Harvey Mansfield, Radical

Despite being a fixture in Harvard University’s ivory towers for almost his entire life, Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., is an anti-establishment icon. From questions about feminism and same-sex marriage to the nature of constitutionalism and the meaning of modern freedom, he has never been afraid of voicing conservative opinions that cut across the conventional wisdom of liberal academia. In a with the Chronicle of Higher Education, the professor even accepted the label “annoying Socratic gadfly.”  

Yet it would be a mistake to chalk up Mansfield’s dissidence to mere partisan politics. His scholarship itself is radical—not in the sense that he wants to tear down the status quo and replace it with something revolutionary, but rather in that he seeks to uncover the deepest roots of political phenomena. Mansfield rejects the dominant ideology of political correctness because he unflinchingly seeks to understand things as they really exist, and to understand the voices of the past as they understood themselves. 

This approach also sets Mansfield against the utilitarian approaches prevailing in other corners of the academy. In , for example, he became noticeably perplexed when the economist Tyler Cowen suggested students might legitimately use artificial intelligence tools to help read books. “That’s not good enough,” Mansfield said. “You want the best, and the best is in the original text. I don’t think you want to substitute for that original text trying to understand it. You need to pay careful attention to everything that is said in the way that it’s said and in the place that it’s said.” According to him, the greatest books are written carefully and, in turn, reward only the closest, most careful readings. Outsourcing that kind of work to an AI would deprive us of the actual benefits of education. 

For decades at Harvard, Mansfield has been teaching students how to do this kind of reading for themselves. His new book, , is adapted from lectures delivered in his History of Modern Political Philosophy class from 1968 to 2022 and is dedicated to those not fortunate enough to have taken the course themselves. It is a brilliant introduction to Mansfield’s scholarship, perhaps his most bracing work since his 2007 work , and a real call-to-arms for liberal education’s defenders.

Read more in Civitas Outlook.