Harvey Claflin Mansfield, Jr. (born 1932) is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1962. He has held Guggenheim and NEH Fellowships and has been a Fellow at the National Humanities Center; he also received the National Humanities Medal in 2004 and delivered the Jefferson Lecture in 2007. He is a Carol G. Simon Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is notable for his generally conservative stance on political issues in his writings.

Mansfield is the author and co-translator of studies of and/or by major political philosophers such as Aristotle, Edmund Burke, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Thomas Hobbes, of Constitutional government, and of Manliness (2006). In interviews Mansfield has acknowledged the work of Leo Strauss as the key modern influence on his own political philosophy.^[1]

Among his most notable former students are: Andrew Sullivan;^[2] Alan Keyes; Robert Kraynak; John Gibbons; William Kristol;^[3] Nathan Tarcov; Clifford Orwin; Mark Blitz; Paul Cantor; Delba Winthrop; Mark Lilla; Arthur Melzer; Jerry Weinberger; Francis Fukuyama, Shen Tong and James Ceaser.

Personal background[link]

Mansfield has been at Harvard since his own student days in 1949, having joined the faculty in 1962. He received his A.B. at Harvard in 1953 and Ph.D. from the same institution in 1961. He was married to the late Delba Winthrop, with whom he co-translated and co-authored work on Tocqueville.

Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. is the son of Harvey C. Mansfield, who was the Ruggles Professor Emeritus of Public Law and Government at Columbia University at the time of his death in 1988 at the age of 83.^[4]

[edit] A Student's Guide to Political Philosophy

In his 2001 book A Student's Guide to Political Philosophy, Mansfield traces the history of political philosophy in "the great books" written by Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, and others of the "highest rank" (1).^[5] He also finds political philosophy in practical politics, which Mansfield considers necessarily partisan, because it involves citizens "arguing passionately pro and con with advocacy and denigration, accusation and defense" (2). He argues that politics does not merely consist of liberal and conservative options, but rather, they are fundamentally opposed to each other, with each side defending its own interest as it attempts to appeal to the common good (2). Since such adversarial sides in a political dispute appeal to the common good, an observer of the dispute can use his capacity to reason to judge which side supplies the most compelling arguments. If such an observer is competent to be a judge, he or she may be thought of as a political philosopher, or as at least on the way to engaging in political philosophy (2–3).

Mansfield stresses the connection between politics and political philosophy, but he does not find political philosophy in political science, which for Mansfield is a rival to political philosophy and "apes" the natural sciences (3–5). From Mansfield's point of view, political science replaces words like "good," "just," and "noble" with other words like "utility" or "preferences." The terms are meant to be neutral, but as a result of the political scientist's purported change of role and perspective from judge to so-called "disinterested observer," such a "scientist" is not able to determine whose arguments are the best, because he or she falls victim to relativism, which, according to Mansfield, is "a sort of lazy dogmatism" (4–5).

In his guide, Mansfield reminds students that political science rebelled from political philosophy in the seventeenth century and declared itself distinct and separate in the positivist movement of the late nineteenth century: thus, he argues in it that whereas "Today political science is often said to be 'descriptive' or 'empirical,' concerned with facts; political philosophy is called 'normative' because it expresses values. But these terms merely repeat in more abstract form the difference between political science, which seeks agreement, and political philosophy, which seeks the best" (6).

Furthermore, according to Mansfield, when people talk about the difference between political philosophy and political science, they are actually talking about two distinct kinds of political philosophy, one modern and the other ancient. The only way to understand modern political science and its ancient alternative fully, he stresses, is to enter the history of political philosophy, and to study the tradition handed down over the centuries: "No one can count himself educated who does not have some acquaintance with this tradition. It informs you of the leading possibilities of human life, and by giving you a sense of what has been tried and what is now dominant, it tells you where we are now in a depth not available from any other source" (7–8). Although modern political science feels no obligation to look at its roots, and might even denigrate the subject as if it could not be of any real significance, he says, "our reasoning shows that the history of political philosophy is required for understanding its substance" (7–8).

Controversies pertaining to Mansfield's work and views[link]

Grade inflation, affirmative action, and the ironic grade[link]

Mansfield is well-known for his opposition to grade inflation at Harvard University, which he claims is due in part to affirmative action.^[6] Manfield also participated in a debate on affirmative action between Cornel West and Michael Sandel (arguing for affirmative action) with Ruth Wisse and himself (arguing against affirmative action). The debate attracted a "massive audience" of a thousand Harvard students, requiring its campus venue to be changed twice before it could take place on November 3, 1997 in Harvard's Sanders Theater, prompting Professor Sandel to comment, "'This puts to rest the myth that this generation has a political apathy, and apathy to political debates.'"^[7]

In response to grade inflation, according to Harvard Crimson reporters Lulu Zhou and Rebecca D. O'Brien, Mansfield revived the "ironic" (or the "inflated") grade in 2006, in order to let his students know what they really deserved in his class without causing them harm by grading them lower than the other professors at Harvard: "In Mansfield’s 'true and serious' grading system, 5 percent of students will receive A’s, and 15 percent will receive A-minuses. But Mansfield won’t share those marks with anyone other than his teaching fellows and students. ... By contrast, Mansfield’s 'ironic' grade—the only one that will appear on official transcripts—will follow average grade distribution in the College, with about a quarter of students receiving A’s and another quarter receiving A-minu[s]es"; in contrast, their privately-received deserved "real" (lower) grades usually centered around a C or C-minus, earning him the nickname "Harvey C-minus Mansfield."^[8] "This [grading] policy—meant to demonstrate the causes and effects of grade inflation—drew heat from students and faculty, and attracted national media attention."^[9] Mansfield himself has joked that his middle initial "C." stands for compassion: "That's what I lack when it comes to grading."^[9] In an interview with the Hoover Institution, Mansfield claimed that college professors are too quick to label students as exceptional.^[10]

Scholarship[link]

Western Civilization[link]

In response to multiculturalism on college campuses, Mansfield has defended the importance of preserving and teaching courses on Western civilization, even proposing a survey course that selects a dozen or so books that capture the principal themes. Mansfield believes that understanding Western civilization is important because the books that explain it deal with problems associated with the human condition.^[11]

Defense of the "strong executive"[link]

Mansfield has argued that the President of the United States has "extra-legal powers such as commanding the military, making treaties (and carrying on foreign policy), and pardoning the convicted, not to mention a veto of legislation," observing that the U.S. Constitution does not ask the President to take an oath to execute the laws, but rather, to execute "the office of the president, which is larger."^[12] Referring to domestic surveillance, Mansfield notes, "those arguing that the executive should be subject to checks and balances are wrong to say or imply that the president may be checked in the sense of stopped. The president can be held accountable and made responsible, but if he could be stopped, the Constitution would lack any sure means of emergency action.^[12] He defends the Separation of powers, arguing that "the executive subordinated to the rule of law is in danger of being subordinate to the legislature."^[13] Washington Post staff writer Philip Kennicott (cited earlier) views Mansfield's defense of executive power as "an argument for suspending civil liberties not just in the sense of martial law, but pretty much any time a strong, impetuous leader—stoked to the gills with thumos—deems it efficient and, more frightening, conducive to enlarging his historical reputation."^[14]

Taming the Prince[link]

In his book Taming the Prince, Mansfield traces the modern doctrine of executive power to Niccolo Machiavelli. He argues that executive power had to be tamed to become compatible with liberal constitutionalism.^[15]

Gender roles and equality[link]

In his 2006 book Manliness, Mansfield defended a moderately conservative understanding of gender roles, and bemoaned the loss of the virtue of manliness in a "gender neutral" society. In a New York Times interview, he defined the concept briefly as "confidence in a situation of risk. A manly man has to know what he is doing."^[16]

Manliness was criticized by Martha Nussbaum in the June 22, 2006 issue of The New Republic.^[17] Nussbaum accuses Mansfield of misreading, or refusing to read, many feminist and nonfeminist texts. She contends that his book is premised on overt misogynistic assumptions that take a position of indifference towards violence against women. Mansfield blindly asserts, she contends, that a woman can resist rape only with the aid of "a certain ladylike modesty enabling her to take offense at unwanted encroachment."^[17] A disregard of modern feminism follows from this assumption.

Concerning controversial comments by former President of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, about mental differences between men and women, Mansfield said that it is "probably true" that women "innately have less capacity than men at the highest level of science... It's common sense if you just look at who the top scientists are."^[16]

Jefferson Lecture[link]

On May 8, 2007, Mansfield delivered the 36th Jefferson Lecture ("the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual and public achievement in the humanities," according to its sponsoring organization the NEH).^[18][19][20] In his lecture, Mansfield suggests "two improvements for today’s understanding of politics arising from the humanities ... first ... to recapture the notion of thumos in Plato and Aristotle ... [and] ... second ... the use of names—proper to literature and foreign to science."^[20]

Books[link]

• Statesmanship and Party Government: A Study of Burke and Bolingbroke. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.
• The Spirit of Liberalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.
• Machiavelli's New Modes and Orders: A Study of the Discourses on Livy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979. Rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
• Thomas Jefferson: Selected Writings. Ed. and introd. Wheeling, IL: H. Davidson, 1979.
• Selected Letters of Edmund Burke. Ed. with introd. entitled "Burke's Theory of Political Practice". Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
• The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli. Trans. and introd. 2nd (corr.) ed. 1985; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. (Inc. glossary.)
• Florentine Histories, by Niccolò Machiavelli. Ed., trans. and introd. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. (Co-trans. and co-ed., Laura F. Banfield.)
• Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power. New York: The Free Press, 1989.
• America's Constitutional Soul. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
• Machiavelli’s Virtue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
• Discourses on Livy, by Niccolò Machiavelli. Trans. and introd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. (Co-trans., Nathan Tarcov.)
• Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville. Trans. and introd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. (Co-trans., Delba Winthrop.)
• A Student’s Guide to Political Philosophy. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2001.
• Manliness. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
• Tocqueville: A Very Short Introduction. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Awards and honors[link]

• Guggenheim Fellowship (1970–71)^[18]
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1974–75)^[18]
• Member of the Council of the American Political Science Association (1980–82, 2004)^[18]
• Fellow of the National Humanities Center (1982)^[18]
• Member of the USIA's Board of Foreign Scholarships (1987–89)^[18]
• Member of the National Council on the Humanities (1991–94)^[18]
• Joseph R. Levenson Teaching Award (1993)^[18]
• President of the New England Historical Association (1993–94)^[18]
• Sidney Hook Memorial Award (2002)^[18]
• National Humanities Medal (2004)^[18]
• 36th Jefferson Lecture^[21] for the National Endowment for the Humanities (2007)^[18][19][14]

See also[link]

• Democracy in America
• Ellis Sandoz
• Leo Strauss

References[link]

External links[link]

