00:00:00.000I'm delighted to report that I have joined as a scholar the Declaration of Independence Center
00:00:06.120for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi. The center offers
00:00:12.300educational opportunities, speakers, internship, and reading groups for the University of Mississippi
00:00:18.280community. It is named in honor of the United States founding document which constitutes the
00:00:25.340nation as a political community and expresses fundamental principles of American freedom,
00:00:31.480including in the recognition of the importance of Judeo-Christian values in shaping American
00:00:37.300exceptionalism. Dedicated to the academic and open-minded exploration of these principles,
00:00:43.760the Center exists to encourage exploration into the many facets of freedom. It will sponsor a
00:00:50.640speaker series, and an interdisciplinary faculty research team. If you'd like to learn more about
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00:01:05.720Hi everybody, this is Scott Saad. Today I have a esteemed professor from Harvard who has been a
00:01:11.860professor since 1962, before I was born. Professor Harvey Mansfield, how are you doing, sir?
00:01:20.640pretty well thank you for considering my age yes uh well okay so i want to just briefly
00:01:28.060introduce your bio it's a it's a shortened bio you're the william r keenan jr professor of
00:01:35.240government at harvard as i said you've been at harvard since 1962 you were the head of the
00:01:41.100department from 1973 to 1977 you held guggenheim and neh fellowships you were the recipient of
00:01:49.240in 2004 of the National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush. You've been the author
00:01:56.100of many books, but today we're going to focus on two books, one that came out in 2026, this beauty
00:02:02.160right here, The Rise and Fall of Rational Control. But you have another one that came out a week ago,
00:02:07.700the same time as my book came out, and it's called Where Harvard Went Wrong, 50 Years of
00:02:14.060commentary that fell on deaf ears so harvey where did harvard go wrong
00:02:23.820harvard harvard went wrong by uh failing to take account of the monolithic character of itself and
00:02:33.900And thinking that they could go along sitting and believing and speaking on the left and only on the left and nothing would ever happen to them.
00:02:50.480And I think that was shown to be a mistaken view when the president that our woke corporation set before us, Claudine Gay, was forced to resign after a six-month tenure for being unable to explain why it was that Harvard,
00:04:10.060And all the things that they had stood for,
00:04:15.100they began to have to qualify and go back on.
00:04:21.320And this was especially true of affirmative action and great inflation.
00:04:25.620These were the two causes that I sort of held forth on for the time I was,
00:04:32.100the 50 years that I was talking in the Harvard faculty.
00:04:38.400The Supreme Court took care of affirmative action.
00:04:41.440and well great inflation that was another liberal fantasy that was nobody defends it now nobody
00:04:51.880defends either of those two things although i'm sure a lot of people still believe in them
00:04:58.500do you did you see a radical shift in many of these issues over the past 10-15 years has there
00:05:07.660been an acceleration of a lot of these woke parasitic ideas or were you able to sort of read
00:05:13.520the writing on the wall from the 1960s? The writing on the wall in the 1960s would have been pretty
00:05:24.100dim to read now and I mean it's the same sort of people and doing the same sort of things
00:05:33.460But in the late 60s, the student rebels were more anti-American, more anti-war, and they didn't, well, they really tried to force the university to do what they wanted.
00:05:58.020This time, they are the ones who inherited the tenured radicals they were, and so they were in charge, but they failed to take account of, you could say, the American people, or one half of the American people,
00:11:35.140Yeah, so there's a bit of a lag in our audio and apologies to all the listeners and viewers. There's a bit of a patchy connection, but we'll try to do the best that we can.
00:11:45.740So here, Harvey, you list a bunch of guys, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emmanuel Kant, Hegel, Karl Marx, and Nietzsche. Why these specific guys versus some other ones give us the psychology of decision-making that included them and excluded others?
00:12:07.260right well i was working under constraints this was a course i was giving so i had only a certain
00:12:18.700number of lectures some 32 or something like that and i didn't want to give a course that
00:12:26.780consisted merely of names and brief statements about each but i wanted to to read whole books
00:12:35.000and to try to understand the arguments in those whole books.
00:12:40.540And I came to the view that Machiavelli was really the source
00:12:45.620of this trend of thinking called rational control,
00:13:34.240But I think these are the principal voices which make, if not clear to us, at least present to our understanding what the most thoughtful, thought-out alternatives are in philosophy today or political philosophy.
00:13:57.780I recently had on my show, I think, two historians that you undoubtedly know, one of whom was it was your colleague at Harvard, James Hankins and Alan Gueso.
00:14:10.240You know, they wrote the two volume series, The Golden Thread. And in their case, I asked them.
