Ryan, Phil. 1996. Was Bloom PC? Canadian Review of American Studies 26, no. 2 (Spring): 1-26.
Augustine
Allan Bloom? The man whose Closing of the American Mind “best articulates the critique” of political correctness and “represents the key text” (Platt 1992, 123), who demonstrates “an excessively ossified, hierarchical, and immutable view of the cultural tradition” (Kurzweil et al 1991, 226), who has been “subjected to an unremitting barrage of criticism and abuse from the academic Left” (Kimball 1990, 3), whose “name has become virtually synonymous with traditionalist views of higher education” (DePalma 1992), who began a speech with the salutation “Fellow elitists” (1990, 13)?
Allan Bloom’s passionate opposition to many of the dearest values of the politically correct is well known. He was an ardent defender of the “great books,” appalled at deconstructionism, that “dogmatic, academic nihilism of the Left” (Ibid., 293), dismayed by the easygoing relativism of his students, and scornful of the spirit of “openness” that holds that “indiscriminateness is a moral imperative” (1988, 25, 30).
And yet, if there was one thing that Bloom stressed to his students, it was the importance of returning to the text without being captured by the conventional interpretations. And Bloom also suggests that, “in what appears similar, one should look for the differences; and in the different, the similar” (1990, 306). When we return to the texts of Bloom himself, we find a writer whose concerns in the face of what is now termed political correctness coexist with certain affinities with that phenomenon. This essay will reexamine Bloom’s relation to the political correctness debate, and will argue that one’s location of Bloom within that debate depends upon how one understands the debate itself…