• "Democracy in America. Colloquium on their translation of the book Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville, presented by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. March 30, 2001. Ashbrook Center, Ashland University, Ashland, Ohio.
• "Dr. Harvey Mansfield, Author of Manliness". Public lecture at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, Saint Anselm College, Goffstown, New Hampshire. April 20, 2006. Accessed June 17, 2007. MP3 podcast.
• Harvey Mansfield, William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Government. Faculty webpage. Department of Government, Harvard University.
• "Harvey Mansfield" NEH website for 2007 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities by Harvey C. Mansfield.
• Ifill, Gwen. "Then and Now: Mansfield". Transcript of interview with Harvey Mansfield. Broadcast on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, September 13, 2002. Accessed June 18, 2007. (Inc. links to streaming video and RealPlayer audio.)
• Video of Stephen Colbert interviewing Harvey Mansfield about Mansfield's book Manliness on The Colbert Report, Comedy Central. Broadcast April 5, 2006. Accessed April 11, 2008. (Caption: "Harvey Mansfield and Stephen collide in a perfect storm of man musk.")
• Works by or about Harvey Mansfield in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Booknotes, December 17, 2000 - Interview with Mansfield on the 2000 University of Chicago Press edition of Democracy in America, which he and his wife, Delba Winthrop, translated and edited. (Audio plays upon load; page includes transcript)
• In Depth interview with Mansfield, September 4, 2005

Coordinates: 53°08′37″N 1°11′47″W / 53.1435°N 1.1963°W / 53.1435; -1.1963

Mansfield
Mansfield marketplace
Mansfield  Mansfield shown within Nottinghamshire
Population	67,885 (2001 Census)
OS grid reference	SK537610
District	Mansfield
Shire county	Nottinghamshire
Region	East Midlands
Country	England
Sovereign state	United Kingdom
Post town	MANSFIELD
Postcode district	NG18, NG19, NG20
Dialling code	01623
Police	Nottinghamshire
Fire	Nottinghamshire
Ambulance	East Midlands
EU Parliament	East Midlands
UK Parliament	Mansfield
List of places: UK • England • Nottinghamshire

Mansfield is a town in Nottinghamshire, England. It is the main town in the Mansfield local government district. Mansfield is a part of the Mansfield Urban Area. The town is surrounded by a pocket of steep hills within the Maun Valley, and has a population of 67,885, with the entire of Mansfield district being 98,181.^[1]

History[link]

Mansfield is thought to date back at least to Roman times, with coins from those times having been found there, as well as a villa. Later the early English royalty are said to have stayed there, the Mercian Kings having used it as a base for hunting in the nearby Sherwood Forest.^[2]

Economy[link]

Mansfield has a large market square and around the market a large commercial centre including a museum, the Palace Theatre and numerous pubs, bars and night clubs. It has also a new indoor market which is nearing completion.

Mansfield was originally the home of Mansfield Brewery, once the largest independent brewer in the UK.^[3] The brewery was acquired by Wolverhampton & Dudley Breweries for £253m in October 1999, with production of the Mansfield range of ales moving to other parts of the country. The brewery's assets were later sold to Pubmaster Ltd and the former site of the brewery is due for redevelopment. In the 1980s, Mansfield Bitter was advertised with a photograph of then US president Ronald Reagan and the tagline "He may be president of the most powerful nation on Earth but he's never had a pint of Mansfield"; "Not much matches Mansfield" was also used. Mansfield was also the location of an Irn-Bru factory, owned by the Scottish drinks company A. G. Barr, production ceased in January 2011 when A. G. Barr decided to close the factory. The brewery was demolished in late 2008 and the land is for sale.

Many of the areas adjacent to the town and it's surrounding countryside still bear the markers Mansfield and district's vibrant mining history. The headstocks which stand close to the village of Clipstone are considered an important landmark to the people of the area, and lots of community groups are working to preserve these headstocks as a reminder of the area's once very busy mining history. Lots of land around the town was once used for coal mining, but as the demand for coal fell, Mansfield's many pits wound down and mine workers moved into other types of employment. Mining subsidance has caused some problems with properties around Mansfield. Lots of the streets in and around the town are long rows of terraced houses, reminiscent of the affordable housing provided for mine workers in the hight of the mining industry.

The Coal Authority is based in the town.

Mansfield has many retailing outlets and the Four Seasons shopping Centre contains many popular national UK shops such as Primark, HMV and the bookstore W.H. Smith. Costa Coffee has recently opened a shop in Mansfield, bringing a wide array of different coffee based drinks to the town. The economic crisis has led to many Mansfield shops closing and being boarded up, or their windows covered with high resolution digital images resembling library, cafe, pub or other shop scenes. There was once a Woolworths store in the town, which closed as Woolworths went into administration nationwide. The store was very popular with Mansfield residents, and provided entertainment and children's items at competitive prices. A small shop called 'Who's Toys' has recently opened in the town, generating lots of interest from the area's Dr Who fan community. The shop sells various Dr Who items, memorabilia and posters.

Several urban regeneration projects are underway in Mansfield, including reconstruction of the nearby Kings Mill Hospital and the MARR (Mansfield and Ashfield Regeneration Route) which was completed 3 months early; it is basically a bypass route round the town designed to reduce traffic flow and improve public transport.

In 2009 Mansfield made a bid for city status and many more redevelopment plans were unveiled to fit with this, such as retail & residential developments, leisure facilities and road improvements, which are underway around the town.^[4] However the Town was Absent from the 2012 short list.

Market[link]

Mansfield is a market town and has a 700-year old town centre market that operates various stalls on various days of the week. In the centre of the market square there is a buttercross. Due partly to economic struggles and thefts, the market has lost some traders. There are however still many interesting stalls on Mansfield Market, which sell a variety of items such as electronics, household items, entertainment items like music and games, clothing and a couple of greengrocer stalls selling a wide array of fresh produce from the local area. On Tuesdays the market takes on the tone of a flea market selling second hand items and antiques. The flea market is very popular among locals. On the third Tuesday of each month, the market is host to a special farmers market, which sells a wide variety of locally produced produce, such as a large variety of cheeses, cakes, fresh vegetables and fruits grown on local farmland, eggs produced by local farmers and many other farmer's market themed products. On the second Tuesday of each month, there is a charity market, which donates revenue to various charities. Mansfield District Council have created a variety of different markets to provide variety and interest for the town and to draw in visitors from other areas to boost the local economy.

Notable people[link]

The television presenter Adam Kingswood (from BBC TV's The Truth About Property), Richard Bacon and professional golfers Oliver Wilson and Greg Owen come from Mansfield. The singer Alvin Stardust lived there as a child. Radio, Television and West End actor Stephen Critchlow was raised and schooled in Mansfield and pianist John Ogdon was born in the suburb of Mansfield Woodhouse in 1937. Mark Holmes, lead singer of the Canadian New Wave/stadium rock group Platinum Blonde, was born and partly raised there.^[5] Mansfield is also the home of the Cantamus Girls Choir, World Choir Olympics champions. As well as this it also features a thriving music scene with many promising up and coming young artists.

• Richard Bacon - TV Presenter
• Nicholas Crafts - Economic Historian
• Alvin Lee - Ten Years After guitarist
• Robert Kozluk - Barnsley F.C. footballer
• James Perch - Newcastle United F.C. footballer
• Kris Commons - Celtic F.C. footballer
• Craig Disley - Shrewsbury Town F.C. footballer
• Rebecca Adlington - 2008 Olympic swimming gold medalist, 400 m and 800m freestyle, the latter in a new world record time.
• Joe Mills - Green Date singer/guitarist
• John Balance - Coil singer/musician
• Wes Dolan - Actor and Singer/Songwriter
• Sam Hynd - Paralympic Gold medalist 400 m freestyle and Bronze medalist in the 200 m Individual Medley^[6]
• John Bainbridge Webster - Chair of Systematic Theology at King's College, University of Aberdeen

The ancestral home of Lord Byron, Newstead Abbey, is located not far away in Ravenshead.

• Liam Lawrence - Former Mansfield Town footballer, now playing for Portsmouth FC in the Championship.
• Robert Dodsley - Playwright, Poet and bookseller. Wrote The King and The Miller of Mansfield and it's sequel, Sir John Cockle, both of which appeared at Drury Lane in 1736 and 1737 respectively.
• William Martin, naturalist, was born in Mansfield in 1767.^[7]

Transport[link]

Buses[link]

Buses in Mansfield are primarily operated by Stagecoach, with Trent Barton, K&H Doyles and National Express also operating in the area. All the operators are investing in transport, with leather seats and air con now becoming a familiar sight. Planning permission has been given to develop a new bus station on the station road car park which is estimated to cost £7 million.^[8][9] The bus station, built in 1977, handles around 1,500 buses and 16,000 passenger arrivals a day. It is the busiest bus station in the county^{[citation needed]} but does not offer an attractive waiting environment and has poor pedestrian links to the town centre. Also, the turning area where busses have to turn to enter and exit the station is outdated and there have been some accidents due to busses backing into one another as they attempt to leave and enter the bays. The new bus station will combat this problem.

The new bus station is currently under construction in Mansfield, which will provide a new location for the town's main bus terminus, and will become part of a regeneration scheme known as the 'Gateway To Mansfield', which will give visitors to the town a clean, tidy first impression. These schemes are underway to help improve facilities for locals, boost visitors to the town and help boost the local economy. The new bus station will increase bus and passenger safety, as well as providing a more welcoming scene for visitors from outside the area arriving by bus.

The new bus station is an attempt for redevelopment of the old bus station site to enhance Mansfield town centre and to regenerate the whole of the Stockwell Gate area. Potential improvements could include a fully enclosed waiting area; automatic doors for comfort and safety, a tourist information centre, electronic bus and rail departure information, toilets and baby changing facilities, tower with lift and stairs to an elevated walkway connecting to the rail station and bus driver's facilities.

Road[link]

The town is the northern terminus of the A38, which runs from Bodmin in Cornwall and is the longest 'A' road entirely within England. Mansfield can be reached in around 10 min from junctions 27, 28 and 29 of the M1 and is around 18 mi from the A1 at neighbouring Newark-on-Trent.

Railway[link]

Mansfield railway station is a stop on the Robin Hood Line, a rail link connecting the town with Nottingham and Worksop. From 1964 until the opening of the line in 1995, Mansfield was, by some definitions, the largest town in Britain without a railway station,^[10] all the more remarkable because the town pioneered the railway in the East Midlands. From 1973 to 1995 the nearby station at Alfreton was named 'Alfreton and Mansfield Parkway' to encourage its use as a railhead for Mansfield. A Sunday rail service was restored to Mansfield in December 2008 - the town having been one of the largest on the rail network without one.

The town was originally the terminus of the Mansfield and Pinxton Railway, built as a horse-drawn plateway in 1819 and one of the first acquisitions of the newly-formed Midland Railway.^[10] The Midland used the final section to extend its new Leen Valley line to the present station in 1849.

