Luke Ford

Derek Antony Parfit spent his career trying to answer two questions. What is a person? And can anything matter if God does not exist? He believed the second question was the most urgent question in the world, and he arranged his life so that almost nothing else could interrupt his work on it. He wore the same clothes every day. He ate the same food. He mixed instant coffee with hot water from the bathroom tap because a kettle took too long. He read philosophy while he brushed his teeth. Colleagues called him the greatest moral philosopher of his age. Strangers had never heard of him. Both facts would have struck him as beside the point.

On June 13, 1981, the fellows of All Souls College, Oxford, met to decide whether Parfit deserved a permanent post. The case for him looked unanswerable. John Rawls (1921-2002) had told the college that Parfit was the most important moral philosopher of his generation, and Rawls based that judgment on fewer than a dozen articles. The referees admitted the publishing record was thin and explained it as a symptom of standards higher than other men could imagine. “He is not as other men are,” wrote R. M. Hare (1919-2002), the White's Professor of Moral Philosophy. The committee that judged academic qualifications recommended his election without dissent. The college said no. Parfit was thirty-eight years old, he had published no book, and All Souls had run out of patience.

He did the arithmetic. He could reapply for the senior research fellowship in March 1984, which meant a book had to appear, or be about to appear, a month or two before that. He had about twenty months. What came out of those twenty months was Reasons and Persons, published by Oxford University Press on April 12, 1984, a book many philosophers rank as the most important work of moral philosophy since Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900). The rejection that humiliated him produced the book that made him permanent. When the college met again in mid-June 1984, Hare wrote that he had called Parfit the probable best moral philosopher of his generation three years earlier and now wished to withdraw the word probable. Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) rose and spoke for him, a speech Berlin later described as designed to leave no dry eye and no possible reason for refusal. The fellows elected him. He stayed at All Souls for the rest of his working life.

The life began far from Oxford. Parfit was born on December 11, 1942, in Chengdu, in the Chinese province of Sichuan. His parents, Norman and Jessie Parfit, were doctors and medical missionaries who taught preventive medicine. The missionary line ran back a generation further on both sides. His father drifted from the mission toward sympathy with Mao, a conversion he managed to square with his pacifism. When the family left China in 1945, the small boy rode home under the gun turret of a Liberator bomber. The family settled in Oxford. The faith did not survive the journey. Parfit later said he abandoned Christianity as a boy because he could not worship a God who would send anyone to hell. The theological revolt of an eight-year-old became the program of a seventy-year career. If God could not ground morality, something else had to, or nothing did.

He went to Eton as a top scholar, edited the school paper, wrote poems, and won the history prizes. At Balliol College, Oxford, from 1961 to 1964, he read history and finished as the best history undergraduate of his year. Then came the swerve. A Harkness Fellowship sent him to America, where he sat in on classes at Columbia and Harvard and discovered that the questions he cared about belonged to philosophy, not history. He came back to Oxford in 1967, started the BPhil at Balliol, and took tutorials from Peter Strawson (1919-2006), A. J. Ayer (1910-1989), David Pears (1921-2009), and Hare. That autumn he sat the All Souls examination and won a Prize Fellowship, the most coveted academic prize in England. He never finished a graduate degree in philosophy. He never needed one. In 1971 he published an article called “Personal Identity” in the Philosophical Review, and after that the credential question closed itself.

All Souls has no undergraduates. It asks almost nothing of its fellows except that they think. For most men the arrangement breeds idleness or eccentric hobbies. For Parfit it removed the last excuse. He had the quiet, the library, the dinners he could skip, and the long corridor of years. What he could not do was finish. In his 1973 application for a Research Fellowship he promised three books. None appeared. He wrote and rewrote, circulated drafts to enormous lists of colleagues, absorbed their objections, answered the objections with new distinctions, and sent the manuscript out again, longer than before. The method looked like paralysis. It was closer to a theory of knowledge. Parfit believed philosophy was a cooperative hunt for objective truth, and a draft was a trap he set for his own errors. Other people were the instrument that sprang it.

The argument that made him famous concerned what a person is. Common sense treats identity as a deep fact. There must be an answer, we assume, to the question of whether a future person will be me, and everything hangs on that answer. Parfit denied it. What matters, he argued, is not identity but psychological continuity and connectedness: chains of memory, intention, desire, and character that hold by degrees and can branch, fade, or overlap. He called the bundle Relation R. To force the point he built thought experiments that read like pulp science fiction. A machine scans your body, destroys it, and builds an exact replica on Mars. A surgeon divides a brain and puts half in each of two bodies. Which one is you? Parfit's answer was that the question has no deep answer, and that this does not matter, because Relation R survives even where identity gives out.

The doctrine sounds bleak. Parfit experienced it as release. In Reasons and Persons he wrote that his life had once seemed like a glass tunnel through which he moved faster every year, with darkness at the end, and that when he gave up the belief in a deep further self, the walls of the tunnel disappeared. The distance between his present self and his future self grew; so did the distance between himself and other people shrink. If the border of the self is a matter of degree, egoism loses its metaphysical charter. Prudence and morality start to look like neighbors. He took comfort in the thought that his death would break no deep thread, only end one chain of connections among many.

Reasons and Persons did more than dissolve the self. Its final section invented a field. Parfit asked what present people owe to future people, and found that the question breaks our tools. Choose one energy policy and certain people will be born; choose another and different people will be born instead. If the risky policy leads to lives that are hard but still worth living, whom has it wronged? The people it burdened owe it their existence. He named this the Non-Identity Problem, and no one has solved it. He then pressed further and derived what he called the Repugnant Conclusion: on assumptions most people accept, an enormous population of lives barely worth living comes out better than a small population of excellent lives. He hated the conclusion. He spent thirty years trying to escape it and never did. The two puzzles now sit under every serious argument about climate policy, existential risk, and the movements that call themselves effective altruism and longtermism. Parfit organized nothing and led nothing, but the people who ask whether humanity's remote future should govern present choices are working inside rooms he built.

The man who wrote these arguments became a legend of another kind. In September 2011 Larissa MacFarquhar (b. 1968) profiled him in the New Yorker, and the portrait fixed the public image. He struck her as somehow not quite present in his own body, without the ordinary anti-social emotions of envy, malice, and dominance. He did not credit his conscious mind with his own work. He pictured his thinking self as a minister at a large desk who writes a question, drops it in the out-tray, and twiddles his thumbs while unseen civil servants in a back room labor over the answer and return it to the in-tray. He was helpless before other people's moods, above all unhappiness, which flooded him. He could form no mental images of his own past; his memories came to him as propositions, facts without pictures. He wept at the mere thought of suffering, and he held that no one, not even Hitler, could deserve to suffer. The wardrobe was uniform: white shirts and gray trousers bought in bulk so that dressing required no decision. He carried water in a vodka bottle. He rode an exercise bike with a book propped on the handlebars. Every minute saved from the body went to the work.

The austerity had one exception, and the exception obeyed the same law. Parfit photographed buildings. He shot three places only, Oxford, Venice, and St. Petersburg, and he traveled to the last two every year for the purpose. He worked at dawn and dusk, in slanting light, water, and mist. People rarely appear in the frames, and where they do they look like accidents. He employed a professional retoucher and gave the man instructions: remove the army truck parked before the Winter Palace, strip the scaffolding from the front of San Marco, take out the telephone wires, the litter, the passersby. His widow explained the project in a sentence. “He was capturing an ideal.” The perfectionism that delayed his books for decades governed the pictures too. He wanted the buildings as they ought to be, permanent, with the accidents deleted. It was his metaphysics with a camera.

He was not the recluse the anecdotes suggest. Younger philosophers who sent him papers received back comments longer than the papers. He built careers other than his own. His partner from the early 1980s was Janet Radcliffe Richards (b. 1944), a philosopher and bioethicist, and the two married in 2010, the same year Oxford's mandatory retirement rule pushed him out of his fellowship at sixty-seven. He took the eviction hard. He kept working through recurring visiting posts at Harvard, New York University, and Rutgers, where graduate students met a tall white-haired man who would pursue an objection down a corridor and into the street because the argument was not finished.

