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

The natural rights doctrine holds that certain human rights and freedoms are universal and inalienable, and therefore not subject to legal sanction or abolition. The concept originates in the political philosophy of liberalism developed by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke; in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson identifies life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as natural rights of man. In his Introduction, Bloom claims that our understanding of what it means to be American has shifted from an identity based upon natural rights to one based on one’s religion, race, and ethnicity, which have come to be regarded as having priority over universal rights. The natural rights doctrine, as a product of Enlightenment rationalism, has been severely criticized as a racist and ideological construct by contemporary historicist and sociological schools of thought.

In Enlightenment political philosophy, the state of nature refers to the natural condition of man before the invention of political, religious, legal, and other institutions that regulate social life. In the state of nature, man is ruled by desire and the instinct for self-preservation, unimpeded by thoughts of virtue. The individual pursuit of self-interest, however, ultimately leads to social organization and laws protecting individual rights, arrived at through consensus, in the interests of common survival.

Political theorists such as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau attempted to construct models of just political governance presupposing a social contract between men, based on rational truths about human nature. The thought experiment of the state of nature tried to identify how men, freed from conventional attachments to nation, religion, and family, would organize their lives according to their natural priorities and needs, resulting in a social contract protecting the rights of both the governing elite and the governed. For Hobbes and Locke, the state of nature inevitably led men to war in order to acquire the limited means of sustenance; the purpose of civil society was to protect individuals from the aggression of others and secure a somewhat equitable distribution of resources. For Rousseau, by contrast, the state of nature signified the primal wholeness, rather than imperfection, of man’s original being—the pleasurable sentiment of life rather than its brutish suffering. In Rousseau’s political philosophy, the longing for the undivided unity of the natural man is a symptom of bourgeois society’s endemic illness. Rousseau’s influence is felt in the environmentalism of Thoreau and John Muir and in various forms of anarchism and “back-to-nature” movements, for which politics and laws are felt to be repressive rather than protective.

The term “bourgeois” denotes the “new man of the new democratic political regime” as established by the American and the French Revolutions (157). For European philosophers and artists, the word has long had a pejorative meaning, indicating the materialistic, soulless, and egotistic individual, lacking a sense of beauty and nobility and driven by narrow mercantile motivations and self-interest. The aristocratic elite, displaced by revolutionary republicanism, shared their contempt for the bourgeois with the progressive Left, only to see the bourgeois solution to the political problem ultimately succeed in Western democracies. Rousseau’s analysis of the bourgeois as ineluctably self-divided, torn between self-love and social duty, individuality and alienation, has been profoundly influential and an important source of the complex phenomenon of Romanticism. Value relativism, Bloom argues, is the symptom of the bourgeoisie’s moral malaise. 

Historicism is the theory that historical forces determine social and cultural phenomena. It denies interpretations that posit universal or natural origins in the sphere of human affairs, arguing that historical development is the primary factor in human existence. Historicism is the dominant philosophical perspective in the work of G.W.F. Hegel and his successors in 19th-century Germany, influencing Nietzsche, who extended its scope to morality and reason. Bloom argues that historicism is an important factor in the rise of value relativism in its insistence that moral systems are historically determined and culturally specific.