Public Discourse: "The Closing of the American Mind Thirty Years Later: A Symposium"

From the Public Discourse here. A taste:

Peter Lawler, one of America’s most insightful critics of popular culture, will treat Part One: Students, which includes some of Bloom’s most controversial arguments on subjects like rock music, the sexual revolution, feminism, and divorce. Michael Platt, author of an influential review of Closing and important essays on both Shakespeare and Nietzsche, will discuss Part Two: Nihilism, American Style. Paul Rahe will analyze Part Three: The University. Rahe, a distinguished intellectual historian, was a student of Bloom’s at Cornell University during the campus protests that Bloom narrates in this section. Those same protests caused Bloom to leave Cornell for the University of Toronto and Rahe to transfer to Yale University. Finally, Jon Fennell, accomplished philosopher of education, the driving force behind the establishment of the Classical Education program at Hillsdale College, and author of another early essay on Bloom and education, will write a summary and critique of the symposium.

This was the last piece Peter Lawler wrote before he died.  Allan Bloom, contra Lawler, did not think that America had an accidentally Thomistic Founding. Rather after Leo Strauss, Bloom thought America's Founding was Lockean (modern). And there was an accidental or esoteric influence that undergirded Locke; but it was a different Thomas. Hobbes not Aquinas. 

In the above linked piece, Nathan Schlueter observes the contentiousness of Bloom's many theses. Another taste:

Like a great book, The Closing of the American Mind sparks intense disagreements. Is Bloom’s description of the principles of the American Founding accurate? Does he caricature the flat souls of his students? Do philosophical ideas really have the power he attributes to them? Is his genealogy of ideas accurate? How does he understand the relationship between philosophy and morality? What does nature teach about the moral life? Can the restoration of a Great Books education in the university really be the remedy for the crisis of the West?