Harvey Mansfield

Harvey Claflin Mansfield Jr. (born March 21, 1932) is an American political philosopher.

Mansfield was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on March 21, 1932.

In 1949, he enrolled at Harvard University with a focus in studying government, receiving his Bachelor of Arts in 1953.

As an undergraduate, he was a liberal who supported Adlai Stevenson II.

After graduating, Mansfield received a Fulbright Scholarship to study in England for a year.

From 1954 to 1956, he served in the United States Army in Virginia and France.

He returned to Harvard and received his Ph.D. in 1961.

Mansfield initially began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, for a few years before lecturing at Harvard.

He was the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he taught since 1962.

He has held Guggenheim and NEH Fellowships and has been a Fellow at the National Humanities Center.

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.

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 was educated at public schools before college.

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).

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).

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.

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.

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.

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, Charles R. Kesler, Alan Keyes, William Kristol, Clifford Orwin, Paul Cantor, Mark Lilla, Francis Fukuyama, Sharon Krause, Bruno Maçães, and Shen Tong.

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).

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.