{"id":197259,"date":"2026-07-04T22:17:38","date_gmt":"2026-07-05T06:17:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=197259"},"modified":"2026-07-04T09:26:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T17:26:10","slug":"allan-bloom-the-teacher-who-wanted-your-soul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=197259","title":{"rendered":"Allan Bloom: The Teacher Who Wanted Your Soul"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the afternoon of Sunday, April 20, 1969, the heavy doors of Willard Straight Hall opened and about a hundred Black students walked out into the cool Ithaca air. They had held Cornell University<\/a>‘s student union for a day and a half. Some carried rifles and shotguns. One wore a bandoleer of ammunition across his chest. Members of Students for a Democratic Society<\/a> cheered as the column crossed the Arts Quad. Photographers caught the image, and within days it ran on the covers of national magazines.<\/p>\n

Allan Bloom<\/a> (1930-1992), a professor of government at Cornell, watched his university surrender. The administration signed a seven-point agreement recommending that the faculty nullify penalties against students disciplined for earlier disruptions. Bloom told the Cornell Daily Sun the agreement shocked him. When the faculty prepared to meet, fifty students calling themselves the silent center protested the capitulation with signs reading DON’T LET THEM BULLY YOU and BERLIN ’32, ITHACA ’69. Some of them, at Bloom’s direction, handed out excerpts from Plato’s Republic.<\/p>\n

The scene compresses the man. A campus in crisis, guns in the quad, a president about to fall, and a chain-smoking Plato scholar sending students into the crowd with photocopied pages of a dialogue written twenty-four centuries earlier, as if the one thing an armed standoff needed was Socrates on justice. Bloom believed it did. He spent his life on the premise that old books address present emergencies better than present opinion does, and that a university exists to arrange the meeting.<\/p>\n

He came from Indianapolis. Allan David Bloom was born there on September 14, 1930, to second-generation Jewish parents who both worked as social workers. At thirteen he read an article in Reader’s Digest about the University of Chicago<\/a> and told his parents he wanted to go. They thought the idea unreasonable. They were practical people. The family moved to Chicago in 1944, and there his parents met wealthier Jews and came to see that education could pave the way to a comfortable life. In 1946, at fifteen, Bloom entered the university’s program for gifted students, a legacy of president Robert Maynard Hutchins<\/a> (1899-1977) and his campaign to build an education on great books rather than on vocational training. Bloom later wrote in The Closing of the American Mind that when he first saw the campus he somehow sensed he had discovered his life. He had never before noticed buildings dedicated to a purpose beyond shelter, manufacture, or trade.<\/p>\n

He stayed a decade. He took his degrees in Hyde Park and enrolled for graduate work in the Committee on Social Thought<\/a>, a small interdisciplinary program with brutal requirements and no clear job market at the far end. The classicist David Grene<\/a> (1913-2002) served as his tutor and remembered him as energetic, humorous, and committed to the classics with no definite career ambition. Bloom wrote his dissertation on the political philosophy of Isocrates and took the Ph.D. in 1955.<\/p>\n

The decisive encounter of those years was Leo Strauss<\/a> (1899-1973), the German-Jewish \u00e9migr\u00e9 whose readings of Plato, Maimonides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Nietzsche reshaped American political theory after the war. Strauss taught that political philosophy begins in the tension between reason and revelation, between philosophy and the city, between truth and opinion. He also taught a method of reading. Great philosophers, he argued, often wrote for two audiences at once, offering an exoteric teaching the public could safely receive while preserving a deeper and more dangerous teaching for readers alert to irony, contradiction, omission, and structural oddity. Strauss called his students his puppies. Bloom got closer to the sun than most of them, and his friend Werner Dannhauser<\/a> (1929-2014) judged that the closeness seared him. Bloom credited Strauss with showing him what a liberal education is for. In the preface to Giants and Dwarfs he said his education began with Freud and ended with Plato.<\/p>\n

Paris finished the formation. Bloom studied and taught there from 1953 to 1955 at the \u00c9cole Normale Sup\u00e9rieure<\/a>, befriended Raymond Aron<\/a> (1905-1983), and studied under Alexandre Koj\u00e8ve<\/a> (1902-1968), the Russian-born Hegelian whose seminars had already shaped a generation of French thought. Koj\u00e8ve argued that history pointed toward a universal and homogeneous state, a global order of equal recognition, rational administration, and material satisfaction. Bloom took the thesis seriously and viewed it with dread. If history ended in comfort and bureaucratic peace, what became of greatness, nobility, eros, and philosophy? He later edited the English edition of Koj\u00e8ve’s lectures on Hegel, and the question ran under everything he wrote afterward. The famous 1987 book about American students is, at bottom, a report that Nietzsche’s Last Man had arrived on campus and was doing fine.<\/p>\n

Paris also gave him his tastes. Dannhauser, who cavorted with him in half the cities of the West, remembered Bloom in Paris shopping for pastries, walking the Seine, browsing bookstores, barhopping at night, ordering Coca-Colas in fancy places, and smoking everywhere with relief at his distance from American censoriousness about cigarettes. The kid from Indianapolis liked to quote Marx and Engels on the idiocy of rural life. His heart belonged to Paris.<\/p>\n

Dannhauser first met him in 1956, in a University of Chicago class on Plato’s Republic. Bloom already held his doctorate and kept coming to classes anyway while teaching adult education courses downtown in the university’s Basic Program. The young man Dannhauser saw that day was gawky and disheveled, a bit of a slob, thinking with his face, and above all voluble. The natty dresser came later.<\/p>\n

