Post: #1

Literally just started reading tonight, about to finish the first section entitled: "Our Virtue."

So far, I have enjoyed the book and his ideas.

Anybody have any thoughts they wish to share?

I plan on reading it, drop some thoughts here and then do a ROK writeup (hopefully within a month).

Post: #2

Eric Alterman summed it up adequately as a "jeremiad against modernity."

Post: #3

One of my all time favourite books, I go back to it several times a year, esp. his brilliant attack on feminism, and his summary of western thought from Socrates to Heidegger. When you are finished it I highly recomend Saul Bellow's Ravelstein (a quasi-fiction/memoire about the life Bloom) and Harvey C. Mansfield's "Manliness", who was one of Bloom's students.

Post: #4

Best thing about the book is the reception it received when it came out. He was denounced on both the left and the traditional right for reasons that he clearly explains in the book itself.

Post: #5

No, but will read soon. Thanks for bringing it up. Apparently, Chomsky called it "mind-bogglingly stupid", whick peaks my interest in it even more. ha

Post: #6

Read it halfway, was thoroughly engrossed.
Found out it was on audio and finished the 2nd half that way.

Post: #7

I read it when I was a teenager. It's still a very relevant criticism of the "counterculture" and, although written in the 80s, predicted the trajectory of the next two decades very well. I highly recommend it.

Post: #8

THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND REVISITED

http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusive...merican-mi

Quote:Bloom helps us see that, whether students lack convictions or disguise them, the educational effect is pretty much the same. The most important question in peoples lives—that is to say, the question of how they should live—remains largely unconnected to the sophisticated intellectual training that continues to take place in the classroom. I can often get students to “share” their moral “opinions,” and often with a certain warmth of conviction. I can also get students to analyze classical arguments for or against various accounts of the good life. But I find it difficult to induce students to take a passionate and rational interest in fundamental questions. Students are either soulless creatures, or they recuse their souls from any contact with reason and argument. This phenomenon was what troubled Allan Bloom, and this is why he wrote The Closing of the American Mind.

Post: #9

Amazing book. Should be mandatory reading for all college educated males. Bloom stated many of the points we know in the manosphere decades before the manosphere was born. Bloom also goes much much in depth than the manosphere does, by really focusing on the intellectual history that has lead to the domination of the left and the birth of political correctness.

Bloom is a conservative, but not in the Republican sense. More in Burkean (Edmund Burke) sense.

Post: #10

A book with a related theme is Anti-Intellectualism in America by Richard Hofstadter. I thought it was outstanding.

Post: #11

(10-03-2014 11:41 AM)Samseau Wrote:  Amazing book. Should be mandatory reading for all college educated males. Bloom stated many of the points we know in the manosphere decades before the manosphere was born. Bloom also goes much much in depth than the manosphere does, by really focusing on the intellectual history that has lead to the domination of the left and the birth of political correctness.

Bloom is a conservative, but not in the Republican sense. More in Burkean (Edmund Burke) sense.

"I am not a conservative — neo or paleo. Conservatism is a respectable outlook... I just do not happen to be that animal."
— Allan Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs

Like his teacher Leo Strauss he was largely misinterpreted, and consequentially detested by almost every political ideologue. The funny thing is that both ends of the political spectrum accused him of being on the other side since he devoted himself to Truth, which tends to make you a lot of enemies. Suffice it to say though that the focus of the book is how cultural relativists, or sjw as they are called now, are the biggest threat to western civilization in our time.

Post: #12

Yes, read this back in college in the old days. A classic text. A friend of mine actually took one of his classes at the Univ. of Chicago. Said he was a cool dude.

Post: #13

some of my choicest quotes from the book:

"And here is where the whole business turns nasty. The soul of men--their ambitious, warlike, protective, possessive character--must be dismantled in order to liberate women from their domination. Machismo--the polemical description of maleness or spiritedness, which was the central *natural* passion in men's souls in the psychology of the ancients, the passion of attachment and loyalty--was the villain, the source of the difference between the sexes. The feminists were only completing a job begun by Hobbes in his project of taming the harsh elements of the soul. With machismo discredited, the positive task is to make men caring, sensitive, even nurturing, to fit the restructured family. Thus once again men must be re-educated according to an abstract project. They must accept the "feminine elements" in their nature.... And it is indeed possible to soften men. But to make them "care" is another thing, and the project must inevitably fail."


"I am not arguing that here that the old family arrangements were good or that we should or could go back to them. I am only insisting that we not cloud our vision to such an extent that we believe that there are viable substitutes for them just because we want or need them. The peculiar attachment for mothers for their children existed, and in some degree still exists, whether it was the product of nature or nurture. That fathers should have the same kind of attachment is much less evident. We can insist on it, but if nature does not cooperate, all our efforts will have been in vain.... Law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk."


"Man has always had to come to terms with God, love, and death. They made it impossible to be perfectly at home on earth. But America is coming to terms with them in new ways. God was slowly executed here; it took two hundred years, but the local theologians tell us He is now dead. His place has been taken by the sacred. Love was put to death by psychologists. Its place has been taken by sex and meaningful relationships. That has taken only about seventy-five years. It should not be surprising that a new science, thanatology, or death with dignity, is on the way to putting death to death. Coming to terms with the terror of death, Socrates' long and arduous education, learning how to die, will no longer be necessary."

Post: #14

http://iwcenglish1.typepad.com/documents...n-mind.pdf

Post: #15

Thanks for the recommendation. It will be my next Audible listen to after I finish my current book.

Post: #16

I just started reading this book. For me it seems, it is talking about 2016. Was the situation already that bad, in the mid 80's?

Post: #17

Situation was not so bad in the 1980s, at least from what I have heard and read.

Bloom (who is long gone) would be utterly shocked at the average American college campus today. He would probably write a book called, "The Mentally Ill American Mind."

There aren't many Allan Bloom-type scholars left. Bloom was a student of Leo Strauss; the Straussians are a dying breed in universities. Maybe there will be a revival when university administrators (who are money whores at the end of the day) realize that men don't want to pony up $50K per year for 4 years to be in an anti-male, PC environment where they feel like they need to walk on egg shells the entire time.

But I wouldn't hold my breath.

Post: #18

Recommended.

It's particularly good if you feel the lure of philosophy and don't know why it's important or where to start.

On thing that I like about this book is that it demystifies the whole concept of "the classics". I had always assumed that they were dry, abstruse texts only a stuffy tweed-jacket-with-elbow-patches intellectual could love, boring tomes boringly excerpted in boring Western Civ classes. Nope. They're good reading, if you can find modern translations - avoid the slavishly academic ones from the late 1800s and most of the 1900s, which are little more than transliterations using English words with the original Greek or Latin grammar. (This is probably why people turned away from the classics over time - now that Greek and Latin are rarely taught in primary schools, this "authentic" approach to translation results in books which are stilted and incomprehensible despite being written in English.)