Allan Bloom Quotes
Human nature must not be altered in order to have a problem-free world. Man is not just a problem-solving being, as behaviorists would wish us to believe, but a problem-recognizing and -accepting being.
Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind. Simon & Schuster, 1987.
Remark to J. Edgar Hoover who masterminded the forced deportation of Emma Goldman, a leading anarchist of the day. Hoover had not given Goldman or her attorney any notice of the time of her deportation so they were unable to obtain legal stays. Hoover maintained to Goldman that he had given her a "square deal."
Allan David Bloom was an American philosopher, classicist, and academician. He studied under David Grene, Leo Strauss, Richard McKeon, and Alexandre Kojève. He subsequently taught at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, Tel Aviv University, Yale University, École Normale Supérieure of Paris, and the University of Chicago. Bloom championed the idea of Great Books education and became famous for his criticism of contemporary American higher education, with his views being expressed in his bestselling 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind. Characterized as a conservative in the popular media, Bloom denied that he was a conservative, and asserted that what he sought to defend was the "theoretical life". Saul Bellow wrote Ravelstein, a roman à clef based on Bloom, his friend and colleague at the University of Chicago.