The career then ran through the usual stations at unusual speed. Yale<\/a> from 1960 to 1963. Cornell from 1963 to 1970. His first book, Shakespeare’s Politics (1964), written with Harry V. Jaffa<\/a> (1918-2015), treated the plays as political philosophy, studies of rule, ambition, eros, and regime. His translation of Plato’s Republic appeared in 1968 and became one of the standard English versions. Its principle was literalness. Bloom wanted the roughness, repetition, and strangeness of the Greek preserved, because for him a great book was an arranged surface full of clues, and a smooth translation flattened the clues into modern common sense. The literalness was philosophical. It forced students to slow down, distrust paraphrase, and ask why the author wrote this sentence in this way at this point.<\/p>\n

At Cornell, Bloom served on the faculty of Telluride House<\/a>, the residential association where selected students ran their own house, hired the staff, and organized seminars, with faculty guests living among them. He ate with students, argued with them, and made intellectual life feel larger than coursework. Francis Fukuyama<\/a> (b. 1952) lived at Telluride and took Bloom’s course on Greek philosophy; decades later Fukuyama’s end-of-history thesis carried Koj\u00e8ve into American policy debate by way of Bloom’s classroom. The detail matters because Bloom never treated teaching as classroom performance alone. Conversation, friendship, meals, and proximity belonged to education.<\/p>\n

So did recruitment of unlikely souls. Ed Whitfield, president of Cornell’s Afro-American Society, remembered dinners at which Bloom tried to persuade him to become a philosopher rather than an activist. Whitfield thought the choice a false one. Decades later he noted that Bloom said the students had destroyed the university and academic freedom, and that the academy looked healthy enough to him despite everything they said. The two men sat at the same table and lived in different universes. Bloom saw a spirited young man whose energies belonged to Plato. Whitfield saw a professor who could not grasp why Black students had lost faith in the institution around them.<\/p>\n

The institution gave them both their answer in the spring of 1969. Racial tension had been building for years. President James Perkins<\/a> (1911-1998), a Quaker who had chaired the board of the United Negro College Fund, had raised the number of Black students from roughly two dozen in 1963 to about 250 by 1968, and the university proved unprepared for what followed. In December 1968 students demanding a separate curriculum overturned vending machines and marched through a dining hall. A faculty-student disciplinary body issued reprimands. In April 1969, on the eve of Parents Weekend, a cross burned on the porch of a Black women’s cooperative house. Before dawn on Saturday, April 19, members of the Afro-American Society took over Willard Straight Hall, ejecting parents from their guest rooms. White fraternity members tried to retake the building by force. The occupiers brought in guns. Thirty-six hours later they marched out armed, the administration signed, and the photograph went around the world.<\/p>\n

The faculty at first refused to ratify the surrender, voting down the recommendation to nullify the reprimands. Then, under threat, it reversed itself. For Bloom the reversal was the true catastrophe. The guns were an event; the collapse of faculty nerve was a revelation. He wrote later in The Closing of the American Mind that students had discovered professors who catechized them about academic freedom could be turned, with a little shove, into dancing bears. A handful of professors resigned in protest, among them the constitutional scholar Walter Berns<\/a> (1919-2015), the government chairman Allan Sindler, and, in time, the historian Donald Kagan<\/a> (1932-2021) left for Yale. Thomas Sowell<\/a> (b. 1930), then a young Black economics professor at Cornell, had already resigned in August 1968 after the administration undercut his authority in his own classroom, and he later called the crisis the most violent campus episode of a violent decade. Perkins announced his resignation by the end of May. The government scholar Clinton Rossiter<\/a> (1917-1970), who had sided with the administration, killed himself the following year. Bloom quit and was gone by 1970.<\/p>\n

He spent the next nine years at the University of Toronto<\/a>, productive and half in exile. There he translated Rousseau’s \u00c9mile (1979), treating it as Rousseau intended, a rival to Plato’s Republic, a book about the formation of a human being from infancy to marriage rather than a manual of pedagogical tips. Plato and Rousseau were for Bloom the two great teachers of the soul, and each understood that education forms desire before it forms opinion. He also translated and commented on Rousseau’s Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theater, edited the journal Political Theory, and contributed to the Strauss-Cropsey History of Political Philosophy.<\/p>\n

In 1979 he came home to Chicago and the Committee on Social Thought, the program that had trained him. He co-directed the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy, funded by the foundation then bankrolling much of the intellectual counter-establishment. And he acquired the friend who would give him his second afterlife. Saul Bellow<\/a> (1915-2005) taught alongside him on the Committee, and the two became close to the point of inseparability. Bellow said Bloom inhaled books and ideas the way other people breathe air.<\/p>\n

The Chicago Bloom of the 1980s is the figure his students remember and Bellow later fixed in print. He lived in an apartment building at 58th and Dorchester in Hyde Park, blocks from campus, next to the tower that housed Bellow and a small colony of Nobel laureates. He bought Lanvin jackets and Zegna ties and spilled food on them; hostesses learned to spread newspaper under his chair at dinner parties. He wandered his apartment in a silk dressing gown among fine glass, French linens, expensive stereo equipment, and thousands of CDs, chain-smoking, orating, reclining on a black leather couch with Baroque music playing. In the seminar room he stuttered, lit cigarette after cigarette, forgot most of them, broke others, and at moments of high tension put the lit end in his mouth. His student Clifford Orwin called him the most charismatic human being he ever knew, and noted that he lacked every standard trait of the effective teacher except the one that counted, the power to transfer his conviction that the book on the table was the most important thing in the students’ lives.<\/p>\n

