The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - May 20, 2026


My Chat with Harvard Political Philosopher Dr. Harvey Mansfield (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_995)


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26 minutes

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3,192

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117

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3

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1

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Hate speech

8

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Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Willam R. Keenan Jr. has been a professor at Harvard since 1962. He is the author of two books, The Rise and Fall of Rational Control and Where Harvard Went Wrong: 50 Years of Commentary That Fell on Deaf ears. He was the recipient of the National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush in 2004.

Transcript

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00:00:00.000 I'm delighted to report that I have joined as a scholar the Declaration of Independence Center
00:00:06.120 for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi. The center offers
00:00:12.300 educational opportunities, speakers, internship, and reading groups for the University of Mississippi
00:00:18.280 community. It is named in honor of the United States founding document which constitutes the
00:00:25.340 nation as a political community and expresses fundamental principles of American freedom,
00:00:31.480 including in the recognition of the importance of Judeo-Christian values in shaping American
00:00:37.300 exceptionalism. Dedicated to the academic and open-minded exploration of these principles,
00:00:43.760 the Center exists to encourage exploration into the many facets of freedom. It will sponsor a
00:00:50.640 speaker series, and an interdisciplinary faculty research team. If you'd like to learn more about
00:00:56.540 the center, please visit Ole Miss, that's O-L-E-M-I-S-S dot E-D-U slash independence slash.
00:01:05.720 Hi everybody, this is Scott Saad. Today I have a esteemed professor from Harvard who has been a
00:01:11.860 professor since 1962, before I was born. Professor Harvey Mansfield, how are you doing, sir?
00:01:20.640 pretty well thank you for considering my age yes uh well okay so i want to just briefly
00:01:28.060 introduce your bio it's a it's a shortened bio you're the william r keenan jr professor of
00:01:35.240 government at harvard as i said you've been at harvard since 1962 you were the head of the
00:01:41.100 department from 1973 to 1977 you held guggenheim and neh fellowships you were the recipient of
00:01:49.240 in 2004 of the National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush. You've been the author
00:01:56.100 of many books, but today we're going to focus on two books, one that came out in 2026, this beauty
00:02:02.160 right here, The Rise and Fall of Rational Control. But you have another one that came out a week ago,
00:02:07.700 the same time as my book came out, and it's called Where Harvard Went Wrong, 50 Years of
00:02:14.060 commentary that fell on deaf ears so harvey where did harvard go wrong
00:02:23.820 harvard harvard went wrong by uh failing to take account of the monolithic character of itself and
00:02:33.900 And 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.
00:02:50.480 And 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,
00:03:20.480 was unable to refuse support
00:03:25.840 or to respond in any reasonable way
00:03:35.160 to the October 7th atrocity in Israel.
00:03:41.500 Now, how's this?
00:03:42.380 That was a good kid.
00:03:44.140 So it was actually,
00:03:45.680 it wasn't so much a lack of free speech
00:03:48.420 as the failure to use it properly
00:03:53.600 in that one searing occasion
00:03:56.300 that caused the trouble
00:03:58.060 and really forced her to resign.
00:04:02.560 And with her resigning,
00:04:05.000 suddenly everything else came apart.
00:04:10.060 And all the things that they had stood for,
00:04:15.100 they began to have to qualify and go back on.
00:04:21.320 And this was especially true of affirmative action and great inflation.
00:04:25.620 These were the two causes that I sort of held forth on for the time I was,
00:04:32.100 the 50 years that I was talking in the Harvard faculty.
00:04:38.400 The Supreme Court took care of affirmative action.
00:04:41.440 and well great inflation that was another liberal fantasy that was nobody defends it now nobody 0.53
00:04:51.880 defends either of those two things although i'm sure a lot of people still believe in them
00:04:58.500 do you did you see a radical shift in many of these issues over the past 10-15 years has there
00:05:07.660 been an acceleration of a lot of these woke parasitic ideas or were you able to sort of read
