The Closing of the American Mind
Encyclopedia
The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom
(published 1987, ISBN 5-551-86868-0), describes "how higher education
has failed democracy
and impoverished the souls of today's students." He focuses especially upon the "openness" of relativism
as leading paradox
ically to the great "closing" referenced in the book's title. Bloom argues that "openness" and absolute understanding undermines critical thinking and eliminates the "point of view" that defines cultures.
Bloom's Closing of the American Mind is a critique of the contemporary university and how Bloom sees it as failing its students. In it, Bloom criticizes analytic philosophy
as a movement, "Professors of these schools simply would not and could not talk about anything important, and they themselves do not represent a philosophic life for the students." To a great extent, Bloom's criticism revolves around his belief that the "great books" of Western thought
have been devalued as a source of wisdom. Bloom's critique extends beyond the university to speak to the general crisis in American society. Closing of the American Mind draws analogies between the United States
and the Weimar Republic
. The modern liberal philosophy, he says, enshrined in the Enlightenment
thought of John Locke
—that a just society could be based upon self-interest alone, coupled by the emergence of relativism in American thought—had led to this crisis.
For Bloom, this created a void in the souls of Americans, into which demagogic radicals as exemplified by '60s student leaders could leap. (In the same fashion, Bloom suggests, that the Nazi
brownshirts once filled the gap created in German society by the Weimar Republic
.) In the second instance, he argued, the higher calling of philosophy and reason understood as freedom of thought
, had been eclipsed by a pseudo-philosophy, or an ideology
of thought. Relativism
was one feature of modern liberal philosophy that had subverted the Platonic–Socratic teaching.
Bloom's critique of contemporary social movements at play in universities or society at large is derived from his classical and philosophical orientation. For Bloom, the failure of contemporary liberal education
leads to the sterile social and sexual habits of modern students, and to their inability to fashion a life for themselves beyond the mundane offerings touted as success. Bloom argues that commercial pursuits had become more highly valued than love, the philosophic quest for truth, or the civilized pursuits of honor and glory.
In one chapter, in a style of analysis which resembles the work of the Frankfurt School
, he examined the philosophical effects of popular music
on the lives of students, placing pop music, or as it is generically branded by record companies "rock music", in a historical context from Plato’s Republic to Nietzsche’s Dionysian longings. Treating it for the first time with genuine philosophical interest, he gave fresh attention to the industry, its target-marketing to children and teenagers, its top performers, its place in our late-capitalist bourgeois economy, and its pretensions to liberation
and freedom
. Some critics, including the popular musician Frank Zappa
, argued that Bloom's view of pop music was based on the same ideas that critics of pop "in 1950s held, ideas about the preservation of 'traditional' white American society." Bloom, informed by Socrates
, Aristotle
, Rousseau and Nietzsche, explores music’s power over the human soul. He cites the soldier
who throws himself into battle at the urging of the drum corps
, the pious believer who prays under the spell of a religious hymn
, the lover seduced by the romantic guitar
, and points towards the tradition of philosophy that treated musical education as paramount. He names the pop-star Mick Jagger
as a cardinal representative of the hypocrisy and erotic-sterility of pop-music. Pop music employs sexual images and language to enthrall the young and to persuade them that their petty rebelliousness is authentic politics, when, in fact, they are being controlled by the money-managers whom successful performers like Jagger quietly serve. Bloom claims that Jagger is a hero
to many university students who envy his fame and wealth but are really just bored by the lack of options before them. Along with the absence of literature in the lives of the young and their sexual but often unerotic relationships, the first part of Closing tries to explain the current state of education in a fashion beyond the purview of an economist
or psychiatrist
—contemporary culture's leading umpires.
, his colleague at the University of Chicago, he expanded his thoughts into a book "about a life, I've led" that critically reflected on the current state of higher education in American universities. His friends and admirers imagined the work would be a modest success, as did Bloom, who recognized his publisher’s modest advance to complete the project as a lack of sales confidence. Yet on the momentum of strong initial reviews, including one by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
in the New York Times and an op-ed piece by syndicated conservative commentator George Will
entitled "A How-To Book for the Independent" it became an unexpected best seller, eventually selling close to half a million copies in hardback and remaining at number one on the New York Times Non-fiction Best Seller list for four months.
