Harvey C. Mansfield

Where Harvard Went Wrong contains Harvey Mansfield’s addresses, spanning fifty years, to Harvard colleagues and students. Mansfield’s plea is, and has always been, that Harvard abandon its partisanship with the left and adopt instead a bipartisan position that welcomes conservatives as well as liberals. With the humor and grace necessary to a longtime lone conservative voice, Mansfield tackles the consequences that intolerant wokeism has wrought upon the university. In a collection of seven articles reproduced from the undergraduate newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, Mansfield treats the clash between Harvard and the Trump administration: he covers Harvard’s unsteady self-conception as an Ivory Tower, affirmative action for conservatives, free speech and protest speech, and the misconceived division between science and the humanities. Altogether, not confining himself to complaints of injustice, he shows what conservatives might offer to improve American higher education. In other, varied speeches and articles from 1975 to the present, Mansfield contrasts the new and the old Harvard, setting the stage for the conflict today; offers a reform curriculum for a college with ambition; and studies the insidious effects of rampant grade inflation and the forfeiture of merit-based grading. In Where Harvard Went Wrong, one professor stands up to a whole faculty, offering arguments rather than evasions and equivocation, and keeping as his lodestar the principle that education must conserve the tradition of learning as well as progress beyond the present. This book is meant for both parties—a guide for conservatives and a gentle, friendly reproach to liberals.

A renowned scholar traces the evolution of modern political philosophy. The Rise and Fall of Rational Control is a bold interpretation of centuries of intellectual revolutions. Based on Harvey C. Mansfield’s legendary Harvard course, taught for decades to rapt classrooms, this volume is both a grand work of ideas and an elucidating reflection on liberalism, its eclipse, and the possibility of renewal. Mansfield locates the birth of modern political philosophy in the work of Niccolo Machiavelli, the first to assert that the objective of politics is not to achieve wishful ideals of justice or virtue—as the ancients had it—but to manipulate the brute facts of the world in service of interests. Here rational control, free from the order of gods or God, is the key to achieving the modern order, which can liberate humans from slavery and conflict. Hobbes and Locke later develop Machiavelli’s modern idea, laying foundations for liberalism. Then comes the first crisis in the form of Rousseau, who introduces historical change into the very idea of reason, which itself is said to evolve. After Rousseau, history takes center stage, as witnessed in Kant, Marx, and Hegel. The second crisis of modernity arrives with Nietzsche, who casts doubt on reason itself. Ever since, political thought has been stranded in the desert of postmodernism, where Machiavelli’s necessities are replaced by faded subjectivity. Tracing the rise and fall of rational control, Mansfield asks where we go from here. Can we progress beyond our unease with what is modern, or should we aim to return somehow to what came before?