# The Closing of the American Mind *Published 1987 by Simon & Schuster. 392 pages. Subtitle: "How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students." Author: [[Allan Bloom]]. Spent 10 weeks at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Sold over 1 million copies.* The most commercially successful work of conservative cultural criticism in the late 20th century — a University of Chicago philosophy professor's argument that American universities had surrendered to cultural relativism, rock music, feminism, and the 1960s counterculture, producing students incapable of genuine thought. The book occupies a hinge position in the [[Elite Education Paradox]]: it was written by a professor at one of America's most elite universities, published by a major trade house, praised by the intellectual establishment, and read by over a million people — yet its argument was that elite education had catastrophically failed. It is the second major work in the conservative campus-critique genre that [[William F. Buckley Jr.]] founded with *[[God and Man at Yale]]* (1951), and the immediate predecessor to [[Dinesh D'Souza]]'s *Illiberal Education* (1991), which would take the same arguments and apply them to specific campus case studies. The genre's through-line — from Bloom through D'Souza and [[Peter Thiel]]/[[David Sacks]]'s *[[The Diversity Myth]]* (1995) to [[Christopher Rufo]]'s anti-CRT/anti-DEI campaigns — runs directly through this book. ## The Author Allan Bloom (1930–1992) was a professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago — the most elite perch in American academic philosophy. He was a student of [[Leo Strauss]], the political philosopher whose "Straussian" method of reading political texts influenced an entire generation of conservative intellectuals (including many associated with the [[Claremont Institute]]). Bloom was a classicist, a translator of Plato's *Republic* and Rousseau's *Emile*, a high-culture aesthete who listened to classical music and read in multiple languages. He was also, as Saul Bellow's thinly fictionalized portrait in *Ravelstein* (2000) confirmed, gay — a detail that complicated his reception among the religious conservatives who embraced his book's conclusions. ## The Argument The book's 392 pages are organized around three sections, each building a layer of the same argument: ### Part One: Students Bloom argues that contemporary American students arrive at the university already corrupted by cultural relativism — the belief that all values are equal, all cultures are equivalent, and no moral claim can be superior to any other. This relativism, Bloom argues, is not tolerance but intellectual surrender: it makes students incapable of genuine philosophical inquiry because genuine inquiry requires believing that some answers are better than others. He links this intellectual collapse to two cultural forces: **rock music** (which Bloom argues appeals to the body rather than the soul, producing a generation incapable of sustained thought) and **the sexual revolution** (which severed eros from its philosophical dimension, reducing love to appetite). These passages — a 60-year-old classics professor denouncing Mick Jagger — were widely mocked but resonated with parents concerned about their children's education. ### Part Two: Nihilism, American Style Bloom traces the intellectual genealogy of relativism from German philosophy (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Weber) through the American academy, arguing that ideas developed in the specific context of [[Weimar Germany]]'s crisis were imported into American universities without the philosophical rigor their originators intended. American relativism, Bloom argues, is a degraded version of European nihilism — "nihilism with a happy ending." ### Part Three: The University The final section argues that the American university abandoned its core mission — the pursuit of truth through the Western philosophical tradition — during the 1960s campus upheavals. Faculty capitulated to student demands for "relevance," introduced ethnic studies and women's studies programs that replaced philosophical inquiry with identity politics, and transformed the university from a site of intellectual formation into a credential factory serving the therapeutic needs of students. ## Why It Became a Phenomenon A 392-page book by a philosophy professor about Plato, Nietzsche, and the decline of Western civilization should not have sold over a million copies. The book's extraordinary commercial success reflects several convergent factors: **Timing:** The book appeared in 1987, when the "campus political correctness" debate was beginning to surface in mainstream media. It gave educated, culturally conservative readers a framework for their anxieties about what was happening at their alma maters and their children's universities. **The elite-credential paradox:** Bloom was not a polemicist or a pundit. He was a genuine philosopher at America's most intellectually demanding university. His critique carried weight precisely because it came from inside the institution, not from an external critic. (The same paradox that powers every entry on the [[Elite Education Paradox]] page.) **The culture-war market:** The book proved that there was a massive commercial audience for intellectualized conservative cultural criticism — a market that subsequent works (D'Souza, Thiel/Sacks, Lukianoff/Haidt) would exploit. **Accessible prose:** Unlike most academic philosophy, the book was written in elegant, readable English — Bloom's classical training produced a writing style that mass audiences could follow even when the arguments were philosophically dense. ## The Genre's Pivot Point *The Closing of the American Mind* marks the transition between Buckley's 1951 campus critique (religious + economic) and the modern culture-war campus critique (anti-relativism + anti-identity-politics + anti-DEI). The through-line: | Work | Year | Frame | |---|---|---| | *[[God and Man at Yale]]* | 1951 | Yale has abandoned Christianity and free-market economics | | ***The Closing of the American Mind*** | **1987** | **Universities have abandoned the Western philosophical tradition for relativism** | | *Illiberal Education* | 1991 | Specific campus case studies of "political correctness" | | *[[The Diversity Myth]]* | 1995 | Stanford's multiculturalism has replaced genuine intellectual diversity | | *The Coddling of the American Mind* | 2018 | "Safetyism" is harming students and suppressing speech | | [[Christopher Rufo]] | 2020–25 | CRT and DEI are ideological capture masquerading as education | Bloom's contribution was to shift the critique from religious grounds (Buckley's concern) to philosophical grounds (the [[Western canon]], classical education, the pursuit of truth). This made the campus critique available to secular conservatives who couldn't endorse Buckley's explicitly Christian frame — and simultaneously gave religious conservatives a non-sectarian vocabulary for the same complaints. ## Legacy Bloom died of AIDS-related complications in 1992 at age 62. His book's impact outlived him by decades: - It popularized "the Western canon" as a political battleground, leading directly to the 1990s "canon wars" at Stanford ("Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture's got to go") that [[Peter Thiel]] and [[David Sacks]] experienced as undergraduates and that produced *The Diversity Myth* - It established "relativism" as a conservative epithet - It created the template for the bestselling conservative campus critique — proving the market existed for such works - The "Straussian" intellectual tradition it represented continues to influence the [[Claremont Institute]], which produced [[Michael Anton]]'s "Flight 93 Election" essay and much of [[the New Right]]'s intellectual framework ## Why It Matters in This KB 1. **The commercial proof-of-concept**: This book proved that intellectualized conservative cultural criticism could sell a million copies. Every subsequent campus-critique bestseller — including those by figures in this KB — builds on that market discovery. 2. **The genre's pivot**: It shifted the campus critique from religious to philosophical grounds, making it available to the secular right and to Silicon Valley libertarians who would never accept Buckley's Christian frame. 3. **The Straussian pipeline**: Bloom's University of Chicago / Leo Strauss intellectual lineage connects directly to the [[Claremont Institute]], which is the New Right's most important intellectual institution. 4. **[[Elite Education Paradox]] case study**: A University of Chicago professor using his elite credential to attack elite education — the paradox in its purest form. ## See Also - [[God and Man at Yale]] — Buckley's 1951 founding text that this book extends - [[The Diversity Myth]] — Thiel and Sacks's Stanford-specific variant that followed - [[Elite Education Paradox]] — The structural contradiction this book embodies - [[Christopher Rufo]] — The 2020s operational heir to the campus-critique tradition - [[Claremont Institute]] — The Straussian intellectual institution downstream of Bloom's tradition - [[Cultural Marxism]] — The conspiracy theory that simplifies Bloom's philosophical argument into a narrative of deliberate leftist subversion