The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students

In these chapters, Bloom discusses the invention of the modern idea of the self, tracing its development from Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau up to Freud. The essential thread of this concept from the Renaissance to the present is that man is a natural being, defined more by feeling and desire than reason. The supremacy of the self, the discovery of its profundity, the liberation of its desire, and its self-realization in creativity and culture constitute the environment from which value relativism emerges. As the modern concept of the self replaced the earlier Christian idea of the soul, the Romantic conception of culture came to supersede the Enlightenment notion of the political state.

Hobbes’s and Locke’s theories of the “state of nature” revolutionized the concept of human identity. The dominant Christian tradition, prior to Machiavelli, held that the individual was composed of body and soul, opposing principles mysteriously joined in a state of permanent tension. The soul, metaphysical in origin, strove virtuously against the desires of the body, seeking to live morally and transcend man’s animal nature. Spurred by the methods and discoveries of the scientific revolution in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Enlightenment discarded the Christian model of the individual, replacing the concept of the soul with a new idea of the self as the essence of human personality.