Harvey Mansfield
Harvard Government professor emeritus; 60+ years at Harvard; 90 years old as of July 2022; leading American Straussian; idol to Michael Anton and Claremont figures; dissertation advisor to Costin Alamariu (BAP); author of Manliness (2006); his fête at AEI (July 6, 2022) became a revealing gathering of New Right and establishment conservatism
Who He Is
Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. is one of the most prominent American political philosophers of the twentieth century. He taught in Harvard’s Department of Government for sixty years, influenced generations of conservative and Straussian scholars, and wrote extensively on Machiavelli, Tocqueville, Edmund Burke, and the question of executive power. His books include Machiavelli’s Virtue (1996), A Student’s Guide to Political Philosophy (2001), and Manliness (2006).
He is the central generational figure connecting the Straussian tradition to the MAGA New Right. Michael Anton cited him as an idol; Charles Kesler studied in his tradition; and most damningly, Costin Alamariu (Bronze Age Pervert) completed his dissertation under Mansfield’s supervision, and Mansfield signed off on a dissertation committee that included explicitly race-science-adjacent material.
Intellectual Stance
Mansfield is an East Coast Straussian — in the tradition of Strauss’s own Harvard seminars, not the West Coast Jaffaite branch. His Straussianism emphasizes:
- Esotericism: the idea that great thinkers write between the lines, concealing dangerous truths from unready audiences
- Anti-egalitarianism: consistent skepticism toward democratic equality as a philosophical aspiration
- Manliness: his 2006 book argued that “manliness” — the assertion of confident self-expression in the face of opposition — is a real and valuable human quality suppressed by contemporary liberalism
- Executive power: his Taming the Prince (1989) traced the philosophical genealogy of strong executive power
Christopher Hitchens formulated the essential paradox: “The cynicism of Strauss’s theory and practice was summarized in his antithesis between Athens and Jerusalem. I am certain to vulgarise the recondite here, but Straussians believe in religion and not in God.” This explains how secular Straussians like Mansfield could be sympathetic to Christian nationalism without being believers.
The AEI Fête (July 6, 2022)
On July 6, 2022, the American Enterprise Institute hosted an afternoon of panels in Mansfield’s honor — organized by Yuval Levin and Bill Kristol, both former Mansfield students, on the occasion of Mansfield’s 90th birthday and 60 years of teaching. The event was a reunion for prominent Straussians after Covid-related isolation.
The audience was nearly all white, overwhelmingly male, with a strong showing of young Republicans in navy blazers and khakis. Mansfield himself sat in the front row, periodically nodding off, supported by his “spectacular” (his word) third wife Anna.
The second panel — ostensibly on “Tocqueville and America” — pitted two Trump advocates (Charles Kesler and Peter Berkowitz, a Hoover Institution fellow who had served in the first Trump administration as director of policy planning at the State Department) against two critics (Bryan Garsten of Yale and Yuval Levin as moderator). Bill Kristol left the room before this panel began.
Garsten’s challenge: In a quiet, tactful way, Garsten raised Lincolnian questions about the preservation of American institutions. He quoted Mansfield’s own earlier warnings about populism’s dangers — “It’s a dangerous game to try to ride the tiger. You might end up inside it” — and asked: “Are we going to be overcome by the democratic impatience with forms and formalities so much so that constitutionalism as a source of conservatism gets put aside?”
Kesler’s defense: Trump “in a way” represented a “democratic upsurge” because “the old constitution… had fallen into a certain kind of disrepair, or even deliberate diminishment and abandonment.” The populism was “proconstitutional, even though it takes an angry form in many cases.” Field: “This was a rehash of The Crisis of the Two Constitutions — a book that replicated the same Manicheanism, in more genteel form, of ‘charge the cockpit or you die’ and ‘the hour is late’ Red Caesarism.”
Garsten’s closing question was the sharpest: “Under what conditions [could] populism be expected to generate a new appreciation for constitutionalism? Or does it create habits and practices that will, in the end, do just the reverse? … Can we have that [populist] style of politics and hope that it leads us to a very different style of politics at some point in the future?”
Mansfield’s conclusion: He praised “conservative isles of virtue,” took formulaic swipes at liberals, and concluded with a petty jab at Obama — for his “ambition and senseless assertiveness.” Field: “I have seldom been so glad to no longer be part of something as when I walked out of the AEI building into the DC sunshine that day.”
The Alamariu Connection
Mansfield was on the dissertation committee of Costin Alamariu — aka Bronze Age Pervert — whose Yale dissertation “The Problem of Tyranny and Philosophy in the Thought of Plato and Nietzsche” was supervised by Bryan Garsten and Steven B. Smith. Harvey Mansfield was a committee member. When Alamariu was named by The Atlantic in August 2023, Smith expressed shock — but Mansfield’s name on the committee was quietly noted. The fact that the most notorious Hard Right intellectual of his generation had benefited from Mansfield’s mentorship says something about Straussianism’s political drift.
Field’s Assessment
Field’s conclusion about Mansfield and Straussianism: “The Claremonters, as well as their more genuinely devout NatCon and Postliberal colleagues, were cooperating with the likes of Donald Trump, with sincere extremists like those who constitute the Charismatic world, and with creeps like Stephen Wolfe. It was, in the end, the Enlightenment philosophers who made them do it.”
Strauss’s dichotomies — Athens vs. Jerusalem, Ancients vs. Moderns — “fostered an either/or mode of thought that actively made room both for true believers — the more fanatical, the better — as well as for anyone who, educated in Straussian schools of esoteric dissembling and thymos, came to believe in their own superiority. But this model didn’t always make room for others — for people who were more quietly pious, or more questioning than strident… In some of these circles, anyone who believed in modern liberty and pluralism… was seen at best as shallow and naïve, and at worst as a harbinger of the Last Man or the Longhouse.”
Cross-References
- Leo Strauss — Mansfield’s intellectual progenitor
- Esotericism — the Straussian doctrine Mansfield practices and teaches
- The Claremonters — the New Right current shaped by Mansfield’s tradition
- Costin Alamariu — dissertation committee member; the most embarrassing connection
- Michael Anton — student and admirer
- Charles Kesler — leading West Coast Straussian; squared off with Garsten at AEI fête
- West Coast Straussianism — Jaffa’s branch vs. Mansfield’s East Coast version
- Curtis Yarvin — Yarvin attended NatCon 4; Mansfield’s Straussianism indirectly enabled the intellectual atmosphere