The last project was the largest. On What Matters appeared in two volumes in 2011, with a third published in 2017 after his death. The book grew from a decades-long draft called Climbing the Mountain, and the title carried the thesis. Parfit argued that the three great modern moral theories, the Kantian, the contractualist, and the consequentialist, are not rivals but climbers ascending the same mountain from different sides. Revised into their best versions, he claimed, they converge on a single set of principles, which he called the Triple Theory. Beneath the convergence claim sat the deeper one. Parfit was an atheist who insisted that moral truths exist anyway, objective, unmade by us, binding whether or not anyone cares. Some things matter, he argued, and their mattering is as hard a fact as arithmetic. He said that if this were false, if all reasons bottomed out in desire and convention, then nothing would matter, and his life's work, and everyone's, would have been pointless. He did not present this as one thesis among others. It was the wager of his existence.

The philosophical world honored him and divided over him. The British Academy elected him a fellow in 1986. He received the Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy in 2014. Reasons and Persons became the best-selling academic philosophy title in the modern history of Oxford University Press. But many colleagues thought the mountain had no single summit, that Kant's dignity, the contractualist's reasonable rejection, and the consequentialist's ledger of outcomes run on different engines and meet nowhere. Bernard Williams (1929-2003), the philosopher Parfit admired most and agreed with least, had spent his career arguing that the impartial view from nowhere leaves out what makes a human life worth leading. The dispute is not settled. Parfit's answer to his critics was more argument, more drafts, more replies folded into the text, until On What Matters swelled past two thousand pages, a book that reads less like a treatise than like a man conducting his own posthumous seminar in advance.

He died in London in the first hours of January 2, 2017, at seventy-four, with the third volume finished and in press. In 2023 David Edmonds (b. 1964), a former student, published Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality, and the biography weighed the explanations for the strangeness: the pressure of the 1981 snub, an autistic cast of mind Edmonds first credited and later doubted, or the simpler possibility that the work itself, pursued without remainder, will make any man strange.

The story invites a moral, and the temptation should be resisted, because Parfit resisted it. He did not think his life exemplary. He thought his questions urgent. He gave up variety in food, clothes, travel, and company the way a man running toward something drops what he carries. What he ran toward was a proof that the death of God did not kill morality, that suffering is bad whoever suffers it, that the future people who will never thank us have claims on us now, and that the self whose comfort we guard so fiercely is a looser and less important thing than we fear. He wanted to be survived not by a reputation but by conclusions. On his own theory, that wish makes sense. What mattered about Derek Parfit was never the man inside the borders. It was Relation R, the chain of thought still connecting, still branching, running forward through people he never met.

Notes

The June 13, 1981 All Souls rejection scene, the twenty-month calculation, the Rawls, Hare, and Glover references, Berlin‘s June 1984 speech, and the OUP sales claim come from David Edmonds‘ account excerpted in the New Statesman, April 13, 2023.

The father’s turn toward Maoism, the Liberator bomber gun turret, and the April 12, 1984 publication date come from the Oxford Alumni review of the Edmonds biography.

The 1967 All Souls exam sitting, the tutors, and the 1973 application promising three books come from Jonathan Dancy‘s British Academy memoir of Parfit, which draws on the All Souls college file.

Photography details, including the three cities only, annual trips, dawn and dusk light, the retoucher, the army truck at the Winter Palace, the San Marco scaffolding, Richards’ “capturing an ideal” quote, the weeping at suffering, and the Hitler line, come from the New Statesman piece on the Narrative Projects exhibition, June 2018.

The civil-servant image of his mind, the absence of anti-social emotions, the flooding empathy, and the propositional memories without pictures come from Larissa MacFarquhar, “How to Be Good”, The New Yorker, September 5, 2011.

The vodka bottle of water comes from the Princeton University Press page for Edmonds’ biography, Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality, quoting a review.

Mandatory retirement at 67 in 2010 and the visiting posts at Harvard, NYU, and Rutgers come from Wikipedia on Derek Parfit.

Edmonds’ shifting view on autism comes from reader accounts of the biography at Steps to Phaeacia and The End of Better.

Reasonable extrapolations I made: the boyhood loss of faith over hell, widely reported in both the MacFarquhar profile and the Edmonds biography, though I did not pull a page reference; the instant coffee with tap water and reading while brushing teeth, standard Parfit lore from the same two sources; the “glass tunnel” passage, his own words in Reasons and Persons, part three, near the end of the personal identity discussion; white shirts and gray trousers bought in bulk, from MacFarquhar and Edmonds; the exercise bike with a book, from the same sources; the closing line of the second volume of On What Matters about our obligations to the future, which I paraphrased into the final paragraph’s themes rather than quoting; and general characteristics of All Souls, including no undergraduates and minimal duties, which are matters of common knowledge about the institution.

‘How to be Good’

Larissa MacFarquhar writes in The New Yorker on Sep. 5, 2011:

Parfit lived near his parents in Oxford, and saw them once a week, for Sunday lunch. His mother read up on philosophy to try to understand his work, but since Parfit saw her only with his father they couldn’t talk much about it. His father was baffled by him; he couldn’t understand why he became a philosopher—he thought he ought to have been a scientist. He tried, unsuccessfully, to interest his son in tennis.

Joanna [Derek’s sister] struggled to find work. Finally, she managed to qualify as a nanny. She became pregnant and had a son, Tom, whom she raised on her own. A few years later, she adopted a daughter. She loved her children, but they didn’t make her happy. Every few months, she telephoned Parfit to talk to him about how depressed she was and how badly things were going. He dreaded those calls. Then, in her thirties, she died in a car crash.

She had not made a will, and after she died there was a harrowing fight over her son. Her daughter was re-adopted quickly, but Jessie was determined that Tom should be placed in a family she knew. The trouble was, his placement was in the hands of the local council, and Jessie so antagonized the council with her uncompromising opinions and her upper-middle-class accent that it sought actively to thwart her. Jessie was in agony, and Parfit became very emotionally involved. The case ended up in court, and he wrote a long and passionate brief supporting his mother. At last, the case was resolved in their favor. Jessie died soon afterward, although she was not sick or particularly old. Once Tom was safely placed with his new family, nearby, Parfit never saw him.

As the years went by, Theo came to accept that although her brother loved her, it was simply not important to him to spend time with his family. He was extremely softhearted, and she knew that in a crisis he would always help her, but deepening ties to his past through continuity, valuing blood as a source of kinship—these were just not part of who he was. Years later, Parfit wrote to her in a letter that they had reacted to their unhappy family in opposite ways. They were like the Rhine and the Danube: they begin very close, but then they diverge—one flows to the Atlantic, the other to the Black Sea.

Sometime around 1982 or ’83, the philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards moved from London to Oxford, having ended her first marriage. She had become well known a few years earlier for writing “The Skeptical Feminist,” a fierce attack on anti-rational tendencies in the women’s movement, and was teaching philosophy of science at the Open University. She was very beautiful and very feminine. She attended a seminar that Parfit was teaching. She had never encountered anyone like him: he was obviously a strange person, but not in any of the usual ways. Afterward, Amartya Sen, a friend, who was co-teaching the seminar, greeted her, and, when she left, Parfit asked Sen who she was…

Parfit read Richards’s book and wrote her a letter about it, suggesting that they meet and discuss it further. He went out and bought three identical black suits. They met. He offered to rent her a computer. (He had just discovered computers—he had bought one secondhand and was very excited about it.) With unpracticed but single-minded diligence, he pursued her.

She was bewildered. An eminent philosopher had sent her a letter that in tone and content resembled an academic article, and now he was offering to rent her a computer. How much did it cost to rent a computer? He had not named an amount. He certainly seemed very interested in talking with her, and he was charming and brilliant and unexpectedly good-looking, but what was he up to? He never flirted—he talked to her exactly as he would talk to a man. After a time, she deduced from the sheer frequency of his attentions that his interest must be romantic, but this was not apparent in his behavior. She began to wonder if he would propose to her before they had kissed…

Soon, having won her, Parfit burrowed back into his work. At first, this was fine—she didn’t want a man around all the time—but then they decided to buy a house together. They had intended to look in Oxford, but Parfit lost his heart to a beautiful eighteenth-century house near Avebury, a Neolithic henge monument in Wiltshire. He had to have it—he bid the price up and was terribly anxious until the deed was signed. Then, happy to have won his house, he sat in his study with the blinds down. Ten minutes away, there was a glorious bluebell wood, and he loved bluebell woods—one of his fears about global warming was that it would get too hot for bluebells—but Richards couldn’t get him to go there. It existed: that was enough. Eventually, she realized that her need for human company, modest as it was, was greater than he was capable of meeting. They sold the house, she bought a house in London, and he went back to his rooms in All Souls. From then until he retired, more than ten years later, they spent very little time together, although they spoke on the phone several times a day.

