Sunday, September 16, 2007

Allan Bloom in NYT   [Stanley Kurtz]

Just as I’ve posted "Closing, Still Open," my take on the twentieth anniversary of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, The New York Times has come out with "Revisiting the Canon Wars," an essay on the impact of Bloom’s book. While the Times deals respectfully with Bloom, and even quotes a study by the National Association of Scholars, just about everyone interviewed for this story is a prominent left-leaning professor–and a long-time critic of Bloom. The exception, Mark Lilla, proves the rule, since the Lilla quote used by the Times is critical of conservatives. Couldn’t Rachel Donadio have gone to Harvey Mansfield as well?

Anyway, here’s a fun take from Redstate on the NYT essay, and on the experience of reading Bloom’s book years ago as a radical-leaning high school senior. Excerpt:

I love this book because it was the first one that really ever humiliated me the first time I read it, and because it signaled to me just how little I actually knew — but not because I identified with it. I remember reading it and thinking how little I really knew about anything important discussed in the book. All I had to counter Bloom with was a collection of pop-culture platitudes.

And the truth is that I didn't know anything, and that was a good lesson to learn: because there are times in this life that you might have to "press the reset button" for yourself and return to Square One. If you ever have to do that, I can think of a lot of people much worse than Allan Bloom to help you out.

If you read Bloom’s book in its entirety, and you haven’t studied political philosophy, it can make you feel that way. But the first third of The Closing of the American Mind is a brilliant, riveting, and utterly readable take on music, love, and family life in America. That first part of the book is what made Closing a surprise number one best-seller. So in my own treatment of Closing, in the light of our time, I’ve taken the music chapter as my jumping-off point.

09/16 11:32 AMShare