The princes pay tribute. - Review - book review

Public Interest, Summer, 2001 by Jerry Z. Muller

EDUCATING the Prince, [ ] a new Festschrift in honor of Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., includes a list of his published work that attests to his prolific scholarship. But Mansfield has long had a reputation as an outstanding teacher as well. Thousands of Harvard undergraduates-among them, the presumptive princes of the book's title-have had their mental horizons expanded (and their GPAs contracted) by attending his courses. A much smaller number have worked with him on the doctoral level, and it is from these that the contributors are drawn.

The Festschrift is an inherently imperfect form. For it seeks to celebrate the honoree by reflection, by displaying his interests as mirrored in the work of his students-and mirrors may distort or dull or diffuse what they reflect. William Kristol, co-editor of the volume with Mark Blitz, acknowledges as much when he writes in his introduction that "I am confident I speak for all the contributors to this volume when I assert that these efforts of his students fall short of what Harvey Mansfield deserves." Some of the essays do indeed sparkle, and taken as a whole they remind us of the range of Mansfield's interests and achievements. Many of the best moments come when the contributors recall an insight from one of Mansfield's books, or an apercu from his lips, such as, "Studying methodology is like practicing seduction on an empty couch."

Mansfield is a political theorist whose interests have linked con temporary concerns with the study of some of the great political thinkers of the past. The objects of his most sustained interest have been Edmund Burke and Machiavelli. His first book, Statesmanship and Party Government: A Study of Burke and Bolingbroke, published in 1965, included a well-founded critique of the image of Burke as a Christian natural law theorist (a conception then popular among conservatives), and stressed, by contrast, Burke's avoidance of first principles and his emphasis on prudence derived from historical experience. In this and other respects examined by Mansfield, such as his attention to political economy, Burke was an eminently modern thinker, a conservative rather than an orthodox one.

MANSFIELD, too, is a conservative. He supports the modern, liberal democratic regime, but he claims that liberal democrats frequently misunderstand the conditions that have made such regimes successful: above all, the limits placed on direct democracy by liberal constitutions in general and by the U.S. Constitution in particular. The egalitarianism of democratic rhetoric disguises and distorts the need for democracies to attract spirited leaders, Mansfield claims, and the liberal emphasis on law-abidingness disguises the allowances that successful constitutions make for extra-ordinary acts by elected leaders, a flexibility without which liberal democracies would not function. The very propensity to refer to leaders as "executives," who act with the authority of others, masks their leadership role.

Mansfield has explored these themes in a number of works, most notably in his 1989 book, Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power. Like other students of Leo Strauss, Mansfield frequently reminds us that modern liberal institutions depend in part for their flourishing on practices that are neither modern nor liberal. (This is one of the recurrent themes of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, which Mansfield and his wife Delba Winthrop have recently translated.) Like other Straussians, Mansfield often plays with the distinction between the ancients and the moderns, but unlike some Straussians, he calls attention to the respects in which the moderns are superior to the ancients. He traces that superiority to Machiavelli, the founder of a political science of effective causes, rather than a high-minded theory of lofty but unattainable ideals. Not only has Mansfield produced important translations of Machiavelli's major works-The Prince, The Discourses on Livy (with Nathan Tarcov), and The Fl orentine Histories (with Laura Banfield)-but the inescapable relevance of Machiavelli is an important theme in many of his other works.

Mansfield regards the U.S. Constitution as a remarkably successful instrument, a success he attributes not to its purported congruence with Greek natural right or Christian natural law (in the manner, say, of Harry Jaffa), but to the success of modern, Machiavellian political science. "The typical mistake of the conservative," Leo Strauss once wrote, "consists in concealing the fact that the continuous and changing tradition which he cherishes so greatly would never have come into being through conservatism, or without discontinuities, revolutions, and sacrileges committed at the beginning of the cherished tradition and at least silently repeated in its course." Mansfield, in this respect and in many others, is an unorthodox conservative. At the beginning of the tradition to which Americans are heir, he asserts, stands the scandalous and sacrilegious Machiavelli (in whom he sees an adumbration of many themes often identified with Hobbes). Mansfield's method, often enough, is genealogical in Nietzsche's sense : It reveals a forgotten lineage, recalling the discontinuities, revolutions, and sacrileges that have gotten us to where we are--and the good reasons for them.