The Closing of the American Mind

New York: Touchstone / Simon & Schuster. Very Good+ with No dust jacket as issued. (1988). Softcover. 0671657151 . No signatures. Price sticker on rear cover. ; Paperback reprint. 392, [3], [1 (blank)] pages. Page dimensions: 209 x 134mm. "In this acclaimed number one national best-seller, one of our country's most distinguished political philosophers argues that the social/political crisis of 20th-century America is really an intellectual crisis. Allan Bloom's sweeping analysis is essential to understanding America today. It has fired the imagination of a public ripe for change." - from blurb on rear cover. With a Foreword by Saul Bellow. Contents: Foreword; Preface; Introduction: Our Virtue; Part One - Students : The Clean Slate; Books; Music; Relationships - Self-Centredness, Equality, Race, Sex, Separateness, Divorce, Love, Eros; Part Two - Nihilism, American Style : The German Connection; Two Revolutions and Two States of Nature; The Self; Creativity; Culture; Values; The Nietzscheanization of the Left or Vice Versa; Our Ignorance; Part Three - The University : From Socrates' Apology to Heidegger's Rektoratsrede; Tocqueville on Democratic Individual Life; The Relation Between Thought and Civil Society; The Philosophic Experience; The Enlightenment Transformation; Swift's Doubts; Rousseau's Radicalization and the German University; The Sixties; The Student and the University - Liberal Education, The Decomposition of the University, The Disciplines, Conclusion; Index. .