The Midland Railway extended its Rolleston Junction - Southwell branch to Mansfield in 1871, continued the line north of Mansfield to Worksop in 1875, opened a link from Mansfield Woodhouse to Westhouses & Blackwell in 1886, and completed another link from Pleasley through Bolsover to Barrow Hill in 1890. Mansfield had become a railway centre of some importance, but it was a Midland Railway centre.

The Midland Railway monopoly was broken by the locally promoted Mansfield Railway between Kirkby South Junction and Clipstone Junctions opened in stages between 1913 and 1916 for goods trains and in 1917 for Nottingham - Ollerton passenger trains calling at a second Mansfield passenger station. Although nominally independent, the Mansfield Railway connected with the Great Central Railway at both ends and trains were worked by the Great Central. ^[11]

Thus Mansfield had two railway stations: Mansfield Town, the former Midland station on Station Road, near Belvedere Street and Mansfield Central, the former Mansfield Railway station on Great Central Road, near Ratcliffe Gate. Central station lost its scheduled passenger services at the beginning of 1956 and Town station closed to passengers in 1964 leaving Mansfield without any passenger trains until the Robin Hood line restored the service in 1995.

A tram service operated between 1905 and 1932, run by Mansfield & District Light Railways.

Sport[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

Mansfield is home to Mansfield Town F.C., known as the Stags. They were relegated to the Conference National after 77 years in the Football League at the end of the 2007–08 season. The team's traditional rival is the nearby town of Chesterfield in Derbyshire. The rivalry between the two clubs is considered among the fiercest in the lower leagues. Some Yorkshire (and Derbyshire) folk still associate Mansfield with failure to support the UK miners' strike (1984–1985); football matches between Mansfield Town: Barnsley, Rotherham United, Doncaster Rovers and Chesterfield and have seen fans of the latter chant "scab". Before the strike, Mansfield Town and Chesterfield FC fans could stand in relative harmony on the terraces (this is no-longer the case).

Mansfield Giants are Mansfield’s Premier Basketball Club, and have a 3 star Accreditation and Club Mark from the English Sports Council. Giants play in the England Basketball (EB2)

Angling is well supported in the Mansfield district, where ponds remain from the former textile milling industry. Tennis there is Mansfield Lawn Tennis Club. It has 4 grass courts and 5 hard courts.

Mansfield is one of the three outlets of the Nottinghamshire County Council Swim Squad, who compete as Nova Centurion. The Sherwood Swimming Baths in Mansfield Woodhouse are, as of 2008, being refurbished and likely to re-open in 2009 as the Rebecca Adlington Swimming Centre in September 2009.

During the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, a Mansfield local called Rebecca Adlington won two gold medels for 800 meter freestyle swimming. Rebecca's record breaking success in Beijing lead to her being welcomed home to Mansfield in an open top bus parade. Thousands of people took to the streets around the town to welcome her home. Her success has boosted interest in swimming in the area, leading to many more swimming schemes being set up in the Mansfield area to encourage young people to begin swimming. The Sherwood Baths swimming baths has since been renamed and reopened as the Rebecca Adlington Swimming Center.

Mansfield is home to the Water Meadows swimming complex, situated on Bath Lane, which hosts a gym alongside two swimming pools. It has the very popular wave machine, which operates in the shallow pool and gives the swimmers the experience of waves, similar to swimming in an ocean. Water Meadows is extremely popular as a school swimming baths, many schools, both from inside and outside the Mansfield area regularly come to the town to access the facilities offered at Water Meadows.

Parks[link]

Mansfield has many parks and areas of green land. Titchfield Park, located on the same site as the Water Meadows swimming complex, is home to a large grassy area which covers two sides of the river Maun, joined by two bridges in the park. The park boasts a bowls green, basketball court, children's play area and many flowerbeds which are filled with blooms during the summer months.

Fisher Lane Park, located at the top of Littleworth outside the town, is an area of green land that is popular with dog walkers, kite flyers and skaters. Mansfield District Council installed a concrete skate plaza on Fisher Lane Park, causing some controversy with locals. However, the skate plaza has proven to be very popular with local youths, who access it daily. During the summer months, small fairs use Fisher Lane Park to set up some rides and stalls for local children.

Carr Bank Park is another park close to the town, which has a rocky 'grotto', bandstand and many flower beds, which are filled with blooms during the summer.

Entertainment[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

Palace Theatre[link]

The Palace Theatre is located on Leeming Street and is the town's primary entertainment venues. Built as a cinema in 1910, it was originally known as the Palace Electric Theatre and was later adapted to a proscenium arch theatre presenting live shows. It has also been known as the Civic Hall and Civic Theatre before the current name was revived in the 1990s. With a seating capacity of 534, the theatre is a mid scale touring venue presenting a programme of both professional and amateur productions.It features lots of productions such as pantomimes,dance shows,plays and award ceremoneys.

Mansfield is also home to multi-award winning theatre company 'Shadow Syndicate'. 'Shadow Syndicate' is a contemporary theatre group situated in Nottinghamshire, based at the Manor Academy. Founded in 2009, Shadow Syndicate have performed many shows and have performed at a variety of locations and performance spaces. Shadow Syndicate work alongside scripted and self-devised material. The company have been regulars at the Buxton Festival Fringe since their beginning in 2009 resulting in 5 award nominations including, Best Young drama production and Best Young actor. The cast of Shadow Syndicate alternates between productions giving various individuals the opportunity to perform on a professional stage. The company have had the honour of working with various professional writers, actors and the National Theatre.

Mansfield Museum[link]

Mansfield Museum is situated alongside the Palace Theatre on Leeming Street. It opened in 1904 and has been based on Leeming Street from 1938. There is no entry fee for this museum and the museum attracts around 40,000 visitors each year. This museum has won a number of awards including the Guardian Family-friendly Museum of the Year Award in recent years.^{[citation needed]}

The Old library Venue & Media Centre[link]

The Old library Venue & Media Centre is a multi-media centre located in the centre of Mansfield, Nottinghamshire. It houses a state of the art recording studio along with a 100 seat Studio Theatre, Cafe/Bar and other working spaces.

Intake Club[link]

The Intake Club is a music venue located on Kirkland Avenue in Mansfield town centre. The venue has a public bar, function room and a gig room with a stage and capacity for 450 patrons. The full capacity of the Venue is 700. A number of leading bands have played at the club including Deathstars, Fightstar, Witchfynde, Hayseed Dixie, Hardcore Superstar, Wishbone Ash, The Hamsters, John Parr, Ade Edmondson, Tygers of Pan Tang and Vampires Rock. The club also caters for more local bands. The club also hosted the annual CAMRA Mansfield Beer Festival.

Town Mill[link]

The Town Mill was a Mansfield music venue that was converted from the original mill of Mansfield. The Town Mill re-opened its doors on July 5, 2002 with the UK Subs being the first band on the opening night. Leading bands that have played the venue include Jamie T, INME, Wheatus, cide project The Levellers, The Bluetones, B-Movie, Dr Feelgood, The Futureheads, The Wildhearts, Midge Ure, Does It Offend You, Yeah?, Hadouken! The Wombats, The Species, RockMelon and Battlecat!, in the seven years it was open. The venue also had local, unsigned bands playing regularly and hosted an annual "Battle of the Bands". The Town Mill closed on 4 December 2010. A failed attempt was made to reopen The Town Mill by a community interest company consisting of former patrons. So far the venue remains closed.

Sherwood Forest[link]

Just a few miles outside of Mansfield lies Sherwood Forest. Mansfield had an Oak Tree and a plaque to mark what was the centre of Sherwood Forest on West Gate. Now the trees have been taken down and a giant metallic feather has replaced them as a marker. Some residents of the town feel this is an eyesore, and the feather sculpture has been plagued by health and safety problems.

Summer In The Streets[link]

Every year between the months of June & August, Mansfield District Council hosts an event called Summer In The Streets. This festival consists of various public events held all over the town over many days, such as children's entertainment, fairground rides in the market square, hands on workshops for things like crafts & circus skills. The highlight of the festival is an event held in the town's Titchfield park, called 'Party In The Park'. This hosts a wide range of entertainment, such as live music acts by local bands, performances from local dance groups and activities such as face painting.

On August the 21st 2010 as a part of various summer entertainment set on by Mansfield District Council, the popular Irish boyband Westlife played a live concert at Mansfield's Field Mill Stadium, home to the town's football team, the Stags. This is the first big name to visit the town, and it is suggested the act brought a lot of visitors and financial benefits to Mansfield.

Odeon Cinema[link]

Mansfield has a large cinema run by Odeon Cinemas. The theatre screens most new release films, and hosts special days for children, older people and the hearing/visually impaired.

Venue 44[link]

Venue 44 was a nightclub that had various names prior to being renamed 44 in 1992. It was organised by Geoff Oakes and Hacienda based DJ Sasha to become a 'new Rave/Dance club'. They named it Renaissance which was to become a worldwide superclub until the Renaissance name went into administration in 2010. With its capacity of around 1000 on two floors, it quickly became the top Dance Club in the UK, with clubbers attending from every part of the UK. Many top DJ's played sets there and they could often be seen drinking in pubs and bars in the town beforehand. Venue 44, was also home to Vibealite, Hot To Trot and Arcana. The building itself stood empty for years after the club nights moved elsewhere and was eventually demolished in 2011.

Making It Discovery Centre[link]

The Making It Discovery Centre is situated on Littleworth. It provides an array of science and technology activities and experiences aimed at primary age schoolchildren. Making It is popular as a school trip destination, with many schools travelling in from outside the area to access this facility. The Making It Discovery Centre is housed in what was the main entrance for the former Mansfield Brewery. Making It also hosts a small cafe which sells drinks and snacks.

Rush Nightclub[link]

Rush is one of Mansfield's existing nightspots, catering for pop, rave, dance, house, trance and other urban music styles. The club has two resident DJs, DJ Ratus and DJ O.B.

Media[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

The local newspaper is the Chad (Formerly Chronicle Advertiser). Mansfield is home to one radio station, Mansfield 103.2 broadcast from the Fishpond Hill transmitting station on Skegby Lane which also broadcasts Mansfield versions of the Nottingham stations Radio Nottingham and Capital FM on 95.5 and 96.5 FM respectively.

DAB broadcasts from Fishpond's Hill began on 21 July 2006 with the NOW Nottingham multiplex, subsequently the Digital One and BBC National muxes were also added (during 2006-07) to give excellent digital radio reception across the town.

Television reception in Mansfield however is a different story. Television reception has often been poor due to the location of the town being between regions. Historically Mansfield has been part of the BBC North and Yorkshire Television region. Between 20 December 1965 and 30 July 1974 some homes in Mansfield received Anglia Television (until Belmont began transmitting Yorkshire Television).

Since the arrival of Diamond Cable (formerly ntl, and now Virgin Media) in 1995, BBC East Midlands and Central East were provided and since regionalisation of SKY digital, Mansfield is classified as 'North Midlands', meaning many residents can now watch BBC East Midlands which is the default region for this area and appears on channel 101. Channel 103 shows ITV Yorkshire East.

