Donald Lazere: ‘The Closing of the American Mind,’ 20 Years Later
[Donald Lazere, professor emeritus of English at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, has written on the culture wars for many scholarly and journalistic periodicals. His books include Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy: The Critical Citizen’s Guide to Argumentative Rhetoric and English Studies and Civic Literacy: Teaching the Political Conflicts, forthcoming.]
“HITS WITH THE APPROXIMATE FORCE AND EFFECT OF ELECTROSHOCK THERAPY” raved Roger Kimball’s review in The New York Times, as quoted on the paperback jacket of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, a surprise best-seller in 1987 and the opening salvo in a ceaseless conservative war against the academic and cultural left. On the 20th anniversary of The Closing, and 15 years after Bloom’s death, the most salient issues concerning Bloom are his role in neoconservative Republican circles and his semi-closeted homosexuality, possibly culminating — as in Saul Bellow’s thinly fictionalized account in Ravelstein — in death from AIDS.
In Bloom’s introductory chapter to his 1990 collection of essays Giants and Dwarfs, titled “Western Civ,” previously published in Commentary, he responded to the reception of The Closing as a conservative tract by claiming that he was neither a conservative ("my teachers—Socrates, Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Nietzsche — could hardly be called conservatives") nor a liberal, “although the preservation of liberal society is of central concern to me.” He saw himself, rather, as an impartial Socratic philosopher, above political engagement or “attachment to a party” and denying, against leftist theory, that “the mind itself must be dominated by the spirit of party.”
A close re-reading of his books, however, confirms that they are lofty-sounding ideological rationalizations for the policies of the Republican Party from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush.
Bloom rages against the movements of the 60s — campus protest, black power, feminism, affirmative action, and the counterculture — while glossing over every injustice in American society and foreign policy (he scarcely mentions the Vietnam War).
Bloom’s personal affiliations further belied his boast of being above “attachment to a party” and captivity to “the spirit of party.” Today these statements appear to go beyond coyness into the kind of hypocrisy that has become boilerplate for conservative scholars, journalists, and organizations like the American Council of Trustees and Alumni or National Association of Scholars, whose leaders vaunt their dedication to intellectual disinterestedness while acting as propagandists for the Republican Party and its satellite political foundations....
Read entire article at Inside Higher Ed
“HITS WITH THE APPROXIMATE FORCE AND EFFECT OF ELECTROSHOCK THERAPY” raved Roger Kimball’s review in The New York Times, as quoted on the paperback jacket of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, a surprise best-seller in 1987 and the opening salvo in a ceaseless conservative war against the academic and cultural left. On the 20th anniversary of The Closing, and 15 years after Bloom’s death, the most salient issues concerning Bloom are his role in neoconservative Republican circles and his semi-closeted homosexuality, possibly culminating — as in Saul Bellow’s thinly fictionalized account in Ravelstein — in death from AIDS.
In Bloom’s introductory chapter to his 1990 collection of essays Giants and Dwarfs, titled “Western Civ,” previously published in Commentary, he responded to the reception of The Closing as a conservative tract by claiming that he was neither a conservative ("my teachers—Socrates, Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Nietzsche — could hardly be called conservatives") nor a liberal, “although the preservation of liberal society is of central concern to me.” He saw himself, rather, as an impartial Socratic philosopher, above political engagement or “attachment to a party” and denying, against leftist theory, that “the mind itself must be dominated by the spirit of party.”
A close re-reading of his books, however, confirms that they are lofty-sounding ideological rationalizations for the policies of the Republican Party from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush.
Bloom rages against the movements of the 60s — campus protest, black power, feminism, affirmative action, and the counterculture — while glossing over every injustice in American society and foreign policy (he scarcely mentions the Vietnam War).
Bloom’s personal affiliations further belied his boast of being above “attachment to a party” and captivity to “the spirit of party.” Today these statements appear to go beyond coyness into the kind of hypocrisy that has become boilerplate for conservative scholars, journalists, and organizations like the American Council of Trustees and Alumni or National Association of Scholars, whose leaders vaunt their dedication to intellectual disinterestedness while acting as propagandists for the Republican Party and its satellite political foundations....