Allan Bloom as Best Seller

The Australian novelist Patrick White once remarked that while good books sometimes make it to the best-seller list, it is rarely their goodness that puts them there. White was not talking about the many popular books that quite consciously and naturally aim for a low common denominator. He was talking about those occasional surprises that, written to all seeming for the few, somehow manage to reach the many.

Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students” (Simon & Schuster) is surely such a book. Studies of American higher education stream forth every year, and scarcely one makes it even to the bottom spot on the list, much less--as Bloom’s has--to the top spot for a stay of many weeks. Bloom’s book, moreover, would seem to enter the starting gate with a handicap, for its central chapters are a capsule history of European political philosophy--not a subject, to put it mildly, for which there has been any great public clamor. But, as it turns out, there is something precisely in this most forbidding part of the book that does indeed meet a public need.

Bloom makes the history of philosophy function as an etiological tale, a tale like “How the Leopard Got His Spots”--or in this case “How the American University Lost Its Soul.” The story opens in the Enlightenment as philosophy first seizes its autonomy from religion and then secures it by the great and popular Enlightenment projects of Science and Law: Henceforth material improvement and domestic tranquillity are to provide a popular constituency so great that neither the church nor even the state will be able to put the genie of free thought back in the jug. But while philosophy has its defenses in place against church and state, it has not reckoned on an attack from within its own ranks, and Bloom’s story here becomes a tale of treachery.

The attack on reason begins with Jean Jacques Rousseau and climaxes with Friedrich Nietzsche, who brilliantly exposes the inadequacy of rationalism’s arguments for rationalism itself:

“Nietzsche surveyed and summed up the contradictory strands of modern thought and concluded that victorious rationalism is unable to rule in culture or soul, that it cannot defend itself theoretically and that its human consequences are intolerable. This constitutes a crisis of the West, for everywhere in the West, for the first time ever, all regimes are founded on reason. Human founders, looking only to universal principles of natural justice recognizable by all men through their unaided reason, established governments on the basis of the consent of the governed, without appeal to revelation or tradition. But reason has also discerned that all previous cultures were founded by and on gods or belief in gods. Only if the new regimes are enormous successes, able to rival the creative genius and splendor of other cultures, could reason’s rational foundings be equal or superior to the kinds of foundings that reason knows were made elsewhere. But such equality or superiority is highly questionable; therefore reason recognizes its own inadequacy. There must be religion, and reason cannot found religions.”

Where does reason turn when it recognizes that (1) there must be a religion but (2) reason itself cannot found it? It turns inevitably to man, but not to rational man. It turns to creative, artistic man, man passionately committed to his own human creativity: “It is Pascal’s wager, no longer on God’s existence but on one’s capability to believe in oneself and the goals one has set for oneself.” Men “touched by God,” even if there is no God to touch them, can by their innate human greatness attract followers, organize whole societies around their key inspirations, and in the end provide culture with the coherence that neither reason nor religion can any longer supply.

Bloom finds the demagogic potential in Nietzsche’s view horrifying; but Bloom is to Nietzsche as Milton is to Satan in “Paradise Lost.” Though horrified, he is fascinated, and in his company so are we. His account of the Nietzschean critique of rationalism and of the afterlife of that critique in social science is the most compellingly written, swiftly moving portion of the book.

Nietzschean nihilism becomes “Nihilism, American Style” through the mediation of the German sociologist Max Weber, to whom Bloom assigns a simply staggering influence over all aspects of American thought. Indeed, though Bloom does not say this, the pivotal event in 20th-century American intellectual life for him would have to be Talcott Parsons’ decision to translate Weber’s “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” For as Bloom sees it, that book, like a Trojan horse within the American walls, disgorged the myrmidons of Nietzsche. Americans, Bloom says, by accepting Weber without realizing that he carried Nietzsche within him, accepted the defeat of rationalism without ever quite noticing that there had been a war; Bloom wants above all else to tell us about that war. Our country, he says, accepted Weber’s terms-- charisma , as in the case of John Calvin; value system , as in Calvinist work ethic--without realizing that they would apply as well to Hitler as to Calvin and, to come at last to the etiological point, that they would apply as well to a charismatic student terrorist as to his peaceable professor.

Bloom tells this story extremely well; but few intellectual historians would take it as anything like the whole story, and I should think that many ordinary American readers might pull up short at a statement like the following:

“The fact that most of us never would have heard of Oedipus if it were not for Freud should make us aware that we are almost utterly dependent on our German missionaries or intermediaries for our knowledge of Greece, Rome, Judaism and Christianity; that, however profound that knowledge may be, theirs is only one interpretation; and that we have only been told as much as they thought we needed to know.”

America dependent on German missionaries for its knowledge of Christianity? Only as much as they thought we needed? Bloom here sounds like a resentful graduate student with an Austrian dissertation director. He seems to have forgotten that this nation began its life as a set of English colonies and that, among foreign ideas, English ones have always so predominated as to scarcely seem foreign at all.

