Giants and Dwarfs: Essays 1960-1990.

THE CLOSING of the American Mind made Allan Bloom a rock star. The essays collected in Giants and Dwarfs show what the University of Chicago professor was doing before the beast hit, and what he continues to do today in intervals of peace.

Several of the essays here take up the topic that made him famous, the American university and its woes. But the core of the book deals with the subject Bloom believes should be at the heart of the university curriculum-indeed, at the heart of human thought, or at least the thought of those intelligent enough to ponder it: political philosophy.

Bloom was a student of Leo Strauss, and the tribute Bloom wrote after Strauss's death, in 1973, is as good a place to begin Giants and Dwarfs as any. Strauss discovered political philosophy accidentally, moving backward from Zionism to an examination of earlier Jewish alternatives, first Spinoza, then Maimonides. Maimonides led him in turn to Plato. Strauss, writes Bloom, had been given a conventional classical education. "But that education precisely had made the classics uninteresting to him." Seeing the classics through medieval eyes made them seem like real arguments over real issues. Subsequent philosophers, Strauss discovered, argued back.

The script of this debate, as sketched by Bloom, goes roughly like this: In the beginning is tradition-societies doing what comes naturally. Philosophy begins when a 'rare individual," like Socrates, realizes that tradition is not natural at all, but is only an opinion, and he is compelled to seek beyond it." Socrates searched for, among other things, some modus vivendi between philosophers and society, with their necessarily different conceptions of virtue-a problematic search, as his execution demonstrated.

Flash forward to Machiavelli, who decided that philosophy could remake society, rendering it peaceful and prosperous. In order to accomplish this feat, a number of philosophy's ancient concerns had to be pitched overboard. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property," writes Bloom, "were just what Aristotle did not talk about. They are the conditions of happiness, but the essence of happiness, according to Aristotle, is virtue. So the modems decided to deal with the conditions and to let happiness take care of itself." Hobbes found his condition in men's fear of upheaval and death; Locke, in their fear of failing to make ends meet. We live under their dispensation.

But we also live in the shadow of Rousseau, who argued that a society founded on such low-road motivations could never be satisfying. Men educated to feel compassion rather than fear, Rousseau believed, could aim for a life that was both virtuous and stable. Unfortunately, Rousseau's sketch of this education in Emile, as described by Bloom, is so full of tedious absurdities that it is hard to take it as seriously as Bloom believes it should be taken. More unfortunately, it led to Robespierre. Marx and Nietzsche made yet more radical criticisms of modern life, which in due course gave us Stalin and Hitler. Meanwhile, those of us who haven't become monsters under the impact of the 'hypermoderns" have become discontented with our Lockean lot.

This summary does not do justice to the seriousness of the enterprise, which is the best thing about it. For Bloom, reading the philosophers is hard work. One risks mangling even so plain-seeming a writer as Machiavelli "unless one takes pencil and paper, outlines, counts, stops at everything, and tries to wonder." The effort is worth it; each of these men claimed to have found the truth, and some of them are bound to have done so.

The Middle Ages, Bloom notes, "had no interest in Greek Civ." They read Aristotle because they believed he could instruct them. The search for instruction leads to continual surprises. In an essay published in 1980, Bloom disarmingly observes that he has only recently" hit upon a new understanding of Tocqueville. (The author of Democracy in America, Bloom says, was also a student of Rousseau-which is the best thing I've ever heard about Rousseau.)

Giants and Dwarfs recalls the jolt I got the first time I took a class from a Straussian. The most important thing in life, he told his audience of bored collegiate course-shoppers, is deciding how to live. There are, he went on, half a dozen alternatives; we'll be surveying them, and you should choose one. Heady stuff for freshmen, or men.

Giants and Dwarfs also left me with a number of reservations. When Bloom reads non-philosophers, he is apt to come to grief. His discussion of Book IV of Gulliver's Travels was so tone-deaf I wondered if we'd read the same thing. There is also a tendency to write as if actual societies conformed to philosophers' paradigms. America, the Lockean project par excellence, should be devoid of martial valor, along with other virtues. Yet 16 of our Presidents, including the incumbent, have fought in battle.

Bloom's most striking failing is his inattention to religion. The fly-over from Aristotle to Machiavelli is typical. The only medieval philosophers Bloom discusses in any detail are Maimonides and the Arab Alfarabi, and he discusses them only as secret believers in the irreconcilability of philosophy and revelation.

If he scants the Catholic centuries, he ignores Protestantism. This leads to odd misjudgments of America. Religion has been "totally transformed" here, he writes, under the influence of contract theorists and the society they created. Bloom does not know, or does not consider, that Jefferson described his "wall of separation" in a letter to a group of Baptists; or that the dismantling of theocracy in New England a century earlier was as much the result of theological conundrums-how could the authorities tell who was a saint? -as of the need to accommodate nonPuritans. The religions of America created American religious liberty, not the other way around.

Bloom takes his dim view of religions because, as he says over and over, theology is the only possible rival to philosophy as a guide to truth, and it's obvious which side of that quarrel he comes down on. But if he had approached religions as serious alternatives, he would have had a folder of wiser essays to choose from.

Which kind of philosophy, finally, does Bloom endorse? He says early on in Giants and Dwarfs that "the preservation of liberal [that is, Lockean] society is of central concrn to me," and his eulogy "Raymond Aron: The "Last of the Liberals" is warm and heartfelt. But, stopping to wonder, we find ourselves asking: If Aron was the last liberal, and he is dead, then what is Bloom?

My guess is that he is his own notion of a latter-day Socratic, willing to prop up the Lockean arrangement so long as he can seek gnosis in its interstices. In this view, all the institutions of American life-from the Presidency to the local school board, from EBM to the comer store, from St. Patrick's Cathedral to the First Methodist Church of Muncie exist to serve as outworks for the Committee on Social Thought.

It may wound the reader's amourpropre to realize this is what Bloom thinks of him. But considering the nasty by-ways other philosophers have taken in the last two hundred years, we should probably be grateful.