of "the American Right...
...Columnists like Clarence Page (Chicago Tribune) and Chuck Stone (Philadelphia Daily News) wrote in a similar vein...
...Here they are, in no particular order...
...occasionally he omits important matters...
...Robert Pattison, in the Nation of May 30, 1987, attacked The Closing of the American Mind, but he approached it with genuine respect...
...Having read almost every review of The Closing of the American Mind, a numbing labor, I have been able to identify thesixteen—count 'em—most frequent charges against it...
...According to Saul Bellow, "Professor Bloom has his own way of doing things...
...In some circles, success automatically arouses suspicion...
...Howard Cosell, Bill Buckley, and David Brinkley interviewed Bloom, whose picture kept cropping up in magazines, sometimes on the cover...
...A number of the early reviewers had warned against a coming campaign of vilification against the book, but one was now tempted to dismiss their fears...
...Remember, you heard it here first...
...By this time many of the best charges had been preempted so Hechinger had to repeat the canard about "Bloom's contempt for modern youth...
...those of a sunny disposition, like me, dreamed of a sale of 50,000 along with a bit of a stir...
...Got it...
...The book is dedicated to his students, and an easily demonstratable love of the latter suffuses its pages...
...Our founding principles provide freedom for the ambitious in politics, business and culture...
...He levels a whole galaxy of accusations against both Bloom and Strauss, most of which I have dealt with previously...
...Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students"—points to a huge potential audience...
...he tells me so himself...
...she provides the scholarly background for Betty Friedan's remark that Bloom wants to put women back in their girdles...
...One might, of course, contend that much of this praise should be dismissed because it comes from sources right of center, but the liberal media alas proved to be rather kind...
...Those who want the genuine article when it comes to relativism and historicism should turn to Nietzsche, who is even better than Bloom's sensitive rendering of him...
...In this case, fortune took the form of unusually favorable early reviews...
...According to the standard line of argument, he must be guilty of absolutism because of his sustained critique of relativism, particularly cultural relativism, right...
...Education occupies a prominent place on the nation's agenda of worries, and college students together with graduates probably constitute a majority of the reading public...
...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988...
...Werner J. Dannhauser ALLAN BLOOM AND THE CRITICS In the eighteen months since the release of The Closing of the American Mind, reactions to the book have increasingly come to confirm its thesis...
...S. Frederick Starr in the Washington Post Book World: "Few books in recent years come close to Allan Bloom's grand tour of the American Mind either in the ambition of their reach or in the breadth of their grasp...
...A. J. Ayer, who brought us logical positivism, and thus the demise of philosophy departments as places in which one could profitably study philosophy, griped against Bloom in the London Sunday Times for ignoring, presumably because of ignorance, professional philosophers in the United States...
...They came from both sides of the political spectrum...
...Occasionally, Rieff tries to argue seriously, as when he denies that obedience is a democratic virtue, conveniently forgetting about obedience to the law...
...Her strangest characterizations of Bloom refer to his "religious conception of philosophy" and his presenting himself "as a profoundly religious man...
...Who would have thought so...
...He also became the 318th sage to proclaim that since The Closing of the American Mind was finding such a huge audience The American Mind must still be open...
...I commend their exchange to one and all, especially Mansfield's splendid defense of The Closing of the American Mind, which (along with H. D. Forbes's review in the Idler) is much the best thing written about the book...
...He was a graduate student of physics, an admirer of Hans Bethe, a participant in antinuclear demonstrations, and he was engaged to a Presbyterian clergywoman...
...Some of us, however, freely admit to our foibles and enjoy vicarious satisfaction from the triumphs of our friends...
...As for Bloom, I hope he will not be insulted when I declare that he is not all that difficult to understand...
...Socratic skepticism, the will to an open horizon, operates between these two imposters, analyzing human ignorance of final answers, but taking its bearing by the permanence of the questions...
...In this respect, she might enter into a fruitful dialogue with Robert Bellah and Kenneth Minogue...
...Then the book took off, selling some 500,000 copies, riding the best-seller list for nearly a year, and even now moving briskly as a paperback...