00:05:13.520 the writing on the wall from the 1960s? The writing on the wall in the 1960s would have been pretty
00:05:24.100 dim to read now and I mean it's the same sort of people and doing the same sort of things
00:05:33.460 But 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.
00:05:56.640 And there was resistance.
00:05:58.020 This 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,
00:06:25.140 those who are not on the left.
00:06:29.180 And so even though they were this time
00:06:37.780 more calmer than in the late 60s,
00:06:43.940 they were the same people in charge
00:06:49.360 and they didn't have to be quite as rough
00:06:52.280 as their counterparts were earlier on.
00:06:57.580 So that's, I think, the comparison one could make.
00:07:01.860 In the late 60s, there wasn't the nastiness of anti-Semitism
00:07:10.040 that we saw here in Harvard starting October 8th.
00:07:18.180 Right.
00:07:18.660 And it had been planned that woke Harvard would come to its culmination in the appointment of Claudine Gay. 0.99
00:07:34.100 It was a black woman. 0.99
00:07:36.280 I know her.
00:07:37.080 I feel somewhat sorry for her. 0.99
00:07:41.040 But a black woman of woke belief was everything that the Harvard Corporation hoped to install.
00:07:53.760 And it fell apart very quickly. 0.77
00:07:57.540 Thanks to Elise Stefanik.
00:08:01.020 Yes.
00:08:01.940 Yes.
00:08:02.340 She's done great work.
00:08:04.100 It's from upstate New York. 0.99
00:08:06.440 Not a Jew, but a very effective accuser. 0.99
00:08:12.420 How was it for you over all the years? 0.51
00:08:15.680 She was the one.
00:08:17.340 Oh, sorry, if I can get a question.
00:08:19.400 How was it for you in all these years to be, I suspect,
00:08:23.260 one of the only outright and open conservative professors?
00:08:27.100 And it reminds me here of E.O. Wilson, who was a Harvard biologist.
00:08:32.180 I don't know if you know him, who went through a very difficult time himself.
00:08:36.160 Oh, yeah, I knew him, yeah.
00:08:37.300 Through the culture wars.
00:08:38.520 So would we say that your reception within Harvard was not unlike his at Harvard?
00:08:49.220 I didn't get quite the hostility that he did.
00:08:53.460 He was more of a threat to the ruling circles than I was.
00:08:59.760 So they listened to me most of the time, politely.
00:09:05.260 They heard me out, but they didn't listen.
00:09:08.200 They didn't really listen.
00:09:09.440 They didn't.
00:09:10.660 Nothing that I said went home to them.
00:09:14.420 And so I didn't have a terrible time having friends,
00:09:21.120 and my colleagues were congenial and helpful,
00:09:27.620 But they are the ones that hurt Harvard and brought it to the past that it came to.
00:09:43.640 So they are mostly the faculty that's responsible for what happened to Harvard.
00:09:49.600 they took it so far and were so provocative that at some point they were bound to encounter
00:09:59.980 opposition and that happened with donald trump uh surprisingly the first republican to take any
00:10:07.620 notice really of what was going on in the years in the universities so that so that was uh that
00:10:14.860 There's, of course, Trump, and he overdoes, I like to say,
00:10:20.200 he overdoes everything he does.
00:10:22.720 But he went after them with a bludgeon.
00:10:29.680 And, of course, that's still not over.
00:10:33.900 Do you hold out hope that the universities in their current form could be saved?
00:10:41.340 i do hold out hope partly because i'm optimistic and it's often irresponsible to be pessimistic
00:10:50.760 making excuses for yourself uh so i yes i i have hope i have some confidence that their
00:10:59.140 current harvard president and others like him uh spotted around the country uh see the necessity of
00:11:07.000 doing something different.
00:11:11.360 And so Alan Garber is our president,
00:11:16.020 and he's got some credit with the faculty for standing up to Trump.
00:11:20.860 And the question now is whether he can use that credit
00:11:23.540 to bring on reforms which the same faculty doesn't really care for.
00:11:28.600 Right. All right. Let's jump into this beauty right here.
00:11:32.140 So that's the...
00:11:35.140 Yeah, 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.
00:11:45.740 So 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?
00:12:07.260 right well i was working under constraints this was a course i was giving so i had only a certain
00:12:18.700 number of lectures some 32 or something like that and i didn't want to give a course that
00:12:26.780 consisted merely of names and brief statements about each but i wanted to to read whole books
00:12:35.000 and to try to understand the arguments in those whole books.
00:12:40.540 And I came to the view that Machiavelli was really the source
00:12:45.620 of this trend of thinking called rational control,
00:12:52.440 trying to show how that was the case,
