Filmed June 26, 2026
BILL KRISTOL:
Hi, Bill Kristol here. Welcome back to Conversations. I’m very pleased to be joined again for the 23rd time by Harvey Mansfield. We’ve had so many wonderful conversations about political philosophy and also politics and even mystery novels. But a lot of those conversations have focused on what we’ll focus on today or have been preliminary, maybe, to what we’re focusing on today which is your wonderful new book, The Rise and Fall of Rational Control, a thoroughly rewritten version of lectures I heard 50 years ago. It’s hard to believe more than 50 years ago. But really, anyone who wants to think about anything serious, I would say, should read this book. So, Harvey, thanks for joining me today.
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m not sure whether 23 is a significant number of some kind, but I’ve enjoyed every one of them.
BILL KRISTOL:
Well that’s nice, and I have, too, and I think many of our viewers and listeners have. So, rational control, you use that as kind of … The book’s about modern political philosophy. It’s, as I say, a thorough updating, reworking, formalizing maybe, of the lectures you gave for many, many years in Gov 106A and then 106B and then 1061 at Harvard, and which were wonderful lectures on the history of modern political philosophy from Machiavelli through Hobbes & Locke to Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. I think is that pretty much all of them, I think? Marx.
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
Yup.
BILL KRISTOL:
And rational control is kind of the … What’s the right way to say it? The red thread. The thread you see as kind of the skeleton key to unlocking what’s at the heart of modern political philosophy. So, say a word about that.
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
Sure. There is a red thread connecting modern political philosophy. And it does begin with Machiavelli. I think that’s very true. It’s not just a series of events or accidents or important occurrences. It’s a political philosophy, and it begins with Machiavelli, and Machiavelli begins with necessity. He says it’s necessary to do what is necessary instead of to do what you wish would be good. So, the primacy of the good, which you get in Plato and Aristotle, is replaced by the primacy of necessity. And necessity consists of various different necessities, things that you are forced to do.
Some of them are without thinking, spontaneous, and some you do have a choice, but in every case, your choice should be to choose the necessary way. So, necessity has this kind of strange relationship with what seems to be its opposite choice. So, when you do what is necessary, you follow the effect of it because that shows you what really moved you. That shows you the cause. So, necessary leads to a kind of cause which has an effect, not the cause which is your purpose or your end.
That means that you must do what is necessary to preserve yourself, and preserving yourself always requires improving your situation, and that’s indicated by the word acquire. Necessity is a necessity to acquire. And Machiavelli uses that word, acquire, generally, not just in economics, as Aristotle had, or, as modern economists would say, acquisition. We don’t think of it as including conquest. But Machiavelli, yes, it does include conquest.
And that means that everything you do is aimed at… Because you now have your final cause as the effectual cause, everything you do is aimed at making yourself independent. And Machiavelli has a wonderful phrase for that. To be alone. Essere solo. Uno solo. That’s what you need to be. So, that’s a private goal. And it’s a goal which you can’t achieve by saying, “I’m trying to make myself alone.” Trump almost does that. He is so blatant about his egoism, but most of the time you have to engage in fraud. So, you mustn’t say, “Give me your gun. I want to shoot you.” You say, “Give me your gun.” After you’ve got it, then you can shoot him. This is Machiavelli’s example, by the way.
So, that means that all association is fundamentally conspiratorial. It’s you’re getting the better of someone, or you’re joining with someone to get the better of someone else. And the people that you join with have to be wary of you because you might betray them, or they might betray you. So, necessity introduces a kind of pall of conspiracy over all politics. And that, you can say, constitutes rational control.
Rational control is doing something which is reasonable for you but doesn’t address the reason of the person that you’re acting with. So, you don’t argue with someone. You force that someone, or you put that someone, in a certain position, as we would say today, in which you have leverage. That’s a kind of physical image of physical compulsion or coercion.
So, I like to use the example of speed bumps, even though my wife doesn’t care for it.
The city introduces speed bumps to slow you down. It doesn’t come to you and say, “You’re driving too fast. We need that everybody slow down.” You might answer yes, or you might answer no. In any case, you would argue, and you wouldn’t behave right away. But if this bump is right there, you have to slow down, otherwise you are hurting your suspension. So, that would be an example of doing something or, you could almost say, coercing to do something that is rational but doesn’t address rationale of the reason of the person that you’re doing it to. That would be a fundamental definition of rational control. So, that’s what Machiavelli does and what he introduces, that politics is gaining rational … He doesn’t use the word rational. He uses the word prudence. Prudential control over other people before they do it to you.
