Pioneers of Cultural Relativism

The core of Allan Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, a complaint about the nature of higher education, is an argument against cultural relativism. “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of,” he wrote, “almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.” Bloom insisted that students at American elite universities had been so indoctrinated by their primary and secondary educations, under the influence of the culture of the 1960s, that they had come to prioritize an indefensible commitment to openness over universal natural rights and the pursuit of the good life. “When there are no shared goals or vision of the public good,” he asked, “is the social contract any longer possible?”