, a liberal professor of political philosophy
and classicist, and Harry V. Jaffa
, a conservative, both argued that Bloom was deeply influenced by 19th-century European philosophers, especially Friedrich Nietzsche
. Nussbaum wrote that, for Bloom, Nietzsche had been disastrously influential in modern American thought. Jaffa pointed out the lack of attention Bloom paid to the moral role gay rights were playing in the lives of current students. According to Jaffa, while Bloom discusses contemporary social movements, particularly those that gained ascendancy in the 1960s, he is virtually silent on the gay rights movement.
In a passage from her review, Nussbaum wrote: "How good a philosopher, then, is Allan Bloom? The answer is, we cannot say, and we are given no reason to think him one at all." The outraged "assault" on the book was continued by negative and impassioned reviews by Benjamin Barber
in Harper's; by the scholar of ancient philosophy and Nietzsche Alexander Nehamas
in the London Review of Books
; and by David Rieff
in The Times Literary Supplement
. David Rieff
called Bloom "an academic version of Oliver North
: vengeful, reactionary, antidemocratic." The book, he said, was one that "decent people would be ashamed of having written." The tone of these reviews led James Atlas in the New York Times Magazine to conclude "the responses to Bloom's book have been charged with a hostility that transcends the usual mean-spiritedness of reviewers." One reviewer, the philosopher Robert Paul Wolff
writing in the scholarly journal Academe, reviewed the book as a work of fiction: he claimed that Bloom's friend Saul Bellow
, who had written the introduction, had written a "coruscatingly funny novel in the form of a pettish, bookish, grumpy, reactionary complaint against the last two decades", using as the narrator a "mid-fiftyish professor at the University of Chicago, to whom Bellow gives the evocative name 'Bloom.'" Yet some reviewers tempered that criticism with an admission of the merits of Bloom's writing: for example, Fred Matthews, a historian from York University
, began an otherwise relatively critical review in the American Historical Review
with the statement that Bloom's "probes into popular culture" were "both amusing and perceptive" and that the work was "a rich, often brilliant, and disturbing book".
Some critics embraced Bloom's argument. Norman Podhoretz
noted that the closed-mindedness in the title refers to the paradoxical consequence of the academic "open mind" found in liberal political thought—namely "the narrow and intolerant dogmatism" that dismisses any attempt, by Plato or the Hebrew Bible for example, to provide a rational basis for moral judgments. Podhoretz continued, "Bloom goes on to charge liberalism with vulgarizing the noble ideals of freedom and equality, and he offers brilliantly acerbic descriptions of the sexual revolution and the feminist movement, which he sees as products of this process of vulgarization."
In a 1989 article (The German Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 3, Focus: Literature since 1945 (Summer, 1989)), Ann Clark Fehn discusses the critical reception of the book, noting that it had eclipsed other titles that year dealing with higher education (College, by Ernest Boyer, and Cultural Literacy, by E. D. Hirsch), and quoting Publisher's Weekly, which had described Bloom's book as a "best-seller made by reviews."
Camille Paglia
, a decade after the book's release, called it "the first shot in the culture wars". Linguist and anarcho-socialist
political theorist Noam Chomsky
dismissed the book as "mind-bogglingly stupid" for its canonistic
approach to education. On the other hand, an early New York Times review by Roger Kimball
called the book "an unparalleled reflection on the whole question of what it means to be a student in today's intellectual and moral climate."
Allan Bloom
Allan David Bloom was an American philosopher, classicist, and academic. He studied under David Grene, Leo Strauss, Richard McKeon and Alexandre Kojève. He subsequently taught at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, Yale University, École Normale Supérieure of Paris, and the University...
(published 1987, ISBN 5-551-86868-0), describes "how higher education
Higher education
Higher, post-secondary, tertiary, or third level education refers to the stage of learning that occurs at universities, academies, colleges, seminaries, and institutes of technology...
has failed democracy
Democracy
Democracy is generally defined as a form of government in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Ideally, this includes equal participation in the proposal, development and passage of legislation into law...
and impoverished the souls of today's students." He focuses especially upon the "openness" of relativism
Relativism
Relativism is the concept that points of view have no absolute truth or validity, having only relative, subjective value according to differences in perception and consideration....
as leading paradox
Paradox
Similar to Circular reasoning, A paradox is a seemingly true statement or group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation which seems to defy logic or intuition...
ically to the great "closing" referenced in the book's title. Bloom argues that "openness" and absolute understanding undermines critical thinking and eliminates the "point of view" that defines cultures.
