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Renowned political philosopher Harvey Mansfield holds the Harvey C. Mansfield Chair of Political Philosophy at the University of Austin (UATX). After a legendary 60-year teaching career at Harvard, he brings his expertise in Machiavelli, manliness, and classical political philosophy to this institution. 1, 2]

[### What should I ask Harvey Mansfield?

Marginal REVOLUTION

https://marginalrevolution.com › 2025/11 › what-shoul...](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/11/what-should-i-ask-harvey-mansfield.html)

Nov 30, 2025 — You must ask him for his view of the development of the Claremont Institute. For 20-25 years they poo-pood his emphasis on executive power in ...Read more

The UATX Chair

The Harvey C. Mansfield Chair in Political Philosophy was established to honor and continue the scholar's legacy of rigorous, conservative-leaning political philosophy and intellectual diversity. The chair was generously funded by the Alder Tree Charity Foundation. [1,2]

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AI Overview

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Renowned conservative political philosopher Harvey C. Mansfield analyzes libertarian thinkers like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman by contrasting their devotion to the free market with the necessity of moral virtue. [1, 2, 3]

A comprehensive breakdown of this philosophical dynamic includes:

  1. Mansfield on Hayek, Friedman, and Libertarianism
  1. The Core Philosophical Tension

For a deeper dive into Mansfield’s critiques of the modern era, his recent book, The Rise and Fall of Rational Control, explores the philosophical foundations behind these ideological shifts. [1]

“Liberty and Virtue in the American Founding.” - Harvey C. Mansfield

Publication information: Mansfield HC. “Liberty and Virtue in the American Founding.” Never a Matter of Indifference; Sustaining V...

Harvard University

Harvey Mansfield XX Transcript - Conversations with Bill Kristol

May 2, 2020 — Democracy with its inability to justify authority of any kind leads to degraded souls. So I think I would give it a try. KRISTOL: ...

Conversations with Bill Kristol

Harvey Mansfield, "Who and What Are Republicans?"

The concept of their philosopher Friedrich Hayek, readers of Ayn Rand know that they have their heroes too. Libertarians caused tr...

University of Chicago L

[### Hayek's Wings

Libertarianism.org

https://www.libertarianism.org › articles › hayeks-wings](https://www.libertarianism.org/articles/hayeks-wings)

May 27, 2026 — In The Fatal Conceit, Friedrich Hayek says that “there may exist just one way to satisfy certain requirements for forming an extended order.Read more

[### Harvey Mansfield, "Who and What Are Republicans?"

University of Chicago Law School

https://www.law.uchicago.edu › recordings › harvey-ma...](https://www.law.uchicago.edu/recordings/harvey-mansfield-who-and-what-are-republicans)

The concept of their philosopher Friedrich Hayek, readers of Ayn Rand know that they have their heroes too. Libertarians caused trouble for both parties ...Read more

[### Grab a Whip and a Chair

Reason Magazine

https://reason.com › Latest](https://reason.com/1990/08/01/grab-a-whip-and-chair/)

Aug 1, 1990 — Harvey Mansfield's inquiry into the nature of executive power poses a disturbing challenge for political theory. If Mansfield is right, ...Read more

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[### Can the Free Market Work without Virtue?

Taylor & Francis Online

https://www.tandfonline.com › ... › Volume 44, Issue 2](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10457097.2015.1011041)

Libertarianism has become one of the most influential movements of the last twenty years. Its political effects can be seen as the driving force behind many in ...

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6 26 some talk Harvey Mansfield - Wikipedia

Harvey Claflin Mansfield Jr. (born March 21, 1932) is an American political philosopher. He was the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he taught from 1962 until his retirement in 2023. He has held Guggenheim and NEH Fellowships and has been a Fellow at the National Humanities Center. In 2004, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush and delivered the Jefferson Lecture in 2007.

Mansfield is a scholar of political history, and was greatly influenced by Leo Strauss.[1] He is also the Carol G. Simon Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. Mansfield is notable for his generally conservative stance on political issues in his writings. At Harvard, he became one of the university's most prominent conservative figures. In 2023, he retired from teaching as one of the university's longest-serving faculty members.[2]

His notable former students include: Mark Blitz, James Ceaser, Tom Cotton,[3] Andrew Sullivan,[4] Charles R. Kesler, Alan Keyes, William Kristol,[5] Clifford Orwin, Paul Cantor, Mark Lilla, Francis Fukuyama, Sharon Krause, Bruno Maçães, and Shen Tong.

