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
There are great industries of psychotherapy that address our difficulties in 'relationships' -- that pallid, pseudoscientific word the very timidity of which makes substantial attachments impossible. One has to have a tin ear to describe one's great love as a relationship.
What a people bows before tell us what it is
The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth.
Education is the movement from darkness to light.
The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.
Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion.
Once the law is broken with impunity, each man regains the right to any means he deems proper or necessary in order to defend himself against the new tyrant, the one who can break the law.
Law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk.
Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether that opinion is merely a democratic prejudice.
The artist is the most interesting of all phenomena, for he represents creativity, the definition of man.
As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.
We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished.
In America we have only the bourgeoisie, and the love of the heroic is one of the few counterpoises available to us. In us the contempt for the heroic is only an extension of the perversion of the democratic principle that denies greatness and wants everyone to feel comfortable in his skin without having to suffer unpleasant comparisons. Students have not the slightest notion of what an achievement it is to free oneself from public guidance and find resources for guidance within oneself.
I am not a conservative — neo or paleo. Conservatism is a respectable outlook... I just do not happen to be that animal.