The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom
Published 1987 · 400 pages · 138,549 words · about 11 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The Closing of the American Mind to read?
The Closing of the American Mind scores 66 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 72 out of 100
- Bloom draws freely on Greek philosophical terms (eudaimonia, eros, thumos), German concepts (Weltanschauung, Bildung), and the specialized vocabulary of political philosophy — Platonic, Nietzschean, Hegelian. Readers without a humanities background will encounter unfamiliar terms on nearly every page, though context often provides partial orientation.
- Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
- Bloom constructs long periodic sentences with multiple nested subordinate clauses in the Jamesian tradition, demanding careful tracking of grammatical structure. Paragraphs often run for a full page, building arguments across elaborately layered qualifications. The syntax is disciplined rather than experimental — demanding but never chaotic.
- Abstraction: 82 out of 100
- The entire book operates at the level of philosophical argument about the soul, democracy, nihilism, and liberal education. Bloom rarely grounds his claims in narrative example; instead he works through the ideas of Plato, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Heidegger with sustained theoretical intensity. This places it closer to Brothers Karamazov's philosophical debates than to any concrete narrative.
- Information density: 78 out of 100
- Each chapter integrates references to multiple philosophers, historical moments, literary works, and political movements simultaneously. A single page may invoke Locke, Tocqueville, Nietzsche, and contemporary American campus culture without pause. Readers who do not already know these thinkers will find themselves constantly having to pause and retrieve context.
- Narrative indirection: 20 out of 100
- Bloom is a polemicist who states his conclusions directly and forcefully. There is no gap between what he says and what he means — this is argumentative prose, not ambiguous fiction. The reader is never required to infer Bloom's position; it is announced on nearly every page.
- Symbolic density: 22 out of 100
- As a work of cultural criticism, the book deploys cultural touchstones — Plato's cave, the Nietzschean abyss, rock music — as rhetorical illustrations rather than literary symbols with layered interpretive meaning. The mode is discursive and analytical, not symbolic or allegorical.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- Bloom writes with full sincerity and occasional archness, but there is no sustained ironic gap between his stated and implied meaning. He means exactly what he says, even at his most provocative — that rock music corrupts, that relativism destroys, that Plato offers the remedy.
- Resolution withholding: 25 out of 100
- Bloom arrives at explicit, unambiguous conclusions: American universities have abandoned their mission, cultural relativism has impoverished student souls, and a return to the great books tradition offers the cure. The argument is resolved with confident prescription rather than open-ended questioning.
- Structural complexity: 22 out of 100
- The book follows a clear three-part structure — Students, Nihilism American Style, The University — proceeding in logical, essayistic sequence. There is no narrative fragmentation, no nonlinear chronology, no shifting perspectives. It reads like an extended philosophical essay with orthodox chapter organization.
How The Closing of the American Mind is regarded
The Closing of the American Mind holds a literary regard score of 69 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.