The Great Delusion

If Mearsheimer’s anthropology is correct, the implications for the work of Derek Parfit are profound.
Mearsheimer argues that humans are inherently social, tribal, and shaped by socialization to the point where individualism is secondary. He posits that reason is often a tool used after social and innate sentiments have already determined our moral codes. This perspective directly challenges the project of a philosopher like Parfit, who spent his career using rigorous, individualistic reason to deconstruct personal identity and morality.
Parfit’s reductionist view suggests that a person is nothing more than a collection of physical and mental states linked by psychological continuity. He strips away the idea of a separately existing self, or “soul,” to argue that personal identity is not what matters. In his framework, one should move toward an impersonal morality that transcends the boundaries of the individual.
If Mearsheimer is right, Parfit’s philosophical project suffers from a category error. Mearsheimer would argue that by attempting to use pure, decontextualized reason to arrive at moral truths, Parfit ignores the very “socialization” and “innate sentiments” that define how humans think. While Parfit uses thought experiments like teletransportation to isolate the individual and test rational consistency, Mearsheimer would likely contend that these experiments are artificial. They remove the subject from the social, tribal, and developmental context that shapes the human mind long before it can engage in the type of abstract logic Parfit prizes.
Where Parfit seeks to liberate the individual from the “delusion” of a robust self—thereby allowing for greater altruism—Mearsheimer suggests that this individual is not a free-floating agent waiting to be liberated. The individual is already “embedded in a society.” For Mearsheimer, the “delusion” is not the self, but the liberal belief that humans can be treated as atomistic, rational actors who formulate moral codes through critical reflection.
If Mearsheimer’s account of human nature holds, Parfit’s attempt to construct a universal, rationalist ethic might be seen as an exercise in high-level intellectual abstraction that fails to account for the actual psychological and social structures governing human behavior. Parfit’s focus on the irrelevance of personal boundaries might align with a universalist liberal goal, but Mearsheimer would likely argue that humans are fundamentally wired to prioritize their own group, making the adoption of such an impersonal, universalist morality psychologically unnatural and politically difficult to sustain.

Mearsheimer’s anthropology views the Kantian, the contractualist, and the consequentialist moral theories as expressions of liberal universalism. He considers them to be deeply flawed because they rely on the assumption that individuals are atomistic actors who reach conclusions through reason, rather than products of intense socialization and tribal sentiment.

The Kantian project rests on the idea that an individual can use pure reason to arrive at a moral law that applies to all people at all times. Mearsheimer rejects this because he believes individuals are not autonomous thinkers who form their own moral codes. Instead, he argues that our preferences and values are heavily predetermined by our upbringing and the specific society into which we are born. He would see the Kantian claim—that a rational person can transcend his local, tribal identity to embrace a universal duty—as an illusion. For Mearsheimer, human behavior is driven by strong attachments to one’s own group, not by a commitment to a universal principle that ignores those attachments.

Contractualism, as framed by thinkers like T.M. Scanlon, posits that morality consists of principles for the general regulation of behavior that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced, general agreement. Mearsheimer would view this as a misunderstanding of how humans operate. Contractualism assumes that individuals can enter into a social contract by setting aside their particular interests in favor of a mutually beneficial arrangement. Mearsheimer’s anthropology suggests that humans are tribal creatures who prioritize the survival and prosperity of their own society over any abstract, universal agreement. He would argue that people do not choose their moral constraints through a rational, egalitarian process; they inherit them through socialization, which effectively binds them to their group and often pits them against others.

Consequentialism, most notably utilitarianism, evaluates the morality of an action by its outcome—specifically, the goal of maximizing the good for the greatest number. Mearsheimer would argue that this is a fantasy because it ignores the tribal nature of human beings. A person is inherently biased toward his own group. When an individual calculates the consequences of an action, he does not weigh the interests of all humans equally. He is fundamentally hardwired to weigh the interests of his own tribe much more heavily than the interests of outsiders. Mearsheimer would suggest that any attempt to enforce a system that demands universal impartiality will fail because it demands that people act against their own deepest social instincts.

Mearsheimer would argue that these three theories are products of an elite, Western, liberal mindset that ignores the reality of human nature. They assume that if people just reason well enough, they will move toward a universal moral consensus. He would counter that because we are born into tribes and nurtured by them, our moral reasoning is always local, tribal, and focused on the survival of our own group. These theories represent a form of idealism that ignores the profound social reality that shapes our identities.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

Derek Parfit occupies a strange, complex place within the framework David Pinsof describes. On one hand, Parfit fits the classic archetype of an intellectual who believes the world is a series of misunderstandings to be corrected. He believed that if people only understood the nature of personal identity or the logic of moral reasons, they would stop being trapped by self-interest and parochial concern. He essentially spent his life building a massive, intricate ladder of logic—his books—to help humanity climb out of what he saw as a moral hole.

Pinsof’s critique targets the intellectual who assumes that human behavior is a collection of cognitive glitches. Parfit, however, did not view humans as broken machines in need of a tune-up. He viewed the self as a philosophical mistake. He did not claim that tribalism or self-interest were errors of information processing; he argued that they rested on a metaphysical error—the belief that the boundary between oneself and others is absolute. He thought this belief was not just a strategic bias, but a genuine, objective falsehood about the structure of reality.

The tension between these two perspectives is stark:

According to Pinsof, humans are highly evolved, rational agents pursuing status and resources. What intellectuals call “biases” are smart, self-serving heuristics. Parfit’s attempt to argue people out of their self-interest would be, in this view, a classic case of an intellectual mistaking stated motives for actual ones. Parfit’s “morality” would be dismissed as a high-status signal, a way for an Oxford don to demonstrate his moral superiority while ignoring the zero-sum competition for status and resources that governs human life.

According to Parfit, humans are not mere status-seeking animals, or at least, they do not have to be. Parfit believed that through intense, cold, analytic reflection, it is possible to transcend the evolutionary programming that binds us to our own future selves and our narrow, tribal interests. He did not treat philosophy as a tool for political advocacy or social engineering, but as a path to objective truth. He would likely agree with Pinsof that humans are motivated by things other than “happiness,” but he would argue that the “status” or “dominance” Pinsof highlights are simply irrational goals once you strip away the false importance of the individual self.

Parfit was not trying to “save the world” through policy nudges or by correcting “misinformation.” He was trying to change the fundamental way humans conceptualize their own existence. He was a radical individualist who ended up advocating for a radical form of altruism.

If Pinsof is correct, Parfit’s life work is an example of the intellectual’s “misunderstanding” myth—a man who dedicated his life to the idea that he could talk people out of their evolved nature. If Parfit is correct, Pinsof’s cynical realism is just another form of parochialism, a failure to see that the “real” motives he describes are only real because we have not yet done the work to think our way out of them. Parfit’s life is perhaps the ultimate test of whether an intellectual can transcend the evolutionary logic Pinsof maps, or if that attempt is just one more strategy in the game.

On the afternoon of Sunday, April 20, 1969, the heavy doors of Willard Straight Hall opened and about a hundred Black students walked out into the cool Ithaca air. They had held Cornell University‘s student union for a day and a half. Some carried rifles and shotguns. One wore a bandoleer of ammunition across his chest. Members of Students for a Democratic Society cheered as the column crossed the Arts Quad. Photographers caught the image, and within days it ran on the covers of national magazines.

