Allan Bloom is a political philosopher, a friend and disciple of the late Leo Strauss. He teaches at the University of Chicago, which appears more and more to be one of the only institutions of higher learning in this country where it is still possible to pursue knowledge and wisdom for their own sakes, where the administration does not believe that the purpose of the university is to “reflect the surrounding society.” At Chicago, as he did earlier at Cornell, Professor Bloom has devoted himself to educating a few discerning students in the great tradition of Western thought, a tradition that once concerned itself above all with the most important things—namely, the question of the true and the good and the question of God. According to the Greeks and to virtually all Western thinkers up to Hegel, these questions were political questions, since no regime could endure unless its relation to the true, to the good, and to God was clarified. Politics was the arena where the most important things were debated, and a society that ignored that debate, or refused to engage in it, was no longer truly political, although it might continue for a while as a despotism, as Aristotle recognized.

Professor Bloom has now gathered his reflections in a book which is an extraordinarily accurate diagnosis of the current state of American civilization.¹ Some of the advance praise for the book has given the mistaken impression that it is wholly, or even chiefly, taken