The conviction had content. Bloom’s teaching turned on two Greek words, eros and thymos. Eros meant longing, the wound of incompleteness, the desire for something higher than what one has. Thymos meant spiritedness, pride, indignation, the demand for recognition. Following Plato, Bloom held that philosophy cannot be produced by logic alone. A student must first be dissatisfied. He must feel that the ordinary answers fail him and want something beyond comfort, career, and approval. Bloom’s classroom existed to awaken that want, and his cultural criticism followed from the same premise. He attacked rock music and casual sex in The Closing of the American Mind on pedagogical grounds rather than moral ones. Rock gave the young an artificial intensity without discipline or ascent. Easy sex flattened the drama of longing. A soul whose desires had been cheaply satisfied at fifteen had less fuel at twenty for the harder pleasures of philosophy, friendship, and love. A tamer soul was a dumber soul.<\/p>\n

Bellow badgered him to put the argument in a book. Bloom expanded a National Review essay, Bellow helped place the manuscript with Simon and Schuster and wrote the foreword, and The Closing of the American Mind appeared in April 1987 with a subtitle that clenched the throat: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. Nobody expected much. The book sold more than a million copies, sat atop the bestseller lists for months, made Bloom a millionaire, and made the University of Chicago magazine reach for the phrase academic rock star. He dined at the White House. He went on Oprah<\/a>. The New York Times Magazine profiled him in January 1988 under the headline Chicago’s Grumpy Guru.<\/p>\n

The argument deserved the noise. Bloom claimed that American students arrived at college already convinced that truth is relative, that judgment is oppression, that culture is preference, and that the purpose of education is self-expression or career. Their openness, he argued, had closed them. The old liberal education exposed the young to rival answers about justice, God, love, courage, and death, and demanded they take sides at the risk of being wrong. The new openness taught that no answer beats any other, a posture that looked generous and worked as anesthesia. It protected students from fanaticism and from seriousness in the same motion. It dissolved prejudice and dissolved the strong opinions philosophy needs as raw material. An empty mind is not a free mind. The students Bloom described were not dangerous rebels. They were agreeable, tolerant, ironic, sexually relaxed, and unable to imagine a truth that might place a demand on them. They were nice. That was the indictment.<\/p>\n

The counterattack came fast and from the highest floors. Benjamin Barber<\/a> called him a philosopher despot with an elitist agenda in Harper’s. Henry Louis Gates Jr.<\/a> answered in the New York Times under the headline Men Were Men, and Men Were White. Martha Nussbaum<\/a>, in an essay titled Undemocratic Vistas, went after his classical scholarship. Frank Zappa<\/a> answered the rock chapters. Bloom relished the fight. When Harvey Mansfield<\/a> (b. 1932) introduced him at Harvard in 1988, Mansfield told the audience Bloom had always behaved as if he were famous, so fame could not spoil him. Bloom then stood up and observed that the loudest voices calling him an enemy of democracy came from the Ivy League, particularly Harvard, which reminded him of the farmer who hears a thief in the chicken coop and knows the fox by its cry.<\/p>\n

He denied being a conservative at all, and the denial was more than branding. He said he defended the theoretical life. He thought bourgeois society was part of the problem, a machine for producing comfort, calculation, and mediocrity, and his loyalty ran to philosophy, friendship, and the education of spirited young people rather than to family values as a platform. The conservative movement adopted him anyway, because his fire fell on its enemies. The Olin money, the Reagan-era culture war, and the book’s timing made him a founding document of a fight he claimed to stand above. Both things were true at once. He was a Socratic who despised political labels, and he was a load-bearing wall in the conservative counter-academy. He cashed the checks and kept the pose, and the pose was sincere.<\/p>\n

His private life stayed private while he lived, in the manner of his generation and his circle. Bloom never married and had no children. His companion was Michael Z. Wu, a former student; Bloom dedicated his last book to Wu and named him sole heir. Among his friends the arrangement was known and unremarked. Paul Wolfowitz<\/a> (b. 1943), a former student, later described the atmosphere of Bloom’s Chicago circle as don’t ask, don’t tell. Bloom attacked feminists and campus militants in print and never attacked homosexuality, an omission his readers can weigh for themselves.<\/p>\n

He fell ill in the early 1990s. From his hospital bed he dictated Love and Friendship, published posthumously in 1993, a tour through Plato, Rousseau, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Austen, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Montaigne in search of rival accounts of longing, attachment, jealousy, and fidelity. The book confirms that his quarrel with the university was never institutional at bottom. He wanted to know what happens to the human capacity for love when the old languages of soul, virtue, honor, and beauty lose their authority. He died in Chicago on October 7, 1992, at sixty-two. The university attributed his death to bleeding ulcers complicated by liver failure. At the funeral, Bellow eulogized his friend’s habits with money, saying Bloom treated a windfall as something to throw from the back of a moving train.<\/p>\n

Eight years later Bellow spent the whole inheritance of their friendship. Ravelstein<\/a> (2000), published when Bellow was eighty-four, is a roman \u00e0 clef so thin the clef opens on the first page. Abe Ravelstein is a bald, extravagant, chain-smoking Chicago professor who writes a surprise bestseller at his novelist friend’s urging, lavishes gifts on his young companion Nikki, dresses his former students into the corridors of the State Department, and dies of AIDS. Strauss appears as Felix Davarr, Wolfowitz as a war-planning adviser named Phil Gorman, Dannhauser as Morris Herbst, Wu as Nikki. Bellow, as the narrator Chick, claims Bloom asked for the portrait and told him to hold nothing back. Martin Amis<\/a> (1949-2023) called the novel a masterpiece in which Bloom lives. Others called it betrayal. Nathan Tarcov, Bloom’s former student, co-executor of his estate, and successor at the Olin Center, was said by friends to be appalled. Dannhauser told an interviewer that even if Allan wanted Saul to write about him, he would not have wanted every wart. Bellow himself wobbled on the AIDS claim in interviews, saying he had long thought he knew what Allan died of and then found he did not. The dispute over the cause of death remains open in the public record. What the novel settled was something else. It made public that the great theorist of eros had lived his subject, that the man who taught longing from Plato’s Symposium had a beloved, a household, and a deathbed like anyone, and that his teaching and his life were one argument.<\/p>\n

