A review by armedaphrodite
The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom

challenging informative sad slow-paced

1.0

Less a book of philosophy, more a book of someone hopelessly in love with philosophers. The second and third parts of the book do have some engaging philosophical enquiries and some anti post-structuralist arguments, though meandering for sure. But the first part reads somewhere between a poor attempt to make a modern argument for the intertwining of erotic love and philosophy based on misreads of classical philosophy on the one hand, and an admission of pederasty on the other (which, given his friend Saul Bellow's depiction of him in Ravelstein, may not be far off).

I think the line that perfectly encapsulates this book is, "Young people know that rock [music] has the beat of sexual intercourse." Beyond vastly mischaracterizing a whole genre of music (which he calls a "prepackaged masturbatory fantasy") and bringing in his own weird focus on sex, he goes on to try to argue that kids should be "shown the mysteries" by their elders and guides.