Allan Bloom’s book became notorious almost immediately after its publication. According to an afterword written by Adam Ferguson, and appended to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition issued in 2012, it made the bestseller list several months after it was published in 1987 and had sold nearly a million copies by the following year. (Ferguson also reveals that the manuscript was originally titled Souls Without Longing but was changed for commercial reasons.) The celebrated novelist Saul Bellow wrote a few pages to introduce Bloom to his audience: ‘He is the author of an excellent book on Shakespeare’s politics, and has translated Plato’s Republic and Rousseau’s Emile. It will be difficult for nettled colleagues to wave him away, and many will want to do just that, for he is shrewd and mettlesome, as well as learned …’  Ferguson reports that the eponymous main character of Bellow’s novel of 1996, Ravelstein, ‘is a thinly fictionalized Allan Bloom’. Ferguson cites Bellow’s depiction of his protagonist: ‘He had written a book – difficult but popular – a spirited, intelligent, warlike book … His intellect had made a millionaire of him. It is no small matter to become rich and famous by saying exactly what you think.’

What the goals of higher education should be, and whether universities are falling far short of them, are questions that are alive today, perhaps more so than they were when Bloom’s book first appeared. In the United States, the Trump administration has pressured many universities, both private and public, to cut back their admission of international students, and to tailor their appointments, policies, and curriculum to suit Trump’s agenda. In doing so, it relies on a growing disapproval of higher education among the voting public. Third level schools of learning are considered too expensive, too left-wing, too ineffective in making students employable after graduation. Too often, they leave university without degrees and heavily in debt. Universities are losing the governmental funding they need to support scientific research.

These headwinds are utterly different from the ones that worried Bloom (who died in 1992 – of AIDS, according to Ferguson). He proposes that the highest goal of universities – in fact, the one measure by which we should judge them – is to introduce students to the unfettered life of the mind, acquainting them with and nurturing in them a love of the great works of Western philosophy and civilisation. The authors he writes about most frequently (and most favorably) are Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Founding Fathers of the American constitution. There is also a rogue’s gallery: Nietzsche above all, but not far behind are Marx, Max Weber, Freud and Heidegger. Philosophers are not the only authors he discusses: there are many references to and discussions of the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, Swift, Goethe, Flaubert and Mann. His treatment of these writers plays an essential role in his arguments. By seeing what he admires or despises in them, we get a better sense of the outlook on life that he believes a university education ought to inculcate.

It is unclear to me, however, whether the enormous readership of Bloom’s book has much to do with his discussion of these major figures. Did many of those readers buy and enjoy The Closing of the American Mind primarily because they were happy to learn more about the great works Bloom discusses? Did they purchase the book to advance their education, and were their expectations met? Or, on the contrary, did few of them read the whole book because too much of it was devoted to these authors?

It is certain that its great commercial success owes much to its polemical tone and its grievances about academia. Its title and subtitle invite that kind of readership. Higher education is an easy target, as we see today, for reasons noted earlier. The popular stereotype of the professor is that of a narrow, self-absorbed, arrogant, dull specialist, made complacent and self-satisfied by tenure. Academics are elitists, or so it is widely assumed. For all these reasons, the accusation that higher education has failed democracy will face little initial resistance.

Bloom assures his readers, from the very start, that he, for one, cares very much about his students. He asks them about their goals and expectations in life. What he finds is that few have been inspired by their schools to see university as the start of a new and wonderful phase of life, an encounter with the great minds of the past. They see their courses as a mere means to a degree, a stepping stone to a comfortable life or a lucrative career. Their minds close down rather than open up. One can see why Bloom at first gave his book the title Souls Without Longing. The soul of a young person, if it is healthy, should yearn for an intellectual adventure, capable of lasting a lifetime, that will raise his or her life to a new level of fulfillment and engagement. University courses can instill in them that yearning, by giving them an appreciation for the great books. But most courses do nothing of the sort. Bloom complains that universities  are cutting back on their course distribution requirements. Grades are inflated. Students can easily avoid any encounter with what would transport their lives to a higher plane. Universities thus fail to lead students to ‘discover new faculties in themselves’; they do not ‘reveal another level of existence that had been hidden from them’.