Biography

Mansfield was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on March 21, 1932.[6] His mother, Grace Yarrow Mansfield, was an alumna of Vassar College, and coeditor, with Elizabeth Bristol Greenleaf, of a book on the ballads and sea songs of Newfoundland.[7][8][9] His father, Harvey Mansfield Sr., had been editor of the American Political Science Review and was the Ruggles Professor Emeritus of Public Law and Government at Columbia University at the time of his death in 1988 at the age of 83.[10] Mansfield Sr., who had also taught at Yale and been the departmant chairman at Ohio State, was described by his son as "a New Deal Democrat, a liberal who had an aversion to the Left." At Ohio State, Mansfield had met Harry V. Jaffa, a young assistant professor whose anti-Communist conservatism was also an influence. Like Jaffa, Mansfield eventually joined the Republican Party over the issue of communism.[11]

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Western civilization

In response to multiculturalism on college campuses, Mansfield has defended the importance of preserving and teaching courses on Western civilization, even proposing a survey course that selects a dozen or so books that capture the principal themes. Mansfield believes that understanding Western civilization is important because the books that explain it deal with problems associated with the human condition.[27]

On May 8, 2007, Mansfield delivered the 36th Jefferson Lecture ("the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual and public achievement in the humanities", according to the National Endowment for the Humanities, which sponsored the lecture).[28][29][30] In his lecture, Mansfield suggests "two improvements for today’s understanding of politics arising from the humanities ... first ... to recapture the notion of thumos in Plato, and Aristotle... [and] ...second ... the use of names—proper to literature and foreign to science".[30] This is a reference to his own philosophy, which forbids discounting the wisdom of the past simply because those who spoke it lived a long time ago.

The "strong executive"

Mansfield has argued that the President of the United States has "extra-legal powers such as commanding the military, making treaties (and carrying on foreign policy), and pardoning the convicted, not to mention a veto of legislation", observing that the U.S. Constitution does not ask the President to take an oath to execute the laws, but rather, to execute "the office of the president, which is larger."[31] Referring to domestic surveillance, Mansfield notes:

Those arguing that the executive should be subject to checks and balances are wrong to say or imply that the president may be checked in the sense of stopped. The president can be held accountable and made responsible, but if he could be stopped, the Constitution would lack any sure means of emergency action.[31]

He defends the separation of powers, arguing that "the executive subordinated to the rule of law is in danger of being subordinate to the legislature."[32]

Gender roles and equality

In his 2006 book Manliness, Mansfield defended a moderately conservative understanding of gender roles, and bemoaned the loss of the virtue of manliness in a "gender neutral" society. In a New York Times interview, he defined the concept briefly as "confidence in a situation of risk. A manly man has to know what he is doing."[33] He defines the idea in more concrete terms in the book. There, a manly man does not have to know what he is doing, but only has to act as though he does.[citation ^needed] Also in the book, Mansfield subjects the concept of manliness to a test in which he refers for support of his argument to such diverse authorities as Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Rudyard Kipling, Ernest Hemingway, and Naomi Wood. In his argument, manliness is ultimately related to assertiveness—"decisiveness without complete knowledge"—and its place in society is debated. In an interview with Bill Kristol, Mansfield said:

What I wrote was a modest defense of manliness. And the emphasis [is] on modest because manliness can be bad as well as good. Not everyone who takes risks deserves to have them turn out right and so manliness is, I think, responsible for a lot of evil. You can say that terrorists are manly, they’re willing to risk their lives and give their lives for a principle they believe in or a point they believe in.[34]

Manliness was criticized by the philosopher and law scholar Martha Nussbaum in the June 22, 2006, issue of the New Republic.[35] Nussbaum accuses Mansfield of misreading, or failing to read, many feminist and non-feminist texts, in addition to the ancient Greek and Roman classics he cites. She argues that his book is based on overt misogynistic assumptions that take a position of indifference towards violence against women. Mansfield asserts, she contends, that a woman can resist rape only with the aid of "a certain ladylike modesty enabling her to take offense at unwanted encroachment."

Concerning controversial comments by former President of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, about mental differences between men and women, Mansfield said that it is "probably true" that women "innately have less capacity than men at the highest level of science .... It's common sense if you just look at who the top scientists are."[33]

LGBT rights

In 1993, Mansfield testified on behalf of Colorado's Amendment 2, which amended the state constitution to prevent gays, lesbians and bisexuals from pursuing legal claims of discrimination. In his testimony, he argued that being gay "is not a life that makes for happiness," that homosexuality is "shameful," and that by not being able to have children gay people were not "socially responsible."[36][37] Nussbaum, who testified in the same trial against Amendment 2, later remarked that Mansfield's source for his claim that gay and lesbian people were unhappy was not contemporary social science research but the great books of the Western tradition (Plato, Tocqueville, Rousseau, etc.).[38]

Grades and affirmative action

Mansfield has voiced criticism of grade inflation at Harvard University and claims it is due in part to affirmative action, but says he cannot show its causal effect.[39][40][41] Critics have shown that grade inflation predates any significant presence of black students at Harvard.[42] In November 1997, Mansfield participated in a debate on affirmative action between Cornel West and Michael Sandel (arguing for affirmative action) with Ruth Wisse and himself (arguing against affirmative action).[43][44] The debate attracted a "massive audience" of a thousand Harvard students, requiring its campus venue to be changed twice before it could take place in Harvard's Sanders Theater, prompting Professor Sandel to comment, "This puts to rest the myth that this generation has a political apathy, and apathy to political debates."[43] In 2013, Mansfield, after hearing from a dean that "the most frequent grade is an A," claimed to give students two grades: one for their transcript, and the one he thinks they deserve. He commented, "I didn’t want my students to be punished by being the only ones to suffer for getting an accurate grade."[45]