00:12:56.400 and then also how the principal variations or versions of rational control
00:13:04.240 or you could say of modernity,
00:13:06.920 that's my understanding of what is modern,
00:13:10.000 took place.
00:13:11.980 And there are people that I left out
00:13:13.900 like Montesquieu, Descartes, Spinoza.
00:13:20.780 So I often thought that there could be
00:13:25.240 a sort of alternative, of course,
00:13:29.060 that would take up all the people
00:13:30.860 that I had to leave out in this one.
00:13:34.240 But 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.
00:13:57.780 I 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.
00:14:10.240 You know, they wrote the two volume series, The Golden Thread. And in their case, I asked them.
00:14:16.720 Yeah, 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?
00:14:23.340 for example in their case just like you
00:14:25.300 they didn't include Spinoza
00:14:27.240 so that must be a very sort of
00:14:29.360 stressful decision making process
00:14:31.180 because on the one hand you obviously
00:14:33.220 can't include all of the great thinkers
00:14:35.080 but on the other hand you don't want to
00:14:37.100 leave an incomplete story
00:14:38.740 it's true
00:14:41.380 it's true
00:14:42.140 Spinoza especially you're right about that
00:14:44.900 he's
00:14:45.980 so the consummate modern
00:14:50.720 Jew 0.91
00:14:51.660 And it created modern Judaism and also presented alternatives to both Hobbes and Locke, as well as support for them.
00:15:11.660 And he was a great student of Machiavelli. 0.85
00:15:14.400 So, yes, Spinoza especially would be one I regret.
00:15:19.480 So not including. But nonetheless, I think this was enough for a single semester course.
00:15:32.760 So 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.
00:15:52.860 So 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?
00:16:09.160 yes i i do try to do that i try to when i'm talking about rousseau i try to become a rousselian
00:16:18.760 and show people what what uh because he was not a stupid person right and even even more true of
00:16:27.540 marx said i i think uh i i gave a better view of marx than than a marxist would give or most of 0.95
00:16:35.560 So, yes, I try to step in and become a defender of the faith
00:16:44.120 of each one of my eight people with a few sort of concluding remarks
00:16:54.700 that show I haven't lost my notion of my beliefs.
00:17:02.220 right if i so i've often played this game with various uh people on my show when i asked them
00:17:08.800 if you could invite 10 historical people to your ultimate dinner party who would they be and before
00:17:16.600 i ask you to answer it i'll tell you who would be my number one it would be leonardo da vinci
00:17:22.380 because i'm a staunch interdisciplinarian i greatly admire people who are polymaths and of course by
00:17:29.780 definition he represents the ultimate renaissance man so if i were to ask you harvey who are the
00:17:36.100 10 men and people that you'd invite would the eight in your book be part of those 10 and you
00:17:41.700 just add another two or would you come up with a different list yes i think so those are all
00:17:48.520 moderns i also gave a course the semester ahead of this on the ancients so plato and aristotle
00:17:54.980 i'd certainly invite socrates number one and they don't aristotle and xenophon so and um and
00:18:06.820 somebody from the middle ages maybe uh um thomas aguinas or
00:18:17.460 maimonides let's have yes so i'm getting to more getting to more than 10.
00:18:23.380 right well i i was hoping that you would say maybe marcus aurelius because i love the fact
00:18:30.460 that here you had an emperor who would get annoyed when people would ask him to do emperor things
00:18:36.860 because he wanted to sit in his study and think and philosophize and that really resonated with
00:18:42.360 me again from a polymath perspective but fair enough uh what are some things that today you
00:18:48.440 You know, you've done it all. You've been a professor since the early 60s.
00:18:51.860 Are there things today that you wake up, you know, rub your hands in gleeful anticipation about the looming day?
00:19:00.480 What what keeps Harvey animated about the exciting future?
00:19:03.880 partisanship i think has been the theme of my writing starting from my first book
00:19:17.520 which was on edmund burke um thoughts on the cost of the present discontents
00:19:22.700 a really a pamphlet that he wrote in 1770 and this was the first argument
00:19:27.760 to argue that, to say that parties, political parties, in a decent regime, a republic maybe,
00:19:37.920 but not necessarily, was a good thing rather than a bad thing.
00:19:44.480 And Machiavelli had said that too.
00:19:46.820 But Machiavelli, well, he had two parties, the nobles and the plebs.
00:19:51.340 And those were sort of the nobility, the high-flown people, and the low plebeian types with whom they contested.