Summary
| "Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion." - Allan Bloom, Closing of the American Mind |
Bloom's Closing of the American Mind is a critique of the contemporary university and how Bloom sees it as failing its students. In it, Bloom criticizes analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century...
as a movement, "Professors of these schools simply would not and could not talk about anything important, and they themselves do not represent a philosophic life for the students." To a great extent, Bloom's criticism revolves around his belief that the "great books" of Western thought
Western thought
The term Western thought is usually associated with the cultural tradition that traces its origins to Greek thought and the Abrahamic religions...
have been devalued as a source of wisdom. Bloom's critique extends beyond the university to speak to the general crisis in American society. Closing of the American Mind draws analogies between the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and the Weimar Republic
Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic is the name given by historians to the parliamentary republic established in 1919 in Germany to replace the imperial form of government...
. The modern liberal philosophy, he says, enshrined in the Enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...
thought of John Locke
John Locke
John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...
—that a just society could be based upon self-interest alone, coupled by the emergence of relativism in American thought—had led to this crisis.
For Bloom, this created a void in the souls of Americans, into which demagogic radicals as exemplified by '60s student leaders could leap. (In the same fashion, Bloom suggests, that the Nazi
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
brownshirts once filled the gap created in German society by the Weimar Republic
Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic is the name given by historians to the parliamentary republic established in 1919 in Germany to replace the imperial form of government...
.) In the second instance, he argued, the higher calling of philosophy and reason understood as freedom of thought
Freedom of thought
Freedom of thought is the freedom of an individual to hold or consider a fact, viewpoint, or thought, independent of others' viewpoints....
, had been eclipsed by a pseudo-philosophy, or an ideology
Ideology
An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...
of thought. Relativism
Relativism
Relativism is the concept that points of view have no absolute truth or validity, having only relative, subjective value according to differences in perception and consideration....
was one feature of modern liberal philosophy that had subverted the Platonic–Socratic teaching.
Bloom's critique of contemporary social movements at play in universities or society at large is derived from his classical and philosophical orientation. For Bloom, the failure of contemporary liberal education
Liberal education
A Liberal education is a system or course of education suitable for the cultivation of a free human being. It is based on the medieval concept of the liberal arts or, more commonly now, the liberalism of the Age of Enlightenment...
leads to the sterile social and sexual habits of modern students, and to their inability to fashion a life for themselves beyond the mundane offerings touted as success. Bloom argues that commercial pursuits had become more highly valued than love, the philosophic quest for truth, or the civilized pursuits of honor and glory.
In one chapter, in a style of analysis which resembles the work of the Frankfurt School
Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main...
, he examined the philosophical effects of popular music
Popular music
Popular music belongs to any of a number of musical genres "having wide appeal" and is typically distributed to large audiences through the music industry. It stands in contrast to both art music and traditional music, which are typically disseminated academically or orally to smaller, local...
on the lives of students, placing pop music, or as it is generically branded by record companies "rock music", in a historical context from Plato’s Republic to Nietzsche’s Dionysian longings. Treating it for the first time with genuine philosophical interest, he gave fresh attention to the industry, its target-marketing to children and teenagers, its top performers, its place in our late-capitalist bourgeois economy, and its pretensions to liberation
Liberty
Liberty is a moral and political principle, or Right, that identifies the condition in which human beings are able to govern themselves, to behave according to their own free will, and take responsibility for their actions...
and freedom
Freedom (political)
Political freedom is a central philosophy in Western history and political thought, and one of the most important features of democratic societies...
. Some critics, including the popular musician Frank Zappa
Frank Zappa
Frank Vincent Zappa was an American composer, singer-songwriter, electric guitarist, record producer and film director. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa wrote rock, jazz, orchestral and musique concrète works. He also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed...
, argued that Bloom's view of pop music was based on the same ideas that critics of pop "in 1950s held, ideas about the preservation of 'traditional' white American society." Bloom, informed by Socrates
Socrates
Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary ...
, Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
, Rousseau and Nietzsche, explores music’s power over the human soul. He cites the soldier
Soldier
A soldier is a member of the land component of national armed forces; whereas a soldier hired for service in a foreign army would be termed a mercenary...
who throws himself into battle at the urging of the drum corps
Drum and bugle corps (modern)
A drum and bugle corps, also known as a drum corps, is a musical marching unit consisting of brass instruments, percussion instruments, and color guard. Typically operating as independent non-profit organizations, drum corps perform in competitions, parades, festivals, and other civic functions...
, the pious believer who prays under the spell of a religious hymn
Hymn
A hymn is a type of song, usually religious, specifically written for the purpose of praise, adoration or prayer, and typically addressed to a deity or deities, or to a prominent figure or personification...