The argument outlived the argument about him. The Closing of the American Mind reads today as a late Cold War period piece in its examples and as current events in its diagnosis. The Chicago conference held on the book’s tenth anniversary treated it as a living document, and every subsequent campus convulsion has sent readers back to the Cornell chapters. But the book was always the smallest part of the man. Bloom’s real work sat in seminar rooms across five decades, in translations built to slow readers down, and in the question he pressed on every spirited nineteen-year-old who wandered into range: what is the best life, and what makes you so sure you are living it? He believed a university exists to keep that question open and armed. He believed education is not the transmission of skills or the raising of self-esteem. He believed it is conversion, the reordering of a soul’s loves, and he practiced it with a cigarette burning at the wrong end.<\/p>\n

Notes<\/p>\n

The Cornell<\/a> crisis, timeline, signs, Plato<\/a> handouts, faculty reversal, resignations, and Rossiter<\/a> come from “Cornell’s Straight Flush”<\/a>, City Journal<\/i>; the Cornell Daily Sun<\/i> 45th anniversary timeline<\/a>; “Cornell ’69 and What It Did”<\/a>, Minding the Campus<\/i>; “The Day Cornell Died”<\/a> by Thomas Sowell<\/a>; and the Cornell library study guide<\/a> for the cross-burning and gun sequence.<\/p>\n

The Whitfield<\/a> dinners and his later verdict come from “Ripples From a Protest Past”<\/a>, The Chronicle of Higher Education<\/i>.<\/p>\n

The Reader’s Digest<\/i> anecdote, parents’ resistance, entry at fifteen, Grene<\/a> as tutor, Isocrates<\/a> dissertation, Paris dates, Aron<\/a>, career stations, Fukuyama<\/a> and Telluride, and the students list come from Wikipedia<\/a> and “25 Years Later”<\/a> by Liel Leibovitz<\/a> in Tablet<\/i>. The Tablet<\/i> piece also has the Mansfield<\/a> introduction at Harvard, the chicken-coop joke, and the lit-end-of-the-cigarette detail.<\/p>\n

The Dannhauser<\/a> memoir, with the 1956 Plato class, Paris pastries and Coca-Colas, Strauss<\/a>‘s puppies, and “seared by the sun,” comes from “My Friend, Allan Bloom”<\/a>, originally in Commentary<\/i> and reprinted at the Washington Examiner<\/i>.<\/p>\n

The Orwin material on Bloom<\/a>‘s charisma, stutter, and chain smoking comes from “On Allan Bloom”<\/a> by Clifford Orwin<\/a> at Project MUSE.<\/p>\n

The Bellow<\/a> friendship, apartment at 58th and Dorchester, Wu as dedicatee and sole heir, Tarcov appalled, Dannhauser’s warts remark, and the moving-train eulogy line come from “Allan Bloom, warts and all”<\/a>, Chicago Sun-Times<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Ravelstein<\/i><\/a> details, including Lanvin and Zegna, newspaper under the chair, Davarr, Gorman, Nikki, Amis<\/a>‘s verdict, and Bellow’s “inhaled books” line, come from Wikipedia on Ravelstein<\/i><\/a>. Bellow backing off the AIDS claim comes from “Bellow’s Bloom”<\/a>, Washington Examiner<\/i>. Andrew Sullivan<\/a> on eros and the outing comes from “Longing: Remembering Allan Bloom”<\/a>, originally in The New Republic<\/i> and reprinted at IGF Culture Watch. Wolfowitz<\/a>‘s don’t-ask-don’t-tell remark comes from Inside Higher Ed<\/i><\/a> via the Wikipedia footnotes.<\/p>\n

Millionaire, White House dinners, and Oprah<\/a> come from the CultureVulture review of Ravelstein<\/i><\/a>. “Chicago’s Grumpy Guru” is by James Atlas<\/a>, New York Times Magazine<\/i>, January 3, 1988. Critics include Benjamin Barber<\/a> in Harper’s<\/i>, January 1988; Henry Louis Gates Jr.<\/a> in The New York Times Book Review<\/i>, May 29, 1988; Martha Nussbaum<\/a>‘s “Undemocratic Vistas” in The New York Review of Books<\/i>, 1987; and Frank Zappa<\/a>‘s “On Junk Food for the Soul.”<\/p>\n

Reasonable extrapolations without a link: the physical feel of the Ithaca quad and Hyde Park, the general character of Telluride life, the Hutchins-era atmosphere at Chicago, and the compression in the final paragraph, which is interpretation rather than reporting. <\/p>\n

The Man Who Read the Playbook: Allan Bloom’s Hero System<\/strong><\/p>\n

A seminar room in Hyde Park, sometime in the mid-1980s. Gray light on limestone. Around the table sit a dozen graduate students who have organized their lives to be here, and at the head sits a bald man in a Lanvin jacket with ash on the lapel. He stutters. He lights cigarettes and forgets them, and at moments of highest tension he puts the lit end in his mouth. He asks what Socrates wants from Glaucon, and he asks it the way another man might ask whether the tumor is malignant. The students lean in. One of them, Clifford Orwin, later calls him the most charismatic human being he ever knew, and adds that Bloom lacked every trait a teacher is supposed to need. The room does not care. The room believes, for fifty minutes, that the ranking of human lives is the most urgent question on earth, and that the men who can rank them sit at this table.<\/p>\n

