The Rape of the Masters by Roger Kimball6/11/2023 ![]() ![]() Now, the audacity of a paid-up secular academic talking without irony about "souls" in 1987 was perhaps the first thing that made people nervous about the book. Bloom himself described the book as a "meditation on the state of our souls." For all its loose-bagginess, The Closing of the American Mind is a book written with commanding passion, urgency, and conviction. Nevertheless, if parts of the book are reminiscent of the academic lecture hall, the overall effect is nothing short of electric. It sometimes grabs readers by the lapels and gives them a shake at other times it assumes a dry, professorial tone as it delineates the genealogy of freedom, discriminates among diverse meanings of equality, or parses a choice passage from Plato, Locke, Rousseau, Tocqueville, or Nietzsche. ![]() ![]() It is a rich and promiscuous stew that Allan Bloom served up, part polemic, part exhortation, part exercise in cultural-intellectual history. The book is also – let me acknowledge this at once – a curious literary artifact. What is it? In the simplest sense, it is a pedagogical autobiography, written by a fiftyish academic philosopher who was also a dedicated teacher and whose experience of university life from the late 1960s through the mid-1980s had left him disabused, mournful, and alarmed. This is no ordinary matter we are discussing, Glaucon, but the right conduct of life. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |