Allan Bloom

Allan Bloom: The Professor Who Started the Culture Wars

A dense philosophical brief against relativism, deconstruction, and rock music by a University of Chicago classicist was never supposed to sell half a million hardcover copies or spend four months atop the *New York Times* nonfiction bestseller list. When *The Closing of the American Mind* did exactly that in 1987, Allan Bloom went overnight from respected translator of Plato to the most argued-about intellectual in America — a status the critic Camille Paglia would later call "the first shot in the culture wars."

From a Reader's Digest Article to the University of Chicago

Allan David Bloom was born on September 14, 1930, in Indianapolis, Indiana, to second-generation Jewish parents who worked as social workers. At thirteen, an article he happened to read in *Reader's Digest* about the University of Chicago fixed his ambition on the school; when his family moved to Chicago in 1944, he enrolled two years later, at fifteen, in the university's humanities program for gifted students. He earned his bachelor's degree at eighteen, alongside classmates who included the philosopher Richard Rorty, and went on to the university's demanding, interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought, where the classicist David Grene supervised his doctoral thesis on the Athenian orator Isocrates, completed in 1955. He then studied in Paris under the Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève, but it was Leo Strauss, his teacher at Chicago, whom Bloom credited as the decisive influence on his thought — his education, he later wrote, "began with Freud and ended with Plato."

A Career of Teaching and Translating

Bloom taught at Yale from 1960 to 1963, at Cornell until 1970, at the University of Toronto until 1979, and eventually returned to the University of Chicago, along with stints at Tel Aviv University and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. His students included the political scientist Francis Fukuyama. Long before his bestseller, Bloom had built a serious scholarly reputation as a translator and interpreter of classical and Enlightenment texts, publishing an influential 1968 translation of Plato's *Republic* aimed, in his words, at "the serious student," and later translating Rousseau's *Emile* and his *Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theater*. His approach to Plato — emphasizing Socratic irony and treating the ideal city of the *Republic* as a deliberately impossible thought experiment rather than a blueprint — became a hallmark of his interpretive style.

The Book That Escaped the Academy

Bloom's 1987 book, encouraged and prefaced by his close friend, the novelist Saul Bellow, argued that American higher education had abandoned the serious pursuit of moral and philosophical truth in favor of a corrosive relativism — one that, in Bloom's account, produced not tolerance but a new, unexamined dogmatism. He traced the roots of the crisis to modern philosophy's retreat into logical positivism and ordinary-language analysis, and to deconstruction's dissolution of any stable ground for moral judgment, then extended the argument well beyond the seminar room, drawing an unsettling analogy between contemporary American culture and Weimar Germany, in which he suggested demagogic student radicals of the 1960s had filled a moral vacuum much as Nazi brownshirts once had. A long, much-discussed section indicted popular music, and Mick Jagger specifically, as commercialized pseudo-rebellion that persuaded young listeners their consumption was a form of political liberation.

Praise, Fury, and Everything Between

Initial reviews, including one by George Will, were largely favorable, and the book's commercial momentum built from there. What followed was unusually vicious even by the standards of intellectual controversy: the critic David Rieff called Bloom "an academic version of Oliver North: vengeful, reactionary, antidemocratic," and the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, writing in the *New York Review of Books*, questioned outright "how good a philosopher... Allan Bloom" actually was. The journalist James Atlas observed that the response displayed "hostility that transcends the usual mean-spiritedness of reviewers." Defenders were equally emphatic: Norman Podhoretz praised Bloom's "brilliantly acerbic descriptions of the sexual revolution and the feminist movement," and the historian Fred Matthews, despite reservations, called the book "a rich, often brilliant, and disturbing" achievement. Writing thirty years later, one retrospective assessment credited Bloom with correctly identifying relativism's grip on universities, even while noting his sample — elite students at elite schools — was narrower than his sweeping conclusions implied.

Final Years and Ravelstein

Bloom's later work included the essay collection *Giants and Dwarfs* (1991), on figures from Kojève to Leo Strauss to John Rawls, and his final book, *Love and Friendship* (1993), a study of love in Stendhal, Austen, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, and Plato that he dictated from a hospital bed while partially paralyzed, choosing, as Bellow recalled, to keep writing about literature rather than accept ordinary get-well sentiments; it was dedicated to his companion, Michael Z. Wu. Bloom died on October 7, 1992, in Chicago, at 62. He was gay, an aspect of his life he did not publicize, and whether AIDS caused his death remains disputed among those who knew him — friends who did not deny his homosexuality nonetheless contested that attribution. Saul Bellow's 2000 novel *Ravelstein* was a thinly fictionalized portrait of Bloom's final years that reopened the question publicly.

Why Allan Is Called a Genius

The case for Bloom's genius rests less on original philosophical system-building — he was, by his own account, a teacher and interpreter of Plato and Rousseau rather than an innovator of new doctrine — and more on an unusual gift for translating dense classical and Continental philosophy into a polemic urgent enough to become a genuine mass phenomenon, selling to readers who had never opened Plato or Nietzsche. That is a rhetorical and pedagogical talent as much as a strictly intellectual one. The counter-case, made forcefully by serious critics like Martha Nussbaum, is that his central argument leaned on a selective and sometimes crude reading of figures like Nietzsche, and that his cultural diagnosis — extending from campus philosophy departments to Weimar Germany to Mick Jagger — sacrificed rigor for provocation. What is undisputed is his sheer influence: few academic books of the twentieth century reshaped a national conversation as directly, whatever one concludes about the argument's philosophical soundness.

Legacy

*The Closing of the American Mind* remains a touchstone in debates over multiculturalism, the Western canon, and free inquiry on campus that continue, largely unresolved, decades after its publication — a book whose critics and admirers still argue less about whether it identified real fractures in American intellectual life than about what, if anything, should be done about them.

Achievements

• National Humanities Medal
• Charles Frankel Prize — 1992
• Notable work: The Closing of the American Mind
• Held posts at University of Toronto, Cornell University and University of Chicago