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argues that every culture is a hero system, a shared fiction that lets a dying animal feel like an object of primary value in a universe of meaning. A man cannot live staring at his own extinction, so he earns significance in whatever theater his tribe has built: sons, souls saved, acres cleared, papers published, money stacked. The theaters differ. The play is the same. Becker’s cold addendum is that the players must not know it is a play. The denial works only while it stays denied.<\/p>\n

Bloom breaks the addendum. He read the playbook. His tradition begins with Plato (c. 429-347 BCE) having Socrates define philosophy as the practice of dying, and Bloom teaches that definition for forty years. He knows the young come to him terrified and unformed. He knows that careers, causes, and pleasures are anesthetics. He says so in print, at length, to a million buyers. His originality inside Becker’s scheme is the claim of exemption: all hero systems deny death except one. The philosopher does not repress the terror. He turns and looks at it, and the looking is the highest life. Every other project on the menu, the family, the nation, the revolution, the fortune, is a noble or ignoble sleep. Philosophy alone stays awake. The Closing of the American Mind is a 392-page argument that America has stopped producing insomniacs.<\/p>\n

Becker doubts the exemption. He suspects the philosopher’s ladder is one more theater, with better seats. The rest of this essay tests Bloom’s claim against Bloom’s life.<\/p>\n

Two terrors run under that life. The first is the body’s. Bloom chain-smokes through heart trouble, jokes with his barber about cholesterol, and dies at sixty-two of internal bleeding and a failing liver, with a friend’s novel later asserting AIDS and the record still open. He keeps his eros off the page while making eros his subject, and he spends his last weeks in a hospital bed dictating a book about love. The animal dies the way animals die, in a body, attended, afraid or not afraid, and no translation of the Republic changes the mattress.<\/p>\n

The second terror frightens him more, and it is the signature of his system. Koj\u00e8ve teaches him that history might end, not in fire, in upholstery: a universal state of equal recognition, full stomachs, and administered peace. Nietzsche (1844-1900) gives the resident of that state a name, the Last Man, who blinks. For Bloom the true horror is not that he will die. It is that the world might stop producing people for whom anything is worth dying, that longing might go extinct, that the species might settle into a comfort so complete no one climbs. Death kills the hero. The end of history kills the heroic. A man can face the first with Socrates. Against the second there is only the classroom, held like a garrison.<\/p>\n

From these terrors come the sacred values, and each one is a word that other hero systems also use, at different exchange rates.<\/p>\n

Take eros. In Bloom’s system eros is a ladder. The longing that begins in a body is the low rung of an ascent that ends in the love of truth, and the whole apparatus of education exists to keep the longing hungry and pointed up. Satisfaction is the enemy. A nineteen-year-old whose desires have been met at cost is a nineteen-year-old who will never need Plato. The word carries other loads elsewhere. For the woman in the fertility clinic waiting room, forty-one, third cycle, eros has narrowed to a follicle count and a payment plan; longing means a child, and the ladder points at a nursery. For the Carmelite nun the same hunger has one licit object, and she has spent thirty years training it on Him, in a cell, on a schedule; she might recognize Bloom’s ascent and note that he skipped the vows. For the engineer at the dating app, eros is a retention curve; his bonus depends on longing that never quite closes, and he has built what Bloom feared with a cheerfulness Bloom never imagined. For the youth pastor running a purity seminar in a church gym, eros is a flood behind a levee, and his heroism consists of sandbags. Each of them says desire. Each means a different god. Bloom’s version demands that the fire stay lit and stay aimed at books, and his biography adds the detail his system never prices: his own consummations stayed off the ledger, known to friends, unwritten, while he taught longing to the young as the one subject that cannot be faked.<\/p>\n

Take the book. In Bloom’s system a book is a sealed instrument. The great writers wrote for two audiences, a surface for the city and a code for the few, and reading is initiation. A book is also a raft: the author survives on it across millennia, and the reader who boards it joins the only aristocracy that matters, a conversation among the dead conducted over the heads of the living. He translates the Republic with deliberate roughness so the code survives the crossing. Other systems weigh the word differently. For the Baptist deacon in Alabama the book is singular and inerrant, and the hero task is submission to it, so that Bloom’s talk of hidden teachings sounds like the serpent’s first question. For the Tehran engineer who passed hand-copied Forugh Farrokhzad poems through the 1980s, a book is contraband and courage, and its value scales with the risk of holding it. For the memorizer in a Sana’a Quran school, the book lives in the chest, word-perfect, and the immortality it grants is recitation, a boy becoming a vessel. For the acquisitions editor in Manhattan, the book is a P&L with a jacket, and she can tell you within five hundred units what a soul is worth this season. Bloom’s own case ends in her column. The man whose system honors coded writing for the few produces the loudest mass artifact of the decade, dines at the White House, sits with Oprah, and buys the Lanvin with the proceeds. The market hands him the immortality the seminar could not, and he takes it, and he knows what he has taken. He spends the money like a man mocking it, and Bellow tells the funeral that Bloom treated a windfall as cargo to heave off a moving train.<\/p>\n

