Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students

by Bloom, Allan; Ferguson, Andrew; Bellow, Saul

• ISBN13: 9781451683202
• ISBN10: 1451683200
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781439126264
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-04-03
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• More Book Details

Summary

The brilliant, controversial, bestselling critique of American culture that "hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy" ( The New York Times)now featuring a new afterword by Andrew Ferguson in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition. A cultural phenomenon with more than 750,000 copies in print, The Closing of the American Mind is as penetrating a criticism of our culture today as it was twenty-five years ago. In this acclaimed number one national bestseller, Allan Bloom, one of our country's most distinguished political philosophers, argues that the social and political crises of contemporary America are really an intellectual crisisa dangerous narrowing of curiosity and exploration by the university elites. In his new afterword, author Andrew Ferguson recounts why the book caused such a furor at publication and why its argument continues to provoke and endure.

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. 11
Preface	p. 19
Introduction: Our Virtue	p. 25
Students
The Clean Slate	p. 47
Books	p. 62
Music	p. 68
Relationships	p. 82
Self-Centeredness	p. 82
Equality	p. 88
Race	p. 91
Sex	p. 97
Separateness	p. 109
Divorce	p. 118
Love	p. 122
Eros	p. 132
Nihilism, American Style
The German Connection	p. 141
Two Revolutions and Two States of Nature	p. 157
The Self	p. 173
Creativity	p. 180
Culture	p. 185
Values	p. 194
The Nietzscheanization of the Left or Vice Versa	p. 217
Our Ignorance	p. 227
The University
From Socrates' Apology to Heidegger's Rektoratsrede	p. 243
Tocqueville on Democratic Intellectual Life	p. 246
The Relation Between Thought and Civil Society	p. 256
The Philosophic Experience	p. 268
The Enlightenment Transformation	p. 284
Swift's Doubts	p. 293
Rousseau's Radicalization and the German University	p. 298
The Sixties	p. 313
The Student and the University	p. 336
Liberal Education	p. 336
The Decomposition of the University	p. 347
The Disciplines	p. 356
Conclusion	p. 380
Afterword	p. 383
Index	p. 395
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