Commentary

Manhood in the Age of Trump

From The Wall Street Journal, by Tunku Varadarajan March 30, 2018 5:02 p.m. ET: Cambridge, Mass. A wise and nuanced playfulness is Harvey Mansfield’s forte. He’s just turned 86 and has been teaching at Harvard since he was 30, making him one of the… More

Respectable Partisans of Modern Liberty by Mark Blitz

– Mark Blitz, "Respectable Partisans of Modern Liberty," Library of Law and Liberty, October 2, 2015.
Mark Blitz, professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, offers a provocative essay on Harvey Mansfield’s  Statesmanship and Party Government and the political thought of Edmund Burke. Excerpt: Fifty years have passed since Harvey… More

The Law According to Harvey Mansfield by Richard Reinsch

– Richard Reinsch, “The Law According to Harvey Mansfield,” Library of Law and Liberty, March 28, 2013.
Excerpt: Of course the modern state heightens this tension between the arbitrariness of law and the whole of law with its constant innovations. Modern political science laid the foundations for this tension with its reduction of law to protecting only… More

Machiavelli’s Virtue

– Robert D. Kaplan, “Machiavelli’s Virtue,” Stratfor Global Intelligence, March 20, 2013.
Excerpt: Self-interest informs compromise with other human beings, and thus a state governed by self-interest is likely to compromise with other states: whereas a person or state governed solely by religious or moral virtue will tend to delegitimize as… More

The Harvey Mansfield Story

– Eric P. Newcomer, “The Harvey Mansfield Story: Harvard’s Political Philosopher,” Harvard Crimson, March 1, 2012.  
Excerpt: Seated at Grafton Street Pub & Grill with a child-size glass of Guinness in hand, Professor Harvey Claflin Mansfield ’53, Harvard’s soft-spoken firebrand, has no intention of upturning the reputation he has earned during the nearly five… More

Profile in Courage by Emily Esfahani Smith

– Emily Esfahani Smith, “Profile in Courage: Harvey Mansfield,” Defining Ideas (a Hoover Institution online journal), December 13, 2010.
Excerpt: Liberalism believes that there are principles by which we live, self-evident truths, and that is our founding principle, all men are created equal.” Referring back to his foil, he adds, “Nietzsche challenged that, and challenged anybody’s… More

The Arts of Rule Eds. Krause/McGrail

The Arts of Rule: Essays in Honor of Harvey Mansfield, Sharon R. Krause and Mary Ann McGrail, eds., Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009.
Excerpt: This is a book about the arts of rule. It has been created for the purpose of honoring Harvey C. Mansfield, who has taught so many of us so much about these arts. Above all, he has made us aware of their variety. The arts of rule cover the exercise… More

Philosophy as a Way of Life

– Blitz, Mark, "Philosophy as a Way of Life," National Endowment for the Humanities, 2007.
Excerpt: A student who attends Harvard today might think of Harvey Mansfield as a tough-grading conservative who defends manliness on late night television. But in the early 1960s, many Harvard professors were tough graders, highbrows regarded television as a… More

‘Manliness,’ an Obsolete Concept? by Ken Gewertz

– Ken Gewertz, “'Manliness,' an obsolete concept? Discuss,” Harvard Gazette, April 10, 2003.
Excerpt: A few years back, an editor from Harvard Magazine called Harvey Mansfield and asked if he would contribute a short quote for a profile of a fellow faculty member. Mansfield replied that the quality that had always impressed him about this colleague… More

Jaffa vs. Mansfield

– West, Thomas G., "Jaffa vs. Mansfield," Perspectives on Political Science, Claremont Institute, Fall 2002.
Excerpt: What were the original principles of the American Constitution? Are those principles true? Many historians and political scientists write about the first question. Scholars are never shy about telling us what happened in the dead-and-gone eighteenth… More

Educating the Prince Eds. Blitz/Kristol

Educating the Prince: Essays in Honor of Harvey Mansfield, Mark Blitz and William Kristol, eds., Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000.
In this festschrift for Harvey Mansfield, twenty-one former students, themselves distinguished scholars and writers, reflect on the whole gambit of Mansfieldian themes, from Machiavelli to modern America, the wisdom of the ancients to the political science… More

The Mentor Conservatives Turn to for Inspiration

– Richardson, Lynda, "The Mentor Conservatives Turn to for Inspiration: A Gadfly and Confessor To a Harvard Lineage," New York Times, 16 October 1999.
Excerpt: It is the first day of the semester, and Harvey C. Mansfield has once again drawn a standing-room-only crowd of Harvard students to his course on the history of ancient and medieval political philosophy. Courtly and serious in a dark gray suit, Mr.… More

The 30 Years’ War

– Janet Tassel, "The Thirty Years War," Harvard Magazine, September 1999.
Excerpt: Thirty years ago, on a warm April day in 1969, Harvard faced one of the most daunting challenges in its history. Under the leadership of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), about three dozen students and others invaded and occupied University… More

Manly Virtues and Vices

– Craig Lambert, "Manly Virtues and Vices," Harvard Magazine, May 1998.
Excerpt: Don Quixote is an archetypal manly man. Supremely confident in his abilities, forthright in his dealings, passionate about righting wrongs and protecting the weak, Cervantes’ hero embodies the manly virtues. Yet Quixote was also thin-skinned,… More