The brilliant, controversial, bestselling critique of American culture that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” ( The New York Times )—now featuring a new afterword by Andrew Ferguson in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition. A cultural phenomenon with more than 750,000 copies in print, The Closing of the American Mind is as penetrating a criticism of our culture today as it was twenty-five years ago. In this acclaimed number one national bestseller, Allan Bloom, one of our country’s most distinguished political philosophers, argues that the social and political crises of contemporary America are really an intellectual crisis—a dangerous narrowing of curiosity and exploration by the university elites. In his new afterword, author Andrew Ferguson recounts why the book caused such a furor at publication and why its argument continues to provoke and endure.

Allan Bloom was professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College and co-director of the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy at the University of Chicago. He taught at Yale, University of Paris, University of Toronto, Tel Aviv University, and Cornell, where he was the recipient of the Clark Teaching Award in 1967. He died in 1992.