The Belmont transmitter provides the best reception to most of the town offering analogue and digital TV and is the most frequently used transmitter in the town providing BBC East Yorkshire & Lincolnshire and ITV Yorkshire (East)

Emley Moor is also receivable and in some areas of the town offers better reception than Belmont, providing BBC Yorkshire & North Midlands and Yorkshire Television (West).

While Yorkshire Television's news programme "Calendar" still covers Mansfield, BBC Look North has for many years refused to cover the town, insisting that Mansfield belongs in the BBC East Midlands region (though few homes get acceptable terrestrial reception of BBC East Midlands). This was highlighted when the celebrations for Rebecca Adlington's success at the Beijing olympics, although recorded by East Midlands Today, were shown on both East Midlands Today and Look North so that all Mansfield residents could see them.

Many homes have dual aerials with one pointing at Belmont (or in some places Emley Moor) and the other at Waltham (East Midlands), the latter which usually gives a far inferior picture quality but was often used in the days when ITV had more regional variations so that Mansfield folk could keep up with local news and sport. Dual aerial systems are being removed as they will not work for reception of digital terrestrial TV (until after switchover in 2011), in addition to the East Midlands variations being available through cable and satellite but many still remain from the 1990s and late 1980s.

Other transmitters serving Mansfield include:

Emley Moor- BBC Yorkshire & Yorkshire (West)

Sutton Coldfield- BBC Midlands & Central (West) and

Bilsdale- BBC North East & Tyne Tees (South)

All three transmitters provide good signals across the town, in many cases providing superior reception to Waltham. With the correct aerial it is also possible to pick up Granada Television from Winter Hill, though the picture is usually very poor quality.

During an episode of CBBC's 'Dick n Dom in Da Bungalow', one of their games which consisted of sticking pictures of themselves on the backs of members of the public, was broadcast from West Gate in Mansfield.

Politics[link]

Mansfield is notable for being one of the few towns in the United Kingdom with a directly-elected Mayor. Tony Egginton has been the Mayor of Mansfield since 17 October 2002

Alan Meale (born Joseph Alan Meale) has been the Labour constituent Member of Parliament since 1987. Prior to this, Mr. Meale had been a member of the Socialist Campaign Group.

Criticisms[link]

D. H. Lawrence, in Lady Chatterley's Lover, described Mansfield as "that once romantic now utterly disheartening colliery town".^[12]

The 2005 and 2007 editions of Channel 4's programme The Best and Worst Places to Live in the UK named Mansfield as the sixth and ninth worst place to live in Britain, largely due to the poor performance of schools in the area at the time.^[13]

Twin towns[link]

• Mansfield, Ohio, United States

• Mansfield, Massachusetts, United States
• Mansfieldtown, Ireland
• Heiligenhaus, Germany
• Reutov, Russia
• Stryi, Ukraine

Neighbouring cities, towns and villages[link]

Destinations from Mansfield

	Sheffield, Chesterfield, Bolsover, Glapwell, Pleasley	Worksop, Shirebrook, Warsop, Mansfield Woodhouse	Gainsborough, Retford, Ollerton, Clipstone, Edwinstowe
	Matlock, Teversal, Skegby		Rainworth, Bilsthorpe, Lincoln
		Mansfield    East
	Sutton-in-Ashfield, Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Eastwood, Heanor, Derby	Ravenshead, Newstead, Hucknall, Nottingham	Blidworth, Southwell, Newark-on-Trent, Grantham

Climate[link]

Mansfield experiences a maritime climatic regime, as is typical for all parts of the British Isles. This results in a narrow temperature range, evenly spread rainfall, low levels of sunshine, and often breezy conditions throughout the year. The closest weather station to Mansfield for which records are available is Warsop, approximately 4 miles to the North of Mansfield town centre.

The absolute maximum temperature record for the area stands at 34.6c(94.3f),^[14] recorded in August 1990. In a typical year the warmest day should reach 28.9c(84.0f),^[15] and 12.72 days^[16] should reach 25.1c(77.2f) or higher.

The absolute minimum temperature record for the area is -19.1c(-2.4f),^[17] recorded during January 1987. 59.0 nights of the year report an air frost on average.

Rainfall averages 634mm^[18] annually, with 113 days^[19] reporting in excess of 1mm of rain. All averages refer to the observation period 1971-2000.

See also[link]

• Mansfield Town F.C.
• Cantamus Girls Choir
• Portland College
• St. Peter and St. Paul's Church, Mansfield
• St. John's Church, Mansfield
• St. Mark's Church, Mansfield
• A Spire for Mansfield

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official site
• Mansfield regeneration site
• Palace Theatre official site
• Mansfield and District University of the Third Age
• Local Mansfield Online Community
• The Brunts School, in Mansfield

Leon Richard Kass (born February 12, 1939) is an American physician, scientist, educator, and public intellectual, best known as proponent of liberal education via the "Great Books," as an opponent of human cloning and euthanasia, as a critic of certain areas of technological progress and embryo research, and for his controversial tenure as chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005. Although Kass is often referred to as a bioethicist,^[1] he eschews the term and refers to himself as "an old-fashioned humanist. A humanist is concerned broadly with all aspects of human life, not just the ethical."^[2]

Kass is currently the Addie Clark Harding Professor in the College and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and the Hertog Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His books include Toward A More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs; The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of our Nature; Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics; and The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis.

Early life and education[link]

Kass was born in Chicago to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. He described his family as "Yiddish speaking, secular, socialist."^[3] Although his upbringing was not religious, it was moralist: "Morality, not Judaism, was the religion of our home, morality colored progressively pink with socialism, less on grounds of Marxist theory, more out of zeal for social justice and human dignity."^[4] He would not begin to explore his religious heritage until later in his career

Kass enrolled in the University of Chicago at age 15, graduating from the College with a degree in biology in 1958. The College was well known for its extensive core curriculum, and Kass studied the "great books" then prescribed by Chicago's core. "I became a devotee of liberal education . . . with a special fondness for the Greeks."^[4] He graduated from the University of Chicago's medical school in 1962 and, following an internship in medicine at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, completed a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Harvard University in 1967, working in the laboratory of Nobel laureate Konrad Bloch.^[5]

In 1961, Kass married the former Amy Apfel, a fellow graduate of the College of the University of Chicago. As instructors in the College in later years, they would frequently teach seminars together.^[6] Their scholarly collaborations include several articles on marriage and courtship and a reader on the subject.^[7] (The Kasses have two married daughters and four granddaughters; they reside in Chicago and Washington.)

Leon and Amy Kass went to Holmes County, Mississippi, in 1965 to do civil rights work. The character of the rural, poor, and uneducated African Americans with whom they lived and worked contrasted with his colleagues at Harvard and other elite universities. It was this experience, he later said, that

caused me to shed my enlightenment faith and ultimately begin a journey in which Jewish thought would ultimately come to play a more prominent part. Why, I wondered then, was there more honor, decency, and dignity among the impoverished and ignorant but church-going black farmers with whom we had lived than among my privileged and educated fellow graduate students at Harvard, whose progressive opinions I shared but whose self-absorption and self-indulgence put me off. If poverty and superstition were the cause of bad character, how to explain this?^[4]

First forays into bioethics[link]

After completing his doctorate, Kass conducted molecular biology research for the National Institutes of Health, authoring several scientific papers^[8] while serving in the U.S. Public Health Service. His early interest in bioethics was stimulated by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, both of which he read at the suggestion of Harvey Flaumenhaft. In these books, Kass saw examples of "how the scientific project to master nature could, if we are not careful, lead to our dehumanization, via eugenics, drug-induced contentment, and other transformations of human nature, possibilities already foreseeable in the new biology. . . . Will man remain a creature made in the image of God, aspiring to align himself with the divine, or will he become an artifact created by man in the image of God-knows-what, fulfilling the aspirations only of human will? . . . I soon shifted my career from doing science to thinking about its human meaning."^[4]

In 1967, Kass read an article by Joshua Lederberg suggesting that humans could one day be cloned, permitting the perpetuation of the genotypes of geniuses.^[9] In a letter to the editor, Kass made a moral case against cloning and suggested that "the programmed reproduction of man will, in fact, dehumanize him."^[5] Thus began a second career of writing on bioethics, including essays on organ transplantation, genetic screening, in vitro fertilization, cloning, the conquest of aging, assisted suicide, medical ethics, and biotechnology. Kass was also involved in founding the Hastings Center. In 1970, he left the laboratory at NIH to become the executive director of the Committee on Life Sciences and Social Policy at the National Research Council of the National Academy of Science, which produced the first public document that tried to assess the ethical and social consequences of the coming advances in biotechnology.^[10]

Teaching experience[link]

As he moved from biology to bioethics, Kass also moved from full-time research into teaching, first at St. John's College from 1972 to 1976, Georgetown University from 1974 to 1976, and at Chicago from 1976 onward. At St. John's, Kass taught in the Great Books program as well as in-depth studies of Aristotle's De Anima and Nicomachean Ethics and Darwin's On the Origin of Species. At the University of Chicago, Kass taught courses across the humanities and sciences, including both undergraduate and graduate seminars in the Nicomachean Ethics, Plato's Symposium and Meno, Lucretius, human passions, science and society, Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Genesis, Darwinism, Descartes's Discourse on the Method, classical geometry, Tolstoy's War and Peace, marriage and courtship, Exodus, and biotechnology.