BILL KRISTOL:
That’s a really wonderful explanation and very bracing one and so interesting. So, how do we get from rational control which is, as you say, sort of in contrast to rational persuasion, let’s say, which seems to be a little bit what politics was more about for some of the ancients, at least? But how do we get from rational control to, let’s say, to liberalism and John Locke? We get there in your book through Thomas Hobbes, and you can mention, discuss Hobbes if you wish. But, I mean, Locke seems on the surface to be about choice more than necessity, or at least as much as necessity. The American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, which appeals back to Locke, is about making a choice. And actually, the Declaration explicitly is about persuading both people abroad and our fellow citizens of the decent respect to the opinion of mankind and all that stuff.
So, how do we get from Machiavelli to liberalism?
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
Good. Well, the Declaration does use ‘necessary’ twice in the first paragraph. “It’s necessary to choose.” Yes, and it does open up a choice. So, that’s right. Well, what Hobbes and Locke do is to transform uno solo into a right. A right that you have to preserve yourself. And when you can exercise that right, you are acting justly.
And, of course, justice isn’t very far from necessity. Machiavelli had spoken of justice as necessity. But you do have a right to choose your form of government that you live under. Although, Locke in his wandering way qualifies that by speaking of being driven into society under certain circumstances which are not unusual. In fact, which would happen.
But that’s it. Instead of Machiavelli’s dirty tricks and his emphasis on conspiracy and getting the other person before he gets you, you have a right. And it’s for you, and of course it’s for the rest of mankind. This is in Locke. But if the rest of mankind happens to get in the way of you, then it has to wait until you satisfy your own right. Uno solo becomes something which is just and deserved so that we can live together honestly. It’s especially good in that way because when you have a right, you know that the other person has it too. It’s equal.
It’s like in economics. You want the lowest price you can get, but you know that the person who’s selling you something wants the highest price he can get. So, you understand that person’s point of view better than if you just get angry and indignant that he’s cheating you, or if you try to look for a just price. So, here’s where rational control comes in, that the system as a whole is just. That’s the free market because it respects each person’s freedom to choose whether to buy or sell.
But, it isn’t arrived at through the use of reason. I mean, you do say how much to yourself you want for something, but you don’t try to say, “I’m poor and needy, and I need a lower price if you don’t mind.” And you argue. You can bargain, but you can’t argue justice in general. So, there’s a fine line there. So, that’s just the free market. That’s something which Locke helped to introduce, perhaps was a fundamental cause of, and then because he gave you a right to private property. This is something that Hobbes did not do. So, you can say that Locke is the author of liberalism in its economic aspect.
And he’s also the author of liberalism’s intellectual aspect. He spoke of a right to free speech or, rather, a right to be tolerated in the speech that you make coming out of your own mind.
One’s own mind seems to acquire some of the prestige of uno solo. But on the whole, he prefers the right of your body to the right of your soul. The trouble with the right of your soul is that your soul might be connected to the church and would be connected to the church. And that means that somebody else could tell you what to do through control of your soul. But if the government is limited to control of bodily actions or behavior, then yourself is free and your soul isn’t involved. So liberalism is a kind of disregard of the soul, the soul which opens you to the possibility of being ruled.
BILL KRISTOL:
But on the political side, so on the economic, I guess the political equivalent you might say of the free market, is the separation of powers, maybe checks and balances, a system that is rational but doesn’t require too much rationality by the actors within it. Ambition counteracts ambition, just as I suppose in the free market, acquisitiveness checks or balances other people’s acquisitiveness. I sort of see there’s a Machiavellian side of that, but why isn’t it also fair to say that that’s a rational project? Madison makes arguments in The Federalist Papers. He has to persuade Hamilton and other citizens of why this is a sensible way to set up the government. Obviously the ancients were more high-minded also understood people will be self-interested and ambitious and superficially separation of powers looks a little bit like Aristotle’s mixed regime and all that.