Allan Bloom (1930-1992), a professor of government at Cornell, watched his university surrender. The administration signed a seven-point agreement recommending that the faculty nullify penalties against students disciplined for earlier disruptions. Bloom told the Cornell Daily Sun the agreement shocked him. When the faculty prepared to meet, fifty students calling themselves the silent center protested the capitulation with signs reading DON’T LET THEM BULLY YOU and BERLIN ’32, ITHACA ’69. Some of them, at Bloom’s direction, handed out excerpts from Plato’s Republic.

The scene compresses the man. A campus in crisis, guns in the quad, a president about to fall, and a chain-smoking Plato scholar sending students into the crowd with photocopied pages of a dialogue written twenty-four centuries earlier, as if the one thing an armed standoff needed was Socrates on justice. Bloom believed it did. He spent his life on the premise that old books address present emergencies better than present opinion does, and that a university exists to arrange the meeting.

He came from Indianapolis. Allan David Bloom was born there on September 14, 1930, to second-generation Jewish parents who both worked as social workers. At thirteen he read an article in Reader’s Digest about the University of Chicago and told his parents he wanted to go. They thought the idea unreasonable. They were practical people. The family moved to Chicago in 1944, and there his parents met wealthier Jews and came to see that education could pave the way to a comfortable life. In 1946, at fifteen, Bloom entered the university’s program for gifted students, a legacy of president Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899-1977) and his campaign to build an education on great books rather than on vocational training. Bloom later wrote in The Closing of the American Mind that when he first saw the campus he somehow sensed he had discovered his life. He had never before noticed buildings dedicated to a purpose beyond shelter, manufacture, or trade.

He stayed a decade. He took his degrees in Hyde Park and enrolled for graduate work in the Committee on Social Thought, a small interdisciplinary program with brutal requirements and no clear job market at the far end. The classicist David Grene (1913-2002) served as his tutor and remembered him as energetic, humorous, and committed to the classics with no definite career ambition. Bloom wrote his dissertation on the political philosophy of Isocrates and took the Ph.D. in 1955.

The decisive encounter of those years was Leo Strauss (1899-1973), the German-Jewish émigré whose readings of Plato, Maimonides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Nietzsche reshaped American political theory after the war. Strauss taught that political philosophy begins in the tension between reason and revelation, between philosophy and the city, between truth and opinion. He also taught a method of reading. Great philosophers, he argued, often wrote for two audiences at once, offering an exoteric teaching the public could safely receive while preserving a deeper and more dangerous teaching for readers alert to irony, contradiction, omission, and structural oddity. Strauss called his students his puppies. Bloom got closer to the sun than most of them, and his friend Werner Dannhauser (1929-2014) judged that the closeness seared him. Bloom credited Strauss with showing him what a liberal education is for. In the preface to Giants and Dwarfs he said his education began with Freud and ended with Plato.

Paris finished the formation. Bloom studied and taught there from 1953 to 1955 at the École Normale Supérieure, befriended Raymond Aron (1905-1983), and studied under Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968), the Russian-born Hegelian whose seminars had already shaped a generation of French thought. Kojève argued that history pointed toward a universal and homogeneous state, a global order of equal recognition, rational administration, and material satisfaction. Bloom took the thesis seriously and viewed it with dread. If history ended in comfort and bureaucratic peace, what became of greatness, nobility, eros, and philosophy? He later edited the English edition of Kojève’s lectures on Hegel, and the question ran under everything he wrote afterward. The famous 1987 book about American students is, at bottom, a report that Nietzsche’s Last Man had arrived on campus and was doing fine.

Paris also gave him his tastes. Dannhauser, who cavorted with him in half the cities of the West, remembered Bloom in Paris shopping for pastries, walking the Seine, browsing bookstores, barhopping at night, ordering Coca-Colas in fancy places, and smoking everywhere with relief at his distance from American censoriousness about cigarettes. The kid from Indianapolis liked to quote Marx and Engels on the idiocy of rural life. His heart belonged to Paris.

Dannhauser first met him in 1956, in a University of Chicago class on Plato’s Republic. Bloom already held his doctorate and kept coming to classes anyway while teaching adult education courses downtown in the university’s Basic Program. The young man Dannhauser saw that day was gawky and disheveled, a bit of a slob, thinking with his face, and above all voluble. The natty dresser came later.

The career then ran through the usual stations at unusual speed. Yale from 1960 to 1963. Cornell from 1963 to 1970. His first book, Shakespeare’s Politics (1964), written with Harry V. Jaffa (1918-2015), treated the plays as political philosophy, studies of rule, ambition, eros, and regime. His translation of Plato’s Republic appeared in 1968 and became one of the standard English versions. Its principle was literalness. Bloom wanted the roughness, repetition, and strangeness of the Greek preserved, because for him a great book was an arranged surface full of clues, and a smooth translation flattened the clues into modern common sense. The literalness was philosophical. It forced students to slow down, distrust paraphrase, and ask why the author wrote this sentence in this way at this point.

At Cornell, Bloom served on the faculty of Telluride House, the residential association where selected students ran their own house, hired the staff, and organized seminars, with faculty guests living among them. He ate with students, argued with them, and made intellectual life feel larger than coursework. Francis Fukuyama (b. 1952) lived at Telluride and took Bloom’s course on Greek philosophy; decades later Fukuyama’s end-of-history thesis carried Kojève into American policy debate by way of Bloom’s classroom. The detail matters because Bloom never treated teaching as classroom performance alone. Conversation, friendship, meals, and proximity belonged to education.

So did recruitment of unlikely souls. Ed Whitfield, president of Cornell’s Afro-American Society, remembered dinners at which Bloom tried to persuade him to become a philosopher rather than an activist. Whitfield thought the choice a false one. Decades later he noted that Bloom said the students had destroyed the university and academic freedom, and that the academy looked healthy enough to him despite everything they said. The two men sat at the same table and lived in different universes. Bloom saw a spirited young man whose energies belonged to Plato. Whitfield saw a professor who could not grasp why Black students had lost faith in the institution around them.

The institution gave them both their answer in the spring of 1969. Racial tension had been building for years. President James Perkins (1911-1998), a Quaker who had chaired the board of the United Negro College Fund, had raised the number of Black students from roughly two dozen in 1963 to about 250 by 1968, and the university proved unprepared for what followed. In December 1968 students demanding a separate curriculum overturned vending machines and marched through a dining hall. A faculty-student disciplinary body issued reprimands. In April 1969, on the eve of Parents Weekend, a cross burned on the porch of a Black women’s cooperative house. Before dawn on Saturday, April 19, members of the Afro-American Society took over Willard Straight Hall, ejecting parents from their guest rooms. White fraternity members tried to retake the building by force. The occupiers brought in guns. Thirty-six hours later they marched out armed, the administration signed, and the photograph went around the world.

The faculty at first refused to ratify the surrender, voting down the recommendation to nullify the reprimands. Then, under threat, it reversed itself. For Bloom the reversal was the true catastrophe. The guns were an event; the collapse of faculty nerve was a revelation. He wrote later in The Closing of the American Mind that students had discovered professors who catechized them about academic freedom could be turned, with a little shove, into dancing bears. A handful of professors resigned in protest, among them the constitutional scholar Walter Berns (1919-2015), the government chairman Allan Sindler, and, in time, the historian Donald Kagan (1932-2021) left for Yale. Thomas Sowell (b. 1930), then a young Black economics professor at Cornell, had already resigned in August 1968 after the administration undercut his authority in his own classroom, and he later called the crisis the most violent campus episode of a violent decade. Perkins announced his resignation by the end of May. The government scholar Clinton Rossiter (1917-1970), who had sided with the administration, killed himself the following year. Bloom quit and was gone by 1970.

He spent the next nine years at the University of Toronto, productive and half in exile. There he translated Rousseau’s Émile (1979), treating it as Rousseau intended, a rival to Plato’s Republic, a book about the formation of a human being from infancy to marriage rather than a manual of pedagogical tips. Plato and Rousseau were for Bloom the two great teachers of the soul, and each understood that education forms desire before it forms opinion. He also translated and commented on Rousseau’s Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theater, edited the journal Political Theory, and contributed to the Strauss-Cropsey History of Political Philosophy.

