Professor Bloom's Delight on the Right: American Conservatism and The Closing of the American Mind
(Sprache: Englisch)
In 1987 the American philosopher Allan Bloom published his controversial book The Closing of the American Mind, in which he criticized contemporary trends in American academia as well as in the culture at large. The book was largely perceived to be a...
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In 1987 the American philosopher Allan Bloom published his controversial book The Closing of the American Mind, in which he criticized contemporary trends in American academia as well as in the culture at large. The book was largely perceived to be a conservative tract, and many commentators on the political Right praised the work, although Bloom himself rejected the label conservative . The controversy Bloom unleashed was - and is - a battle between political forces for cultural sovereignty, especially in the universities, and the commanding heights of American intellectual life. This conflict was well captured in Camille Paglia s famous description of The Closing of the American Mind as the first shot in the culture wars.The purpose of this study is to inquire into the American Right s reception and reconstruction of Bloom s book and to determine the initial impact and lasting influence it had on American conservative thought. To provide the necessary context, the history of American conservatism from 1945 up to the respective points in time is also illuminated in this work.
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Extract:Chapter I, American Conservatism from the End of the Second World War to 1987:
During Franklin D. Roosevelt's time in office his liberalism dominated the political atmosphere in the United States. Even after the war, conservatives still had not climbed out of the hole they had dug during the New Deal and in their isolationism prior to World War II. The Grand Old Party did ultimately manage to win the White House and both houses of Congress in the election of 1952 but did so largely as a result of the sentiment that twenty years of Democratic rule was enough. Moreover, the Republican nominee Dwight D. Eisenhower, an immensely popular war hero, was largely apolitical (and therefore chose right-winger and avowed anti-communist Richard Nixon as his running mate to signal goodwill to the hard-liners in the GOP). Eisenhower provided steady, pragmatic and non-ideological stewardship; after the Congress was regained by the Democrats in 1954, he went on to implement essentially liberal policies. His presidency could hardly be called that of a convinced conservative.
It was outside of the political arena that conservatives slowly found an intellectual basis on which to erect their ideological edifice. From 1943 to 1953 conservatives had rallied around intellectuals like Austrian economist and philosopher F. A. Hayek, who in his famous 1944 book The Road to Serfdom had argued forcefully against any form of economic and political collectivism, which he saw as the breeding ground for both Communism and German National Socialism. In 1953, a number of books were published that would influence generations of conservatives to come: Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History, Robert Nisbet's The Quest for Community, Whittaker Chamber's Witness, and, above all, The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk. The latter also became an early contributor to another milestone in the intellectual history of the American Right, namely the opinion journal National Review, which was founded
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by William F. Buckley, Jr. In 1955. According to Buckley, the new magazine was directed at intellectuals; ist aim was to revitalize the conservative position and to influence the opinion-makers in the US. National Review's emphasis on intellectually respectable conservative opinion proved a winning concept - ist circulation had been about 30,000 in 1960 and then jumped to 60,000 in 1963, to over 90,000 in 1964, to around 95,000 in 1965, and finally to more than 100,000 in the late 1960s. The magazine nevertheless relied-and relies-on donations to stay afloat: Buckley remarked in 2005 that National Review had lost about $25 million over 50 years. While there have been other conservative publications of considerable reach and importance, National Review's distinction, according to Martin Durham, was that it combined preexisting trends into a self-conscious conservatism .
Much of post-war conservatism was, perhaps counter-intuitively, based on a great deal of intellectual innovation. How utterly liberalism dominated American politics is manifest in the literary and cultural critic Lionel Trilling's devastating verdict on conservatism in his 1950 book The Liberal Imagination: In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. The birth of postwar conservatism therefore constituted a formidable task for intellectuals such as Russell Kirk or William F. Buckley and consisted of invention as much as of renaissance. As Lisa McGirr notes:
While the ideas that came under the umbrella of the post-World War II Right can certainly be traced back to earlier incarnations (deep distrust of the state, libertarian individualism, an emphasis on property as the fundamental basis of freedom, antiradicalism, and staunch religiosity were all prevalent currents in American history), such echoes do not amount to
Much of post-war conservatism was, perhaps counter-intuitively, based on a great deal of intellectual innovation. How utterly liberalism dominated American politics is manifest in the literary and cultural critic Lionel Trilling's devastating verdict on conservatism in his 1950 book The Liberal Imagination: In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. The birth of postwar conservatism therefore constituted a formidable task for intellectuals such as Russell Kirk or William F. Buckley and consisted of invention as much as of renaissance. As Lisa McGirr notes:
While the ideas that came under the umbrella of the post-World War II Right can certainly be traced back to earlier incarnations (deep distrust of the state, libertarian individualism, an emphasis on property as the fundamental basis of freedom, antiradicalism, and staunch religiosity were all prevalent currents in American history), such echoes do not amount to
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Autoren-Porträt von Moritz P. Mücke
Moritz P. Mücke, B.A., was born in 1990 in Frankfurt am Main. He studied in Germany and the United States and completed his degree in American Studies at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt in 2014 with distinction. His research interests include Political Philosophy, American History, Geopolitics, and American Conservatism.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Moritz P. Mücke
- 2014, Erstauflage, 52 Seiten, Maße: 15,5 x 22 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: Anchor Academic Publishing
- ISBN-10: 3954893037
- ISBN-13: 9783954893034
Sprache:
Englisch
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