Why I Miss the Culture Wars

By Nicholas B. Dirks. When Allan Bloom’s infamous book, The Closing of the American Mind, was published in 1987, it was, as Camille Paglia later declared, the "first shot of the culture wars." Bloom’s book—by any account an odd amalgam of polemical denunciation of academe, philosophical argument, and memoir—quickly generated a spirited debate about college life, the place of the liberal arts, and, as Bloom himself put it, "the state of our souls." More...