Take the teacher. Here Bloom’s system beats loudest, because teaching is its answer to death. Becker calls the deepest human project causa sui, the wish to father oneself, to owe the gift of life to no one and pass it on by one’s own power. Bloom, who fathers no children, fathers minds. The lineage runs like a genealogy: Strauss begets Bloom, Bloom begets Fukuyama and Wolfowitz and Pangle and Orwin, and the seed is a way of reading. Telluride House gives him a household without a wife; the seminar gives him generation without the body. The word teacher trades elsewhere at other rates. For the Parris Island drill instructor, a teacher is a man who breaks civilians into parts and reassembles them as Marines, and the transmission is obedience under fire. For the Seoul mother who spends a third of the family income on hagwons, the teacher is an arms dealer in the credential war, and her heroism is measured in her son’s exam percentile. For the melamed drilling five-year-olds on the aleph-beis in a Brooklyn cheder, teaching is the relay of a covenant, and he is one link in a chain that must not break with him. For the keynote thought leader working the conference circuit, teaching is an asset class, and the students are called an audience. Bloom stands closest to the melamed and would resent the comparison, since his chain carries no covenant, only the conversation. But the structure is the same: a childless man securing descent. The rival he never names in all his pages on education is the parent, the ordinary father who transmits life the old way, through diapers and mortgages and a body that came from his body. Bloom’s system quietly ranks that man below the teacher, and has to, because the teacher’s whole claim to immortality depends on pedagogical generation outranking the biological kind.<\/p>\n

Take openness. Bloom performs his most famous move on this word, and the move is pure Becker even though he never cites him. American culture, he argues, has adopted openness as its supreme virtue, and the openness is a closing, because a mind open to everything can be claimed by nothing. Translated into Becker’s terms: relativism is the demolition of hero systems as such. The student taught that no way of life ranks above another has been handed a world with no theater left in it, no stage on which significance can be earned, and he responds the way Becker predicts, with low-grade depression, irony, and consumption. Bloom’s rage at the flat souls of his students is grief over demolished theaters. The word means other things on other stages. For the Unitarian minister in Vermont, openness is the creed, the hard-won escape from her grandfather’s hellfire, and Bloom’s hierarchy smells of the thing she fled. For the venture capitalist, openness means optionality, never committing to a thesis a term sheet can’t exit, and he calls it keeping the aperture wide. For the Hasidic father in Williamsburg, openness is the street pressing on his sons, the smartphone in the study hall, the acid that eats fences, and he builds his heroism as a wall. For the woman three years out of a compound in Idaho, openness cracked her prison, and she will hear no sermon against it. Bloom agrees with the Hasid on the diagnosis and with none of them on the cure. He wants the fences down and the ranking kept, every belief exposed to the knife and the knife wielded only by the few who can survive the surgery. That position has a name in Becker: a hero system for those strong enough to watch the others burn.<\/p>\n

Now run the subtraction. Take away the Committee, the lineage, the million copies, the apartment on Dorchester with the French linens and the Baroque on the stereo. Take away the seminar table and the twelve leaning students. What remains, in October 1992, is a body in a Chicago hospital bed, propped up, short of breath, dictating. The book he dictates is Love and Friendship, chapters on Rousseau (1712-1778), on Shakespeare, on Austen, on the varieties of human attachment, spoken aloud to the end. Read one way, the scene vindicates him. This is the practice of dying as advertised, the philosopher working the question of love while the liver fails, awake to the last. Read Becker’s way, the scene shows the system operating at full load at the exact moment it should be dropping away, the immortality project running like a bilge pump, words against water. Both readings are available. The measure of the man is that both are plausible, which is more than most hero systems can say for their heroes at the end.<\/p>\n

The afterlife arrives on schedule and in the wrong hands. Bloom’s system promises survival through students and books, a controlled transmission, the teaching passing sealed to the initiated. What the world receives instead, eight years later, is Ravelstein, a novel by his best friend, in which the sealed man appears unsealed: the spending, the gossip, the companion, the diagnosis asserted and then half retracted in interviews. Bellow gives him the only immortality that reaches past the seminar, and it wears Bellow’s face. The disciples call it betrayal. The executor is said to be appalled. Here sits the cost that Bloom’s own ledger has no column for: a hero system built on the mastery of texts ends with its founder as a character in someone else’s, edited by another hand, his code broken by the one reader he loved who never joined the school. There is a second unpriced cost, quieter. Michael Z. Wu keeps a dedication and an estate, and grief converted to inheritance is the kind of settlement Bloom’s Plato, who wrote the Symposium, might have asked harder questions about than Bloom’s admirers did.<\/p>\n

The hero, then. Bloom plays Socrates in a Lanvin jacket: the barefoot man of the agora restaged with Zegna ties, a stereo, and royalties, dying in talk as the original died in talk, hemlock swapped for cigarettes at the rate of two per haircut. The imitation is sincere and the discount is real. Socrates wrote nothing, charged nothing, and owned one cloak; his refusal of the world’s currencies was the proof of the claim. Bloom takes the currencies, all of them, and holds the claim anyway, and the strain between the two is where his hero system either breaks or shows its honesty, depending on the reader. His unnamed rival stands closer than the Last Man he denounced. It is the ordinary father at the kitchen table, the man who answers death with children instead of dialogues and never needs a seminar to feel his life has weight. Bloom’s entire edifice is a wager that the classroom outranks that kitchen, and the wager cannot be settled, because the two heroes keep different books. And the final cost is the one already named: the man who taught that a book is a raft across death got his crossing, and the raft was built by a friend, from his warts, without his permission. He wanted to be Plato. He arrived on the far shore as Alcibiades, the beloved character in a text he did not write, bursting in drunk at the end of the banquet, telling the truth about the teacher, and stealing the scene.<\/p>\n

The Energy Star of Hyde Park: Allan Bloom Through Randall Collins<\/strong><\/p>\n

