Allan Bloom

Allan Bloom (1930 to 1992) was an American philosopher, classicist and university teacher who became one of the best known critics of contemporary American higher education. Educated at the University of Chicago, where he earned his doctorate in 1955 from the Committee on Social Thought, he studied under Leo Strauss, David Grene and Alexandre Kojeve, and went on to teach at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, Tel Aviv University, Yale University, the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and finally the University of Chicago. He argued for a Great Books education grounded in the close reading of classic texts, and set out his case against what he saw as relativism in the university in his bestselling 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind. Although the popular press called him a conservative, Bloom rejected the label and said he was defending what he called the theoretical life. The novelist Saul Bellow, his friend and colleague, based the novel Ravelstein on him.