Harvey Mansfield On Machiavelli And Modernity

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Harvey is a political philosopher. He’s been on the faculty at Harvard since 1962, and he’s currently the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government. His 13 books include Taming the Prince, Manliness, and Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth. His new book is The Rise and Fall of Rational Control: The History of Modern Political Philosophy. Harvey was my tutor as a graduate student at Harvard, an overseer of my dissertation, and I was a teaching fellow for the course in modern political thought that his latest book reprises brilliantly. To be honest, my reverence for him made me nervous for this podcast. But his brilliance and dry humor and joie de vivre all came through, and he put me at ease.

For two clips of the episode — on the shift from virtue to freedom during the Enlightenment, and how Nietzsche reframed the West — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: raised by New Deal liberals in New Haven and DC; his dad a Yale professor and mom a musician; Leo Strauss an academic mentor; thymos and masculinity; Plato’s Apology of Socrates; Aristotle; Aquinas; why democracy leads to tyranny; the humor of Machiavelli; Spinoza and dissent; Locke’s Two Treatises; the incest prohibition; Hegel; Hobbes; common sense; Nietzsche and nihilism; deconstructing Christianity; science as a product of “white supremacy”; the sex binary; de Beauvoir’s Second Sex; the postmodern view of science; Rawls; AI and human obsolescence; grade inflation; Judith Shklar and her love of Montaigne; Oakeshott; anti-semitism on campus after 10/7; and how moderns set aside the deepest questions.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. We have some real stars coming up: Ben Rhodes on Iran and speech-writing, HW Brands on the life of George Washington, John Gray on Trump’s new world, Bob Wright on the evolutionary force of AI, Tiffany Jenkins on privacy in a liberal democracy, Daniel McCarthy on conservatism, Stephen Grosz on the struggles of love, and Robby George on all our disagreements. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to [email protected].