James R. Muir - The Strange Case of Mr. Bloom (1996)

Journal

of

Philosophy

of

Education, Vol.

30,

No.

2,

1996

The Strange Case

of

Mr

Bloom

J.

R.

MUIR

The intention

of

this paper is to suggest that the educationalphilosophy

of

Allan Bloom merits renewed consideration, and thatsuch consideration reveals major failings in contemporaryeducational philosophy.

A

prerequisite

of

such consideration is anexamination

of

the ways in which his ideas have been misinterpreted.

In

particular, Bloom is neither a political conservative nor aneducational traditionalist, nor an advocate

of

the Great

Books

programme. Bloom’s recovery

of

the Socratic or classical politicalrationalist approach to education both reveals enormousshortcomings in the dominant conceptions

of

the nature

of

philosophy

of

education, and revitalises an alternative conception already widelyaccepted among classicists and political philosophers.

In his Preface to the

Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts,

Rousseau offers adisturbing insight into the nature of human beings.

There will always be men destined to be subjugated by the opinions of their century,their country, their society.

A

man who plays the freethinker and the philosophertoday would, for the same reason, have merely been a fanatic at the time of theLeague.

Rousseau refers here to the Holy League of Henri, third Duc de Guise,established in

1576

and dedicated to the suppression of Protestantism in France.Rousseau observed, in other words, that men are freethinkers in regimes wheredemocratic principles are dominant for precisely the same reason that they arereligious bigots in regimes where theological principles are dominant. The ‘samereason’ is, in Rousseau’s view, that most people are conformists, content toadhere to, or slightly radicalise, the dominant opinions of their time and place.The danger is that such conformism inevitably comes to dominate theinstitutions of civil society, particularly in education.This danger is manifested in the peculiarly hostile academic responses to theeducational philosophy of Allan Bloom.’ As Rousseau’s observation wouldlead

us

to expect, these responses conform to the more conventional academicopinions, and it is in this context that the intention

of

this paper must beunderstood. This intention has two intimately related and equally importantcomponents. The first intention is to recover the substance of Bloom’sarguments by critically examining the ways in which those arguments have beensystematically misrepresented by his critics, who for the most part attack onlythe unorthodoxy of opinions which they themselves have formulated and

0

The Journal offhe Philosophy

of

Education Society

of

Great Britain

1996.

Published

by

Blackwell Publishers,

108

Cowley

Road, Oxford

OX4

1

JF,

UK

and

238

Main Street, Cambridge,

MA

02142,

USA.

198

J.

R.

Muir

attributed to him. Such a critical examination is also intended, secondly, toexpose real inadequacies in the dominant conception of educational philosophywithin Educational Studies.

THE POLITICAL CATEGORISATION

OF

MR

BLOOM

A

strategem which might be called the Categorisation Dodge is commonlyemployed against Bloom. It is a familiar strategem used in order to avoid adetailed examination of arguments which fall outside conventional academicopinion. When confronted with such an argument, the conventional academicfirst places it into a more familiar category, where such a category constitutes aconventionally repudiated opinion. The academic then proceeds by marshallingthe conventional arguments against the conventionally repudiated

category,

thereby side-stepping any confrontation with the substance of the argumentitself. One thinks, for example, of the Right-wing strategem of convertingmoderate arguments for principled equality into a nightmarish vision of a drab,uniform social order in which all evaluative distinctions between people havebeen eliminated. Those using this strategem then proceed to argue (quiterightly) that such a social order would be unjust and tyrannical, thereby (quitewrongly) side-stepping the arguments which are actually made for principledequality.The Categorisation Dodge has been applied with revealing eagerness in thecase of Allan Bloom, and particularly

The

Closing

of

the

American

Mind

(CAM).

Perhaps the most popular category into which Bloom’s ideas havebeen placed is that

of

‘Political Dogmatism’. This category has twocomponents, ‘Conservative Dogmatism’ and ‘Left-wing Nihilist Dogmatism’,and Bloom’s ideas have been placed in both. This sort of contradictory politicalcategorisation is a common means

of

responding to the Straussian school ofpolitical philosophy, out of which Bloom arose.2Early reviews of

CAM

coming from the Left were very favourable, whilereviews coming from the conservative Right were sharply ~ritical.~riters

on

the conservative Right placed Bloom in the category of ‘Left-wing Nihilist’,’although there was no argument to show that Bloom’s ideas constitute orimply left-wing political commitment.

