On the venerable, and invaluable, government professor at Harvard
Editor’s Note: The below is an expanded version of a piece published in the current issue of National Review.
Harvey Mansfield is about a month into the new school year. He has been going back to school for a long time — and to the same school, Harvard. He entered the college as a freshman in 1949; he has been on the faculty since 1962. There is always a certain apprehensiveness, he says: What will the students think of you? What will you think of them? How will it go?
Harvard has long had a “shopping week.” Students can attend a variety of classes, seeing what they like, before settling on a schedule. But the college has decided to eliminate the shopping week. In any case, I suggest to Mansfield that it should be the other way around: Professors should shop for students. He replies, “Of course it should be the other way around.”
Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. — a professor of government, and a professor of political philosophy, in particular — was born on March 21, 1932. Herbert Hoover would be president for another year. This past summer, in Washington, D.C., the American Enterprise Institute and the Foundation for Constitutional Government staged a conference: “Harvey Mansfield at 90.”
I first encountered him in about 1985. Frankly, he is unchanged, these many years later: a thoughtful speaker, with a wry sense of humor; a natty dresser; a fit fellow, with a full head of hair (grayer now). Mansfield seems a fixed feature of American intellectual life.
How many students has he had? Thousands, surely. He has never calculated. “I’m not a popular teacher,” he says. “I get a consistent but sort of medium enrollment in my courses — nothing like Michael Sandel, who gets hundreds of students, maybe a thousand, when he teaches a course.” (Sandel is another professor of government, and of political philosophy, at Harvard.)
Mansfield may not be popular with the masses, so to speak. But few professors have an alumni association so appreciative and so devoted.
There are reasons for his relative unpopularity, Mansfield says. “My courses are a little bit difficult. I try to present a challenge, and to give a lecture that may not be fully understood right away.” It may take a little reflection, or a lot of reflection.
For years, Mansfield had the reputation of an exceptionally hard grader. Harvey C. Mansfield was known as “Harvey C-minus.” Is he still a hard grader? Harder than his peers? “Not much,” he says. “I’ve had to surrender to grade inflation — for the obvious reason that I don’t want to punish students for taking my course.”
By the way, what does the middle initial “C” stand for? I think of another Harvard professor — another great professor of government — the late James Q. Wilson. That “Q” was intriguing: It stood for “Quinn.” The “C” stands for “Claflin” — the maiden name of Mansfield’s paternal grandmother. “A corruption of ‘McLaughlin,’” the professor explains.
You might think that grade inflation makes students more relaxed. The opposite is true, says Mansfield. Any blemish on the transcript — even an A-minus! — could spell trouble. Why are you less than perfect, huh? What’s wrong with you? Students worry about their admission to grad school, and their employment prospects.
“I don’t think that anyone comes to Harvard without ambition,” says Mansfield. “Somehow our students are selected for that. They want to make an ‘impact,’ that ugly word. Even worse is ‘impactful.’”
True. Furthermore, I think that the only thing that should be “impacted” is a tooth.
Mansfield did not set out to be a Harvard lifer. He did not set foot on campus as a freshman and think, I want to be here for the rest of my life. It is true, however, that “I stayed at Harvard every chance I got,” as he says. He spent two years in the Army. “I was drafted — I was compelled — but it was still something I did willingly.” And he spent two years as an assistant professor at the University of California–Berkeley.
“Did you like Berkeley?” I ask. He did, yes. On the weekend, you could go to the mountains, to the desert, or to the ocean. “So I did all three things, and that was a new experience.” What’s more, the university was co-ed. (Harvard was not at the time.) And it was pleasant to have classes with women in it.
Harvey Mansfield is “our professor.” What do I mean by that? He is a conservative, one of the few at Harvard, if not the only one. We conservatives — wherever we live, wherever we have gone to college — value him highly. Does he count it a privilege to be “the conservative”? Or is it a burden? Would he like a little help?
Chuckling, Mansfield says, “It would be nice to have a little help, and I do have a little help. You could say I’m the only outspoken conservative at Harvard. But there are other conservatives, who tend to keep quiet about their politics. They are not exactly in the closet. But they certainly practice self-censorship.”
So do many students, I would think.
Professor Mansfield is outspoken, as he says. He occasionally wades into controversies of the day. But make no mistake: He does not preach politics at his students. No good professor does, he says. The job of a professor is to teach his subject — and broaden his students’ horizons and make their lives bigger.
In a grand survey course, Mansfield introduces students to ancient political philosophers, medieval political philosophers, and modern ones. He tries to make the best case for each. He wants each philosopher to put his best foot forward. Even the ones he dislikes or disdains, such as Marx? Even them.
The word “conservative” is getting ever fuzzier in American life, in my observation. Maybe the word “liberal,” too. Mansfield has observed the same — and discusses liberalism and conservatism with me at some length.