Along with his wife and other colleagues, Kass cofounded in 1977 the "Human Being and Citizen" common core course at Chicago, today the most popular humanities core course at Chicago, devoted to the question of what is an excellent human being and what an excellent citizen.^[11] In 1983, he, Allan Bloom, and James M. Redfield founded the "Fundamentals: Issues and Texts" program. Kass taught in and chaired this program for eighteen years. He won the University of Chicago's Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1983 and the Amoco Foundation Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Teaching in 1993.^[8]

"The president's philosopher"[link]

As the stem cell controversy brewed in the late 1990s and into 2001, President George W. Bush had to decide whether to allow federal funding for research on stem cells derived from embryos. Many scientists were advocating the removal of limits on embryonic stem cell research, but critics expressed concern about they characterized as the wanton destruction of human life. In an August 2001 speech, Bush announced that he would support funding research on stem cell lines already created--"where the life and death decision has already been made"--but not on lines created by the further destruction of embryos. And because "[e]mbryonic stem cell research is at the leading edge of a series of moral hazards," Bush said, he would create the President's Council on Bioethics, to be led by Kass and with a mandate to "monitor stem cell research, to recommend appropriate guidelines and regulations, and to consider all of the medical and ethical ramifications of biomedical innovation."^[12] As the council was appointed and prepared to begin meeting in early 2002, Kass received a great deal of media attention, especially due to his reputation for pessimism and concern about the moral implications of scientific progress with respect to health and life issues. Calling him "the president's philosopher," U.S. News and World Report noted that "he tends to dwell on the dark side of modern medicine. . . . Kass has tried to raise the public's consciousness of emerging technology's risks to values that humanity holds dear."^[13] The Council from its inception was charged by Bush to consider these larger questions, well beyond the domain of stem cell research. The first specific task of the Council, according to the executive order creating it, was "to undertake fundamental inquiry into the human and moral significance of developments in biomedical and behavioral science and technology."^[14]

The composition of the Council was also subject to controversy. Kass was accused of "stacking the deck" with philosophers, scientists, and public intellectuals likely to oppose "unfettered medical research in the area of stem cells, therapeutic cloning, and reproductive cloning. Given that fact, researchers had better worry a lot about what the Council is likely to recommend to the president."^[15] Critics also charged that Kass eliminated those who disagreed with him, such as Elizabeth Blackburn and William May, and replacing them with opponents of cloning.^[16][17] Kass replied to these criticisms by saying that the Council was more intellectually diverse than prior bioethics commissions precisely because it included opponents of abortion.^[17] (Previous commissions had "excluded representatives of the right to life movement."^[18]) Also, the council members Robert George, Francis Fukuyama and James Q. Wilson debated with stark disagreement their opposing points of view on the biological status of the human embryo and came to no agreed conclusions.^[19] Since Bush had deliberately created the Council to debate and clarify the issues without necessarily reaching consensus, Kass said that he welcomed disagreement within the Council: "This council is easily the most intellectually and ethically diverse of the bioethics commissions to date. We have worked with mutual respect while not papering over our differences. No one who has attended any of our meetings or read the transcripts can believe that we do anything but serious and careful work, without regard to ideology, partisan politics or religious beliefs."^[20]

The Council has been renewed by executive order every two years since 2001, and the subjects it considered ranged beyond the stem cell battles during which it was established. Kass sought throughout to develop a "richer" bioethics, attentive to larger human and philosophical questions at the root of bioethical dilemmas, and he lamented that the Council was pigeonholed: "The Council came into existence identified as the 'stem cell council,' and people on all sides of the embryo research debate seem to care more about the Council's views on this subject than about anything else. Not by our choice--and certainly not by mine--the Council was born smack in the middle of 'embryoville,' and it has never been able to leave this highly political field."^[21] Despite the public's narrow conception of its work, during Kass's chairmanship, the Council produced five book-length reports, a white paper, and a humanistic reader on ten topics generally neglected in the bioethics literature.^[22]

Kass described the Council's work as "public bioethics," rejecting previous approaches that favored government by self-appointed "experts"--scientific or bioethical—and presenting the issues in terms accessible to the broader public and its political representatives. He sought a "richer" inquiry that debates "ends as well as means," and the Council's reports addressed larger human questions, "not merely administrative or regulatory ones." He said that it presented all sides of ethical issues in order to create a more substantive moral discourse. "A proper bioethics must lead public reflection on the ways in which new biotechnologies may affect those things that matter most regarding how human lives are lived," Kass wrote. "This means beginning by reflecting upon the highest human goods and understanding the latest technological advances in this light."^[21] Eschewing much of the language and theoretical framework of academic bioethics,^[17] Kass drew on literary, philosophical, and theological sources to inform the Council's discussion. At the Council's first meeting, he led a discussion of "The Birth-Mark," a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne.^[13]

Kass stepped down as chairman of the Council in October 2005 and remained a member of the Council until 2007.^[23] He returned to positions at the American Enterprise Institute and the University of Chicago.

Views on bioethics[link]

Biotechnology and medical enhancement[link]

While welcoming biotechnology for its therapeutic promise—to cure disease, relieve suffering, and to restore health and wholeness—Kass worries about its uses for enhancement (boosting capability beyond what is given naturally and even and altering human nature). While biotechnology offers great promise for health care, it has applications for "many other ends, good ones and bad." Biotechnology can be employed to produce "better children, superior performance, ageless bodies, and happy souls." Kass argues that biotechnology may eventually be used as a substitute for virtue, hard work, study, or love in order to "fulfill our deepest human desires," but in the end lowering the reach of those desires only to those objects that can be realized technologically .^[24] His worries about biotechnology stem from what he calls "the technological disposition," which transforms the meaning and character of human life by believing that "all aspects of life can be rationally mastered through technique."^[25]

Stem cell research[link]

Kass has been a consistent critic of embryo research, including embryonic stem cell research, because of its "exploitation" and "destruction" of nascent human life. Although he claims to be agnostic about the moral standing of an early human embryo, he worries about treating human life, at whatever stage, merely as a natural resource. "There is something deeply repugnant and fundamentally transgressive about such a utilitarian treatment of prospective human life," he writes.^[26] But because he recognized the potential of such cells for medical research, he led the President's Council on Bioethics to examine alternative avenues of obtaining pluripotent stem cells: "Pluripotent cells might be obtainable from already dead (not just unwanted or doomed but actually dead) embryos, some of whose individual cells might nonetheless still be viable; from living embryos by nondestructive biopsy; from bioengineered, embryo-like artifacts; and from reprogrammed body cells, taken from children or adults, that are induced to return to the undifferentiated state of pluripotency. . . . We should be hopeful that a technological solution to our moral dilemma might soon be found and that this divisive piece of our recent political history will soon come to an end."^[27]

In 2007, in two separate studies, research teams led by James Thomson and Shinya Yamanaka created induced pluripotent stem cells from adult cells, meaning that the destruction of embryos for stem cells might no longer be necessary. In 2009, the reprogramming technique was further improved, as skin cells were returned to pluripotency by the transfer of a few exogeneous genes and without the use of foreign viruses as vectors.^[28] Robert P. George praised Kass as the driving intellectual force against embryo-killing and in favor of finding alternative methods of obtaining pluripotent stem cells: "All along, it was Dr. Kass who said that reprogramming methods would, if pursued vigorously, enable us to realize the full benefits of stem cell science while respecting human dignity."^[29]

Human cloning[link]

Kass supports a universal ban on the cloning of humans on the grounds that cloning is an affront to morality and human dignity. In a 1997 article in The New Republic entitled "The Wisdom of Repugnance," Kass suggests that we should respect the revulsion most people feel about cloning human beings, just as we respect their supposed revulsion at incest and cannibalism. "In crucial cases," he writes, "repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power fully to articulate it." Kass writes that modern ethical discourse, which emphasizes autonomy, equity, and utility, fails to provide the moral guidance that the modern world demands:

Repugnance, here as elsewhere, revolts against the excesses of human willfulness, warning us not to transgress what is unspeakably profound. Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.

A society that tolerates cloning, Kass writes, "has forgotten how to shudder [and] always rationalizes away the abominable. A society that allows cloning has, whether it knows it or not, tacitly said yes to converting procreation into manufacture and to treating our children as pure projects of our will."^[26][30]

Yet, contrary to the claims of his critics, Kass’s moral views do not rely solely on feelings, and he advances multiple arguments against cloning babies, all centering on his concern for children, family ties, and the dignity of human procreation. He argues that cloning constitutes an "unethical experiment upon the resulting child-to-be"; creates confusions of identity and individuality; "turns begetting into making"; and, by giving parents control over a child's genetic make-up, exacerbates the "dangerous" idea of parental control over children's lives and prospects. "One must never forget that these are human beings upon whom our eugenic or merely playful fantasies are to be enacted," he writes.^[26][30]

A concern for "the natural"[link]

Although he appreciates that human beings are always modifying what is naturally given, Kass worries about the lack of standards for human life in a world in which human nature is treated as utterly malleable and in which the boundaries of human life are all eroded. Kass places "special value on the natural human cycle of birth, procreation and death" and views death as a "necessary and desirable end" and the human and human aspirations that are derived from it. He views human mortality as a blessing in disguise, and he has opposed deliberate efforts to increase maximum human life expectancy in pursuit of bodily immortality.^[31] Kass was an early critic of the widespread use of reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization, partly because he was concerned that their use obscures truths about the essence of human life and society that are embedded in the natural reproductive process. (He later endorsed the marital use of in vitro after Louise Brown was born in 1978.^[32][33])

Kass sees human cloning as a natural progression from the decoupling of sex and procreation, begun with in vitro fertilization: "Cloning turns out to be the perfect embodiment of the ruling opinions of our new age. Thanks to the sexual revolution, we are able to deny in practice, and increasingly in thought, the inherent procreative teleology of sexuality itself. But, if sex has no intrinsic connection to generating babies, babies need have no necessary connection to sex. . . . For that new dispensation, the clone is the ideal emblem: the ultimate 'single-parent child.'"^[30] As in his other writings, Kass emphasizes the connection of reproduction to marriage and family life: "No child conceived with the aid of assisted reproductive technologies should be denied the lineage and biological ties to two parents that all children born 'naturally' have. No child should have to say, 'An embryo was my father.'"^[2]

Philosophical studies[link]

For much of his career, Kass's scholarship moved away from the practical issues of bioethics to issues of human nature and human good, and nearly all of his teaching at Chicago has been about these topics. Yet despite his stated interest in "the natural," Kass does not hold to any traditional teaching of "natural law," and he does not derive any moral rules from nature. Rather, he sees human nature as offering, at most, intimations and "pointings" toward human flourishing and human fulfillment, but pointings in need of both cultural encouragement and cultural restraint if humans are to become the upright animal advertised in his special posture.^[34][35]

Biblical studies[link]

In addition to his studies in natural philosophy and philosophical anthropology, Kass has in recent years been teaching and writing about the Hebrew Bible, especially the book of Genesis. In his 2009 Jefferson Lecture, Kass said that he found in the Bible "an account of human life that can more than hold its own with the anthropological and ethical teachings offered by the great poets and philosophers," with "teachings of righteousness, humaneness, and human dignity . . . that were undreamt of in my prior philosophizing."^[36] Kass reads the text philosophically, not theologically, in the belief that this text, thoughtfully read, has much to teach everyone—believers and non-believers alike—about the human condition and how it may be improved. His full lengthy commentary on Genesis, based on his teaching of the text over twenty years, is addressed primarily to the "children of skeptics" (such as himself). He concludes:

Long dwelling with the book of Genesis, and ever marveling at its beauty, its profundity, and, above all, its power to illuminate and lift the soul, this exhilarated reader of Genesis stands before it on his intellectual knees, filled with awe and gratitude for a text that makes such insights possible. I dare to hope that, with my book as a companion, other wisdom-seeking readers may enjoy a similar experience.

Philosophical influences[link]

• Aldous Huxley
• Hans Jonas
• Jacob Klein
• C. S. Lewis
• Adolf Portmann
• Paul Ramsey
• Kurt Riezler
• Erwin Straus
• Leo Strauss

Honors and awards[link]

Kass was named the 2009 Jefferson Lecturer by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Jefferson Lecture is "the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual and public achievement in the humanities."^[37] Kass's lecture, delivered at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C. on May 21, 2009. was entitled "Looking for an Honest Man: Reflections of an Unlicensed Humanist".^[36] In his lecture, he expressed the view that science has become separated from its humanistic origins and the humanities have lost their connection to metaphysical and theological concerns.^[38]

In addition to his teaching awards from the University of Chicago, Kass also received the Harvard Centennial Medal and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's Gerhard Niemeyer Award in 2003 and the inaugural Bradley Prize from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in 2004. He has been given honorary degrees by the University of Dallas (1997), the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies (2001), Carthage College (2002), and Yeshiva University (2003).^[8] Kass is a fellow of the Hastings Center.