In 1979 he came home to Chicago and the Committee on Social Thought, the program that had trained him. He co-directed the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy, funded by the foundation then bankrolling much of the intellectual counter-establishment. And he acquired the friend who would give him his second afterlife. Saul Bellow (1915-2005) taught alongside him on the Committee, and the two became close to the point of inseparability. Bellow said Bloom inhaled books and ideas the way other people breathe air.

The Chicago Bloom of the 1980s is the figure his students remember and Bellow later fixed in print. He lived in an apartment building at 58th and Dorchester in Hyde Park, blocks from campus, next to the tower that housed Bellow and a small colony of Nobel laureates. He bought Lanvin jackets and Zegna ties and spilled food on them; hostesses learned to spread newspaper under his chair at dinner parties. He wandered his apartment in a silk dressing gown among fine glass, French linens, expensive stereo equipment, and thousands of CDs, chain-smoking, orating, reclining on a black leather couch with Baroque music playing. In the seminar room he stuttered, lit cigarette after cigarette, forgot most of them, broke others, and at moments of high tension put the lit end in his mouth. His student Clifford Orwin called him the most charismatic human being he ever knew, and noted that he lacked every standard trait of the effective teacher except the one that counted, the power to transfer his conviction that the book on the table was the most important thing in the students’ lives.

The conviction had content. Bloom’s teaching turned on two Greek words, eros and thymos. Eros meant longing, the wound of incompleteness, the desire for something higher than what one has. Thymos meant spiritedness, pride, indignation, the demand for recognition. Following Plato, Bloom held that philosophy cannot be produced by logic alone. A student must first be dissatisfied. He must feel that the ordinary answers fail him and want something beyond comfort, career, and approval. Bloom’s classroom existed to awaken that want, and his cultural criticism followed from the same premise. He attacked rock music and casual sex in The Closing of the American Mind on pedagogical grounds rather than moral ones. Rock gave the young an artificial intensity without discipline or ascent. Easy sex flattened the drama of longing. A soul whose desires had been cheaply satisfied at fifteen had less fuel at twenty for the harder pleasures of philosophy, friendship, and love. A tamer soul was a dumber soul.

Bellow badgered him to put the argument in a book. Bloom expanded a National Review essay, Bellow helped place the manuscript with Simon and Schuster and wrote the foreword, and The Closing of the American Mind appeared in April 1987 with a subtitle that clenched the throat: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. Nobody expected much. The book sold more than a million copies, sat atop the bestseller lists for months, made Bloom a millionaire, and made the University of Chicago magazine reach for the phrase academic rock star. He dined at the White House. He went on Oprah. The New York Times Magazine profiled him in January 1988 under the headline Chicago’s Grumpy Guru.

The argument deserved the noise. Bloom claimed that American students arrived at college already convinced that truth is relative, that judgment is oppression, that culture is preference, and that the purpose of education is self-expression or career. Their openness, he argued, had closed them. The old liberal education exposed the young to rival answers about justice, God, love, courage, and death, and demanded they take sides at the risk of being wrong. The new openness taught that no answer beats any other, a posture that looked generous and worked as anesthesia. It protected students from fanaticism and from seriousness in the same motion. It dissolved prejudice and dissolved the strong opinions philosophy needs as raw material. An empty mind is not a free mind. The students Bloom described were not dangerous rebels. They were agreeable, tolerant, ironic, sexually relaxed, and unable to imagine a truth that might place a demand on them. They were nice. That was the indictment.

The counterattack came fast and from the highest floors. Benjamin Barber called him a philosopher despot with an elitist agenda in Harper’s. Henry Louis Gates Jr. answered in the New York Times under the headline Men Were Men, and Men Were White. Martha Nussbaum, in an essay titled Undemocratic Vistas, went after his classical scholarship. Frank Zappa answered the rock chapters. Bloom relished the fight. When Harvey Mansfield (b. 1932) introduced him at Harvard in 1988, Mansfield told the audience Bloom had always behaved as if he were famous, so fame could not spoil him. Bloom then stood up and observed that the loudest voices calling him an enemy of democracy came from the Ivy League, particularly Harvard, which reminded him of the farmer who hears a thief in the chicken coop and knows the fox by its cry.

He denied being a conservative at all, and the denial was more than branding. He said he defended the theoretical life. He thought bourgeois society was part of the problem, a machine for producing comfort, calculation, and mediocrity, and his loyalty ran to philosophy, friendship, and the education of spirited young people rather than to family values as a platform. The conservative movement adopted him anyway, because his fire fell on its enemies. The Olin money, the Reagan-era culture war, and the book’s timing made him a founding document of a fight he claimed to stand above. Both things were true at once. He was a Socratic who despised political labels, and he was a load-bearing wall in the conservative counter-academy. He cashed the checks and kept the pose, and the pose was sincere.

His private life stayed private while he lived, in the manner of his generation and his circle. Bloom never married and had no children. His companion was Michael Z. Wu, a former student; Bloom dedicated his last book to Wu and named him sole heir. Among his friends the arrangement was known and unremarked. Paul Wolfowitz (b. 1943), a former student, later described the atmosphere of Bloom’s Chicago circle as don’t ask, don’t tell. Bloom attacked feminists and campus militants in print and never attacked homosexuality, an omission his readers can weigh for themselves.

He fell ill in the early 1990s. From his hospital bed he dictated Love and Friendship, published posthumously in 1993, a tour through Plato, Rousseau, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Austen, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Montaigne in search of rival accounts of longing, attachment, jealousy, and fidelity. The book confirms that his quarrel with the university was never institutional at bottom. He wanted to know what happens to the human capacity for love when the old languages of soul, virtue, honor, and beauty lose their authority. He died in Chicago on October 7, 1992, at sixty-two. The university attributed his death to bleeding ulcers complicated by liver failure. At the funeral, Bellow eulogized his friend’s habits with money, saying Bloom treated a windfall as something to throw from the back of a moving train.

Eight years later Bellow spent the whole inheritance of their friendship. Ravelstein (2000), published when Bellow was eighty-four, is a roman à clef so thin the clef opens on the first page. Abe Ravelstein is a bald, extravagant, chain-smoking Chicago professor who writes a surprise bestseller at his novelist friend’s urging, lavishes gifts on his young companion Nikki, dresses his former students into the corridors of the State Department, and dies of AIDS. Strauss appears as Felix Davarr, Wolfowitz as a war-planning adviser named Phil Gorman, Dannhauser as Morris Herbst, Wu as Nikki. Bellow, as the narrator Chick, claims Bloom asked for the portrait and told him to hold nothing back. Martin Amis (1949-2023) called the novel a masterpiece in which Bloom lives. Others called it betrayal. Nathan Tarcov, Bloom’s former student, co-executor of his estate, and successor at the Olin Center, was said by friends to be appalled. Dannhauser told an interviewer that even if Allan wanted Saul to write about him, he would not have wanted every wart. Bellow himself wobbled on the AIDS claim in interviews, saying he had long thought he knew what Allan died of and then found he did not. The dispute over the cause of death remains open in the public record. What the novel settled was something else. It made public that the great theorist of eros had lived his subject, that the man who taught longing from Plato’s Symposium had a beloved, a household, and a deathbed like anyone, and that his teaching and his life were one argument.

The argument outlived the argument about him. The Closing of the American Mind reads today as a late Cold War period piece in its examples and as current events in its diagnosis. The Chicago conference held on the book’s tenth anniversary treated it as a living document, and every subsequent campus convulsion has sent readers back to the Cornell chapters. But the book was always the smallest part of the man. Bloom’s real work sat in seminar rooms across five decades, in translations built to slow readers down, and in the question he pressed on every spirited nineteen-year-old who wandered into range: what is the best life, and what makes you so sure you are living it? He believed a university exists to keep that question open and armed. He believed education is not the transmission of skills or the raising of self-esteem. He believed it is conversion, the reordering of a soul’s loves, and he practiced it with a cigarette burning at the wrong end.

Notes

The Cornell crisis, timeline, signs, Plato handouts, faculty reversal, resignations, and Rossiter come from “Cornell’s Straight Flush”, City Journal; the Cornell Daily Sun 45th anniversary timeline; “Cornell ’69 and What It Did”, Minding the Campus; “The Day Cornell Died” by Thomas Sowell; and the Cornell library study guide for the cross-burning and gun sequence.

