# Allan Bloom The Straussian who took the seminar room to the bestseller list — and, in doing so, wrote the founding text of the campus culture war. Allan Bloom (1930–1992) was [[Leo Strauss]]'s most famous student, a translator of [[Plato]] and Rousseau, and the author of *[[The Closing of the American Mind]]* (1987), the surprise million-copy jeremiad arguing that relativism had hollowed out the American university and the American soul. Every subsequent round of the campus wars — political correctness in the 1990s, "wokeness" in the 2020s — replays Bloom's argument, usually without his learning and always without his ironies. ## Background Born in Indianapolis to social-worker parents, Bloom entered the University of Chicago's Hutchins College at fifteen and found his life's teacher in [[Leo Strauss]]. He taught at Chicago, Yale, and Cornell — which he left in disgust after the 1969 [[Willard Straight Hall Takeover]], when the administration capitulated to armed student protesters; the episode is the wound *Closing* never stops dressing. After a decade at Toronto he returned to Chicago's Committee on Social Thought, where his seminars (and his extravagant persona) became legend. His friend Saul Bellow drew him, thinly veiled, as the title character of the novel *Ravelstein* (2000), which also disclosed what Bloom kept private in life: he was gay, and died of complications widely understood to be AIDS-related — an irony that sits unresolved beside the book's culture-war canonization. ## Core ideas ### The Closing of the American Mind Bloom's argument is not the vulgar one made in his name. The "closing" is **openness itself**: the easy relativism that, by declaring all values equal, forecloses the Socratic question — *how should I live?* — before it can be asked. Students arrive nice, flat-souled, and incurious; the university, having abandoned the great books and the idea of truth, gives them nothing to long for. The villains are not only the 1960s left but the German imports — vulgarized [[Friedrich Nietzsche]] and Heidegger — whose "values talk" American culture absorbed as cheerful nihilism ("nihilism without the abyss"). The remedy is Socratic education: reading the canon as if it might be *true*. ### Esoteric teacher, exoteric bestseller Bloom was an **East Coast** Straussian (contrast [[Harry V. Jaffa]]'s West Coast politicization): philosophy above politics, the text above the program. The paradox of his career is that this most esoteric of teachers produced the most exoteric of artifacts — a mass-market polemic that armed a political movement he half-despised. [[Irving Kristol]]'s circle promoted the book; [[Neoconservatism]] claimed it; the culture war weaponized it. Bloom himself insisted he was not a conservative but a Socratic; almost no one listened. ### Translator and teacher His scholarly monuments are the literal translation of [[Plato]]'s *[[The Republic]]* (1968) — built so Strauss-trained readers could see the argument's surface exactly — and his Rousseau translations. His students ranged across the Straussian network, most famously [[Paul Wolfowitz]], through whom the Bloom seminar reaches the [[Iraq War]] (a chain the vault traces on the [[Leo Strauss]] page). ## Reception on the right *Closing* is the **template** for every campus-crisis bestseller since: the corruption-of-the-youth frame, the relativism diagnosis, the canon as cure. The 1990s PC wars cited it; the 2020s anti-woke literature recycles it, usually flattened — Bloom's Socratic elitism, his contempt for commerce and the bourgeois family, his eros-soaked teaching, and his sexuality all vanish in the movement version. Like [[Eric Voegelin]] and [[Michael Oakeshott]], he is a thinker the right uses selectively: the diagnosis is kept, the inconvenient remainder discarded. ## Legacy in the KB context Bloom is the hinge between [[Straussianism]] as philosophy and the **campus culture war** as politics — the demonstration case of how an esoteric school produced a mass polemic and how that polemic became infrastructure for everything from PC panics to book-ban rhetoric. He also completes the vault's Strauss network: teacher ([[Leo Strauss]]), rival branch ([[Harry V. Jaffa]]), student ([[Paul Wolfowitz]]), promoter ([[Irving Kristol]]). ## Major works - *Shakespeare's Politics* (with Harry V. Jaffa, 1964) - Plato, *The Republic* (translation, 1968) - Rousseau, *Emile* (translation, 1979) - *The Closing of the American Mind* (1987) - *Love and Friendship* (1993) ## See also - [[The Closing of the American Mind]] — the bestseller - [[Leo Strauss]] — his teacher - [[Straussianism]] — the school's East Coast pole - [[Willard Straight Hall Takeover]] — the Cornell wound - [[Paul Wolfowitz]] — his most consequential student