[Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism] was not conceived as a book, it does not read like a book, and there is no need to defend it as a book. Any collection of essays and addresses composed in the span of a few years by a single powerful mind will tend to return to the same questions, and to urge (even covertly) the same views; only in that sense is this a book. I have no objection to Bloom's calling his central subject to our attention by his one-word title; and his preface does remind us that, although his topics and audiences may vary, he is himself in the grip of a powerful myth of struggle which he recommends, yet again, to our attention.

The myth is the story of what Bloom now calls "revisionism." This means, briefly put, the polemic impulse; whatever you say, I want to...