Universities, Bloom argues, ought to adopt what he calls the ‘Great Books’ approach. He acknowledges that this faces many objections. Who is to decide what the canon of Great Books is?  One cannot read all of them carefully.  And so on. But he is not moved by these objections. ‘Wherever the Great Books make up a central part of the curriculum, the students are excited and satisfied, feel that they are doing something that is independent and fulfilling, getting something from the university that they cannot get elsewhere. The very fact of this special experience, which leads nowhere beyond itself, provides them with a new alternative and a respect for study itself.’ 

This is a surprisingly weak argument: should ‘Great Books’ be mandatory simply because students will enjoy them? Are these the only sorts of courses they will enjoy? Elsewhere, Bloom gives a different sort of defence: ‘True liberal education requires that the student’s whole life be radically changed by it, that what he learns may affect his action, his tastes, his choices, that no previous attachment be immune to examination and hence from re-evaluation. Liberal education puts everything at risk and requires students who are able to risk everything.’ But this is an even worse reason to study the Great Books and make them a major component of education: why spend huge sums in order to make an extremely risky change in one’s life?  Only the wealthiest families can afford such a gamble. And why should even they ‘risk everything’?

It is surprising that Bloom does not consider a different sort of reason for pursuing a liberal education: when one grapples with the profound questions encountered in philosophy, literature, history and the arts, one’s mental powers grow and are better not only to appreciate the depths of human existence but to act successfully in the world. The years spent studying in college are not only worthwhile in themselves but better equip one to navigate the complex environment one will encounter as a full adult. One becomes more adept at handling complex tasks that require creative thinking, linguistic resourcefulness and mental perseverance.

When the value of higher education is viewed in this way, Bloom’s thesis that our universities have ‘failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today’s students’ is not obviously correct. Exercising the mind for four years on challenging material makes it a more capable organ than it had been. That does not imply that only a university education can have this effect, or that it is the only worthwhile way for a young person to spend several years. There are surely far worse ways to pass through this stage of life: years of tedious labor that leave one with no new skills and provide only a barely sufficient pay cheque.

Bloom’s book engages with the left-wing campus politics of his time, and no doubt this aspect of his polemic helped with sales. Here is a sample: ‘Cornell, where I taught for several years, was one of many institutions that announced great increases in goals for enrollment of blacks … Nothing had been done to prepare these students for the great intellectual and social challenges awaiting them in the university. Cornell now had a large number of students who were manifestly unqualified and unprepared, and therefore it faced an inevitable choice: fail most of them or pass them without their having learned … Courses in black studies and black English … became the way out. It was hopefully assumed that these would not fundamentally transform the university or the educational goals of black students … But this was really a cop-out, and the license for a new segregationism … {T]he black students became aware that they could intimidate the university and that they were not just students but negotiating partners in the process of determining what an education is.’

These last four words – ‘what an education is’ – capture a central theme of Bloom’s book. An American university should know what an education is (or, more fully, a ‘liberal education’), and students are there to be educated. But if they are given a wide choice of subjects to study, they will in effect be akin to the ‘negotiating partners’ that Bloom refers to. Suppose very few of them choose to study a foreign language, or history, or English literature, or philosophy, or religion.  In that case, the university would waste its resources were it to staff these departments. If Bloom wants to give the interests of students no role to play in the design of its curriculum, the university must make nearly every course a requirement. A few colleges that are so restrictive might attract enough students to be viable, but if all universities were so rigid, most would be out of business. Higher education would, in that case, have ‘failed democracy’, in the words of Bloom’s subtitle.