00:14:16.720Yeah, right. And I asked them a very similar question to what I asked you, which is, you know, how do you decide whom to include?
00:14:23.340for example in their case just like you
00:14:51.660And it created modern Judaism and also presented alternatives to both Hobbes and Locke, as well as support for them.
00:15:11.660And he was a great student of Machiavelli.
00:15:14.400So, yes, Spinoza especially would be one I regret.
00:15:19.480So not including. But nonetheless, I think this was enough for a single semester course.
00:15:32.760So when I look at some of the names on that list, so for example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in my view, he is actually responsible for some of the parasitic ideas that are at the root of wokeism. So the idea of the noble savage, the idea of the blank slate, I mean, which also John Locke talks about.
00:15:52.860So as you go through these guys, are you able to exhibit the same reverence for them, notwithstanding that you know that some of their ideas led to some negative consequences down the line?
00:16:09.160yes i i do try to do that i try to when i'm talking about rousseau i try to become a rousselian
00:16:18.760and show people what what uh because he was not a stupid person right and even even more true of
00:16:27.540marx said i i think uh i i gave a better view of marx than than a marxist would give or most of
00:16:35.560So, yes, I try to step in and become a defender of the faith
00:16:44.120of each one of my eight people with a few sort of concluding remarks
00:16:54.700that show I haven't lost my notion of my beliefs.
00:17:02.220right if i so i've often played this game with various uh people on my show when i asked them
00:17:08.800if you could invite 10 historical people to your ultimate dinner party who would they be and before
00:17:16.600i ask you to answer it i'll tell you who would be my number one it would be leonardo da vinci
00:17:22.380because i'm a staunch interdisciplinarian i greatly admire people who are polymaths and of course by
00:17:29.780definition he represents the ultimate renaissance man so if i were to ask you harvey who are the
00:17:36.10010 men and people that you'd invite would the eight in your book be part of those 10 and you
00:17:41.700just add another two or would you come up with a different list yes i think so those are all
00:17:48.520moderns i also gave a course the semester ahead of this on the ancients so plato and aristotle
00:17:54.980i'd certainly invite socrates number one and they don't aristotle and xenophon so and um and
00:18:06.820somebody from the middle ages maybe uh um thomas aguinas or
00:18:17.460maimonides let's have yes so i'm getting to more getting to more than 10.
00:18:23.380right well i i was hoping that you would say maybe marcus aurelius because i love the fact
00:18:30.460that here you had an emperor who would get annoyed when people would ask him to do emperor things
00:18:36.860because he wanted to sit in his study and think and philosophize and that really resonated with
00:18:42.360me again from a polymath perspective but fair enough uh what are some things that today you
00:18:48.440You know, you've done it all. You've been a professor since the early 60s.
00:18:51.860Are there things today that you wake up, you know, rub your hands in gleeful anticipation about the looming day?
00:19:00.480What what keeps Harvey animated about the exciting future?
00:19:03.880partisanship i think has been the theme of my writing starting from my first book
00:19:17.520which was on edmund burke um thoughts on the cost of the present discontents
00:19:22.700a really a pamphlet that he wrote in 1770 and this was the first argument
00:19:27.760to argue that, to say that parties, political parties, in a decent regime, a republic maybe,
00:19:37.920but not necessarily, was a good thing rather than a bad thing.
00:19:46.820But Machiavelli, well, he had two parties, the nobles and the plebs.
00:19:51.340And those were sort of the nobility, the high-flown people, and the low plebeian types with whom they contested.
00:20:07.300And so the latter were not respectable.
00:20:10.460And what Burke did was to make it possible for gentlemen to disagree on partisan politics and still live together, or even govern together, or to govern in alternation.
00:20:29.800Do you get invited to the cool kids party where everybody is progressive, or are you shunned and ostracized?
00:20:36.780i'm certainly shunned and ostracized from anything progressive all of the you mentioned a couple of
00:20:46.000honors that i've had every single honor i've had there's not a lot but every single one of them
00:20:51.040came from a conservative source right so that tells you something and in fact that
00:20:59.240That tells you something, too, about the state of academia today, because people reveal
00:21:07.000themselves when they show you what they honor, and the type of person, and the type of reason
00:22:02.000I don't have any particular good reception with Trump,
00:22:08.980but I totally agree that he would be a number one choice for that.
00:22:16.980Yes, a Medal of Freedom is what he should get.
00:22:19.060One of my colleagues once did get that, James Q. Wilson, but Tom Sowell, I think, is the equal of him, and he's written so many books, and so intelligently and tirelessly, and he keeps himself away from universities and also from the lecture circuit by, well,
00:22:49.060he's got a wife who takes care of him, like me,