Begin with the body in the room. A seminar table at the University of Chicago, the mid-1980s. Twelve graduate students sit close enough to smell the smoke. At the head sits a bald man who stutters, and the stutter does something no smooth lecturer manages: it makes every sentence a small suspense. The students wait for the word to break loose. Their eyes converge on one point. The man lights cigarette after cigarette, forgets them, breaks them, and at the highest pitch of a session puts the lit end in his mouth, and nobody laughs, because by then the room has fused. Clifford Orwin, who sat at that table, calls Allan Bloom the most charismatic human being he ever knew and lists the missing equipment: no poise, no fluency, none of the calm self-possession his teacher Leo Strauss carried. The charisma arrived anyway.<\/p>\n

Randall Collins (b. 1941) builds a sociology that predicts this room. Working from \u00c9mile Durkheim (1858-1917) and Erving Goffman (1922-1982), Collins argues that the basic unit of social life is the interaction ritual: bodies assembled in one place, a barrier marking insiders from outsiders, a shared object of attention, and a shared mood that feeds on the attention. When the ritual works, the participants fall into rhythm with one another, and the rhythm generates what Collins calls emotional energy, a charge of confidence, warmth, and drive that people carry out of the encounter and spend in the next one. Successful rituals also throw off byproducts: solidarity among the participants, moral standards that feel absolute, and sacred objects, things saturated with the group’s charge, a flag, a ring, a book. Charisma, in this account, has no mystery. A charismatic man is a man at the focal point of high-intensity rituals, an energy star, and his magnetism is the stored charge of a thousand successful assemblies. Polish has nothing to do with it. Focus has everything to do with it. The stutter, the smoke, the burned lip: each tightens the room’s attention on one man, and attention is the fuel.<\/p>\n

Collins wrote a second book that fits Bloom tighter still. The Sociology of Philosophies argues that intellectual life across three millennia runs on chains of face-to-face rituals: master and pupils in a room, lecture and argument as the ritual forms, ideas as the sacred objects, and creativity concentrated at the nodes where chains cross. Great thinkers cluster in lineages, pupil touching master touching master, because the two ingredients of intellectual creation, cultural capital and emotional energy, both pass by contact. Books alone transmit the capital. Only rooms transmit the charge.<\/p>\n

Run Bloom’s life through that machine and the life becomes legible link by link.<\/p>\n

The chain reaches him early. A fifteen-year-old from Indianapolis enters the University of Chicago in 1946, into the residue of Robert Maynard Hutchins’s project, a curriculum organized around great books and small discussion classes, ritual technology purpose-built for mutual focus. There he finds Strauss, and the Strauss seminar of the 1950s runs as a textbook Collins assembly. Werner Dannhauser, who sat in it, remembers Strauss as a sun the students felt privileged to orbit, and remembers that Strauss called his students his puppies, which is what solidarity sounds like from the inside: a family idiom for a boundary. The seminar has every element. Co-presence in a Hyde Park room. A barrier of difficulty, since the reading method takes years to learn and the untrained cannot follow the talk. A single focus, the text on the table. A mood of initiates handling dangerous material. Out of it comes a lineage with its own sacred objects, Plato’s dialogues read as coded surfaces, and its own membership emblem, the method, which lets any two Straussians anywhere recognize one another within minutes of conversation. Collins says intellectual movements need emblems that travel. Esoteric reading travels light and cannot be counterfeited by outsiders. It might be the most efficient membership badge American academic life has produced.<\/p>\n

Bloom then does what Collins says the creative ones do: he plugs into a second chain. In Paris from 1953 to 1955 he attends Alexandre Koj\u00e8ve, whose prewar Hegel seminar had run one of the highest-voltage intellectual rituals of the century, with Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille (1897-1962), Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), Raymond Queneau (1903-1976), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) around the table. By the fifties the seminar is over, and Koj\u00e8ve works as a trade bureaucrat, but the charge still hangs on him, and Bloom takes the transmission in person, then spends part of his career editing Koj\u00e8ve into English. Collins’s model predicts where new positions in the attention space open: at the crossing of chains. Bloom stands where the Strauss chain crosses the Koj\u00e8ve chain, Athens crossing Hegel, and his signature theme, the fate of the philosophic soul at the end of history, exists only at that intersection. Neither chain alone produces it.<\/p>\n

Now watch him build his own assemblies. At Cornell in the 1960s he takes a post at Telluride House, and Telluride is a ritual laboratory: selected students living together, running their own house, holding seminars in the building where they eat and sleep. Collins measures rituals by frequency and density of co-presence, and a residential house beats any classroom, because breakfast, argument, and midnight talk chain into one continuous encounter. Francis Fukuyama lives in the house and takes Bloom’s Greek philosophy course, and thirty years on, the end-of-history thesis that makes Fukuyama famous is the Koj\u00e8ve charge arriving through the Bloom link, two nodes down the chain from the Paris seminar. Ideas travel by book. Conviction travels by table.<\/p>\n

Cornell also hands Bloom his great defeat, and Collins explains the defeat better than any account written in the language of courage and cowardice. In April 1969 armed students hold Willard Straight Hall, the administration signs, and the faculty at first votes the agreement down. Then comes the week the conservatives never forgave. Thousands of students pack Barton Hall, day after day, a mass assembly with a single focus, a shared mood at maximum heat, chants, speeches, the felt presence of history. Measured as an interaction ritual, Barton Hall is the most successful gathering in Cornell’s existence, a solidarity engine running around the clock, minting emotional energy for one side of the dispute. Against it the faculty can field a committee meeting. Professors assemble in low-frequency, low-focus encounters, each man arriving alone from his office with his private doubts, no rhythm, no mood, no charge. When the faculty reverses its vote days later, Bloom reads moral collapse. Collins reads an energy differential. A body of men drained of solidarity faces a body of men and women overflowing with it, and the drained side complies, as drained sides do. Bloom’s own gesture during the crisis confirms the analysis by failing. He sends students into the crowd with photocopied pages of Plato’s Republic, a sacred object detached from any assembly, a battery with no circuit. Nobody converts. Sacred objects hold charge only for those who received the charge in rooms, and the crowd at Cornell got its charge in Barton Hall.<\/p>\n

