The Closing of the American Mind
Files
Description
This talk appropriates the title of Allan Bloom’s Bestseller of the late 1980s, an outgrowth of then fashionable U.S. “culture wars.” As some of you may recall, Bloom’s targets were the sixties reforms within universities, especially the demise of the Great Books Western canon, and the rise of fashionable critiques (feminism, racism) leading to other bad “isms,” such as nihilism, historicism, deconstructionism, and cultural relativism. Bloom argued that the U.S. mind was closing due to the leveling rhetoric of “second rate” philosophers like John Rawls, because we had neglected European culture, because our minorities no longer wanted to assimilate, and because we no longer revered our Constitution and the values of our Founders. His recipe for opening young minds including study of Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, Greek classics, and the Bible as sacred text. His book was nostalgic for the golden age of American private elite universities, namely the 1950s – when Cold War competitiveness gave direction to a liberal education, when we recognized “evil” and dared call it such, and when few were afraid of defending American values of freedom and equality. Bloom’s book ended with a frank plea for American stewardship of the world: “This is the American moment in world history, the one for which we shall forever be judged. Just as in politics the responsibility for the fate of freedom in the world has devolved upon our regime….”
Source Publication
Reconciling Law, Justice and Politics in the International Arena: Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Canadian Council on International Law, Ottowa, October 16-18, 2003
Source Editors/Authors
John McManus
Publication Date
2004
Recommended Citation
Alvarez, José E., "The Closing of the American Mind" (2004). Faculty Chapters. 82.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/82
