Harvey Claflin Mansfield Jr. (born March 21, 1932) is an American political philosopher. He was the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he taught from 1962 until his retirement in 2023. He has held Guggenheim and NEH Fellowships and has been a Fellow at the National Humanities Center. In 2004, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush and delivered the Jefferson Lecture in 2007.
Mansfield is a scholar of political history, and was greatly influenced by Leo Strauss.See, e.g., Josh Harlan and Christopher Kagay, "Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr.: The Question of Conservatism", interview, Harvard Review of Philosophy 3 (1993), accessed June 2, 2007. [Restricted access?] Cf. cached HTML version, , accessed June 17, 2007. (18 pages.) He is also the Carol G. Simon Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. Mansfield is notable for his generally conservative stance on political issues in his writings. At Harvard, he became one of the university's most prominent conservative figures. In 2023, he retired from teaching as one of the university's longest-serving faculty members.
His notable former students include: Mark Blitz, James Ceaser, Tom Cotton, Andrew Sullivan,Andrew Sullivan, "Daily Express: Provocations", The New Republic Online (NRO only; blog), January 19, 2005. (Subscription required for full access.) Cf. Contributing Editor, Andrew Sullivan biography at The New Republic. Charles R. Kesler, Alan Keyes, William Kristol, Clifford Orwin, Paul Cantor, Mark Lilla, Francis Fukuyama, Sharon Krause, Bruno Maçães, and Shen Tong.
Biography Mansfield was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on March 21, 1932. His mother, Grace Yarrow Mansfield, was an alumna of Vassar College, and coeditor, with Elizabeth Bristol Greenleaf, of a book on the ballads and sea songs of Newfoundland. His father, Harvey Mansfield Sr., had been editor of the American Political Science Review and was the Ruggles Professor Emeritus of Public Law and Government at Columbia University at the time of his death in 1988 at the age of 83. Mansfield Sr., who had also taught at Yale and been the department chairman at Ohio State, was described by his son as "a New Deal Democrat, a liberal who had an aversion to the Left." At Ohio State, Mansfield had met Harry V. Jaffa, a young assistant professor whose anti-Communist conservatism was also an influence. Like Jaffa, Mansfield eventually joined the Republican Party over the issue of communism.
Mansfield was educated at public schools before college. In 1949, he enrolled at Harvard University with a focus in studying government. As a freshman, he took Natural Sciences 4, taught by Harvard president James Conant, a general education class that explored the relationship of science to humanity, inspired by Conant's involvement with the Manhattan Project. He received his Bachelor of Arts in 1953. As an undergraduate, he was a liberal who supported Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 presidential election. His professors included Carl Friedrich, Samuel Beer and William Yandell Elliott.
After graduating, Mansfield received a Fulbright Scholarship to study in England for a year. Thanks to Beer's influence, he was able to attend a speech by Winston Churchill, which left an impression on him. From 1954 to 1956, he served in the United States Army in Virginia and France. With his academic background, Mansfield was ordered to give lectures to the troops on topics in United States history. He returned to Harvard and received his Ph.D. in 1961, with a dissertation published in 1965 as Statesmanship and Party Government: A Study of Burke and Bolingbroke. Mansfield initially began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, for a few years before lecturing at Harvard. In 1969, he was appointed as a full professor and was chair of the university's government department from 1973 to 1976.
Mansfield was married to Delba Winthrop, with whom he co-translated and co-authored work on Tocqueville. Winthrop's doctoral dissertation (supervised by Mansfield), on Aristotle's view of democracy, was posthumously published in 2018.
He lives in Cambridge and in Ipswich, Massachusetts and is married to Anna Schmidt.
Political philosophy A Student's Guide to Political Philosophy In his 2001 book A Student's Guide to Political Philosophy, Mansfield traces the history of political philosophy in "the great books" written by Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, and others of the "highest rank" (1).Harvey C. Mansfield, A Student's Guide to Political Philosophy (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2001). . (Subsequent parenthetical references to this work follow in the text.) He also finds political philosophy in practical politics, which Mansfield considers necessarily partisan, because it involves citizens "arguing passionately pro and con with advocacy and denigration, accusation and defense" (2). He argues that politics does not merely consist of liberal and conservative options, but rather, they are fundamentally opposed to each other, with each side defending its own interest as it attempts to appeal to the common good (2). Since such adversarial sides in a political dispute appeal to the common good, an observer of the dispute can use his capacity to reason to judge which side supplies the most compelling arguments. If such an observer is competent to be a judge, he or she may be thought of as a political philosopher, or as at least on the way to engaging in political philosophy (2–3).