So why is the Lockean liberal modification of Machiavellianism, how far does it take one away from in a way those Machiavellian roots and towards, as you just said, also towards a certain freedom of speech, freedom of belief, even if it’s based in a way on, I don’t know, the individual body and on rights, it does allow people to do things as they choose to some degree? We talk a lot about choice. So why isn’t this more of a departure from Machiavelli than your—
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
Yes. Locke departs from Machiavelli, I think, on this. Ambition doesn’t have to be conspiratorial or dirty tricks on the contrary. “What is love of fame is the ruling passion of the noblest minds,” that’s not Madison, it’s Hamilton. So there’s something noble about it. And just as an Aristotle, Aristotle, ambition is a virtue and you can have too much of it and too little of it, and he notes that some people are praised for their ambition and other people are blamed for their ambition. So it’s a case where praise doesn’t automatically go to the virtue being named. And I think that applies to The Federalists as well.
Ambition counteracts ambition, but admits that ambition does have something selfish, but it also connects to the institution that you have an office in. So if you’re a senator, your ambition has to do with the prestige and power of the Senate and you’re going to be careful to maintain the institution where your ambition can be satisfied. So ambition goes with institutions, and institutions are something you don’t see in Machiavelli. He speaks of modes and orders. But orders, they can always be changed or manipulated through modes. So orders are what you try to do, but you have to be ready to depart from them right away. Whereas institutions and a constitution make up a part of a whole, which as a whole, is honest. So you’re contributing something of honesty when you push ahead your chances in ambition under Locke. And so I think you’re right to focus on that.
And you could even say that the whole American Constitution is based on ambition, it’s based on. Not on self-interest. Self-interest would often tell you to take it easy to stay out of it, let George do it, let somebody else take responsibility for doing something difficult. But ambition, which has not quiet, but fame as its object, is something different and will get you to do what is responsible. So we’re not talking about the US Constitution, which also uses the word responsibility in a way that Locke doesn’t quite, but which I think develops what Locke meant.
BILL KRISTOL:
And the book is obviously on the rise and fall of rational control. So why does the system you’ve just outlined, which seems like a pretty reasonable accommodation to both Machiavelli and then a little bit of an attempt to make it a little less, at least obviously tough or brutal or whatever, why the fall? I mean, is that an… Are there intrinsic weaknesses or was it simply whatever history came along and Hegel and Marx and Nietzsche wrote what they wrote and people got… And it hasn’t been a fall, I guess I would argue there’s still an awful lot of liberalism going around in the world.
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
Yeah. Well, let me put in a word for Montesquieu who isn’t in this book. Montesquieu gives a definition of despotism, which is the rule of un seul, which is French for Machiavelli’s Italian uno solo. So there you can see a direct contradiction, and Montesquieu especially tries to arrange his political science so that there’s never any unchecked power that one person could attain. And this does have an effect on ambition and also on the need for the power of one, which Locke did agree to. Locke agreed to the making of a very strong executive and this was picked up by the American founders and they made the first Republic ever with a strong executive. So there’s a good deal of uno solo, which we see especially right now in the American constitution.
But Rousseau goes further than Montesquieu and attacks ambition at its root with his analysis of what he called amour-propre, self-love. Amour-propre is something which isn’t natural to human beings. We are born without it, we’re born as kind of simple and innocent, and we pick up reason along the way, it’s not given to us. When accidents occur and we have to find some way to get out of them. So we think and in thinking we begin to think ourselves better than we used to be. And Rousseau questions this, whether the growth of technical or technological competence is the same thing as the growth of morality, and he denies that.
The more capable, the more powerful you make yourself, the less honest and moral in a clear and simple way you’ll have. And that means that reason is dubious. It’s not something you can rely on and it grows historically. It’s not something which is natural and always there for your use. And that introduces history which used as the kind of linchpin or hinge for the rest of the book that we start off with Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke. And those people believe in prudence or reason as something which is natural equipment in a human being and which you can appeal to even though you have to take account of its misuse when you try to use it for something you wish instead of something that’s necessary.
But for Rousseau, even necessity is just as bad as good as a prime motive. So in fact, it’s worse because it makes you cynical and too much concern merely with your own aggrandizement. And then after Rousseau come four Germans who in different ways appeal to history. So the rational control starts with reason and it falls, you can say its first fall is in Rousseau when reason turns out to be historical.
