Closing of the American Mind

It is work to read. Part of this is his highbrow style, and part is that the author fancies himself a philosopher. Calling yourself a philosopher gives you license to coin words and phrases and use them in special ways that the man on the street will never understand. Another aspect of the difficulty is that Bloom calls himself a political philosopher and this means that he discusses various topics as though everyone is well familiar with them. One is "cultural relativism", just to give an example. Does everyone have an agreed upon understanding (or any understanding at all) about what this means?

What is philsophy? Someone says that there are as many definitions as there are philosophers -- maybe more. Another wag says that philosophy is all a series of footnotes on Plato. Armed with these thoughts we can press on to read the book.