Allan Bloom
Allan Bloom
Allan David Bloomwas an American philosopher, classicist, and academician. He studied under David Grene, Leo Strauss, Richard McKeon, and Alexandre Kojève. He subsequently taught at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, Yale University, École Normale Supérieure of Paris, and the University of Chicago. Bloom championed the idea of Great Books education and became famous for his criticism of contemporary American higher education, with his views being expressed in his bestselling 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind. Characterized as...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth14 September 1930
CountryUnited States of America
Never did I think that the university was properly ministerial to the society around it. Rather I thought and think that society is ministerial to the university, and I bless a society that tolerates and supports an eternal childhood for some, a childhood whose playfulness can in turn be a blessing to society.
University convention submerges nature. It issues licenses, and hunting without one is forbidden.
As Western nations became more prosperous, leisure, which had been put off for several centuries in favor of the pursuit of property, the means to leisure, finally began to be of primary concern. But, in the meantime, any notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, had disappeared.
Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy?
The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.
Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise... specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.
Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.
Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.
Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later.
Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment.
Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.
Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.
The students [of the 60s] substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents conspicuous consumption.
The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.