The Prince of Harvard. - Review - book review

Educating the Prince: Essays in Honor of Harvey Mansfield, edited by Mark Blitz and William Kristol (Rowman & Littlefield, 326 pp., $40)

Harvey Mansfield is not a household name, even among conservatives, and that is a pity, though it is hardly a surprise. Political philosophers rarely win popularity contests. But Mansfield's work is less well known than it should be even among his fellow political scientists, few of whom acknowledge his substantial contributions to their discipline. Having long ago decided that their liberalism was an unquestionable creed, Mansfield's colleagues in the academy ignore his publications and turn out young Ph.D.'s who have never read a word of his writings. Such is the fate of genuine thinking under the liberal dictatorship that has replaced the republic of letters on most American campuses.

Not that Mansfield lacks influence. Much to the consternation of his Harvard colleagues (many of whom must curse the day he was granted tenure), Mansfield has left his mark on thousands of undergraduate and graduate students over the past four decades. Many of these have gone on to hold top positions in higher education, politics, law, journalism, and business. Now Mark Blitz and William Kristol (respectively a professor of political philosophy at Claremont McKenna College and the editor and publisher of The Weekly Standard) have brought together some of the most intellectually impressive of these students to pay tribute to the teacher in Educating the Prince: Essays in Honor of Harvey Mansfield.

The range and depth of the 19 essays they have commissioned make the book far more substantial than the average run of such tributes. As one would expect from students of a leading authority and translator of Machiavelli, the author of The Prince figures prominently in these pages. But so do reflections on the American founding and the place of statesmanship in modern politics. Add to these the fascinating chapters on Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Kant, Churchill, Solzhenitsyn, common law, ethics in foreign policy, and the place of the federal bureaucracy in the constitutional order-and you begin to understand Mansfield's distinctive contribution to conservative ideas.

From the time John Stuart Mill first gave voice to the sentiment, conservatism has been tarred "the stupid party"-the party of opposition to science and reason, and of unthinking assent to the authority of custom and convention. Moreover, American conservatives have often allied themselves with populist movements whose thoughtfulness, to put it delicately, has been somewhat less than apparent. From the time of his early study of Burke and Bolingbroke (Statesmanship and Party Government, 1965), Mansfield has done his best to counter this understanding of conservatism-to teach his students that, rightly understood, it is the party of principled and prudent deliberation, the party that admires great acts of virtue and, in doing so, encourages such acts. In other words, conservatism is and should be the party of excellence.

As many of these chapters make clear, Mansfield's teaching begins with Aristotle, from whom we learn that politics is ultimately (in the words of Robert P. Kraynak, professor of political science at Colgate University) "a debate about who should rule." One party to the debate presumes a fundamental inequality among human beings and therefore believes that only the virtuous should have the honor of ruling. The other party denies that there are any relevant hierarchical human differences, and insists that political rule should be shared by all. For Aristotle, politics consists largely of a struggle between oligarchs and democrats, between defenders of distinction and advocates of equality.

If politics is primarily a struggle between competing visions of political justice, how can we hope to determine, let alone realize, the common good? Aristotle's solution was to advocate a "mixed regime" that would blend and moderate the clashing views of both. The democratic belief in the justice of equality would be satisfied by allowing each citizen to "rule and be ruled in turn," while the oligarchic concern for distinction would be reflected in institutions (like election to office) that are based on the presumption that those who win are fitter to rule than those who lose.

Many of the contributors to Educating the Prince note the striking similarities between Aristotle's mixed regime and the American experiment in self-government. However, following Mansfield and his own great teacher, Leo Strauss, they also deny that we can apply Aristotle's concepts and categories to modern political conditions in a straightforward manner. The essays by Ralph C. Hancock and Peter Minowitz echo an argument that Mansfield has made in a number of books, most prominently Taming the Prince (1989) and Machiavelli's Virtue (1996), that Christianity's defense of innate human dignity rendered Aristotle's solution, if not obsolete, then at least in need of revision. The spread of Christianity made it impossible to rely on an oligarchic class to temper the excesses of the democrats, whose egalitarian view of justice had apparently been endorsed by God Himself. In Kraynak's words, those who wished to follow Aristotle in the modern world would be required to "promote virtue indirectly, as 'disguised virtue.'"

This is exactly what Mansfield claims the American Founders were doing: attempting to create a modern analogue to Aristotle's mixed regime suited to the egalitarianism of a Christianized world. It would be a republic in which the unrestrained rule of the people was transformed into responsible self-government by institutional formalities and procedures designed to keep alive the concern for distinction.

As R. Shep Melnick writes in his contribution, the institutions of American government "consist of more than a few basic 'rules of the game.'" They contribute, above all, to shaping "the expectations, aspirations, habits, and inhibitions of rulers and ruled alike." Textbooks are wrong to focus exclusively on the Constitution's role in preventing political tyranny through "checks and balances" among the three branches of government. It certainly does so. But equally important is what Mansfield calls (in the title of his most accessible book) America's Constitutional Soul (1991)-that is, the Constitution's capacity to encourage or "call forth" excellence and give it an outlet.

Consider the presidency. Melnick and Glen E. Thurow imply in their chapters that the strength and independence of the presidency lead Americans to see it as something noble. The fact that we exalt the office leads ambitious men to compete for the honor of winning it. At times this competition has yielded great statesmen, and the fact that men as admirable as Washington, Lincoln, and Reagan have held it makes the office nobler still. Those who seek the presidency today have the added burden of living up to their examples-just as they must now live down the disgraceful impropriety of President Clinton's tawdry behavior.

But the Constitution's role in stemming the tide of democratic egalitarianism is not limited to office-seeking. On the contrary, the Founders believed that the liberty enshrined by the Constitution would have similarly salutary effects. By leaving men free to seek distinction for themselves, those who crave it will also strive for greatness in the private sphere. Most will seek honor and wealth in business; a few will pursue prestige in the worlds of science and learning. To quote Kraynak again: "The American expectation is that liberty itself will produce excellence by encouraging elites . . . to excel in the virtues of their calling."

America thus encourages the growth of what Jefferson called a "natural aristocracy," even while it appears to be thoroughly democratic. Mansfield teaches that America's greatness lies in its continued concern for greatness-and that thoughtful conservatives should concentrate their energies on preserving its constitutional preconditions. Which is to say, they should resist the forces that would transform the Constitution into a document that expands, rather than limits, the scope of democracy. The push among academics to interpret the Constitution in a thoroughly egalitarian light is merely the most obvious example. Others can be detected in the subtler efforts of pollsters and populists to make Washington more "responsive" to the "will" of the people.

To oppose these trends is to stand against some of the most powerful currents in contemporary American life. This is no easy task. But it is one for which Harvey Mansfield and his students have done as much as anyone can to prepare us.

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