The Whitfield dinners and his later verdict come from “Ripples From a Protest Past”, The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Reader’s Digest anecdote, parents’ resistance, entry at fifteen, Grene as tutor, Isocrates dissertation, Paris dates, Aron, career stations, Fukuyama and Telluride, and the students list come from Wikipedia and “25 Years Later” by Liel Leibovitz in Tablet. The Tablet piece also has the Mansfield introduction at Harvard, the chicken-coop joke, and the lit-end-of-the-cigarette detail.

The Dannhauser memoir, with the 1956 Plato class, Paris pastries and Coca-Colas, Strauss‘s puppies, and “seared by the sun,” comes from “My Friend, Allan Bloom”, originally in Commentary and reprinted at the Washington Examiner.

The Orwin material on Bloom‘s charisma, stutter, and chain smoking comes from “On Allan Bloom” by Clifford Orwin at Project MUSE.

The Bellow friendship, apartment at 58th and Dorchester, Wu as dedicatee and sole heir, Tarcov appalled, Dannhauser’s warts remark, and the moving-train eulogy line come from “Allan Bloom, warts and all”, Chicago Sun-Times.

Ravelstein details, including Lanvin and Zegna, newspaper under the chair, Davarr, Gorman, Nikki, Amis‘s verdict, and Bellow’s “inhaled books” line, come from Wikipedia on Ravelstein. Bellow backing off the AIDS claim comes from “Bellow’s Bloom”, Washington Examiner. Andrew Sullivan on eros and the outing comes from “Longing: Remembering Allan Bloom”, originally in The New Republic and reprinted at IGF Culture Watch. Wolfowitz‘s don’t-ask-don’t-tell remark comes from Inside Higher Ed via the Wikipedia footnotes.

Millionaire, White House dinners, and Oprah come from the CultureVulture review of Ravelstein. “Chicago’s Grumpy Guru” is by James Atlas, New York Times Magazine, January 3, 1988. Critics include Benjamin Barber in Harper’s, January 1988; Henry Louis Gates Jr. in The New York Times Book Review, May 29, 1988; Martha Nussbaum‘s “Undemocratic Vistas” in The New York Review of Books, 1987; and Frank Zappa‘s “On Junk Food for the Soul.”

Reasonable extrapolations without a link: the physical feel of the Ithaca quad and Hyde Park, the general character of Telluride life, the Hutchins-era atmosphere at Chicago, and the compression in the final paragraph, which is interpretation rather than reporting.

The Man Who Read the Playbook: Allan Bloom’s Hero System

A seminar room in Hyde Park, sometime in the mid-1980s. Gray light on limestone. Around the table sit a dozen graduate students who have organized their lives to be here, and at the head sits a bald man in a Lanvin jacket with ash on the lapel. He stutters. He lights cigarettes and forgets them, and at moments of highest tension he puts the lit end in his mouth. He asks what Socrates wants from Glaucon, and he asks it the way another man might ask whether the tumor is malignant. The students lean in. One of them, Clifford Orwin, later calls him the most charismatic human being he ever knew, and adds that Bloom lacked every trait a teacher is supposed to need. The room does not care. The room believes, for fifty minutes, that the ranking of human lives is the most urgent question on earth, and that the men who can rank them sit at this table.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argues that every culture is a hero system, a shared fiction that lets a dying animal feel like an object of primary value in a universe of meaning. A man cannot live staring at his own extinction, so he earns significance in whatever theater his tribe has built: sons, souls saved, acres cleared, papers published, money stacked. The theaters differ. The play is the same. Becker’s cold addendum is that the players must not know it is a play. The denial works only while it stays denied.

Bloom breaks the addendum. He read the playbook. His tradition begins with Plato (c. 429-347 BCE) having Socrates define philosophy as the practice of dying, and Bloom teaches that definition for forty years. He knows the young come to him terrified and unformed. He knows that careers, causes, and pleasures are anesthetics. He says so in print, at length, to a million buyers. His originality inside Becker’s scheme is the claim of exemption: all hero systems deny death except one. The philosopher does not repress the terror. He turns and looks at it, and the looking is the highest life. Every other project on the menu, the family, the nation, the revolution, the fortune, is a noble or ignoble sleep. Philosophy alone stays awake. The Closing of the American Mind is a 392-page argument that America has stopped producing insomniacs.

Becker doubts the exemption. He suspects the philosopher’s ladder is one more theater, with better seats. The rest of this essay tests Bloom’s claim against Bloom’s life.

Two terrors run under that life. The first is the body’s. Bloom chain-smokes through heart trouble, jokes with his barber about cholesterol, and dies at sixty-two of internal bleeding and a failing liver, with a friend’s novel later asserting AIDS and the record still open. He keeps his eros off the page while making eros his subject, and he spends his last weeks in a hospital bed dictating a book about love. The animal dies the way animals die, in a body, attended, afraid or not afraid, and no translation of the Republic changes the mattress.

The second terror frightens him more, and it is the signature of his system. Kojève teaches him that history might end, not in fire, in upholstery: a universal state of equal recognition, full stomachs, and administered peace. Nietzsche (1844-1900) gives the resident of that state a name, the Last Man, who blinks. For Bloom the true horror is not that he will die. It is that the world might stop producing people for whom anything is worth dying, that longing might go extinct, that the species might settle into a comfort so complete no one climbs. Death kills the hero. The end of history kills the heroic. A man can face the first with Socrates. Against the second there is only the classroom, held like a garrison.

From these terrors come the sacred values, and each one is a word that other hero systems also use, at different exchange rates.

Take eros. In Bloom’s system eros is a ladder. The longing that begins in a body is the low rung of an ascent that ends in the love of truth, and the whole apparatus of education exists to keep the longing hungry and pointed up. Satisfaction is the enemy. A nineteen-year-old whose desires have been met at cost is a nineteen-year-old who will never need Plato. The word carries other loads elsewhere. For the woman in the fertility clinic waiting room, forty-one, third cycle, eros has narrowed to a follicle count and a payment plan; longing means a child, and the ladder points at a nursery. For the Carmelite nun the same hunger has one licit object, and she has spent thirty years training it on Him, in a cell, on a schedule; she might recognize Bloom’s ascent and note that he skipped the vows. For the engineer at the dating app, eros is a retention curve; his bonus depends on longing that never quite closes, and he has built what Bloom feared with a cheerfulness Bloom never imagined. For the youth pastor running a purity seminar in a church gym, eros is a flood behind a levee, and his heroism consists of sandbags. Each of them says desire. Each means a different god. Bloom’s version demands that the fire stay lit and stay aimed at books, and his biography adds the detail his system never prices: his own consummations stayed off the ledger, known to friends, unwritten, while he taught longing to the young as the one subject that cannot be faked.

Take the book. In Bloom’s system a book is a sealed instrument. The great writers wrote for two audiences, a surface for the city and a code for the few, and reading is initiation. A book is also a raft: the author survives on it across millennia, and the reader who boards it joins the only aristocracy that matters, a conversation among the dead conducted over the heads of the living. He translates the Republic with deliberate roughness so the code survives the crossing. Other systems weigh the word differently. For the Baptist deacon in Alabama the book is singular and inerrant, and the hero task is submission to it, so that Bloom’s talk of hidden teachings sounds like the serpent’s first question. For the Tehran engineer who passed hand-copied Forugh Farrokhzad poems through the 1980s, a book is contraband and courage, and its value scales with the risk of holding it. For the memorizer in a Sana’a Quran school, the book lives in the chest, word-perfect, and the immortality it grants is recitation, a boy becoming a vessel. For the acquisitions editor in Manhattan, the book is a P&L with a jacket, and she can tell you within five hundred units what a soul is worth this season. Bloom’s own case ends in her column. The man whose system honors coded writing for the few produces the loudest mass artifact of the decade, dines at the White House, sits with Oprah, and buys the Lanvin with the proceeds. The market hands him the immortality the seminar could not, and he takes it, and he knows what he has taken. He spends the money like a man mocking it, and Bellow tells the funeral that Bloom treated a windfall as cargo to heave off a moving train.

