Harvey Mansfield and virtue in the arid land of modern liberalism

Abstract

"Harvey C. Mansfield is one of the most distinguished American political philosophers writing today, standing at the very center of a bitter debate over the ultimate meaning of political life in modernity, and here, arguably the most prominent conservative academic teaching in a major American university. Mansfield is usually described as a conservative, or in recent years as neoconservative, due to the prominence some of his alleged students achieved in the ranks of George W. Bush’s administration. But this is a very inadequate label, unless it is intended to mean, in general, that he is not a liberal in the contemporary use of the word in America, and that he has had many students who have achieved public prominence, also in the conservative ranks. Mansfield in a personal description of his thought concurs with being labeled as a conservative, using the equivocal understatement that “some people, with some reason, call [me] a conservative”. But whatever the merits and demerits of such a description, it seems too narrow, and thus woefully incomplete. Mansfield’s range of thought and writings is so wide, so versatile, and his presence as a public intellectual commenting on various aspects of contemporary cultural and political life so ubiquitous, that it would be difficult to compress his intellectual and public activities in such a way as to put on it a definite conservative identification. "(...)