Liberty Beyond “Rational Control”

Harvey C. Mansfield stands out among the preeminent political theorists of our time in part because he is so much more than an academic theorist. His learning is broad and deep, his writing gracious and elegant (except on the rare occasion when he wishes it to be more difficult and obscure, as in his celebrated commentary on Machiavelli’s Discourses), and his concerns are at once genuinely political and philosophical. An “indirect” student of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, to whom he owes so much, he received all his degrees, undergraduate and advanced, from Harvard University, where he studied constitutionalism with such luminaries of the time as Carl Friedrich and Samuel Beer.