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Todd Gitlin on Allan Bloom, Thirty Years After The Closing of the American Mind.

… Today’s knee-jerk illiberalism exhibits many tendencies that Bloom sketched (and sometimes caricatured). Sneers at the Enlightenment as a white male imposition are, as they say on Twitter, trending. Rereading Bloom’s jeremiad, I’m reminded of Theodor Adorno’s backhanded defense of Freud: “In psychoanalysis, nothing is true except the exaggerations.” Bloom’s exaggerations undermined the case for liberal education. It must also be said that they were, at times, disconcertingly and grimly prophetic.

… [Bloom passionately insisted] “that there be an unpopular institution in our midst that sets clarity above well-being or compassion, that resists our powerful urges and temptations, that is free of all snobbism but has standards” and “maintains the permanent questions front and center.” The university, he went on, “must be contemptuous of public opinion because it has within it the source of autonomy — the quest for and even discovery of the truth according to nature. It must concentrate on philosophy, theology, the literary classics, and on those scientists like Newton, Descartes, and Leibniz who have the most comprehensive scientific vision and a sense of the relation of what they do to the order of the whole of things. … The university must resist the temptation to try to do everything for society.” Amen.

… Bloom would not be surprised to see segments of the campus left — students not even born in 1969, and indeed whose parents might not have been born then — proudly declare today: “NO FREE SPEECH.” The mob attack on Charles Murray at Middlebury College, along with various lesser uproars against unpopular views, revealed the force of a continuing revolt against reason.

**************

UD, on the 25th birthday.

Margaret Soltan, October 13, 2017 8:09AM
Posted in: defenses of liberal education

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2 Responses to “Todd Gitlin on Allan Bloom, Thirty Years After The Closing of the American Mind.”

  1. dmf Says:
    October 13th, 2017 at 4:38PM

    Paglia schmoozing at AEI
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv7LvRhvgNI

  2. University Diaries » For a blog like University Diaries, the inevitable post-election attacks on the humanities, social sciences, and the administrative class that runs them, must be noted. Says:
    November 21st, 2024 at 5:36PM

    […] and beliefs are put into question (college is where you read Blake and Nietzsche); but as Todd Gitlin, a man of the left, pointed out in a defense of Allan Bloom, the academy went apeshit radical rather […]

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