He carries his own charge to Toronto for nine years, teaching, translating Rousseau, and then comes home in 1979 to the Committee on Social Thought, the densest ritual venue American letters offers, a small program built entirely around the seminar form. There he forms the dyad that shapes his last decade. Collins insists that the two-person encounter is a ritual too, and the Bloom-Bellow friendship runs as a sustained one: two men in daily talk, teaching a seminar together, trading books, eating, gossiping, each the other’s most attentive audience. Saul Bellow says Bloom inhaled books and ideas like air, which is what an energy star looks like to the man sitting closest. The apartment at 58th and Dorchester serves as the shrine of the micro-cult: the black leather couch, the Baroque on the stereo, thousands of CDs, French linens, guests arranged around the talker in the silk dressing gown. Collins notes that ritual leaders accumulate objects charged by the group’s attention. Visitors to that apartment describe the possessions with the reverence of pilgrims listing relics, and the newspaper spread under his chair at dinner parties tells you the man outranked the linen.<\/p>\n

Then 1987, and the strangest chapter in the case, because The Closing of the American Mind detaches Bloom’s symbols from his rituals and floats them into mass circulation. Collins distinguishes first-order charge, absorbed in the room, from the secondary circulation of emblems among people who never attend. The book sells more than a million copies, and by most accounts the buyers largely do not read it. They do something else with it, and Collins names the something: they display a membership badge. In the culture war of the late eighties, the hardback on the coffee table announces a side, the way a crucifix or a campaign button announces a side, and the announcement requires no acquaintance with the chapter on Heidegger. The book works as a portable piece of solidarity. Its sales curve tracks the intensity of the conflict, since conflict is the great multiplier of ritual demand. And fame then feeds back into fresh assemblies at higher amperage. At Harvard in 1988, Harvey Mansfield warms the hall by saying Bloom always behaved as if he were famous, so fame could not spoil him, and the laughter that follows is the sound of a crowd falling into shared rhythm before the speaker opens his mouth. Bloom takes the podium, notes that the loudest cries against his book come from the Ivy League, and reaches for the farmer who knows the fox by its cry from the henhouse. The room roars. A joke landing in a packed hall is entrainment achieved, hundreds of bodies laughing on one beat, and the man on stage banks the charge.<\/p>\n

The frame also settles an old score inside the book, and settles it against its author. The pages of Closing that drew the most ridicule attack rock music, and Bloom spends some of them on Mick Jagger (b. 1943) as the presiding figure of the young. Read through Collins, the attack is a turf war between ritual industries. A rock concert is an interaction ritual of industrial scale: tens of thousands of bodies, one focus, rhythmic entrainment enforced by drums at chest-shaking volume, ecstasy, solidarity, T-shirts and vinyl sold at the exit as charged objects. It manufactures in one night the emotional energy a seminar produces across a semester, and it sells to the same customer, the unformed nineteen-year-old with surplus longing. Bloom the theorist claims rock deforms the soul’s eros. Bloom the practitioner, seen from Collins’s angle, is a boutique producer denouncing a factory. He knows the product cold because he makes the product. The seminar and the stadium run the same engine at different scales, and his rage at Jagger carries the heat of a man watching a rival work his own crowd.<\/p>\n

The chain outlives the node, and then the physics of decay set in. Bloom dies in October 1992, and the funeral runs as the standard rite for a fallen energy star, the group reassembling around the body to recharge its solidarity, with Bellow’s eulogy circulating for years afterward as a charged text. Collins holds that sacred objects fade unless renewed in fresh assemblies; symbols are batteries, and batteries drain. Eight years later Bellow performs the recharge. Ravelstein returns Bloom to circulation as a character, and whatever the disciples think of the warts, the novel does for Bloom’s emblem what no memorial conference could, pushing the charged name through hundreds of thousands of hands. The lineage meanwhile does what lineages do. Students of Bloom’s students teach the coded reading in rooms he never entered, Fukuyama carries the Koj\u00e8ve strand into policy debate, and the method still identifies members at conference hotel bars within minutes. The Straussian network remains, by Collins’s measures, among the healthiest ritual chains in American intellectual life: high meeting frequency, strong boundaries, portable emblems, contested enough to stay warm.<\/p>\n

What the frame finally shows is a man who mastered the technology he refused to name. Bloom taught that the books contain the power and that the teacher merely opens them. Collins’s ledger records the opposite flow. Thousands of readers held the same Republic and felt nothing. The power sat in the rooms, in the smoke and the stutter and the twelve converging gazes, and the books left those rooms charged the way iron leaves a magnet’s field. His students spent the rest of their lives trying to build such rooms, and the ones who succeeded stood, as he had, at the front, imperfect and lit, with every eye on them. The doctrine says Plato does the work. The chain says the body in the room does it, one assembly at a time, and that the last charge dissipates when the last student who sat there stops gathering people to tell them what it felt like.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the afternoon of Sunday, April 20, 1969, the heavy doors of Willard Straight Hall opened and about a hundred Black students walked out into the cool Ithaca air. They had held Cornell University‘s student union for a day and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27596],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t