Mansfield stresses the connection between politics and political philosophy, but he does not find political philosophy in political science, which for Mansfield is a rival to political philosophy and "apes" the natural sciences (3–5). From Mansfield's point of view, political science replaces words like "good", "just", and "noble" with other words like "utility" or "preferences." The terms are meant to be neutral, but as a result of the political scientist's purported change of role and perspective from judge to so‑called "disinterested observer", such a "scientist" is not able to determine whose arguments are the best, because he or she falls victim to relativism, which, according to Mansfield, is "a sort of lazy dogmatism" (4–5).
In his guide, Mansfield reminds students that political science rebelled from political philosophy in the seventeenth century and declared itself distinct and separate in the positivist movement of the late nineteenth century: thus, he argues in it that whereas "Today political science is often said to be 'descriptive' or 'empirical,' concerned with facts; political philosophy is called 'normative' because it expresses values. But these terms merely repeat in more abstract form the difference between political science, which seeks agreement, and political philosophy, which seeks the best" (6).
Furthermore, according to Mansfield, when people talk about the difference between political philosophy and political science, they are actually talking about two distinct kinds of political philosophy, one modern and the other ancient. The only way to understand modern political science and its ancient alternative fully, he stresses, is to enter the history of political philosophy, and to study the tradition handed down over the centuries: "No one can count himself educated who does not have some acquaintance with this tradition. It informs you of the leading possibilities of human life, and by giving you a sense of what has been tried and what is now dominant, it tells you where we are now in a depth not available from any other source" (7–8). Although modern political science feels no obligation to look at its roots, and might even denigrate the subject as if it could not be of any real significance, he says, "our reasoning shows that the history of political philosophy is required for understanding its substance" (7–8).
Taming the Prince In his book Taming the Prince, Mansfield traces the modern doctrine of executive power to Niccolò Machiavelli. He argues that executive power had to be tamed to become compatible with liberal constitutionalism.
Political views
Western civilization In response to multiculturalism on college campuses, Mansfield has defended the importance of preserving and teaching courses on Western civilization, even proposing a survey course that selects a dozen or so books that capture the principal themes. Mansfield believes that understanding Western civilization is important because the books that explain it deal with problems associated with the human condition.
On May 8, 2007, Mansfield delivered the 36th Jefferson Lecture ("the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual and public achievement in the humanities", according to the National Endowment for the Humanities, which sponsored the lecture)."Harvey Mansfield, Noted American Author and Political Theorist, to Deliver the 2007 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities" , press release, National Endowment for the Humanities, March 22, 2007."About the Jefferson Lecture" , National Endowment for the Humanities, accessed June 16, 2007.Harvey C. Mansfield, , 36th Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, presented on May 8, 2007, at the Warner Theatre, Washington, D.C., neh.gov (NEH), accessed June 16, 2007. In his lecture, Mansfield suggests "two improvements for today’s understanding of politics arising from the humanities ... first ... to recapture the notion of thumos in Plato, and Aristotle... [and] ...second ... the use of names—proper to literature and foreign to science". This is a reference to his own philosophy, which forbids discounting the wisdom of the past simply because those who spoke it lived a long time ago.
The "strong executive" Mansfield has argued that the President of the United States has "extra-legal powers such as commanding the military, making treaties (and carrying on foreign policy), and pardoning the convicted, not to mention a veto of legislation", observing that the U.S. Constitution does not ask the President to take an oath to execute the laws, but rather, to execute "the office of the president, which is larger."Harvey Mansfield, "The Law and the President: In a National Emergency, Who You Gonna Call?" The Weekly Standard, January 16, 2006, accessed February 5, 2007. Referring to domestic surveillance, Mansfield notes:
He defends the separation of powers, arguing that "the executive subordinated to the rule of law is in danger of being subordinate to the legislature."Harvey C. Mansfield, "The Case for the Strong Executive: Under Some Circumstances, the Rule of Law Must Yield to the Need for Energy," Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2007, accessed June 17, 2007.
Gender roles and equality
In his 2006 book Manliness, Mansfield defended a moderately conservative understanding of gender roles, and bemoaned the loss of the virtue of manliness in a "gender neutral" society. In a New York Times interview, he defined the concept briefly as "confidence in a situation of risk. A manly man has to know what he is doing." He defines the idea in more concrete terms in the book. There, a manly man does not have to know what he is doing, but only has to act as though he does. Also in the book, Mansfield subjects the concept of manliness to a test in which he refers for support of his argument to such diverse authorities as Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Rudyard Kipling, Ernest Hemingway, and Naomi Wood. In his argument, manliness is ultimately related to assertiveness—"decisiveness without complete knowledge"—and its place in society is debated. In an interview with Bill Kristol, Mansfield said: