Allan Bloom

Allan Bloom (1930-1992), American philosopher and university professor. Allan David Bloom was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1955. As an interdisciplinary graduate student Bloom began to explore the idea of “transcultural truth,” a concept that would continue to direct his intellectual pursuits. His academic career began as a lecturer in liberal arts at the University of Chicago in 1955 and took him next to Yale University in 1962, where he taught political science, and then to Cornell University the next year to teach government. There a promotion followed the publication of Shakespeare's Politics (1964), a collection of essays written by Bloom and Harry V. Jaffa. In 1968 his translation of Plato's Republic was published. While teaching at Cornell during the 1960s, Bloom was angered that the university administrators acceded to student demands and pressures, and he ultimately left Cornell to serve as visiting professor at the universities of Tel Aviv and Paris from 1969 to 1970, accepting a professorship of political science at the University of Toronto in 1970.

In 1979, the year his translation of Jean Jacques Rousseau's Emile appeared, Bloom returned to the University of Chicago as a full professor and codirector of the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy. In essays written between 1967 and 1982 he continued to explore the decline of education in the United States, decrying the rift between the humanities and the sciences and urging a curriculum centered once again around classic texts. In 1987 he topped the best-seller lists and garnered media attention and critical acclaim with his book The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students, in which he criticized the seeming disinterest or inability on the part of either individuals or society in general to pursue knowledge and make judgments about the worth of ideas and values. Bloom's book Love and Friendship, which examines human relations from the perspective of writers and thinkers, was published posthumously in 1993.