Description
- Format: PDF
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster (April 1, 1987)
- Language: English
- 392 pages
- ISBN-10: 0671479903
- ISBN-13: 978-0671479909
In this acclaimed number one national best-seller, one of our country’s most distinguished political philosophers argues that the social/political crisis of 20th-century America is really an intellectual crisis. Allan Bloom’s sweeping analysis is essential to understanding America today. It has fired the imagination of a public ripe for change.
Review
S. Frederick Starr The Washington Post Book World Rich and absorbing….A grand tour of the American mind.
From Publishers Weekly
This work by a University of Chicago professor was a bestseller in cloth. According to PW, “marred by the author’s biases, this jeremiad laments the decay of the humanities, the decline of the family and students’ spiritual rootlessness and unconnectedness to traditions.”
Plato said that music was a barbaric art form, and Bloom, translator of Plato’s Republic, charges that rock ‘n’ roll’s sole attraction is a “barbaric appeal to sexual desire.” This University of Chicago professor claims that racial segregation among today’s students is largely due to the fact that “blacks have become blacks” and stick together. He brands Margaret Mead as a “sexual adventurer” whose call for cultural diversity betrayed her indifference to American ideals embodied in th Declaration of Independence. Marred by the author’s biases, this jeremiad laments the decay of the humanities, the decline of the family and students’ spiritual rootlessness and unconnectedness to traditions. Bloom traces what he sees as as an antiEnlightenment attitude in our society that dates back to Rousseau. He calls for a “Great Books” educational program that would teach students the unity of the sciences, social sciences and arts.
From Library Journal
Bloom is angry about college studentstolerant of everything, they cannot appreciate the virtues of Lockean democracy and often abandon the great questions about God and man. Meanwhile, the humanities are like “a refugee camp where all the geniuses driven out of their jobs and countries . . . are idling.” The reason is partly relativism in the social sciences but largely German philosophers since Nietzsche, especially Heidegger, who “put philosophy at the service of German culture.” Bloom’s case about the humanities and German philosophy deserves an ear, but his students from “the twenty or thirty best U.S. universities” are nothing like my recent American students, who pursue the old questions with vim and vigor. Perhaps they do not belong to Bloom’s elite. Leslie Armour, Philosophy Dept., Univ. of Ottawa, Canada
About the Author
Allan Bloom was Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College and co-director of the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy at the University of Chicago. He taught at Yale, University of Paris, University of Toronto, Tel Aviv University, and Cornell, where he was the recipient of the Clark Teaching Award in 1967. He died in 1992.–This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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