A professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago, Bloom unleashed a storm of criticism last year with his book, The Closing of the American Mind, an acidic assault on the way the U.S. educates its young people and on the decline of intellectuality in national life. Liberal academics, defending the trend toward de-emphasis of the classics, responded that Bloom's prescriptions are unsuited to a society as heterogeneous as America's. The book has sold 800,000 copies and has just been issued in paperback. TIME senior correspondent William McWhirter spent four hours with Bloom, 58, surrounded by classic texts and European oil paintings in his apartment overlooking the campus.
Q. Benjamin Barber of Rutgers University calls your book "one of the most profoundly antidemocratic books ever written for a popular audience." What do you say?
A. All the comments I made about the closing of the American mind have been proved -- in spades -- not by the negative reviews but by the violence and passion of the reaction. I'm an elitist, I'm a sexist -- you know, all the great political terms. You only had to wait for a few months after the book's success for such "intellectuals" to come out.
We're going through a very intense period in the American university today. It is in many ways more profound and revolutionary than the campus upheavals of the 1960s. It may not be as noticeable to the outside world because there has been less resistance. But without such resistance, it is as if the foundations are collapsing.
You hear all the talk that this is a very large and diversified country. But precisely because we are diverse, we have to remind ourselves what we have in common all the time -- what is America, what is a human being -- in order that we not just break down into a set of atoms that cannot cohere to a greater whole. That was always the characteristic of the immigrants, who understood that. They became Americans not by growing up in old roots or maintaining ethnic diversity or accepting American myths but by learning certain common - principles. I'm a son of such immigrants, a Jewish boy, but one who could be raised in Indianapolis, the American Midwest.
My notion of education is precisely that in the U.S. we have this lengthy, old tradition. You read the Federalist papers and you are already with Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke.
Q. Can you really fault the universities?
A. I do partly blame the universities. One of the reasons for students' not reading seriously is their belief that they can't learn important things from books. They believe books are just ideologies, mythologies or political tools of different parties. If the peaks of learning offered some shining goal in the distance, it would be very attractive to an awful lot of people -- people with very diverse backgrounds. The golden thread of all education is in the first questions: How should I live? What's the good life? What can I hope for? What must I do? What would be the terrible consequences if we knew the truth?
Q. So it is preferable for society to have some elites?