, the lover seduced by the romantic guitar
Guitar
The guitar is a plucked string instrument, usually played with fingers or a pick. The guitar consists of a body with a rigid neck to which the strings, generally six in number, are attached. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with...
, and points towards the tradition of philosophy that treated musical education as paramount. He names the pop-star Mick Jagger
Mick Jagger
Sir Michael Philip "Mick" Jagger is an English musician, singer and songwriter, best known as the lead vocalist and a founding member of The Rolling Stones....
as a cardinal representative of the hypocrisy and erotic-sterility of pop-music. Pop music employs sexual images and language to enthrall the young and to persuade them that their petty rebelliousness is authentic politics, when, in fact, they are being controlled by the money-managers whom successful performers like Jagger quietly serve. Bloom claims that Jagger is a hero
Hero
A hero , in Greek mythology and folklore, was originally a demigod, their cult being one of the most distinctive features of ancient Greek religion...
to many university students who envy his fame and wealth but are really just bored by the lack of options before them. Along with the absence of literature in the lives of the young and their sexual but often unerotic relationships, the first part of Closing tries to explain the current state of education in a fashion beyond the purview of an economist
Economist
An economist is a professional in the social science discipline of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy...
or psychiatrist
Psychiatrist
A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. All psychiatrists are trained in diagnostic evaluation and in psychotherapy...
—contemporary culture's leading umpires.
Publication
Closing of the American Mind was published in 1987, five years after Bloom published an essay in The National Review about the failure of universities to serve the needs of students. With the encouragement of Saul BellowSaul Bellow
Saul Bellow was a Canadian-born Jewish American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts...
, his colleague at the University of Chicago, he expanded his thoughts into a book "about a life, I've led" that critically reflected on the current state of higher education in American universities. His friends and admirers imagined the work would be a modest success, as did Bloom, who recognized his publisher’s modest advance to complete the project as a lack of sales confidence. Yet on the momentum of strong initial reviews, including one by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt is an American journalist, critic and novelist who has worked in the field of books all of his professional career. He began as an editor for various New York City publishing houses, among them Holt, Rinehart and Winston and The Dial Press, from where he moved in 1965 to...
in the New York Times and an op-ed piece by syndicated conservative commentator George Will
George Will
George Frederick Will is an American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winner best known for his conservative commentary on politics...
entitled "A How-To Book for the Independent" it became an unexpected best seller, eventually selling close to half a million copies in hardback and remaining at number one on the New York Times Non-fiction Best Seller list for four months.
Critical reception
The book was met with much critical acclaim. The success of the work attracted a wide spectrum of critics. Martha NussbaumMartha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum , is an American philosopher with a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy and ethics....
, a liberal professor of political philosophy
Political philosophy
Political philosophy is the study of such topics as liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why they are needed, what, if anything, makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it...
and classicist, and Harry V. Jaffa
Harry V. Jaffa
Harry V. Jaffa is Professor Emeritus at Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate University and a distinguished fellow of the Claremont Institute. He has written on Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Winston Churchill, Leo Strauss, American constitutionalism...
, a conservative, both argued that Bloom was deeply influenced by 19th-century European philosophers, especially Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
. Nussbaum wrote that, for Bloom, Nietzsche had been disastrously influential in modern American thought. Jaffa pointed out the lack of attention Bloom paid to the moral role gay rights were playing in the lives of current students. According to Jaffa, while Bloom discusses contemporary social movements, particularly those that gained ascendancy in the 1960s, he is virtually silent on the gay rights movement.
In a passage from her review, Nussbaum wrote: "How good a philosopher, then, is Allan Bloom? The answer is, we cannot say, and we are given no reason to think him one at all." The outraged "assault" on the book was continued by negative and impassioned reviews by Benjamin Barber
Benjamin Barber
Benjamin R. Barber is an American political theorist and author perhaps best known for his 1996 bestseller, Jihad vs. McWorld.-Career:...
in Harper's; by the scholar of ancient philosophy and Nietzsche Alexander Nehamas
Alexander Nehamas
Alexander Nehamas is Professor of philosophy and Edmund N. Carpenter, II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. He works on Greek philosophy, aesthetics, Nietzsche, Foucault, and literary theory....
in the London Review of Books
London Review of Books
The London Review of Books is a fortnightly British magazine of literary and intellectual essays.-History:The LRB was founded in 1979, during the year-long lock-out at The Times, by publisher A...