Take the teacher. Here Bloom’s system beats loudest, because teaching is its answer to death. Becker calls the deepest human project causa sui, the wish to father oneself, to owe the gift of life to no one and pass it on by one’s own power. Bloom, who fathers no children, fathers minds. The lineage runs like a genealogy: Strauss begets Bloom, Bloom begets Fukuyama and Wolfowitz and Pangle and Orwin, and the seed is a way of reading. Telluride House gives him a household without a wife; the seminar gives him generation without the body. The word teacher trades elsewhere at other rates. For the Parris Island drill instructor, a teacher is a man who breaks civilians into parts and reassembles them as Marines, and the transmission is obedience under fire. For the Seoul mother who spends a third of the family income on hagwons, the teacher is an arms dealer in the credential war, and her heroism is measured in her son’s exam percentile. For the melamed drilling five-year-olds on the aleph-beis in a Brooklyn cheder, teaching is the relay of a covenant, and he is one link in a chain that must not break with him. For the keynote thought leader working the conference circuit, teaching is an asset class, and the students are called an audience. Bloom stands closest to the melamed and would resent the comparison, since his chain carries no covenant, only the conversation. But the structure is the same: a childless man securing descent. The rival he never names in all his pages on education is the parent, the ordinary father who transmits life the old way, through diapers and mortgages and a body that came from his body. Bloom’s system quietly ranks that man below the teacher, and has to, because the teacher’s whole claim to immortality depends on pedagogical generation outranking the biological kind.

Take openness. Bloom performs his most famous move on this word, and the move is pure Becker even though he never cites him. American culture, he argues, has adopted openness as its supreme virtue, and the openness is a closing, because a mind open to everything can be claimed by nothing. Translated into Becker’s terms: relativism is the demolition of hero systems as such. The student taught that no way of life ranks above another has been handed a world with no theater left in it, no stage on which significance can be earned, and he responds the way Becker predicts, with low-grade depression, irony, and consumption. Bloom’s rage at the flat souls of his students is grief over demolished theaters. The word means other things on other stages. For the Unitarian minister in Vermont, openness is the creed, the hard-won escape from her grandfather’s hellfire, and Bloom’s hierarchy smells of the thing she fled. For the venture capitalist, openness means optionality, never committing to a thesis a term sheet can’t exit, and he calls it keeping the aperture wide. For the Hasidic father in Williamsburg, openness is the street pressing on his sons, the smartphone in the study hall, the acid that eats fences, and he builds his heroism as a wall. For the woman three years out of a compound in Idaho, openness cracked her prison, and she will hear no sermon against it. Bloom agrees with the Hasid on the diagnosis and with none of them on the cure. He wants the fences down and the ranking kept, every belief exposed to the knife and the knife wielded only by the few who can survive the surgery. That position has a name in Becker: a hero system for those strong enough to watch the others burn.

Now run the subtraction. Take away the Committee, the lineage, the million copies, the apartment on Dorchester with the French linens and the Baroque on the stereo. Take away the seminar table and the twelve leaning students. What remains, in October 1992, is a body in a Chicago hospital bed, propped up, short of breath, dictating. The book he dictates is Love and Friendship, chapters on Rousseau (1712-1778), on Shakespeare, on Austen, on the varieties of human attachment, spoken aloud to the end. Read one way, the scene vindicates him. This is the practice of dying as advertised, the philosopher working the question of love while the liver fails, awake to the last. Read Becker’s way, the scene shows the system operating at full load at the exact moment it should be dropping away, the immortality project running like a bilge pump, words against water. Both readings are available. The measure of the man is that both are plausible, which is more than most hero systems can say for their heroes at the end.

The afterlife arrives on schedule and in the wrong hands. Bloom’s system promises survival through students and books, a controlled transmission, the teaching passing sealed to the initiated. What the world receives instead, eight years later, is Ravelstein, a novel by his best friend, in which the sealed man appears unsealed: the spending, the gossip, the companion, the diagnosis asserted and then half retracted in interviews. Bellow gives him the only immortality that reaches past the seminar, and it wears Bellow’s face. The disciples call it betrayal. The executor is said to be appalled. Here sits the cost that Bloom’s own ledger has no column for: a hero system built on the mastery of texts ends with its founder as a character in someone else’s, edited by another hand, his code broken by the one reader he loved who never joined the school. There is a second unpriced cost, quieter. Michael Z. Wu keeps a dedication and an estate, and grief converted to inheritance is the kind of settlement Bloom’s Plato, who wrote the Symposium, might have asked harder questions about than Bloom’s admirers did.

The hero, then. Bloom plays Socrates in a Lanvin jacket: the barefoot man of the agora restaged with Zegna ties, a stereo, and royalties, dying in talk as the original died in talk, hemlock swapped for cigarettes at the rate of two per haircut. The imitation is sincere and the discount is real. Socrates wrote nothing, charged nothing, and owned one cloak; his refusal of the world’s currencies was the proof of the claim. Bloom takes the currencies, all of them, and holds the claim anyway, and the strain between the two is where his hero system either breaks or shows its honesty, depending on the reader. His unnamed rival stands closer than the Last Man he denounced. It is the ordinary father at the kitchen table, the man who answers death with children instead of dialogues and never needs a seminar to feel his life has weight. Bloom’s entire edifice is a wager that the classroom outranks that kitchen, and the wager cannot be settled, because the two heroes keep different books. And the final cost is the one already named: the man who taught that a book is a raft across death got his crossing, and the raft was built by a friend, from his warts, without his permission. He wanted to be Plato. He arrived on the far shore as Alcibiades, the beloved character in a text he did not write, bursting in drunk at the end of the banquet, telling the truth about the teacher, and stealing the scene.

The Energy Star of Hyde Park: Allan Bloom Through Randall Collins

Begin with the body in the room. A seminar table at the University of Chicago, the mid-1980s. Twelve graduate students sit close enough to smell the smoke. At the head sits a bald man who stutters, and the stutter does something no smooth lecturer manages: it makes every sentence a small suspense. The students wait for the word to break loose. Their eyes converge on one point. The man lights cigarette after cigarette, forgets them, breaks them, and at the highest pitch of a session puts the lit end in his mouth, and nobody laughs, because by then the room has fused. Clifford Orwin, who sat at that table, calls Allan Bloom the most charismatic human being he ever knew and lists the missing equipment: no poise, no fluency, none of the calm self-possession his teacher Leo Strauss carried. The charisma arrived anyway.

Randall Collins (b. 1941) builds a sociology that predicts this room. Working from Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) and Erving Goffman (1922-1982), Collins argues that the basic unit of social life is the interaction ritual: bodies assembled in one place, a barrier marking insiders from outsiders, a shared object of attention, and a shared mood that feeds on the attention. When the ritual works, the participants fall into rhythm with one another, and the rhythm generates what Collins calls emotional energy, a charge of confidence, warmth, and drive that people carry out of the encounter and spend in the next one. Successful rituals also throw off byproducts: solidarity among the participants, moral standards that feel absolute, and sacred objects, things saturated with the group’s charge, a flag, a ring, a book. Charisma, in this account, has no mystery. A charismatic man is a man at the focal point of high-intensity rituals, an energy star, and his magnetism is the stored charge of a thousand successful assemblies. Polish has nothing to do with it. Focus has everything to do with it. The stutter, the smoke, the burned lip: each tightens the room’s attention on one man, and attention is the fuel.

Collins wrote a second book that fits Bloom tighter still. The Sociology of Philosophies argues that intellectual life across three millennia runs on chains of face-to-face rituals: master and pupils in a room, lecture and argument as the ritual forms, ideas as the sacred objects, and creativity concentrated at the nodes where chains cross. Great thinkers cluster in lineages, pupil touching master touching master, because the two ingredients of intellectual creation, cultural capital and emotional energy, both pass by contact. Books alone transmit the capital. Only rooms transmit the charge.

Run Bloom’s life through that machine and the life becomes legible link by link.