00:20:07.300 And so the latter were not respectable.
00:20:10.460 And 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.
00:20:29.800 Do you get invited to the cool kids party where everybody is progressive, or are you shunned and ostracized?
00:20:36.780 i'm certainly shunned and ostracized from anything progressive all of the you mentioned a couple of
00:20:46.000 honors that i've had every single honor i've had there's not a lot but every single one of them
00:20:51.040 came from a conservative source right so that tells you something and in fact that
00:20:59.240 That tells you something, too, about the state of academia today, because people reveal
00:21:07.000 themselves when they show you what they honor, and the type of person, and the type of reason
00:21:14.780 that they give.
00:21:16.620 And so, America's universities have honored only those on the left.
00:21:23.360 And that continues.
00:21:24.360 I'm waiting to see whether it'll be the case next week with Harvard.
00:21:29.140 They almost had a Republican last time, but not quite, not quite.
00:21:34.860 Maybe one will turn up.
00:21:38.640 Can I ask you for a favor, because I'm sure you have some pull within the relevant places.
00:21:45.780 Can we get Thomas Sowell a presidential freedom medal from the current president?
00:21:51.740 because he is, I think, roughly your age,
00:21:54.300 and he is certainly deserving of all possible accolades.
00:21:58.140 Can we make that happen, Harvey?
00:22:02.000 I don't have any particular good reception with Trump,
00:22:08.980 but I totally agree that he would be a number one choice for that.
00:22:16.980 Yes, a Medal of Freedom is what he should get.
00:22:19.060 One 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,
00:22:49.060 he's got a wife who takes care of him, like me,
00:22:53.940 but he saves himself for his writing,
00:23:00.260 and it's wonderful.
00:23:02.060 Right.
00:23:02.780 And, yeah.
00:23:04.460 What is it that made you, I mean, you know,
00:23:06.920 you've been at this, as I said, for many, many decades.
00:23:09.480 Most professors, even today, remain reticent
00:23:13.000 to adopt all of these new modes of communication that we have,
00:23:17.780 as we are doing right here yet here you are someone who's been around in academia longer
00:23:23.020 than them and yet you were perfectly happy to come on this show and chat how can we get the
00:23:28.660 rest of our colleagues to recognize that it's not only peer-reviewed journals that matter i'm
00:23:35.360 perfectly happy say again all right i wish i were perfectly comfortable i wish i were perfectly
00:23:43.440 be comfortable but i but uh yes i'm happy to be here and i i yeah i have the same feeling that we
00:23:50.280 need to catch up with uh technology and um which is uh rushing ahead almost out of control right
00:24:00.820 but i won't comment on that to ask you one other question i'm gonna cut our chat short if only
00:24:07.640 because we're having such technical difficulties with our, you know, link up. But otherwise,
00:24:14.400 I could stay with you here for hours. I want to ask you one final question, which I often
00:24:19.620 ask of my guests. It's a question on the psychology of regret. So Harvey, there are two types of
00:24:25.480 regret in life. There are regrets due to actions and regrets due to inaction. So regret due to
00:24:32.980 action would be I regret that I cheated on my wife and that led to my divorce regret due to
00:24:38.220 inaction would be I regret that I became a political philosopher because my dad was one
00:24:43.260 I've always wanted to be an architect and it turns out Harvey that for most people regrets
00:24:50.540 due to inaction are the ones that loom largest in their consciousness so if I were to ask you after
00:24:57.340 a life lived well
00:24:59.560 what is Harvey
00:25:01.160 Mansfield's most looming
00:25:03.360 regret would you care to share it with us
00:25:05.380 huh
00:25:07.420 well
00:25:10.060 I wish I was
00:25:12.200 smarter
00:25:14.420 oh you're being modest
00:25:16.520 you're being modest
00:25:17.640 no and deeper
00:25:20.480 and more profound
00:25:22.020 and I wish I could
00:25:24.480 write as well and as quickly as
00:25:26.800 tom saw well uh it is a very high bar to try to match the great thomas saw you know i i always say
00:25:37.580 that you know i've been fighting all these wokesters for you know some 30 years well he
00:25:42.880 was fighting them when i was in diapers so he's really the the old school guy who was swatting 1.00
00:25:49.880 them down so he's incredible yes a wonderful man all right well let me bring back again this book
00:25:57.520 people go out the rise and fall of rational control please check it out stay on the line
00:26:03.540 so we could say goodbye offline harvey thank you so much for coming on and come back anytime
00:26:08.020 my pleasure be well