“I am not primarily conservative,” he says. “I consider conservatism to be within liberalism, in the extended sense. And the extended sense comes from John Locke in the 17th century, and Adam Smith and David Hume in the 18th. Edmund Burke.” Mansfield is talking about a society based on individual rights.
He speaks of liberals with “a small ‘l,’” and they would include him. Liberals with a capital “L”? Well, think of President Biden or, before him, Barack Obama. I knew one other person who spoke of these small and capital els: Bill Buckley. Mansfield may be the last one to do so today.
But there is another realm, apart from liberalism, apart from individual rights — and that is “the land of virtue,” as Mansfield says. “One gets that from studying the ancients: Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, and others.” What does it mean to live a virtuous life?
Or you could put it this way: You have a right to do it, sure — but is it right to do?
“My gods live higher in the sky than conservatism,” says Mansfield. Yet he does not mind being known as a “conservative.” Neither does he mind being known as a “Straussian” — which is often an epithet in the mouths of both Left and Right.
Leo Strauss was the great teacher of political philosophy (mainly at the University of Chicago) who lived from 1899 to 1973. He is “someone who continues to instruct me and amaze me,” says Mansfield.
The political philosophers Mansfield has spent the most time with are Machiavelli and Tocqueville. (The latter remains “the best expert on our democracy,” he says.) If Mansfield has a pantheon, it is this: Aristotle, Machiavelli, Tocqueville, Strauss. A diverse, and mighty, group.
“Conservative” and “liberal” can be confusing, as I have said. So can “Right” and “Left.” To what side, in what camp, does Putin belong? He is a former KGB colonel who is re-Sovietizing Russian society — there are no more independent media, and there are more political prisoners than in the late Soviet period — and he is bent on regaining as much of the old empire as he can. In the free West, he has many admirers on the right.
“Illiberalism lives on both the left and the right, at the extremes,” says Mansfield. “There will always be people who object to individual rights and who want to put the ‘common’ first. The extreme of this is communism” (which Mansfield pronounces “commune-ism,” to illustrate his point). “Individual rights are totally submerged in the common good,” as some conceive that good.
The will to power is a perpetual temptation, says Mansfield, and people at both extremes succumb to it. In this way, there is a “hidden embrace” between Left and Right.
In 2006, Mansfield published a striking book, on an age-old subject: manliness. In fact, that is the title of the book: “Manliness” (with no subtitle). The topic has been in the news lately. “Trump is a manly man,” said the chairman of the Claremont Institute at a gala dinner. Dick Cheney has a different view. Cutting an ad for his daughter Liz, Cheney said of Trump, “He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters.”
At a rally with Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona, spoke of “BDE.” “Anybody know what that means?” she asked. “Ask your kids about it later.” The letters stand for “big d**k energy.” Extolling DeSantis, Lake said, “He’s got the same kind of BDE that President Trump has. And frankly, he has the same kind of BDE that we want all of our elected leaders to have.”
In brief, Mansfield’s view of manliness is this: A manly man is willing to take a risk. To take charge in a dangerous situation. He steps up where others hang back. He may have to stand alone. He is not a herd animal. In ancient Greece, the word for “manliness” was the same as the word for “courage.” Also, a manly man — or a manly person — looks out for the weak.
I say “person” because, in Mansfield’s view, a woman can have the traits of manliness.
He distinguishes “manliness” from related words, including “masculinity.” “You can speak of ‘toxic masculinity,’” he says. “There are men who go out of their way to make trouble and be nasty, and they are a great problem in human life, and the only effective response to them is other men who take them on and take them down.”
The example that comes to him first is Churchill, and FDR, confronting Hitler.
These days, as in many days, you hear, “What is college good for? How’s it going to get you a job?” The responsibility of a college, says Mansfield, is the cultivation of the mind. College is different from law school, let’s say, or medical school — a school that trains you for a career.
A college student ought to become acquainted with “the greatness of human accomplishments.” (I am quoting Mansfield.) Who was Aristotle and who was Machiavelli? How do they differ? Who was Mozart and who was Chopin? Can you hear the difference between them? Some of the books that Mansfield teaches are 2,400 years old. They have lasted for good reason.
It is important, says Mansfield, to keep our intellectual heritage alive — and our literary heritage and our artistic heritage and so on. This general heritage is “a good deal more valuable than GDP” (as important as material prosperity is).
For Harvey Mansfield, I have a final question: Is there one thing a person can read — a book, a paper — to get a sense of his thought? I mean, Mansfield’s thought? The professor himself suggests the Jefferson Lecture he delivered in 2007: “How to Understand Politics.” Every year, a Jefferson lecturer is selected by a board that advises the National Endowment for the Humanities. His ’07 lecture, says Mansfield, “would show my interests and, such as they are, my talents.”
“Such as they are” — a typical Mansfieldian touch.
It is good to find one’s calling, one’s role in life, and Mansfield is a born teacher. (And a born student, and a born thinker, etc.) The oldest of his students are about 80. This fall, he has students who are 18. They are damn lucky, and will know it later, if they don’t know it now.