Near the end of The Closing of the American Mind, in a section called ‘The Disciplines’, Bloom considers the common taxonomy of university courses, which sorts them into one of three categories: the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. What does each contribute to an education? Bloom acknowledges that a student will learn much of instrumental value from a course in physics, chemistry, economics, political science and so on. They will add to one’s credentials in the job market.  But do such courses open the mind to what is valuable in itself? No. ‘All that is human, all that is of concern to us, lies out of natural science. That should be a problem for natural science, but it is not. It is certainly a problem for us that we do not know what this thing is, that we cannot even agree on a name for this irreducible bit of man that is not body. Somehow this fugitive thing or aspect is the cause of science and society and culture and politics and economics and poetry and music. We know what these latter are. But can we really, if we do not know their cause, know what its status is, whether it even exists?’ He adds: ‘ … man, to be grasped, needs something the natural sciences cannot provide. Man is the problem, and we live with various stratagems for not facing it.’ (author’s emphasis). Here Bloom is talking about the soul, the thing that he claims is left impoverished by American higher education. It can be nurtured, he believes, only by a small number of college courses.

The social sciences fare no better in Bloom’s estimation. The great theoreticians of the past – Marx, Weber, Freud – have, he believes, rightly lost their authority and prestige; and no one has taken or can take their place. ‘ … the social science intellectual in the German or French mold, looked upon as a kind of sage or wise man who can tell all about life, has all but disappeared. The students are aware of this and do not turn to the social sciences for the experience of conversion.’

For Bloom, the humanities alone – that is, philosophy and imaginative literature – can educate students, but they too, as they are currently taught, are failures. ‘The humanities are the specialty that now exclusively possesses the books that are not specialized, that insist upon asking the questions about the whole that are excluded from the rest of the university, which is dominated by real specialties, as resistant to self-examination as they were in Socrates’ day and now rid of the gadfly … The kinds of questions children ask: Is there a God? Is there freedom? Is there punishment for evil deeds? Is there certain knowledge? What is a good society? were once also the questions asked by science and philosophy. But now the grownups are too busy at work, and the children are left in a day-care center called the humanities.’ He adds: ‘practically no one even tries to read them [the old books] as they were once read – for the sake of finding out whether they are true. Aristotle’s Ethics teaches us not about what a good man is but what the Greeks thought about morality. But who really cares very much about that? Not any normal person who wants to lead a serious life.’

Did Bloom ever venture into a philosophy department to test his claim that scholars who engage with Aristotle’s Ethics are uninterested in the soundness of its claims about happiness, virtue, pleasure, friendship and so on? He is right that some scholars look to this work as a clue to ‘what the Greeks thought’. But there is also a large philosophical literature that asks whether we should accept, modify, or reject Aristotle’s conception of well-being. He is of central importance in the study of moral philosophy, and was so recognised during the 1980s when Bloom was writing his book.

Recall the complaint Bloom makes about higher education in the subtitle of his work: it has ‘failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today’s students’. We have seen what sort of impoverishment he has in mind: they are allowed to take the courses that interest them; they continue to live in the darkness of Plato’s Cave and fail to grapple with the fundamental questions asked by Socrates. The ‘American Mind’ has closed in that it has not been forced to ask fundamental questions about the meaning of life. In what way has higher education failed not only these students but democracy itself?  What is it about democracy that is weakened or undermined by the failure of universities to provide a true liberal education?

An answer that suggests itself is that, according to Bloom, in a well-governed democracy citizens and officeholders must encounter the fundamental questions that are appropriately posed in humanities courses. Having done so, they will be better citizens and officeholders. But I do not find him saying anything of the sort. In fact, Bloom is doubtful that a democracy is the kind of political system that can be well governed. ‘A permanent feature of democracy … is a tendency to suppress the claims of any kind of superiority … essentially by denying that there is superiority, particularly with respect to ruling. The Platonic dialogues are full of young men who passionately desire political glory, and believe they have the talent to rule … The aspiration to be number one and to gain great fame is both natural in man and, properly trained, one of the soul’s great strengths. Democracy is itself hostile to such spiritedness and prevents its fulfillment … [M]odern philosophy … established a rational teaching, making political equality the only just system of society. There is no intellectual ground remaining for any regime other than democracy.’

