When we talk about Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, it is useful to begin by distinguishing between the book, on the one hand, and the phenomenon, on the other. They are different, if related, things.

Let me start with the book. What is it? In the simplest sense, it is a pedagogical autobiography, written by a fiftyish academic philosopher who was also a dedicated teacher and whose experience of university life from the late 1960s through the mid-1980s had left him disabused, mournful, and alarmed.

The book is also—let me acknowledge this at once—a curious literary artifact. It is a rich and promiscuous stew that Allan Bloom served up, part polemic, part exhortation, part exercise in cultural-i ...