Bloom, Allan David

Bloom, Allan David (1936–92) political scientist, author; born in Indianapolis, Ind. Educated at the University of Chicago, he joined the Chicago liberal arts faculty in 1955, moved on to Cornell and the University of Toronto (1963–79), and returned to Chicago in 1979 to teach political philosophy. He remained an obscure translator of Plato until the publication of his Closing of the American Mind (1987), a neoconservative polemic against what he perceived as the politicization of academia and the decline of liberal education in the Western tradition.