Allan Bloom on the Value of the Ancients, or The Closing of the American Classics Department

Abstract

Allan Bloom on the Value of the Ancients, or The Closing of the American Classics Department ERIC ADLER “The multiversity does not appeal to the students’ longings for an understanding of the most serious problems, in particular, their doubts about the route to follow in order to live a good life and their questions about the nature of justice.” —Allan Bloom, “The Crisis of Liberal Education” (1967) In 1987, Simon and Schuster published The Closing of the American Mind by the political philosopher Allan Bloom (1930–1992).1 The book created a firestorm. In it, Bloom presented a mordant critique of American higher education and argued in favor of a return to the Great Books tradition. A lengthy, abstruse tract, The Closing of the American Mind became a surprise smash in the publishing world, earning its author fame and fortune, praise and infamy . It was a mainstay on The New York Times nonfiction bestseller list in 1987 and 1988, and amounted to a seminal work in the academic culture wars. The book’s financial success launched a cottage industry of likeminded works, which ultimately ensured that debates concerning undergraduate education in the US remained a prominent feature of the national dialogue well into the 1990s. Unfortunately for those concerned about the past, present, and future of the humanities , the disputes surrounding The Closing of the American Mind typically generated more heat than light. It is thus worth revisiting Bloom’s cri de coeur, if only because the book helps explain classical studies’ near irrelevance in contemporary American colleges and universities. arion 24.1 spring/summer 2016 According to some classical scholars, Bloom’s jeremiad privileged the study of Greco-Roman antiquity. For instance, in a contribution to the 1989 edited volume Classics: A Discipline and Profession in Crisis?, Amy Richlin asserted that “Allan Bloom, in The Closing of the American Mind, suggests both that the classics are central to higher education and that only the best students are suited to work with the classics.”2 Agreeing with this assessment, Karl Galinsky suggested that The Closing of the American Mind, like other traditionalistic contributions to the academic culture wars, created a dilemma for many classicists, who had pragmatic reasons to support Bloom’s favoring of the Great Books, but who took issue with his political inclinations. In a 1991 article, Galinsky wrote: Do we want to pull the rug from under ourselves by agreeing that the importance of Greco-Roman culture should be diminished? Are we then prepared to relinquish some of our faculty positions to AfricanAmerican studies and the like? The perceived dilemma, inflicted by the usual limiting dichotomies, seems to be that as a proponent of western civilization, one is nolens volens allied with [William] Bennett and [Allan] Bloom, an impression any politically correct humanities professor wants to avoid, of course.3 But in truth this dilemma for classical scholars was greatly exaggerated. Although he grounded his conception of a proper undergraduate education in the examination of canonical Western authors, Bloom did not privilege the study of Greco-Roman antiquity as classical scholars typically approach it. In fact, Bloom proved acutely critical of the discipline of classics and professionalized, philological scholarship . This demonstrates that academic traditionalists such as Bloom were not nearly as supportive of classical studies as some believed. For this reason, the classics played a more negligible role in the academic culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s than many have supposed. And this role has, if anything , become even more negligible in recent years, in an intellectual environment uncongenial to the humanities. Although Bloom’s implicit recommendations for classical scholars canallan bloom on the value of the ancients 152 not be deemed a panacea, failure to take heed of his criticisms will ensure the continued marginality of the discipline. Before we turn to his views on classical studies, however, we need to get a sense of Bloom’s thesis in The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom called his polemic “a meditation on the state of our souls, particularly those of the young, and their education” (19). The book diagnoses the supposed soullessness of undergraduates at the most elite American universities and details the philosophical roots...