Allan Bloom Redux: Solar Eclipse Activation
How the March 29, 1987 solar eclipse brought The Closing of the American Mind to the national stage
Published in February 1987, The Closing of the American Mind propelled Allan Bloom to sudden celebrity and placed him at the center of a national dispute over the direction of liberal education in American universities. Bloom’s rapid ascent to the national stage is a striking example of how eclipses can elevate a native’s professional aims into the broader cultural arena. Here are the eclipse–natal links.
The 1987 eclipse unfolded against the backdrop of the North Node in Aries and the South Node in Libra, marking a nodal return for Bloom. The South Node in Libra signifies the diminishment of liberal philosophy, while the North Node in Aries augments a forthright reforming zeal that can verge on the militant. A North Node solar eclipse in Aries promises an increase (North Node) in prominence for male exemplars of the Aries spirit (Sun). Closely conjunct the eclipse degree is Jupiter in Aries—Bloom’s natal victor Jupiter in Cancer, now transiting through Aries. Here stands the reformer, Allan Bloom, with Jupiter just past its superior conjunction to the Sun, elevating Jupiterian morality at the moment when the planet is farthest from the Earth and symbolically closest to the divine.
The eclipse degree falls in the bound of Venus in Aries, narrowing the scope of Arian fervor to Venusian matters of culture. In the chart of the solar eclipse, Venus is exalted in Pisces and, in addition to ruling the eclipse degree, also rules Mercury. The symbolism is therefore focused and unmistakable: matters of culture, taste, intellect, and aesthetic hierarchy converge under the banner of a reforming, masculine, Jupiter-infused Aries Sun. In short, the eclipse delineation may be distilled as follows: “An increase in fame for a man whose reforming zeal aspires to the restoration of high culture, at the expense of polite deference to cultural relativism.”
For a slightly deeper dive, here is ChatGPT’s summary of The Closing of The American Mind including its controversial reception in 1987 and its relevance in contemporary politics.
Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) argues that American universities, once devoted to the formation of the intellect and character through the study of the Great Books, have lost their philosophical purpose. Bloom claims that the modern university has replaced the pursuit of truth with value-relativism—the belief that no ideas are better than any others, and that “openness” itself is the highest virtue. In his view, this false openness has closed the American mind by depriving students of the very standards, hierarchies, and canonical works necessary for genuine intellectual development. Instead of wrestling with Plato, Shakespeare, Augustine, Locke, and Nietzsche, students drift in a sea of shallow “opinions” shaped more by pop culture, therapy-speak, and social causes than by reasoned inquiry.
Bloom argues that relativism produces two pathologies in students:
Moral paralysis — the inability to make meaningful judgments about good and evil, justice and injustice; and
Existential emptiness — a collapse of yearning for the Good, replaced by comfort, entertainment, and consumer identities.
The university, he says, has abandoned its mission as the steward of the Western philosophical heritage and become instead a marketplace of lifestyle choices. Bloom targets the legacy of the 1960s campus revolution—free love, radical politics, rock music, and therapeutic psychology—as a cultural force that dethroned reason, discipline, and tradition. In place of the older liberal-arts education that formed souls, universities now churn out professionals who are technically skilled but spiritually adrift.
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Key Themes
Relativism as the new dogma — professed “openness” leads to a closing of the mind
Abandonment of the Western Canon — loss of a shared intellectual inheritance
Nihilism and the crisis of meaning — especially among youth
Rock music & mass culture — Bloom’s symbol of eros degraded into entertainment
The collapse of liberal education — universities forget their telos: formation of the soul through philosophy
📌 Why the Book Was Controversial (1987)
Bloom’s book ignited a national firestorm. He was accused of being elitist, Eurocentric, anti-democratic, and out of touch with modern culture. Critics on the Left objected to his defense of the Western canon as the backbone of education, calling it a justification for cultural hierarchy and exclusion. Critics on the Right disliked his hostility to unrestrained capitalism’s cultural effects (he believed markets create flat souls as efficiently as the Left does). Yet the book sold over a million copies because it touched a nerve: Bloom put his finger on a widening spiritual and intellectual vacuum at the heart of late-20th-century liberal education.
📌 Relevance Today — Especially in the Age of J. D. Vance
The current populist assault on universities—spearheaded today by figures like Vice President J. D. Vance—echoes Bloom’s claim that universities have lost legitimacy. But there is a crucial difference. Bloom believed universities needed more intellectual rigor and stronger liberal education, not less. His solution was to restore philosophy, the canon, and the life of the mind. Vance and other New Right populists argue instead that universities are irreparably corrupt political institutions that must be defunded, disrupted, or replaced.
Ironically, Bloom criticizes the same relativism and ideological capture that Vance attacks, yet Bloom would have rejected Vance’s anti-intellectual hostility to academia. Bloom feared the collapse of shared standards; Vance weaponizes that collapse for political gain. Bloom wanted to save universities by restoring their ancient mission; Vance wants to break the university system as a power structure.
In this sense, Bloom’s book is more relevant today than at any time since its publication: the crisis he diagnosed—loss of truth, loss of canon, loss of seriousness—is now playing out not just within universities, but in the broader public sphere, where political actors openly debate whether universities deserve to exist at all.