As

Bloom and others have observed,however, subsequent attempts by conventional academics to categorise him asa conservative quickly hardened into the orthodox academic opinion.6 Bloomwas categorised as a ‘cultural conservative’7 or ‘academic f~ndamentalist’.~The conventionally radical (and therefore radically conventional) academicssimply declared that Bloom could be fitted into the ‘Conservative Dogmatist’category, and was therefore susceptible to the conventional refutations

of

conservatism. Each dogmatic constituency attempts to push Bloom’s ideas asfar as possible into the opposite political category, in order to demolish themmore easily.9Bloom’s educational ideas are not based on political doctrine. In the classicalpolitical rationalist view advocated by Bloom, education is an enterprise whichproceeds in two mutually interdependent stages, corresponding to elementaryand higher education. The first

of

these stages is, as a matter of contingenthistorical experience, moral in emphasis and often to some degree dependent on

0

The Journal

of

the Philosophy

of

Education Society

of

Great Britain

1996.

The

Strange

Case

of

Mr

Bloom

199

political doctrine. Bloom is primarily concerned with higher education, or thesecond, dialectical, stage. This stage constitutes a good life in itself which isindependent of political doctrine or circumstance.I0

A

full explication of thisview of the nature of education would take

us

beyond the scope of the presentpaper. Its best known and most powerful formulation originates with LeoStrauss, who, in the words of a sympathetic critic,

gave more thought to the subject of liberal education than did any other majorpolitical thinker of the twentieth century.”

The Straussian view of educational and political philosophy, upon whichBloom’s arguments are constructed, has been richly articulated by others.I2Weshall concentrate here on the specific question of whether Bloom’s educationalideas are derived from any particular political doctrine.In ‘Western Civ’, Bloom reminds

us

that he is ‘not a conservative

-

eo- orpaleo-’, ‘not in any current sense a liberal’,I3 and not a left-wing nihilist. Bloomwas equally critical of political figures on the Right and the Left,14 and wascritical of the American left-wing student radicals of the 1960s to the sameextent,

andfor the same reasons,

as he was of the German right-wing studentradicals of the 1930s.Is He was critical of class distinctions within theuniversities, which still exist, ‘poisonously, in Eng1and’.l6 Although he doesacknowledge that he has ‘always been a supporter and a beneficiary ofmovements towards practical equality’,17 it is not his intention to deriveeducation from a political doctrine. On the contrary, Bloom intends to defendthe theoretical or philosophical life1* gainst the contemporary manifestation ofthe permanent tendency to doubt the sincerity of the theoretical life, namely, thepoliticisation

of

thought and scholarship increasingly dominant within theuniversities.

The permanent human tendency is to doubt that the theoretical stance is authenticand suspect that it is only a covert attachment to a party. And this tendency is muchstrengthened in our time when philosophy is itself understood to be

engage‘,

the mostextreme partisanship. The necessity of parties in politics has been extrapolated to thepoint where it now seems that the mind itself must be dominated by the spirit ofparty.19

If Bloom had been writing in the Middle Ages, he would have argued againstthe invasion of education by theology, or the Church. Bloom seeks to protecteducation and the theoretical life from politicisation, which is the form of thethreat to the autonomy of education and the theoretical life peculiar to ourtime. In either situation, it is inevitable that he would be categorised as a heretic

by

all parties.In Bloom’s view, the equilibrium of political categorisation and criticism ofhis ideas, by those on the Left and on the Right, is evidence of both the currenttendency to politicise the theoretical stance, and the successfully non-politicalnature of his own arguments in favour of higher education orientated towardsthe theoretical life.*O Each political party, finding that Bloom’s educationalideas are contrary to its own, and presupposing that educational ideas must be

Q

The Journal

of

the Philosophy

of

Education Society

of

Great Britain

1996