...That's all...
...They aren't...
...Combining a deft summary of the book with an appreciation of its virtues, he also foretold the future by noting that "this book is going to make a lot of people mad...
...The book not only captured the attention of parents concerned for theirchildren...
...Why does she have to rely on "the well-known evidence of Oxyrynchus Papyrus 3656...
...It is a far cry from identifying students as the victims of higher education, which Bloom does, to blaming the victims, which he does not do...
...How did this reward of virtue come about...
...Good...
...As a professor, it is my happiness that neither comes from the pen of a professor...
...They had watched their children go off to get a liberal education and come back with all sorts of substitutes or by-products: addictions, neuroses, unearned cynicism, a sense of emptiness...
...But that means that Barber's real quarrel is not with Bloom but with the latter's source of inspiration, Tocqueville...
...the other claims to know that nothing is true...
...2. ost books don't make waves, rather resembling pebbles that cause ripples in a vast pool of indifference...
...a task for which she arms herself with six hefty footnotes...
...As can be seen from these samples, Professor Nussbaum's learning is nothing if not ostentatious, and she places it in the service of her primary mission, the discrediting of Bloom's scholarship...
...Bernard Rosenberg asserts that David Grene called Bloom a "bloody lunatic" when, alas, he called Leo Strauss that...
...Simply to confess it: The Closing of the American Mind has its faults...
...Others succumb to envy, malice, and resentment, the besetting vices of university faculties...
...Writing about Bloom in the New Republic of April 4, 1988, he has the misfortune to be rebutted conclusively by Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr...
...One can also sympathize with critics who regretted his "massive silence on the whole subject of Christianity" (Kenneth Minogue, in the Times Literary Supplement), his general lack of regard for religion as "an influence on modern society" (Robert Bellah, in the New Oxford Review...
...However, the main difference between us is that Bloom's mind excels mine...
...Bloomian" became an adjective and Bloom dined with the President...
...it situated the troubles everybody sensed and saw in a larger context without omitting specifics, like the youngsters' predilection for rock...
...Maybe so, but with all qualified respect for St...
...They entered into their principles in order to make their madness as little harmful as possible...
...Barber's thesis just won't wash...
...John's, and Eva Brann's swinger prose, those of us who have dealt with its graduates find no reason for rushing into the streets to celebrate the vitality of Geist...
...The difficulty one has in understanding some of the books of Leo Strauss, especially his later work, is sufficiently accounted for by the fact that he is commenting on difficult texts...
...JOIN THE TENTH AMENDMENT FOUNDATION, INC...
...In 1986 the Democrats regained control of the Senate, and when Bloom and his friends were worrying about the forthcoming reception of The Closing of the American Mind, we spent even more time speculating about the ramifications of the Iran-contra affair...
...Near the beginning, he catches Bloom using some infelicitous prose...
...may the best person win...
...Bernard Rosenberg also claimed to find a "slight touch of racism" in Bloom, and therewith joined a whole chorus of slanderers...
...To his credit, he did not let impending controversy stop him from taking a serious book seriously...
...4. hristopher Lehmann-Haupt began it all with his unstinting praise in the New York Times of March 23, 1987, calling The Closing of the American Mind a "remarkable book . . . which hits with the approximate force and effect of what electric shock-therapy must be like...
...Another one is surpassingly odd and raises the crux of her case against Bloom...
...In the beginning, nobody—not the publisher, not Bloom, and not his friends—expected more than modest sales...
...7. H aving praised Bloom by damning him faintly, and having shrewdly conceded that The Closing of the American Mind lacks perfection, I return to an analysis of the accusations against the book...
...One can also sympathize with critics who regretted his "massive silence on the whole subject of Christianity," his general lack of regard for religion as "an influence on modern society...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 19 Much is at stake here...
...The charge of Bloom's misunderstanding of rock music finds me unprepared to respond because I am tone-deaf and unable to understand any music, except perhaps "Moon River...
...It may be only fitting and proper to declare open season on a successful book...
...Its passion and its honesty...
Vol. 21 • October 1988 • No. 10