With respect, in particular, to nihilism in America, there is a striking English connection to match what Bloom calls “The German Connection.” Bloom takes his leave of British philosophy with a single reference to David Hume. Thereafter, his story is entirely a Continental one, until it becomes an American one as Nietzschean nihilism reaches these shores in its Weberian disguise. But an alternative, entirely British account could be given of American nihilism which would note, first, that a century before Nietzsche, Hume’s skepticism was as permanently chastening to Enlightenment rationalism in Britain as Nietzsche’s would prove to be in Germany and, second, that Germanic thought itself underwent a kind of English conversion when Ludwig Wittgenstein moved to England and joined forces with Bertrand Russell.

As it happens, Richard Eder reviews today (Page 3) a novel, “The World as I Found It,” about just this crossing to England and its remarkable intellectual aftermath. Of that aftermath, Bloom writes dismissively: “Although there was a certain modesty about ordinary language analysis (as the dominant British philosophy came to be called)--’We just help to give you clarity about what you are already doing’--there was also smugness: ‘We know what was wrong with the whole tradition, and we don’t need it anymore.’ ” Well, yes, there was smugness, but there were also powerful arguments against the only tradition Bloom seems to think worth studying. And as the novel shows, there was also a personal story that captured the imagination of leading thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic.

By the end of the British story, all “language games” were equal, even as all “value systems” were equal by the end of the German story--a theoretical difference that may seem small. A related practical difference, however, is surely noteworthy; namely, that British philosophy in this line of descent has been utterly dominant in the philosophy departments of the leading American universities for fully two generations. So total has its victory been that, a few years ago, there was a revolt in the American Philosophical Assn. by philosophers calling for “pluralism”; that is, for a little attention to such neglected thinkers as Friedrich Nietzsche.

Now, the story of American philosophy is not per se the whole story of American intellectual life, but it is surely a larger part of that whole than Bloom has acknowledged. I would maintain, however, that the success of his book derives in good measure from the fact that he has not acknowledged it.

Nothing so helps a story as a villain, particularly when the story is about corrupted youth; and even now, there is no villain quite like a German villain. Bloom has made German thought the villain of his story, above all in a late chapter entitled “From Socrates’ Apology to Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede, “ the Rektoratsrede being a famous, Nazi-sympathizing address that the philosopher Martin Heidegger gave on becoming chancellor of the University of Freiburg. There may indeed be such nihilist, villainous tendencies in German thought. My point is not to deny them but only to note the existence in Anglo-American thought of parallel tendencies equally nihilist, equally villainous, if you will. C. S. Lewis, among others concerned about loss of soul, decried these tendencies decades ago. By neglecting them and by vastly exaggerating the influence of German thought in American life, Bloom provides American readers with something more of us seem to want than one could have guessed; namely, a foreigner to blame for the spiritual impoverishment of American life.

“Many will say,” Bloom writes, “that my reports of the decisive influence of Continental, particularly German, philosophy on us are false or exaggerated. . . .” But he is undeterred: “I need only think of my Amherst student (who asked if he should go back to sublimation) or my Atlanta taxi driver (who said that gestalt was his favorite therapy) to be persuaded that the categories of the mind determine the perception.”

I can only say that I need a lot more than that to be persuaded. Different categories can determine similar perceptions, and a professor who ventures no farther into the world than his classroom or his taxicabs to the airport may not have a reliable answer to the empirical, rather dull question of which categories actually have been influential in which minds.

Founded more on a proposition than on a fact, the United States remains more than most countries, a voluntary association vulnerable, accordingly, to a kind of desertion by its own membership. “There will always be an England,” Englishmen believe; Americans do not regard the United States as quite so inevitable. Theirs is a country that, to a surprising extent, can be defeated by being refuted.

The spread of nihilist attitudes is, by this token, of greater consequence here than it might be elsewhere; and concern about nihilism underlay the success, last year, of “Habits of the Heart” (Harper & Row), another historically informed critique of American pluralism. But we hear little in “Habits of the Heart” (for which a companion volume of readings, “Individualism and Commitment in American Life,” will be published on Nov. 25) about Germany. Instead, we follow an interplay among such long-established features of the American mental landscape as biblical religion, utilitarian (“pursuit of happiness) morality, and republican polity. Popular nihilism in America is perhaps better understood against this more popular background than against philosophically inspired nihilism of either German or British hue.

In “The Closing of the American Mind,” a slightly cranky but enormously stimulating and, finally, quite a good book has made it to the best-seller list. We may all be happy about that. At his best, Allan Bloom is to intellectual history what Barbara Tuchman is to political history. I would simply maintain, after Patrick White, that it is not the goodness of “The Closing of the American Mind” that has made a best seller of it.

NEXT WEEK: Elizabeth Mehren, Book Trade.