Religion and Politics

Who Closed the American Mind?

For The American Conservative, Patrick Deneen analyzes Allan Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, placing it in a modern context, where Bloom’s worry that society was entering an “age of indifference” has been made manifest. Deneen finds the widespread label of Bloom as a conservative to be misguided. In fact, Deneen argues, the book “was, ultimately, more reckless than many of its readers realized at the time—not because it was conservative, but precisely because it rejected the conservative impulses to modesty, prudence, the genius of place, and tradition.”

Read at The American Conservative

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