simon silverdollar said:
but how bad was allen bloom? i've never read him, but have heard conflicting reports; some people say he was just a racist fuck, others say he wasn't really racist, or even conservative, but rather concerned about the kind of 'postmodern' relativism which he felt was taking over US universities.
may be that needs another thread tho.
his accomplishments include his translations of plato's republic and rousseau's emile
he also edited the english edition of kojeve's lectures on hegel
and he helped pioneer, in america, the "literary" approach to reading plato, i.e., taking the dramatic form of the dialogues seriously, i.e., action, setting, characters -- not simply what is said in the dialogues, or treating socrates as plato's mouthpiece
(plus he wrote a great critique of rawls as narrow & provincial & flaccid -- and believe me, if you do legal theory or political philosophy in america, john rawls & dworkin are at the top of the heap)
the knock on bloom is that he wrote "the closing of the american mind" to make $ and win fame & influence
plus some people think that he was a hypocrite b/c of his homosexuality -- he was by many accounts promiscuous -- and he argues in "the closing" that easy sex on college campuses has made students less "desirous" of truth, learning, culture -- so he looks like a hypocrite -- my sense of the matter is that bloom would refer his critics to plato's symposium, i.e., homosexual encounters b/w young & old as propaedeutic to philosophy
as for his being racist -- i think that charge may have something to do w/ his views on music, i.e., he was a great lover of classical music, and he portrays mick jagger as a pied piper, and he goes on about this for several pages in "the closing" -- but there's nothing exceptional about a person of bloom's background & interests favoring classical music & condemning r'n'b and rock -- re: adorno
and still others say that he was entirely too "spirited" to be a philosopher, i.e., too intent on winning battles, too intent on advancing careers of students & allies
and others say he was a closet nietzschean
and as for whether strauss was a nietzschean, i address this over on the "power of nightmares" thread