BILL KRISTOL:
And that becomes a huge theme in the 19th century. And I guess Nietzsche for you is the kind of culmination of that and maybe you should say a word about that. But why again … I mean, in theory, that could be a historical development in the history of thought, just like, I don’t know, Christianity followed the Greeks. It doesn’t mean that it refuted them, it just followed them and overcame them in a historical sense, but maybe not in an intellectual sense.
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
Yeah. Well, first there was Kant who tried to separate reason from fact or from nature. So you could save reason if only it doesn’t try to direct you in circumstances because circumstances can always be misused and they’re never clearly moral. So if you can take morality and make a universal law of it without regard to your nature, without regard to fact as he did, then you can save reason from Rousseau’s criticism of amour-propre. You’re just a moral guy, there’s nothing selfish about you. But the trouble with that is it’s so universal that it’s empty. It’s very hard to get it to direct any particular act, while still retaining its purity. It’s very hard for morality to be pure, as Kant to make it. So, Hegel comes along and he does what you said, tries to find reason in historical stages. So, instead of just accidents, which happen according to Rousseau in his second discourse, stages occur, and these stages are civilizations or cultures that follow a rational course. They don’t have an arc, as Obama might say, “the arc of history,” but they work by contradiction, that each civilization has a specialty, it’s good at something. So, the Greeks are good at formulations and forms, but they’re not very good at law. So, the Romans come along and they add or they contradict the Greeks while overcoming them. So, the overcoming of the…The conquering of the Greeks by the Romans is not an accidental fact.
It’s that the Romans had something which enabled them to overcome the Greeks, and that was a notion of law. And so, that’s the way that history develops through contradiction. And reason then isn’t just one simple thing that’s universal, it’s something which grows, which itself is historical. At the beginning it isn’t what it ends up being, but the development enriches it, makes it better so that the end of history, which just happens to be the German constitutional monarchy, Prussian, you could say, the Prussian constitutional monarchy is much better than its beginning in Africa, which didn’t even have a culture to speak of. Hegel’s very good at, and he’s a brilliant writer, very good at looking at facts and trying to make them significant in thought. So, he’s like a tourist, only say he specializes in the big sites where you have, what is Africa all about? It’s about sorcery. It’s about magic and so on. So, what is relation of that to reason and to the development of reason?
That’s the kind of attempt which he makes in the book that we read as The Philosophy of History. And this I can remark as a failing or a defect in my book in that it doesn’t cover Hegel’s political philosophy, as one would get in his Philosophy of Right, but rather the historical development in the Philosophy of History. And that’s because, I think the latter is really more significant, though both are very important. And just to maintain my theme, that modernity is rational control and at a certain point it becomes historical.
BILL KRISTOL:
I guess to restate my point or challenge, I guess would be, I mean, it did become historical. I think you showed that brilliantly, and that continues through past Hegel, I guess Mark’s version of Hegel, if you want to say it that way, and then Nietzsche goes to maybe another level. And attacks rationality, you might say simply. But again, that’s a historically correct, let’s stipulate, understanding of the great thinkers of political philosophy and of a certain movement, but need it have happened? Couldn’t one be a Lockean or a Montesquieu if you prefer that modification of Locke, or Tocquevillian, you mentioned Tocqueville and you’ve written so much on Tocqueville. I mean, in full knowledge of the 19th century assault on liberalism, why does one assume the assault is a fall, I guess is what I’m saying. Couldn’t it just be a critique that may or may not be true?
And it’s not, again, as if in the world, as we know it, those critiques had a real effect, obviously, in the 19th and 20th century, but liberalism also had its effect, and defeated, you might say that the political godchildren or whatever they were of Marx and to some degree defeated them of Marx and Nietzsche.
I mean, I guess what is it about rational control that couldn’t stand up to this assault, I guess is what I’m saying?
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
Those two attacks from the left and the right were defeated in the 20th century, but they’re still here. They’re still around. There’s still weaknesses of liberalism that has trouble defending self-preservation. That’s a fundamental right, the right of self-preservation, and that can be attacked from the left that self-preservation doesn’t say anything about community or about what is common to us, or it doesn’t say enough and it makes us selfish. And that leads you to the criticism from the right, which is self-preservation is ignoble. It doesn’t account for sacrifice, but the notion of sacrifice is so important for humanity and so connected to heroism. The greatness of man seems to be in the ability to sacrifice the self, rather than to satisfy it.