The chain reaches him early. A fifteen-year-old from Indianapolis enters the University of Chicago in 1946, into the residue of Robert Maynard Hutchins’s project, a curriculum organized around great books and small discussion classes, ritual technology purpose-built for mutual focus. There he finds Strauss, and the Strauss seminar of the 1950s runs as a textbook Collins assembly. Werner Dannhauser, who sat in it, remembers Strauss as a sun the students felt privileged to orbit, and remembers that Strauss called his students his puppies, which is what solidarity sounds like from the inside: a family idiom for a boundary. The seminar has every element. Co-presence in a Hyde Park room. A barrier of difficulty, since the reading method takes years to learn and the untrained cannot follow the talk. A single focus, the text on the table. A mood of initiates handling dangerous material. Out of it comes a lineage with its own sacred objects, Plato’s dialogues read as coded surfaces, and its own membership emblem, the method, which lets any two Straussians anywhere recognize one another within minutes of conversation. Collins says intellectual movements need emblems that travel. Esoteric reading travels light and cannot be counterfeited by outsiders. It might be the most efficient membership badge American academic life has produced.

Bloom then does what Collins says the creative ones do: he plugs into a second chain. In Paris from 1953 to 1955 he attends Alexandre Kojève, whose prewar Hegel seminar had run one of the highest-voltage intellectual rituals of the century, with Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille (1897-1962), Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), Raymond Queneau (1903-1976), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) around the table. By the fifties the seminar is over, and Kojève works as a trade bureaucrat, but the charge still hangs on him, and Bloom takes the transmission in person, then spends part of his career editing Kojève into English. Collins’s model predicts where new positions in the attention space open: at the crossing of chains. Bloom stands where the Strauss chain crosses the Kojève chain, Athens crossing Hegel, and his signature theme, the fate of the philosophic soul at the end of history, exists only at that intersection. Neither chain alone produces it.

Now watch him build his own assemblies. At Cornell in the 1960s he takes a post at Telluride House, and Telluride is a ritual laboratory: selected students living together, running their own house, holding seminars in the building where they eat and sleep. Collins measures rituals by frequency and density of co-presence, and a residential house beats any classroom, because breakfast, argument, and midnight talk chain into one continuous encounter. Francis Fukuyama lives in the house and takes Bloom’s Greek philosophy course, and thirty years on, the end-of-history thesis that makes Fukuyama famous is the Kojève charge arriving through the Bloom link, two nodes down the chain from the Paris seminar. Ideas travel by book. Conviction travels by table.

Cornell also hands Bloom his great defeat, and Collins explains the defeat better than any account written in the language of courage and cowardice. In April 1969 armed students hold Willard Straight Hall, the administration signs, and the faculty at first votes the agreement down. Then comes the week the conservatives never forgave. Thousands of students pack Barton Hall, day after day, a mass assembly with a single focus, a shared mood at maximum heat, chants, speeches, the felt presence of history. Measured as an interaction ritual, Barton Hall is the most successful gathering in Cornell’s existence, a solidarity engine running around the clock, minting emotional energy for one side of the dispute. Against it the faculty can field a committee meeting. Professors assemble in low-frequency, low-focus encounters, each man arriving alone from his office with his private doubts, no rhythm, no mood, no charge. When the faculty reverses its vote days later, Bloom reads moral collapse. Collins reads an energy differential. A body of men drained of solidarity faces a body of men and women overflowing with it, and the drained side complies, as drained sides do. Bloom’s own gesture during the crisis confirms the analysis by failing. He sends students into the crowd with photocopied pages of Plato’s Republic, a sacred object detached from any assembly, a battery with no circuit. Nobody converts. Sacred objects hold charge only for those who received the charge in rooms, and the crowd at Cornell got its charge in Barton Hall.

He carries his own charge to Toronto for nine years, teaching, translating Rousseau, and then comes home in 1979 to the Committee on Social Thought, the densest ritual venue American letters offers, a small program built entirely around the seminar form. There he forms the dyad that shapes his last decade. Collins insists that the two-person encounter is a ritual too, and the Bloom-Bellow friendship runs as a sustained one: two men in daily talk, teaching a seminar together, trading books, eating, gossiping, each the other’s most attentive audience. Saul Bellow says Bloom inhaled books and ideas like air, which is what an energy star looks like to the man sitting closest. The apartment at 58th and Dorchester serves as the shrine of the micro-cult: the black leather couch, the Baroque on the stereo, thousands of CDs, French linens, guests arranged around the talker in the silk dressing gown. Collins notes that ritual leaders accumulate objects charged by the group’s attention. Visitors to that apartment describe the possessions with the reverence of pilgrims listing relics, and the newspaper spread under his chair at dinner parties tells you the man outranked the linen.

Then 1987, and the strangest chapter in the case, because The Closing of the American Mind detaches Bloom’s symbols from his rituals and floats them into mass circulation. Collins distinguishes first-order charge, absorbed in the room, from the secondary circulation of emblems among people who never attend. The book sells more than a million copies, and by most accounts the buyers largely do not read it. They do something else with it, and Collins names the something: they display a membership badge. In the culture war of the late eighties, the hardback on the coffee table announces a side, the way a crucifix or a campaign button announces a side, and the announcement requires no acquaintance with the chapter on Heidegger. The book works as a portable piece of solidarity. Its sales curve tracks the intensity of the conflict, since conflict is the great multiplier of ritual demand. And fame then feeds back into fresh assemblies at higher amperage. At Harvard in 1988, Harvey Mansfield warms the hall by saying Bloom always behaved as if he were famous, so fame could not spoil him, and the laughter that follows is the sound of a crowd falling into shared rhythm before the speaker opens his mouth. Bloom takes the podium, notes that the loudest cries against his book come from the Ivy League, and reaches for the farmer who knows the fox by its cry from the henhouse. The room roars. A joke landing in a packed hall is entrainment achieved, hundreds of bodies laughing on one beat, and the man on stage banks the charge.

The frame also settles an old score inside the book, and settles it against its author. The pages of Closing that drew the most ridicule attack rock music, and Bloom spends some of them on Mick Jagger (b. 1943) as the presiding figure of the young. Read through Collins, the attack is a turf war between ritual industries. A rock concert is an interaction ritual of industrial scale: tens of thousands of bodies, one focus, rhythmic entrainment enforced by drums at chest-shaking volume, ecstasy, solidarity, T-shirts and vinyl sold at the exit as charged objects. It manufactures in one night the emotional energy a seminar produces across a semester, and it sells to the same customer, the unformed nineteen-year-old with surplus longing. Bloom the theorist claims rock deforms the soul’s eros. Bloom the practitioner, seen from Collins’s angle, is a boutique producer denouncing a factory. He knows the product cold because he makes the product. The seminar and the stadium run the same engine at different scales, and his rage at Jagger carries the heat of a man watching a rival work his own crowd.

The chain outlives the node, and then the physics of decay set in. Bloom dies in October 1992, and the funeral runs as the standard rite for a fallen energy star, the group reassembling around the body to recharge its solidarity, with Bellow’s eulogy circulating for years afterward as a charged text. Collins holds that sacred objects fade unless renewed in fresh assemblies; symbols are batteries, and batteries drain. Eight years later Bellow performs the recharge. Ravelstein returns Bloom to circulation as a character, and whatever the disciples think of the warts, the novel does for Bloom’s emblem what no memorial conference could, pushing the charged name through hundreds of thousands of hands. The lineage meanwhile does what lineages do. Students of Bloom’s students teach the coded reading in rooms he never entered, Fukuyama carries the Kojève strand into policy debate, and the method still identifies members at conference hotel bars within minutes. The Straussian network remains, by Collins’s measures, among the healthiest ritual chains in American intellectual life: high meeting frequency, strong boundaries, portable emblems, contested enough to stay warm.

What the frame finally shows is a man who mastered the technology he refused to name. Bloom taught that the books contain the power and that the teacher merely opens them. Collins’s ledger records the opposite flow. Thousands of readers held the same Republic and felt nothing. The power sat in the rooms, in the smoke and the stutter and the twelve converging gazes, and the books left those rooms charged the way iron leaves a magnet’s field. His students spent the rest of their lives trying to build such rooms, and the ones who succeeded stood, as he had, at the front, imperfect and lit, with every eye on them. The doctrine says Plato does the work. The chain says the body in the room does it, one assembly at a time, and that the last charge dissipates when the last student who sat there stops gathering people to tell them what it felt like.