Selected bibliography[link]

Books[link]

• Leon R. Kass. The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis. New York: Free Press, 2003. (ISBN 0-7432-4299-8)
• ———. Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002. (ISBN 1-893554-55-4)
• Amy A. Kass and Leon R. Kass, eds. Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying. South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000. (ISBN 0-268-01960-6)
• Leon R. Kass and James Q. Wilson. The Ethics of Human Cloning. Washington: AEI Press, 1998. (ISBN 0-8447-4050-0)
• Leon R. Kass. The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. (ISBN 0-226-42568-1)
• ———. Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs. New York: Free Press, 1985. (ISBN 0-02-918340-5)
• Kass, Amy A., Leon R. Kass, and Diana Schaub. "What So Proudly We Hail, The American Soul In Story, Speech, And Song". Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2012. (ISBN 1610170067)

Articles and lectures[link]

• Leon R. Kass. "Science, Religion, and the Human Future." Commentary (2007): 36-48.
• Leon R. Kass and Eric Cohen. "'Cast Me Not Off in Old Age.'" Commentary (2006).
• Leon R. Kass. "Ageless Bodies, Happy Souls: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Perfection." The New Atlantis 1 (2003): 9-28
• ———. Foreword. In Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry, report of the President's Council on Bioethics. New York: PublicAffairs, 2002. (ISBN 1-58648-176-2)
• ———. "The Wisdom of Repugnance: Why We Should Ban the Cloning of Human Beings." The New Republic (June 2, 1997).
• ———. "The End of Courtship." The Public Interest 126 (1997): 39-63.
• ———. "Living Dangerously: Am I My (Foolish) Brother's Keeper?" Bradley Lecture, American Enterprise Institute, Washington, March 14, 1994.
• ———. "The Ethical Dimensions of In Vitro Fertilization." American Enterprise Institute, 1979.

Criticism[link]

Pinker: On Eating Ice Cream in Public[link]

Steven Pinker, in "The Stupidity of Dignity"^[39] published in The New Republic, criticised the President's Council on Bioethics 2008 document 'Human Dignity and Bioethics', and ridiculed Kass for the position that people should not eat ice cream cones because it undermined their 'dignity'.

Kass has a problem [...] with the modern conception of freedom. There is a "mortal danger," he [ie Kass] writes, in the notion "that a person has a right over his body, a right that allows him to do whatever he wants to do with it." He is troubled by cosmetic surgery, by gender reassignment, and by women who postpone motherhood or choose to remain single in their twenties. Sometimes his fixation on dignity takes him right off the deep end:

"Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone--a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. ... Eating on the street--even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat--displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. ... Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. ... This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior."

The problem is that "dignity" is a squishy, subjective notion, hardly up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it. The bioethicist Ruth Macklin [...] argued that bioethics has done just fine with the principle of personal autonomy--the idea that, because all humans have the same minimum capacity to suffer, prosper, reason, and choose, no human has the right to impinge on the life, body, or freedom of another. This is why informed consent serves as the bedrock of ethical research and practice, and it clearly rules out the kinds of abuses that led to the birth of bioethics in the first place [...] Once you recognize the principle of autonomy, Macklin argued, "dignity" adds nothing.

See also[link]

• President's Council on Bioethics
• Brave New World argument
• Wisdom of repugnance

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Leon Kass

• Leon Kass's profile at the Committee on Social Thought's website
• Kass's profile at the American Enterprise Institute's website
• Kass's profile at the President's Council on Bioethics website

References[link]

Richard Brookhiser (born February 23, 1955) is an American journalist, biographer and historian. He is a senior editor at National Review. He is most widely known for a series of biographies of America's founders, including Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, and George Washington.

Life and career[link]

Brookhiser was born in Rochester, New York.^[1] His father worked for Eastman Kodak in Rochester and was a lieutenant in the Army Air Corps during World War II.^[2] He has written books that deal either with the nation's founding, or the principles of America's founders, including What Would the Founders Do?, a book describing how the founding fathers would approach topical issues that generate controversy in modern-day America.

Brookhiser began writing for National Review in 1970. "My first article, on antiwar protests in my high school, was a cover story in National Review in 1970, when I was 15." ^[3] He earned an A.B. degree (1977) at Yale,^[1] where he was active in the Yale Political Union as a member and sometime Chairman of the Party of the Right. In his freshman year he took a class on Thomas Jefferson taught by Garry Wills. Although admitted to Yale Law School, Brookhiser went to work full-time for National Review in 1977; by the time he was 23, he was a senior editor, the youngest in the magazine's history. He was selected as the successor to the magazine's founder, William F. Buckley, until Buckley ultimately changed his mind. For a short time he wrote speeches for Vice President George H.W. Bush.

He has written for a variety of magazines and newspapers. Brookhiser's work has appeared in the "Talk of the Town" section of The New Yorker magazine as well as in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Cosmopolitan, The Atlantic Monthly, Time, and Vanity Fair. In 1987 he began a column for The New York Observer which he wrote until 2007.

Brookhiser both wrote and hosted the documentary films Rediscovering George Washington, by Michael Pack, broadcast on PBS on July 4, 2002,^[3] and Rediscovering Alexander Hamilton, also by Pack, broadcast on PBS on April 11, 2011. He was historian curator of the exhibition "Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America", at The New-York Historical Society (2004–2005). He received an honorary doctorate degree in 2005 from Washington College.^[3] As of October 2003, he was driving a '77 Camaro.^[4]

In 2008, President George W. Bush awarded Brookhiser the National Humanities Medal in a White House ceremony.

Cancer and marijuana use[link]

Brookhiser became ill with testicular cancer in 1992 and smoked marijuana in order to remove the nausea that chemotherapy gave him. (Before that, he smoked marijuana in college about 10 times, he said.)^[5]

"Because of the marijuana, my last two courses of chemotherapy were almost nausea-free", he said in 1996. "My cancer is gone now, I was lucky."^[5]

On March 6, 1996, he testified before a Congressional committee about using marijuana, urging the committee members to support decriminalization of marijuana for medical purposes.^[5]

"My support for medical marijuana is not a contradiction of my principles, but an extension of them", Brookhiser told the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime. "I am for law and order. But crime has to be fought intelligently and the law disgraces itself when it harasses the sick. I am for traditional virtues, but if carrying your beliefs to unjust ends is not moral, it is philistine."^[5]

Personal[link]

He lives in Manhattan^[5] with his wife, Jeanne Safer, a psychotherapist and author, most recently, of The Normal One.^[6] They also have a home in Ulster County in the Catskills. They married September 12, 1980.^[1]

Books[link]

• James Madison, 304 pages (Basic Books: 2011) ISBN 0-465-01983-8
• Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement, 272 pages (Basic Books: 2009) ISBN 978-0-465-01355-5
• George Washington on Leadership, 269 pages (Basic Books: 2008) ISBN 978-0-465-00302-0
• What Would the Founders Do?: Our Questions, Their Answers, 261 pages (Basic Books: 2006) ISBN 0-465-00819-4 Contents links.
• Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution, 272 pages (Free Press: 2003) ISBN 0-7432-2379-9
• Rules of Civility: The 110 Precepts That Guided Our First President in War and Peace, 90 pages (University of Virginia Press: 2003) ISBN 0-8139-2218-6
• America's First Dynasty : The Adamses, 1735—1918, 256 pages (Free Press: 2002) ISBN 0-684-86881-4
• George Washington: A National Treasure, 104 pages (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution: 2002) ISBN 0-295-98236-5
• Fighting the Good Fight: A History of the New York Conservative Party, 434 pages (St. Augustine's Press: 2002) ISBN 1-58731-251-4
• (Contributor) Patriot Sage: George Washington and the American Political Tradition, editors Gary L. Gregg, Matthew Spalding, William J. Bennett, 355 pages (ISI Books: 1999) ISBN 1-882926-38-2
• Alexander Hamilton, American, 240 pages (Free Press: 1999) ISBN 0-684-83919-9
• Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington, 240 pages (Free Press: 1996) ISBN 0-684-82291-1
• Way of the Wasp: How It Made America, and How It Can Save It, So to Speak, 171 pages (Free Press: 1990) ISBN 0-02-904721-8
• The Outside Story (Doubleday reissue edition: 1986) ISBN 0-385-19679-2

Notes[link]

External links[link]

• Personal website
• Richard Brookhiser On George Washington, transcript of conversation with David Gergen
• Richard Brookhiser in the NRO Author Archive
• "Hamilton, Our Founder" by Richard Brookhiser, City Journal quarterly, summer 2004
• Booknotes interview with Brookhiser on The Way of the WASP, March 224, 1991.
• In Depth interview with Brookheiser, October 7, 2001 (Note: This interview was cut short due to the commencement of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.)
• In Depth interview with Brookheiser, April 1, 2012

Allan David Bloom (September 14, 1930 – October 7, 1992) was an American philosopher, classicist, and academic. He studied under David Grene, Leo Strauss, Richard McKeon and Alexandre Kojève. He subsequently taught at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, Yale University, École Normale Supérieure of Paris, and the University of Chicago. Bloom championed the idea of 'Great Books' education and became famous for his criticism of contemporary American higher education, with his views being expressed in his bestselling 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind.^[1] Although Bloom was characterized as a conservative in the popular media, Bloom explicitly stated that this was a misunderstanding, and made it clear that he was not to be affiliated with any conservative movements.^[2] Saul Bellow wrote Ravelstein, a roman à clef based on Bloom, his friend and teaching partner at the University of Chicago.