It is no surprise to find in Bloom this hostility to popular rule. He is a great fan of Plato’s Republic, with its proposal that only the wise should rule, and its depiction of democracy as inherently a form of misrule, inferior to every other kind of regime, except for that of a mad tyrant. He alludes, at one point, to Socrates’ claim, in the Republic, that philosophers must be compelled to return to the Cave and to serve its inhabitants. ‘If the theoretical life is a good way of life, it cannot, at least in its most authentic expression, be … in the city’s service.’ In effect, then, when Bloom argues that higher education should challenge students to struggle with the deepest philosophical questions, he realises that this ought to lead them to see that democracies can never be well governed, and that one should become a democratic officeholder only if compelled to do so.

 Bloom is a great admirer of Tocqueville’s two-volume study of American democracy, ‘The great democratic danger, according to Tocqueville, is enslavement to public opinion.’ ‘ … [U]nless there is some strong ground for opposition to majority opinion, it inevitably prevails. This is the really dangerous form of the tyranny of the majority … What the majority decides is the only tribunal.’

‘How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy’ was a clever phrase to use in the subtitle of The Closing of the American Mind, no doubt enhancing its appeal to the general reading public. The original title of the work, Souls Without Longing, accurately expresses its main theme: American college students are wasting their college years because they no longer long for answers to the deepest question of human existence. (Did earlier generations have such aspirations? Bloom pays no attention to that question. The American mind has closed, but we are left to wonder when it was open.)  The book’s subtitle enlists the democratic sympathies of its audience and surely contributed to its commercial success. But Bloom does not argue that higher education ought to be in service to democratic values. On the contrary, as we have seen, he is hostile to the egalitarianism of democracy, as were Plato and Tocqueville. Higher education, he believes, ought to fail democracy – it is not a mere means to good citizenship or good governance. The humanities should instead be the beginning of a lifelong struggle with the deepest questions of life. By revealing the inherent deficiency and danger of democracy, the study of philosophy should make students reluctant to become political leaders. That is where Bloom’s ideas lead.

He detests the relativism that he finds in so many of his students. The assumption that nothing is quite simply true – but true only for the person whose opinion it is – is abhorrent to him. But his own philosophical framework is not far removed from relativism: he is, without admitting or perhaps even realising it, a sceptic of the sort that arose in Plato’s Academy after his death. There is truth (not truth-for-me or for-you), but we can only seek it, never arrive at it. The sceptics admired the early dialogues of Plato, because they arrived at no answers to the questions Socrates raised – what is courage? what is piety? and so on. Our lives, according to these sceptics, should be ongoing, necessarily endless quests for answers to these questions, and we should never feel satisfied that we have arrived at the right answers. Intellectual inquiry is inherently never-ending and yet no less valuable for that.  

That is the basic lesson Bloom would like to teach his students and readers. The American mind is a closed mind – and he might have said the same about the European mind, the Asian mind, and so on. There are few wholesale sceptics in the world, people who suspend judgment about everything, not just about elusive moral issues. Bloom must find it lamentable that many of us have closed minds, have stopped inquiring into the fundamental issues of life. He believes that the goal of higher education should be to turn students into lifelong sceptics, because they will then experience the joys of philosophical inquiry. Those of his readers who finished his book may have profited enormously from reading it. The cultural heroes he engages with, from Homer to Heidegger, come alive on the page, and are portrayed as vitally important for our time.  But does his indictment of higher education in America succeed?  It does not, although many readers may not notice, having lost the thread of the argument. The book is so wide-ranging, combative, erudite, and morally serious that its failure in this respect is not immediately apparent. Many readers, as I have suggested, are likely to have already accepted its accusation from the start.