In 1987, Allan Bloom's polemic The Closing of the American Mind be came a best-seller among both aca demics and the general public. Although much ink has been spilled either attack ing or defending Bloom's assertion that colleges and universities are guilty of impoverishing the souls of today's young people, comparatively little at tention has been given to the cultural phenomenon of either the book itself or its public reception. This neglect is unfortunate. The book's cultural self-contradictions, and their resonance with a powerful current in public opinion, are immensely re vealing. When these matters are sorted out, Bloom and many of his supporters turn out to exemplify the cultural nihil ism that Bloom attempts to dissect and criticize. Despite Bloom's pose as a truth-lov ing philosopher, his book's cultural point of view is elaborately concealed (in the end, I think, even, from Bloom himself). He offers himself as an advo cate of the ancients against the moderns, and superficially, it seems that the basic theme of the book is the philosophical difference between a kind of Platonism, espoused by Bloom, and modernism, with which he argues. Modernism, in this sense, is the point of view introduced histori