Early life and education[link]

Allan Bloom was born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1930 to Jewish social-worker parents. The couple had a daughter, Lucille, in 1928, and the birth of Allan two years later completed the family group. As a thirteen-year-old, he read a Readers Digest article about the University of Chicago and told his parents he wanted to attend; his parents thought it was unreasonable and did not encourage his hopes.^[3] Yet, when his family moved to Chicago in 1944, his parents met a psychiatrist and family friend whose son was enrolled in the University of Chicago’s humanities program for gifted students. In 1946 Bloom was accepted to the same program, starting his degree at the age of fifteen, and spending the next decade of his life enrolled at the university in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood.^[3] This began his life-long passion for the 'idea' of the university.^[4]

In the preface to Giants and Dwarfs: Essays, 1960-1990, he stated that his education "began with Freud and ended with Plato." The theme of this education was self-knowledge, or self-discovery—an idea that Bloom would later write seemed impossible to conceive of for a Midwestern American boy. He credits Leo Strauss as the teacher who made this endeavor possible for him.^[5]

Bloom graduated from Chicago with his bachelor’s degree at the age of 18.^[6] For post-graduate studies, he enrolled in the Committee on Social Thought, where he was assigned Classicist David Grene as tutor, and went on to write his thesis on Isocrates. Grene recalled Bloom as an energetic and humorous student completely dedicated to studying classics, but with no definite career ambitions.^[3] The Committee was a unique interdisciplinary program that attracted a small number of students due to its rigorous academic requirements and lack of clear employment opportunities after graduation.^[3] Bloom earned his Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought in 1955. He subsequently studied under the influential Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève in Paris, whose lectures Bloom would later introduce to the English-speaking world. While teaching philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, he befriended Raymond Aron amongst many other philosophers. Among the American expatriate community in Paris his friends included Susan Sontag.^[7]

Career[link]

Bloom studied and taught in Paris (1953–55) at the École Normale Supérieure,^[9] and Germany (1957). Upon returning to the United States in 1955, he taught adult education students at the University of Chicago with his friend Werner J. Dannhauser, author of Nietzsche's View of Socrates. Bloom went on to teach at Yale from 1960 to 1963, at Cornell until 1970, and at the University of Toronto until 1979, when he returned to the University of Chicago. Among Bloom's former students are prominent journalists, government officials and political scientists such as Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kraynak, Pierre Hassner, Clifford Orwin, Janet Ajzenstat, John Ibbitson and John Milligan-Whyte.

In 1963, as a Professor at Cornell, Allan Bloom served as a faculty member of the Telluride Association, an organization focused on intellectual development and self-governance. The students received free room and board in the Telluride House on the Cornell University campus and assumed the management of the house themselves. Bloom's first book was a collection of three essays on Shakespeare's plays, Shakespeare's Politics; it included an essay from Harry V. Jaffa. He translated and commented upon Rousseau's "Letter to D'Alembert On the Theater," bringing it into dialogue with Plato's Republic. In 1968, he published his most significant work of philosophical translation and interpretation, a translation of Plato's Republic. Bloom strove to achieve "the first translation of Plato's Republic that attempts to be strictly literal.^[10]" Although the translation is not universally accepted, Bloom said he always conceptualized the translator's role as a matchmaker between readers and the texts he translated.^[11] He repeated this effort as a professor of political science at the University of Toronto in 1978, translating Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile. Among other publications during his years of teaching was a reading of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, titled "Giants and Dwarfs"; it became the title for a collection of essays on, among others, Raymond Aron, Alexandre Kojeve, Leo Strauss, and John Rawls. Bloom was an editor for the scholarly journal Political Theory as well as a contributor to History of Political Philosophy (edited by Joseph Cropsey and Leo Strauss).

After returning to Chicago, he befriended and taught courses with Saul Bellow. In 1987 Bellow wrote the Preface to The Closing of the American Mind, the book that made Bloom famous and wealthy. [1] Bellow later immortalized his dead friend in the novel Ravelstein in which the subject is dying of AIDS just as Bloom himself was homosexual and died of AIDS.^[12] Ravelstein engages the chronicler in a discussion about philosophy and love.

Bloom's last book, which he dictated while in the hospital dying, and which was published posthumously, was Love and Friendship, an offering of interpretations on the meaning of love.

Philosophy[link]

Bloom's work is not easily categorized, yet there is a thread that links all of his published material. He was concerned with preserving a philosophical way of life for future generations. He strove to do this through both scholarly and popular writing. His writings may be placed into two categories: scholarly (e.g. Plato's Republic) and popular political comment (e.g. Closing of the American Mind). On the surface, this is a valid distinction, yet closer examinations of Bloom’s works reveal a direct connection between the two types of expression, which reflect his view of philosophy and the role of the philosopher in political life.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Plato's Republic

Bloom’s translation and interpretive essay on Plato’s Republic was published in 1968. For Bloom, previous translations were lacking. In particular, Bloom was eager to sweep away the Christian Platonist layers that had coated the translations and scholarly analysis. In 1971, he wrote, "With the Republic, for example, a long tradition of philosophy tells us what the issues are. [...] This sense of familiarity may be spurious; we may be reading the text as seen by the tradition rather than raising Plato's own questions.^[14]

La scuola di Atene, Raphael

Up until the late 20th century, most English language Platonists were following a tradition that blended Christian theology with Plato. This view, named Christian Platonism, interprets Plato as prophet of the coming Christian age, a monotheist in a polytheist world. In this school, Socrates is considered a pre-Christian saint; the tradition emphasizes Socrates' 'goodness' and other-worldly attributes, such as accepting his death like a martyr. In the words of George Grant, "Straussians say that Christianity led to overextension of soul."^[15]

Yet there developed a different type of Platonism, Pagan Platonism, a type of which Bloom became aware and most certainly adopted from his teacher Leo Strauss (1899–1973), the most important representative of this thought in the past century.^[16] Adherents have a significantly different view of Plato’s Republic.

Strauss developed this point of view by studying ancient Islamic and Jewish theorists, such as Al-Farabi (870-950) and Moses Maimonides (1135–1204). Each philosopher was faithful to his religion but sought to integrate classical political philosophy into Islam and Judaism. Islam has a prophet-legislator, Muhammad, and similarly, Jewish law is a function of its theology. Thus these philosophers had to write with great skill, incorporating the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, many of which contradicted or contravened Islamic or Jewish thought and practice, without being seen to challenge the theology. According to Strauss, Al-Farabi and Moses Maimonides were really writing for potential philosophers within the pious faithful. Strauss calls this the discovery of esoteric writing, and he first presents it as a possibility in Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952). Christianity differed from these faiths in that philosophy was always free to establish a foothold in Christendom, without necessarily being seen as heretical. All one has to do is think of Saint Augustine (354-430) and his City of God and On Free Will.

Strauss took this insight and applied it eventually to Plato’s writings themselves. Bloom's translation and essay of the Republic takes this stance; therefore, it is radically different in many important aspects from the previous translations and interpretations of the Republic. Most notable is Bloom's discussion of Socratic ironically. In fact, irony is the key to Bloom’s take on the Republic. (See his discussion of Books II-VI of the Republic.) Allan Bloom says a philosopher is immune to irony because he can see the tragic as comic and comic as tragic. Bloom refers to Socrates, the philosopher par excellence, in his Interpretative Essay stating, "Socrates can go naked where others go clothed; he is not afraid of ridicule. He can also contemplate sexual intercourse where others are stricken with terror; he is not afraid of moral indignation. In other words he treats the comic seriously and the tragic lightly.^[17] Thus irony in the Republic refers to the 'Just City in Speech' Bloom looks at it not as a model for future society, nor as a template for the human soul; rather, it is a city presented ironicly, an example of the distance between philosophy and every potential philosopher. Bloom follows Strauss in suggesting that the 'Just City in Speech' is not natural; it is man-made.

[edit] Closing of the American Mind

Closing of the American Mind was published in 1987, five years after Bloom published an essay in The National Review about the failure of universities to serve the needs of students. With the encouragement of Saul Bellow, his colleague at the University of Chicago, he expanded his thoughts into a book "about a life I've led",^[3] that critically reflected on the current state of higher education in American universities. His friends and admirers imagined the work would be a modest success, as did Bloom, who recognized his publisher’s modest advance to complete the project as a lack of sales confidence. Yet on the momentum of strong initial reviews, including one by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times and an op-ed piece by syndicated conservative commentator George Will titled, "A How-To Book for the Independent"^[18] it became an unexpected best seller, eventually selling close to half a million copies in hardback and remaining at number one on the New York Times Non-fiction Best Seller list for four months.^[19]

Bloom's Closing of the American Mind is a critique of the contemporary university and how Bloom sees it as failing its students. In it, Bloom criticizes the modern movements in philosophy and the humanities. Philosophy professors involved in ordinary language analysis or logical positivism disregard important "humanizing" ethical and political issues and fail to pique the interest of students.^[20] Literature professors involved in deconstructionism promote irrationalism and skepticism of standards of truth and thereby dissolve the moral imperatives which are communicated through genuine philosophy and which elevate and broaden the intellects of those who engage with them.^[21] To a great extent, Bloom's criticism revolves around his belief that the "great books" of Western thought have been devalued as a source of wisdom. Bloom's critique extends beyond the university to speak to the general crisis in American society. Closing of the American Mind draws analogies between the United States and the Weimar Republic. The modern liberal philosophy, he says, enshrined in the Enlightenment thought of John Locke—that a just society could be based upon self-interest alone, coupled by the emergence of relativism in American thought—had led to this crisis.

For Bloom, this created a void in the souls of Americans, into which demagogic radicals as exemplified by 1960s student leaders could leap. (In the same fashion, Bloom suggests, that the Nazi brownshirts once filled the gap created in German society by the Weimar Republic.) In the second instance, he argued, the higher calling of philosophy and reason understood as freedom of thought, had been eclipsed by a pseudo-philosophy, or an ideology of thought. Relativism was one feature of modern liberal philosophy that had subverted the Platonic–Socratic teaching.

Bloom's critique of contemporary social movements at play in universities or society at large is derived from his classical and philosophical orientation. For Bloom, the failure of contemporary liberal education leads to the sterile social and sexual habits of modern students, and to their inability to fashion a life for themselves beyond the mundane offerings touted as success. Bloom argues that commercial pursuits had become more highly valued than love, the philosophic quest for truth, or the civilized pursuits of honor and glory.

In one chapter, in a style of analysis which resembles the work of the Frankfurt School, he examined the philosophical effects of popular music on the lives of students, placing pop music, or as it is generically branded by record companies "rock music", in a historical context from Plato’s Republic to Nietzsche’s Dionysian longings. Treating it for the first time with genuine philosophical interest, he gave fresh attention to the industry, its target-marketing to children and teenagers, its top performers, its place in our late-capitalist bourgeois economy, and its pretensions to liberation and freedom. Some critics, including the popular musician Frank Zappa, argued that Bloom's view of pop music was based on the same ideas that critics of pop "in 1950s held, ideas about the preservation of 'traditional' white American society."^[22] Bloom, informed by Socrates, Aristotle, Rousseau and Nietzsche, explores music’s power over the human soul. He cites the soldier who throws himself into battle at the urging of the drum corps, the pious believer who prays under the spell of a religious hymn, the lover seduced by the romantic guitar, and points towards the tradition of philosophy that treated musical education as paramount. He names the pop-star Mick Jagger as a cardinal representative of the hypocrisy and erotic sterility of pop-rock music. Pop music employs sexual images and language to enthrall the young and to persuade them that their petty rebelliousness is authentic politics, when, in fact, they are being controlled by the money-managers whom successful performers like Jagger quietly serve. Bloom claims that Jagger is a hero to many university students who envy his fame and wealth but are really just bored by the lack of options before them.^[23] Along with the absence of literature in the lives of the young and their sexual but often unerotic relationships, the first part of Closing tries to explain the current state of education in a fashion beyond the purview of an economist or psychiatrist—contemporary culture's leading umpires.

