In his newsletter this week, the boss reported that “our friends over at National Review asked several contributors to write brief reflections for their 60th anniversary issue (by the way, congratulations!) about what book influenced us the most.” The boss encourages everyone to take a look at the interesting symposium, featuring contributors like Elliott Abrams, Wilfred McClay, Garry Kasparov. And he reproduced his own answer to the question of what book may have influenced him the most. Here it is, for readers who may have missed that issue of National Review:
The Republic of Plato, translated with notes and an interpretive essay by Allan Bloom (Basic, 512 pp., $22).
In the fall of 1970, a freshman at Harvard with “sophomore standing” (easy to get in those days), I showed up for the first meeting of my sophomore tutorial in the Government Department. The teacher was a first-year assistant professor, Mark Blitz, and the six of us in the group were to spend the entire term reading Plato’s Republic. Blitz told us to buy the Bloom translation and start reading Book One.
I remember opening the book in my dorm room the night before the next class, beginning to read Plato, making nothing much of it, and then turning to Bloom’s interpretive essay–and seeing, really for the first time, what it was to read a text carefully. I went through the first few pages of Bloom’s essay with an excitement and amazement I can still recall. One could say that it was the opening of an American mind.
In retrospect, I see that the unobtrusive education of my parents had prepared me for that moment. What’s more, Blitz was a terrific teacher, so it may well be that I would have begun to learn to read Plato without the benefit of Bloom’s essay. And the next year I took Harvey Mansfield’s lecture course on the history of political philosophy; Mansfield dazzled and challenged from the podium in an incomparable way. But of the books I have encountered, I may well owe the most to what we students came to call Bloom’s Republic.
