Word: blooms
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Closing of the American Mind may still sit safely ensconced atop the bestseller lists, but a Bloom backlash has set in. In the months since the initial hoopla over the book, aggrieved members of the academic community excoriated by Professor Bloom have mounted a counteroffensive...
Unlike most of the book's civilian purchasers, they read on past Bloom's juicy passages on the mental masturbation of the MTV generation. There they found Bloom lamenting the "Nietzscheanization"--i.e., descent into cheap nihilism and easy relativism unworthy of Nietzsche--of the American university. In his longing for a return to a more Socratic conception of higher education, however, Bloom's later critics correctly discerned an author whose relationship with the democratic idea was ambiguous...
...Stone's The Trial of Socrates provides an unintended counterweight to the central theses of Bloom, who fancies himself a disciple of Socrates. Stone, the legendary lefty muckraking journalist, set out in his retirement to write a sweeping tome on freedom of thought in human history. His studies inevitably drew him back to Athens. "There, like so many before me," he writes, "I fell in love with the Greeks...
...philosopher-kings was both necessary and impossible. The Republic, by this account, is really a massive excercise in irony, a lesson less in how to construct a utopia than in the limits of what we can reasonably expect from politics. Stone, attributing this interpretation to one "Alan [sic] Bloom", writes that, "Plato could hardly have spent his life spoofing himself...
...nation's reading public has greedily bought up books inducing mass guilt trips. First came Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" to tell us that our society was a superficial, commercialized "pre-packaged masturbational fantasy." Now Kennedy's much-awaited book has arrived, with its predictions of America's fall from its place as the world's greatest power...