Critical reception[link]

The book met with early critical acclaim, including positive reviews in publications including The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Washington Post.^[24]

A second round of reviews was generally more critical.^[24] Martha Nussbaum, a liberal political philosopher and classicist, and Harry V. Jaffa, a conservative, both argued that Bloom was deeply influenced by 19th-century European philosophers, especially Friedrich Nietzsche. Nussbaum wrote that, for Bloom, Nietzsche had been disastrously influential in modern American thought.^[25] Jaffa pointed out the lack of attention Bloom paid to the moral role gay rights were playing in the lives of current students.^[26] According to Jaffa, while Bloom discusses contemporary social movements, particularly those that gained ascendancy in the 1960s, he is virtually silent on the gay rights movement,^[26] which might appear odd in view of the fact that Bloom was homosexual.

In a passage of her review, Nussbaum wrote: "How good a philosopher, then, is Allan Bloom? The answer is, we cannot say, and we are given no reason to think him one at all."^[25] The outraged "assault" on the book was continued by negative and impassioned reviews by Benjamin Barber in Harper's; by Alexander Nehamas, a scholar of ancient philosophy and Nietzsche, in the London Review of Books; and by David Rieff in The Times Literary Supplement.^[27] David Rieff called Bloom "an academic version of Oliver North: vengeful, reactionary, antidemocratic." The book, he said, was one that "decent people would be ashamed of having written." The tone of these reviews led James Atlas in the New York Times Magazine to conclude "the responses to Bloom's book have been charged with a hostility that transcends the usual mean-spiritedness of reviewers."^[3] One reviewer, the philosopher Robert Paul Wolff writing in the scholarly journal Academe, reviewed the book as a work of fiction: he claimed that Bloom's friend Saul Bellow, who had written the introduction, had written a "coruscatingly funny novel in the form of a pettish, bookish, grumpy, reactionary complaint against the last two decades", with the "author" a "mid-fiftyish professor at the University of Chicago, to whom Bellow gives the evocative name 'Bloom.'"^[27] Yet some reviewers tempered that criticism with an admission of the merits of Bloom's writing: for example, Fred Matthews, a historian from York University, began an otherwise relatively critical review in the American Historical Review with the statement that Bloom's "probes into popular culture" were "both amusing and perceptive" and that the work was "a rich, often brilliant, and disturbing book".^[28]

Some critics embraced Bloom's argument. Norman Podhoretz noted that the closed-mindedness in the title refers to the paradoxical consequence of the academic "open mind" found in liberal political thought—namely "the narrow and intolerant dogmatism" that dismisses any attempt, by Plato or the Hebrew Bible for example, to provide a rational basis for moral judgments. Podhoretz continued, "Bloom goes on to charge liberalism with vulgarizing the noble ideals of freedom and equality, and he offers brilliantly acerbic descriptions of the sexual revolution and the feminist movement, which he sees as products of this process of vulgarization."^[29]

In a 1989 article (The German Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 3, Focus: Literature since 1945 (Summer, 1989)), Ann Clark Fehn discusses the critical reception of the book, noting that it had eclipsed other titles that year dealing with higher education (College, by Ernest Boyer, and Cultural Literacy, by E. D. Hirsch), and quoting Publishers Weekly, which had described Bloom's book as a "best-seller made by reviews."

Camille Paglia, a decade after the book's release, called it "the first shot in the culture wars".^[30] MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky dismissed the book as "mind-bogglingly stupid" for its canonistic approach to education.^[31] On the other hand, an early New York Times review by Roger Kimball called the book "an unparalleled reflection on the whole question of what it means to be a student in today's intellectual and moral climate."^[32]

In an article on Bloom for The New Republic in 2000, conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan wrote that "reading [Bloom]... one feels he has not merely understood Nietzsche; he has imbibed him. But this awareness of the abyss moved Bloom, unlike Nietzsche, toward love and political conservatism. Love, whether for the truth or for another, because it can raise us out of the abyss. Political conservatism because it best restrains the chaos that modernity threatens."^[33] More recently, Bloom's book also received a more positive re-assessment from Jim Sleeper in The New York Times.^[34]

Keith Botsford would later summarize:

[edit] Love and Friendship

Bloom's last book, which he dictated while partially paralyzed and in hospital, and which was published posthumously, was Love and Friendship. The book offered interpretations on the meaning of love, through a reading of novels by Stendhal, Jane Austen, Flaubert; Tolstoy in light of Rousseau's influence on the Romantic movement; plays by William Shakespeare; Montaigne's Essays; and Plato's Symposium.

Describing its creation, Bellow wrote:

Of the work, Andrew Sullivan wrote "you cannot read [Bloom] on Romeo and Juliet or Antony and Cleopatra without seeing those works in a new light. You cannot read his account of Rousseau's La nouvelle Heloise without wanting to go back and read it — more closely — again... Bloom had a gift for reading reality — the impulse to put your loving face to it and press your hands against it."^[33] Recollecting his friend in an interview, Bellow said "Allan inhaled books and ideas the way the rest of us breathe air... People only want the factual truth. Well, the truth is that Allan was a very superior person, great-souled. When critics proclaim the death of the novel, I sometimes think they are really saying that there are no significant people to write about. [But] Allan was certainly one."^[36]

Selected works[link]

• Bloom, Allan, and Harry V. Jaffa. 1964. Shakespeare's Politics. New York: Basic Books.
• Bloom, Allan. 1968 (2nd ed 1991). The Republic of Plato. (translated with notes and an interpretive essay). New York: Basic Books.
• Bloom, Allan, Charles Butterworth, Christopher Kelly (Edited and translated), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 1968. Letter to d’Alembert on the theater in politics and the arts. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press; Agora ed.
• Bloom, Allan, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 1979. Emile (translator) with introduction. New York: Basic Books.
• Alexandre Kojève (Raymond Queneau, Allan Bloom, James H. Nichols). Introduction to the reading of Hegel. Cornell, 1980.
• Bloom, Allan. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 5-551-86868-0.
• Bloom, Allan, and Steven J. Kautz ed. 1991. Confronting the Constitution: The challenge to Locke, Montesquieu, Jefferson, and the Federalists from Utilitarianism, Historicism, Marxism, Freudism. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.
• Bloom, Allan. 1991. Giants and Dwarfs: Essays, 1960-1990. New York: Touchstone Books.
• Bloom, Allan. 1993. Love and Friendship. New York: Simon & Schuster.
• Bloom, Allan. 2000. Shakespeare on Love & Friendship. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.
• Plato, Seth Benardete, and Allan Bloom. 2001. Plato's Symposium: A translation by Seth Benardete with commentaries by Allan Bloom and Seth Benardete. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bibliography on Allan Bloom[link]

• Atlas, James. “Chicago’s Grumpy Guru: Best-Selling Professor Allan Bloom and the Chicago Intellectuals.” New York Times Magazine. January 3, 1988.
• "The Constitution in Full Bloom". 1990. Harvard Law Review 104, no. 2 (Dec90): 645.
• Bayles, Martha. 1998. "Body and soul: the musical miseducation of youth." Public Interest, no. 131, Spring 98: 36.
• Beckerman, Michael. 2000. "Ravelstein Knows Everything, Almost". New York Times (May 28, 2000) .
• Bellow, Adam. 2005. "Opening the American Mind". National Review 57, no. 23 (12/19/2005) : 102.
• Bellow, Saul. 2000. Ravelstein. New York, New York: Penguin.
• Butterworth, Charles E., "On Misunderstanding Allan Bloom: The Response to The Closing of the American Mind." Academic Questions 2, no. 4: 56.
• Edington, Robert V. 1990. "Allan Bloom's message to the state universities". Perspectives on Political Science; 19, no. 3
• Fulford, Robert. "Saul Bellow, Allan Bloom, and Abe Ravelstein." Globe and Mail, November 2, 1999.
• Goldstein, William. “The Story behind the Best Seller: Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind.” Publishers Weekly. July 3, 1987.
• Hook, Sidney. 1989. "Closing of the American Mind: An Intellectual Best Seller Revisited". American Scholar 58, no. Winter: 123.
• Iannone, Carol. 2003. "What's Happened to Liberal Education?". Academic Questions 17, no. 1, 54.
• Jaffa, Harry V. "Humanizing Certitudes and Impoverishing Doubts: A Critique of Closing of the American Mind." Interpretation. 16 Fall 1988.
• Kahan, Jeffrey. 2002. "Shakespeare on Love and Friendship." Women's Studies 31, no. 4, 529.
• Kinzel, Till. 2002. Platonische Kulturkritik in Amerika. Studien zu Allan Blooms The Closing of the American Mind. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.
• Matthews, Fred. "The Attack on 'Historicism': Allan Bloom's Indictment of Contemporary American Historical Scholarship." American Historical Review 95, no. 2, 429.
• Mulcahy, Kevin V. 1989. "Civic Illiteracy and the American Cultural Heritage." Journal of Politics 51, no. 1, 177.
• Nussbaum, Martha. "Undemocratic Vistas," New York Review of Books 34, no.17 (November 5, 1987)
• Orwin, Clifford. "Remembering Allan Bloom." American Scholar 62, no. 3, 423.
• Palmer, Michael, and Thomas Pangle ed. 1995. Political Philosophy and the Human Soul: Essays in Memory of Allan Bloom. Lanham, Maryland, U.S.A.: Rowman & Littlefield Pub.
• Rosenberg, Aubrey. 1981. "Translating Rousseau." University of Toronto Quarterly 50, no. 3, 339.
• Schaub, Diana. 1994. "Erotic adventures of the mind." Public Interest, no. 114, 104.
• Slater, Robert O. (2005) Allan Bloom. In John Shook (Ed.) The Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers. (Vol 1) Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press.
• Sleeper, Jim. 2005. "Allan Bloom and the Conservative Mind". New York Times Book Review (September 4, 2005) : 27.
• Wrightson, Katherine M. 1998. "The Professor as Teacher: Allan Bloom, Wayne Booth, and the Tradition of Teaching at the University of Chicago." Innovative Higher Education 23, no. 2, 103.

See also[link]

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

Notes[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Allan Bloom

• Keith Botsford, Obituary: Professor Allan Bloom, The Independent, October 12, 1992
• DePauw University News "Closing of the American Mind Author Allan Bloom Calls on DePauw Students to Seize "Charmed Years". Ubben Lecture Series: September 11, 1987, Greencastle, Indiana. (Accessed May 16, 2007).
• Patner, Andrew. Chicago Sun-Times, "Allan Bloom, warts and all" April 16, 2000. (Accessed May 16, 2007).
• West, Thomas G. The Claremont Institute, The Claremont Institute Blog Writings. "Allan Bloom and America" June 1, 2000. (Accessed May 16, 2007).
• A review of Political Philosophy & the Human Soul: Essays in Memory of Allan Bloom by Michael Palmer and Thomas L. Pangle, in Conference Journal.
• Bloom's Lectures on Socrates, Aristotle, Machiavelli and Nietzsche at Boston University (1983)