So, those two objections can be carried both to their extremes in Nazism and fascism versus communism, but they’re still with us as we just saw in elections in New York City. There’s still room for the critique of liberalism, this will be from the left.
BILL KRISTOL:
Right. Liberalism’s argument never depended, did it, on obliterating all critiques from the left and the right. I mean, the fact that some right-wingers win some running on anti-liberal platforms win elections and some left-wingers do just shows that—
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
Yes. In fact, you could say that liberalism consists in alternation, or at least coexistence of left and right. And maybe what they’ve got as a common good is the common good as seen by left or by the right. And one could say that. Liberalism has an empty center, as someone said. It tells you what your rights are, but it doesn’t tell you how to exercise those rights. So, the exercise of rights must be protected by liberalism in a sphere called civil society, that’s in Hegel too. Civil society consists in the exercise of the rights. And there it seems that in America saying that we have two parties, this is my rather brash and overgeneralizing notion that we have two parties that one is the oligarchical party and one is the Democratic Party. And these correspond to the two parties in every regime as seen by Aristotle, and also by Tocqueville that the empty center is filled up or taken possession of by our parties.
And this wasn’t so much the plan of the American founding or the framers of the Constitution. It is something that one can find in Montesquieu, since as a whole liberalism is democratic, because it universalizes what is particular in Machiavelli, gives everybody a right. We live in a Democratic age, but it turns out to be possible to find a way to make up a party of the virtuous, as the Republicans try to do. If you democratize virtue, then—but still leave it as distinguishing you from the unvirtuous—you can make a party that at least occasionally can win elections. And then Locke comes to the aid of the Republicans in that regard with his defense of private property, that it’s all right for you to get more property than the other fellow. Because this makes for an increase, or as the Wall Street Journal calls it, “growth” in the economy and enriches everybody.
And in general, there’s a difference between people who earn their living, as opposed to those who get monthly checks from the government and are not taxpayers. So, the Republicans want to take advantage of that inequality and use it to try to win elections. And the Democrats on their side are much more concerned with keeping a whole. They don’t want anybody to be left out, so they like to use the word inclusive to describe what they are, and exclusive is bad. Republicans don’t want to exclude, but they do want to recognize the merit of people who contribute more, whereas liberals are looking for people to feel sorry for. They’re more interested in the vulnerable who are at the margin, marginalized. That’s another word they use.
So, those two parties, it seems to me, can continue. Each has its point of view and possibility of alternating with the other party, as we’ve seen, say in the last half century, pretty much equal terms of office for the two parties. So, that’s a way in which Aristotle comes back into liberalism by taking advantage of our partisanship.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, that’s really interesting. And a lot more could say about the two parties in America today, and more broadly, obviously in modern liberal democracy, if there are these two general parties that tend to exist within the framework of democracy and rights and so forth. But I guess I’m a little still uncertain why doesn’t like, Ukraine, for example, show that one could be very vigorous in fighting and World War II, for that matter in fighting for a system that preserves the existence, preserves your rights and preserves your ability to choose your government, and to live reasonably free lives, people are willing to fight for that and sacrifice for it. And then within that, let me put it this way, if we can call it an empty circle or whatever, a hole at the middle of liberalism. But one could also call it a, I don’t know, liberalism creates a boundary within which people can pursue various forms of happiness that are sometimes in a pretty impressive way. And many times in a just more prosaic way, but that’s always been the case, and I guess it’s not so …Again, how severe is that challenge to … Is that challenge to liberalism sort of a devastating challenge? I mean, is it really an empty center or is it simply a choice to not resolve certain things at the center, which seems like a reasonable choice in some ways?
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
Yes, that’s a very good point and I accept it. In general, liberalism is made for peace and not for war and—
BILL KRISTOL:
I guess that’s fair, yeah.
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
And when it comes to defense of the system, usually that’s difficult. Because you can vote for our party, but you can’t vote for the two party system. But you can fight for it when the whole country, which depends on it, is at stake. So in our Civil War, you see that—
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. World War II, you have the Roosevelt brings Republicans. You have a certain bipartisan tradition in foreign policy. I mean, I don’t know, in a way that captures that, right? I mean, that they—
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
It does. Yeah, right. Partisanship though works its way into foreign affairs—
BILL KRISTOL:
Well, fair enough. That’s for sure. That is for sure.