In response to grade inflation, according to Harvard Crimson, Mansfield revived the "ironic" (or the "inflated") grade in 2006, in order to let his students know what they really deserved in his class without causing them harm by grading them lower than the other professors at Harvard: "In Mansfield’s 'true and serious' grading system, 5 percent of students will receive A’s, and 15 percent will receive A-minuses. But Mansfield won’t share those marks with anyone other than his teaching fellows and students. ... By contrast, Mansfield’s 'ironic' grade—the only one that will appear on official transcripts—will follow average grade distribution in the College, with about a quarter of students receiving A’s and another quarter receiving A-minu[s]es"; in contrast, their privately received deserved "real" (lower) grades usually centered around a C or C-minus, earning him the nickname "Harvey C-minus Mansfield."[46] "This [grading] policy—meant to demonstrate the causes and effects of grade inflation—drew heat from students and faculty, and attracted national media attention."[47] Mansfield himself has joked that his middle initial "C" stands for compassion: "That's what I lack when it comes to grading."[47] In an interview with the Hoover Institution, Mansfield claimed that college professors are too quick to label students as exceptional.[27]

Books

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UATX

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A faction competing with Kanelos’ included Lonsdale and several of his allies. Their view is difficult to categorize, and no two people described the lines of division the same way. Some framed it as a battle between the conservatives and the libertarians. Others saw it as the classicists versus the tech bros. But one name came up far more often than any other: Leo Strauss.

A German-Jewish emigrant, Strauss spent most of his career at the University of Chicago. An impactful teacher and prolific writer, Strauss criticized modern liberalism for undermining the influence of religion and natural law and advocated a return to teaching the ancient Greeks, who he said had deep insights into human nature and society.

Leo Strauss, seen in New York in 1939. | Monozigote via Wikimedia Commons

Strauss isn’t a household name, but he’s deeply influential on the modern right.

One can draw a straight line from Strauss to his student Allan Bloom, author of the 1987 bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind, which sounded an early alarm against identity politics, moral relativism and the decay of the university. From there one can make a direct connection to the prominent conservative intellectual Patrick Deneen, who has argued that liberalism’s emphasis on individual rights degrades authority, community and place. Deneen, who reportedly modeled himself on Bloom, won the American Political Science Association’s Leo Strauss Award in 1995 for best dissertation in political theory. Strauss was also the subject of a symposium at UATX in early January 2026, hosted by Loren Rotner, who received his PhD from Claremont Graduate University — a key institution for fueling what was known as West Coast Straussianism.

Kanelos’ view of the academy emphasized pluralism and the individual’s search for truth. On the other side, the Straussians weren’t quite so agnostic. They had a view of the common good they wanted to assert.

This conflict came to a head for the first time in September 2023 when Rotner, then the assistant provost, and Hillel Ofek, then the vice president of communications, engaged in what was described to me by several people as “a coup attempt.” They were critical of Kanelos’ leadership and believed that UATX had been neither aggressive enough in criticizing the universities with which they were in competition nor establishing UATX’s own identity. Another former staffer, who was granted anonymity out of fear of retaliation, said, “They attempted to persuade the UATX board that everything was heading in the wrong direction.”

The rebellion failed. Ofek and Rotner left UATX. Ofek took a position as director of strategy at Lonsdale Enterprises. Rotner became director of the Cosmos Institute, a nonprofit aimed at using AI for human flourishing. UATX did not make Rotner and Ofek, who have since returned to UATX as associate provost and chief strategy officer respectively, available for interviews or to provide comments.

Kanelos survived. UATX moved forward and began recruiting its first class.

In May, 2024, they hit a bump in the road when Jonathan Yudelman, a recent hire from Arizona State University, confronted a woman in a hijab in a video that went viral. But Yudelman was mostly associated with ASU, rather than UATX. The incident was handled internally and soon blew over. Yudelman remains at the university. UATX did not offer a comment on the episode, and Yudelman did not respond to a request for comment.

On Sept. 2, 2024, UATX opened its doors, presenting a united front to the world. In the morning, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott met with the inaugural class of 92 students at the state capitol. Down the block, in the Capital Ballroom of the Royal Sonesta Hotel, the students donned dark blue robes, signed the University of Austin register and, in return, received a copy of The Odyssey. Kanelos, clad in regalia, delivered a rousing address.

“History is not a story unfolding; it is an epic being written. And its authors are those bold enough to exercise their agency in the pursuit of higher things,” he said. According to Kanelos, UATX was returning to the Platonic ideal — to the “olive grove on the fringes of Athens called the Akademia,” where students came together to ask “fundamental human questions.”

There were other schools in Greece, but Kanelos said Plato’s stood above them all. “What distinguished Plato’s Academy,” he told the students, “was doctrinal pluralism and a variety of intellectual approaches. There were no easy answers. Every discussion branched outward with ever-greater complexity.”

The pluralists had won. At least for the moment.

In a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction turn of events, UATX’s commitment to its founding principles would be tested on the school’s first day of operation by an incident of alleged sexual harassment that would dominate the campus’ freshman year.

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Harvey C. Mansfield is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Government at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

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