Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students

内容简介
The brilliant, controversial, bestselling critique of American culture that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times)—now featuring a new afterword by Andrew Ferguson in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition.

A cultural phenomenon with more than 750,000 copies in print, The Closing of the American Mind is as penetrating a criticism of our culture today as it was twenty-five years ago. In this acclaimed number one national bestseller, Allan Bloom, one of our country’s most distinguished political philosophers, argues that the social and political crises of contemporary America are really an intellectual crisis—a dangerous narrowing of curiosity and exploration by the university elites. In his new afterword, author Andrew Ferguson recounts why the book caused such a furor at publication and why its argument continues to provoke and endure.

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“Brilliant. . . . No other book combines such shrewd insights into our current state. . . . No other book is at once so lively and so deep, so witty and so thoughtful, so outrageous and so sensible, so amusing and so chilling. . . . An extraordinary book.” (William Kristol The Wall Street Journal)

“Rich and absorbing. . . . A grand tour of the American mind." (The Washington Post)
作者简介

Allan Bloom was professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College and co-director of the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy at the University of Chicago. He taught at Yale, University of Paris, University of Toronto, Tel Aviv University, and Cornell, where he was the recipient of the Clark Teaching Award in 1967. He died in 1992.

目录

Contents

Foreword by Saul Bellow

Preface

Introduction: Our Virtue

PART ONE. STUDENTS

The Clean Slate

Boob

Music

Relationships

Self-Centeredness

Equality

Race

Sex

Separateness

Divorce

Love

Eros

PART TWO. NIHILISM, AMERICAN STYLE

The German Connection

Two Revolutions and Two States of Nature

The Serf

Creativity

Culture

Values

The Nietzscheanization of the Left or Vice Versa

Our Ignorance

PART THREE. THE UNIVERSITY

From Socrates' Apology to Heidegger's Rektoratsrede

Tocqueville on Democratic Intellectual Life

The Relation Between Thought and Civil Society

The Philosophic Experience

The Enlightenment Transformation

Swift's Doubts

Rousseau's Radicalization and the German University

The Sixties

The Student and the University

Liberal Education

The Decomposition of the University

The Disciplines

Conclusion

Index

文摘

THE CLEAN SLATE

I used to think that young Americans began whatever education they were to get at the age of eighteen, that their early lives were spiritually empty and that they arrived at the university clean slates unaware of their deeper tires and the world beyond their superficial experience. The contrast between them and their European counterparts was set in high relief in the European novels and movies into which we were initiated at the university. The Europeans got most of the culture they were going to get from their homes and their public schools, lyceés, or gymnasiums, where their souls were incorporated into their specific literary traditions, which in turn expressed, and even founded, their traditions as peoples. It was not imply or primarily that these European schoolchildren had a vastly more sophisticated knowledge of the human heart than we were accustomed to in the young or, for that matter, the old. It was that their self-knowledge mediated by their book learning and that their ambitions were formed as much by models first experienced in books as in everyday life. Their books had a substantial existence in everyday life and constituted much of what their society as a whole looked up to. It was commonplace for children of what they called good families to fill their imaginations with hopes of serious literary or philosophic careers, as do ours with hopes of careers in entertainment or business. All this was given to them early on, and by the time they were in their late teens it was part of the equipment of their souls, a lens through which they saw everything and which would affect all their later learning and experience. They went to the university to specialize.

基本信息
出版社: Simon & Schuster; Reissue (2012年4月3日)
平装: 400页
语种： 英语
ISBN: 1451683200
条形码: 9781451683202
商品尺寸: 14 x 2.5 x 21.4 cm
商品重量: 336 g
ASIN: 1451683200