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
Very often. Yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
But say a word maybe just about the—and then I want to ask about teaching a bit—but two things, I guess. Is the alternative to the rational control of Hobbes and Locke a sort of modified rational control of, you call it, I think a revived liberalism that might be possible? Like take it sort of based on Montesquieu talk, and maybe ultimately Aristotle. Or surely, I mean, there is something to be said about preferring rational control to irrational control, right?
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
Yes.
BILL KRISTOL:
It wasn’t Machiavelli and Hobbes—
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
That’s right.
BILL KRISTOL:
…weren’t crazy in thinking that they could do better, you know.
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
No, no, that’s right. So rational control put itself up against prejudice and tradition and superstition. And those are not good things necessarily. My tradition might be, but the other two are certainly bad. And I like to make the point that, if you go now as a tourist to Europe, a good fraction of the number of sites that you see are churches. And you go into those churches and whom do you see? You don’t see worshipers, you see other tourists looking at them.
Now imagine these churches all full of worshipers. That is a lot of power. And I think that’s what Machiavelli and other had in mind. And so this was a significant threat to human freedom and also to virtue. Yes, one has to keep that in mind so that rational control is not merely dictatorial or even totalitarian. And that there are ways of keeping it honest as Locke tried to do.
But it is also against human nature because it simplifies too much. It simplifies the soul into the self. And it tries to offer the notion of self-interest as a solution for all human problems, and that really doesn’t work. So you have to be aware of the limits of it, and you don’t have to go the whole way to take a fall with Nietzsche.
You remember that remark in P.G. Wodehouse with Jeeves and Bertie Wooster. Jeeves the intelligent valet, Bertie Wooster, his moral boss, so to speak. And so Bertie Wooster has, as usual, got himself entangled with an unsatisfactory young woman who wants him to read Nietzsche. And Jeeves looks at him and looks at Bertie and says, “Nietzsche is fundamentally unsound, sir.” So that’s something to bear in mind.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, maybe not, maybe, because your book at least provides the basis for a little more of an elaboration of why that might be. And why a form of, as you say, a political rational control might be defensible or improved upon, I suppose. But let me, just since I took this course so many decades ago, such a wonderful course and the book’s a wonderful book, one should read it, but I’m just curious about teaching.
I mean, you seem to me to have enjoyed teaching the course for all the time that you did. You did it every other year, both the ancient and medieval and then modern political philosophy. You enjoyed other teaching. I think you’re still doing reading groups here in your ostensible retirement as Professor Emeritus. And I’m curious about, I mean, not everyone whom I’ve known and not everyone of whom I’ve admired, honestly, as professors particularly liked teaching, I would say. Or some of them got away from it when they could and so forth.
Obviously people like a break from it and all, but I don’t know. Was it important to you, was it useful to you, interesting to you to teach all these years? Or was that more your job I mean at Harvard? I’m just curious.
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
Yeah, I think that is funny. So one of my colleagues who left teaching in the department was a very good teacher, nonetheless, he said he got tired of always looking for that look in the eye of a student that he understands. That he’s seeing something which he hadn’t seen before. And he could create that, but it got boring. But it’s never gotten boring to me. And one reason is that you’re always on the lookout for somebody who’s better and that’s happened to me and so yeah. The best, I can quote another story too with Churchill. Churchill was invited by an aristocratic friend of his who lived in a mansion at some distance. And he was sitting by the telephone, and the telephone rang. And calling him was the butler from the person that he was going to be seeing. And he said, “Can you please tell me what Mr. Churchill especially likes in the way of things?” And Churchill pretending to be his own butler said, “Mr. Churchill is always easily satisfied with the very best.” So that’s my story. It’s not the first time I’ve told that, like I have to say. I told it at the goodbye celebration that the government department gave me.
BILL KRISTOL:
You shocked…Were your colleagues a little bit shocked or they’re used to being shocked by you, I suppose, right?
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
Yeah, maybe. It doesn’t work. Doesn’t work always. Maybe it works never.
BILL KRISTOL:
I wouldn’t say that.