; and by David Rieff
David Rieff
David Rieff is an American polemicist and pundit. His books have focused on issues of immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism...
in The Times Literary Supplement
The Times Literary Supplement
The Times Literary Supplement is a weekly literary review published in London by News International, a subsidiary of News Corporation.-History:...
. David Rieff
David Rieff
David Rieff is an American polemicist and pundit. His books have focused on issues of immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism...
called Bloom "an academic version of Oliver North
Oliver North
Oliver Laurence North is a retired U.S. Marine Corps officer, political commentator, host of War Stories with Oliver North on Fox News Channel, a military historian, and a New York Times best-selling author....
: vengeful, reactionary, antidemocratic." The book, he said, was one that "decent people would be ashamed of having written." The tone of these reviews led James Atlas in the New York Times Magazine to conclude "the responses to Bloom's book have been charged with a hostility that transcends the usual mean-spiritedness of reviewers." One reviewer, the philosopher Robert Paul Wolff
Robert Paul Wolff
Robert Paul Wolff is a contemporary American political philosopher and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Wolff has written widely on many topics in political philosophy such as Marxism, tolerance , political justification and democracy. Wolff is also well known for his work on...
writing in the scholarly journal Academe, reviewed the book as a work of fiction: he claimed that Bloom's friend Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow was a Canadian-born Jewish American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts...
, who had written the introduction, had written a "coruscatingly funny novel in the form of a pettish, bookish, grumpy, reactionary complaint against the last two decades", using as the narrator a "mid-fiftyish professor at the University of Chicago, to whom Bellow gives the evocative name 'Bloom.'" Yet some reviewers tempered that criticism with an admission of the merits of Bloom's writing: for example, Fred Matthews, a historian from York University
York University
York University is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is Canada's third-largest university, Ontario's second-largest graduate school, and Canada's leading interdisciplinary university....
, began an otherwise relatively critical review in the American Historical Review
American Historical Review
The American Historical Review is the official publication of the American Historical Association, established in 1895 "for the promotion of historical studies, the collection and preservation of historical documents and artifacts, and the dissemination of historical research." It targets readers...
with the statement that Bloom's "probes into popular culture" were "both amusing and perceptive" and that the work was "a rich, often brilliant, and disturbing book".
Some critics embraced Bloom's argument. Norman Podhoretz
Norman Podhoretz
Norman B. Podhoretz is an American neoconservative pundit and writer for Commentary magazine.-Early life:The son of Julius and Helen Podhoretz, Jewish immigrants from the Central European region of Galicia, Podhoretz was born and raised in Brownsville, Brooklyn...
noted that the closed-mindedness in the title refers to the paradoxical consequence of the academic "open mind" found in liberal political thought—namely "the narrow and intolerant dogmatism" that dismisses any attempt, by Plato or the Hebrew Bible for example, to provide a rational basis for moral judgments. Podhoretz continued, "Bloom goes on to charge liberalism with vulgarizing the noble ideals of freedom and equality, and he offers brilliantly acerbic descriptions of the sexual revolution and the feminist movement, which he sees as products of this process of vulgarization."
In a 1989 article (The German Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 3, Focus: Literature since 1945 (Summer, 1989)), Ann Clark Fehn discusses the critical reception of the book, noting that it had eclipsed other titles that year dealing with higher education (College, by Ernest Boyer, and Cultural Literacy, by E. D. Hirsch), and quoting Publisher's Weekly, which had described Bloom's book as a "best-seller made by reviews."
Camille Paglia
Camille Paglia
Camille Anna Paglia , is an American author, teacher, and social critic. Paglia, a self-described dissident feminist, has been a Professor at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania since 1984...
, a decade after the book's release, called it "the first shot in the culture wars". Linguist and anarcho-socialist
Social anarchism
Social anarchism is a term originally used in 1971 by Giovanni Baldelli as the title of his book where he discusses the organization of an ethical society from an anarchist point of view...
political theorist Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
dismissed the book as "mind-bogglingly stupid" for its canonistic
Western canon
The term Western canon denotes a canon of books and, more broadly, music and art that have been the most important and influential in shaping Western culture. As such, it includes the "greatest works of artistic merit." Such a canon is important to the theory of educational perennialism and the...
approach to education. On the other hand, an early New York Times review by Roger Kimball
Roger Kimball
Roger Kimball is a conservative U.S. art critic and social commentator. He was educated at Cheverus High School, a Jesuit institution in South Portland, Maine, and then at Bennington College, where he took a BA in philosophy and classical Greek, and Yale University...
called the book "an unparalleled reflection on the whole question of what it means to be a student in today's intellectual and moral climate."