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
So I just wrote a book called Where Harvard Went Wrong. I didn’t write it. It consists of writings that I have given at Harvard about Harvard. And so it’s partly an “I told you so” book, but it also tells them where I live.
BILL KRISTOL:
Right. Right. Yeah. I know there’s a lot of wonderful stuff in that book and maybe a little maybe Harvard wasn’t so … Of course, when you got there, it had its own deficiencies to say the least, right? I think didn’t you joke about you wouldn’t have gotten tenure perhaps if you had flown the Jolly Roger, raised the Jolly Roger too early or something like that.
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
Yes. Yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
And as someone showed—
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
I made a remark like that. Actually, they knew. They knew something.
BILL KRISTOL:
I’m sure…
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
And those were liberals of a kind you don’t see very often these days.
BILL KRISTOL:
On the other hand, some of it, I’ve got to say, having gotten there in 1970, some of the older political scientists who were well respected, some of the older historians were actually not very…I mean, maybe they were personally more tolerant, that’s good, but they were not… I mean, I don’t know. Some of the political science that was being done then and everyone was enthusiastic about then. I don’t know. It wasn’t so great either. And the historians were still influenced by, I don’t know what, Neo Marxists and so forth, it was kind of a…It’s a funny… I don’t know. There’s never quite a golden age maybe that one wants to think there was. The golden age is very brief. I guess that’s what I’m struck by. It’s like A.lan Bloom, your friend Al.an Bloom’s wonderful book on The Closing of the American Mind. And then when you really think about, well, when was the opening of the American Mind? It seems to have been for about five years in Chicago from 1949 to 19 … Or 10 years maybe, ‘til about 1960 by his account. Mostly opened by European … By people who came from Europe, of course, right? You know, so it’s like…
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
Yeah. Well, for me, the opening of the American mind was a wonderful man I chose as my mentor both as an undergraduate and a graduate student, and that was Sam Beer.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, say a word about that maybe in conclusion, if you will. And then maybe about Leo Strauss, who was your teacher also we should probably mention here, right?
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
Well, Sam Beer was a great guy and I dedicated my book on manliness to him. Because it begins with a story about Sam Beer when he was retiring. And I got a call from some Harvard agency asking me, “What would you say to describe him?” And I said, “He’s manly.” And then the other voice said, “Could you think of another word?” But you can think of another word and that’s philosophy, and that’s what I got from Leo Strauss.
BILL KRISTOL:
And we’ve discussed that in another conversation, so I guess we don’t have to go through it here. But no, well, anyway, congratulations on the book, and on all those wonderful decades of teaching that course. I remember vividly, I’ll just close in 1970. So you were on leave my freshman year in Italy as I recall, in some nice place there working on Machiavelli.
And so I took your student and my teacher, also Mark Blitz’s sophomore tutorial. Where we read Plato and Nietzsche, read The Republic and Beyond Good and Evil. So one book each term, just about seven or eight of us in this little tutorial. That’s the way the system was set up then for the…And so that was really a revelation in how to read, or how to begin to read serious books.
But then I remember walking into 106A and your first lecture there, that was really a wonderful moment. And so I thank you for that actually. And that was a long time ago, 1971 but yeah. And I guess you began teaching the course only a few…I hadn’t realized, of course, at the time when you’re 18 years old, 19 years old, you think that Professor Mansfield, you’ve been there forever. But of course, I guess you were 40 years old then or something. I mean, you were young. And you began teaching the course in the mid ’60s, if I’m not mistaken.
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
That’s right.
BILL KRISTOL:
So you had taught it a couple of times but yeah—
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
That’s right.
BILL KRISTOL:
I was on the early years that was great.
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
Took it over from Carl J. Friedrich. That was a big name in those days.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. Yeah. He was still there my first year, yeah. Anyway, congratulations. Thank you for taking this time.
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
Thank you.
BILL KRISTOL:
… for the 23rd conversation. I’ll look forward to the 24th unless you tell me we shouldn’t have a 24th because 23 is more important, a good number. But I think we can forge ahead.
HARVEY MANSFIELD:
It probably is, anyway. And let me say that I’ve had wonderful students and you’re one of them.
BILL KRISTOL:
Oh, well, that’s very kind and much too kind, but I won’t…Well, thank you. Thank you. Harvey, thanks for joining me today and thank you all for joining us in Conversations.
