Harvey Mansfield on Machiavelli, Straussianism, and the Character of Liberal Democracy
Harvey Mansfield — Professor of Government at Harvard and the foremost living Straussian (a scholar who follows Leo Strauss’s method of reading great books with intense attention to context, irony, and esoteric meaning) — joins Tyler Cowen for Ep. 272 to discuss Machiavelli’s founding role in modern science, the future of the Straussian tradition, the vulgarity of democracy, and what Winston Churchill understood about liberal self-government.
Key ideas
- Machiavelli invented the modern concept of fact. His notion of ‘effectual truth’ — judging action by its upshot rather than its stated intent — is the seed of modern empiricism. The word effectual was new; so was the idea that knowledge should track cause and effect, not wish or speech. Galileo did not take a poll about whether the earth moves; he looked for the fact.
- Esoteric writing is the core Straussian insight. Strauss (Straussianism is the school of thought named after Leo Strauss, 1899–1973) held that great books deliberately speak down to their audiences, embedding the real argument beneath a more acceptable surface. The reader’s job is to raise that downward-shifted argument to the level the author actually intended — what Mansfield calls irony, and what analytic philosophy lacks entirely.
- Spontaneous order cannot liberate itself. Mansfield reads Hayek as a late heir of Machiavelli: both want to ‘take the leash off’ human energies and let a natural order emerge. But spontaneous order always presents itself as suppressed and in need of liberation — and that act of liberation is not spontaneous. It requires an imposed founding.
- Democracy has a vulgarian quality, and that is partly its truth. President Trump is, in Mansfield’s reading, more democratic than his critics because he reaches people who are not refined in their thinking — a Shakespearean type (Falstaff) that democracy both needs and is embarrassed by. Manliness — the human drive toward assertion and risk — is not in decline but in ‘eclipse,’ and its repression generates its own bad forms.
- The great-books tradition is self-guaranteeing. Straussianism does not depend on having Straussian professors at elite universities. The books themselves — Plato’s Republic, Thucydides — are so superior that they attract readers across centuries. Strauss’s achievement was to show what can be seen in them; that demonstration persists as long as the texts do.
Content
Machiavelli and the foundations of modern science
Mansfield opens by arguing that Machiavelli is not merely a theorist of cunning princes but the originator of the modern understanding of knowledge. The term effectual truth — the upshot of an action stripped of the actor’s wishes — is, he says, the conceptual seed from which Galileo’s empiricism and eventually modern science grew. What makes this surprising is how little Machiavelli is credited in histories of science: Mansfield places him before Galileo as the thinker who made the fact (from the Latin facere, to make or do) the basic unit of knowledge, replacing the Platonic and Aristotelian reliance on speech and wish.
This also makes Machiavelli the author of what we now call empirical propositions, even if — Mansfield concedes — a large fraction of his specific predictions would fail an empirical test. The exaggeration is the point: Machiavelli exaggerates to make people see mechanisms they would otherwise overlook. Exaggeration and empirical analysis are, on this reading, allies rather than opposites.
On conspiracy, Mansfield grants Machiavelli’s point that politics always involves a gap between stated justification and actual plan — no executive can publish its intentions in advance — but resists the conclusion that American politics is therefore essentially conspiratorial. The wars of the 20th century were not planned aggressions; they were defensive. America’s frankness and openness are real political facts that Machiavelli’s framework does not fully account for.
Strauss, Rawls, and the limits of analytic philosophy
Mansfield draws a sharp contrast between the Straussian method and two other 20th-century approaches — Quine’s analytic philosophy and Rawls’s liberal political theory.
Analytic philosophy (the dominant mode in Anglophone universities: rigorous, formal, focused on logical argument) extracts an argument from its context and compares it to other abstracted arguments. Strauss, by contrast, asks: why is this argument here, in this text, directed at this interlocutor? He treats an argument as if it were a line in a play — intelligible only with its plot, its background, and its dramatis personae. The key move is recognising that Socrates, in the Platonic dialogues, is always speaking down to his interlocutors. The argument we read is an inferior version intended for a particular audience; the reader must raise it. That upward movement is what Mansfield calls irony, and its absence in analytic philosophy is, he says, the decisive difference.
On Rawls: Mansfield judges him ‘slightly decayed liberalism.’ Rawls’s concept of ‘public reason’ — the idea that the reasoning that convinces a philosopher should be the same reasoning offered to the public — is precisely what Strauss denies. Reason is never public in that way, because it must accommodate the character of the audience, which is usually less reasonable than the author. Mansfield suggests Strauss would have sent Rawls back to Locke, whose account of the state of nature is a better foundation for liberal principles than Rawls’s ‘original position.‘
The vulgarity of democracy and Trump as a Shakespearean type
Asked where Trump fits on the Shakespearean map, Mansfield does not reach for the tragic: he reaches for the comic-vulgarian tradition. Trump, he argues, works at ‘the level of discordant impulse’ and reaches people who are ‘not refined in their thinking and in their ways.’ That is not a disqualification from democracy; it is, in a sense, democracy’s own logic. The Shakespearean type is Falstaff — a vulgarian Democrat, neither heroic nor polished, but deeply resonant with large numbers of people.
Mansfield also uses this to frame a broader argument about manliness (the drive toward assertion, risk, and self-distinction that he treated in his 2006 book Manliness). Manliness is not disappearing; it is unemployed. The chapter he called ‘Unemployed Manliness’ describes the danger of suppressing a genuine feature of human nature — the expression comes back, he suggests, in bad forms: political assassination, the appeal of figures like Bronze Age Pervert (Costin Alamariu, a provocateur who wrote his Yale dissertation on Nietzsche and the necessity of violence). Mansfield knew Alamariu and declines to call him a true Straussian; he read selectively, with his own agenda rather than patient attention to text.
Churchill and the character of liberal democracy
One vivid section concerns Mansfield’s memory of seeing Churchill speak at the 1953 Conservative Party conference in Margate. Churchill, near the end of his faculties, was asked whether he would call an early election. He compared calling an unnecessary election to taking a patient’s temperature when the patient was already well. The analogy stuck with Mansfield as a demonstration of a certain kind of political intelligence: the ability to make a serious argument through a homely image, with room for thought left in it.
What Churchill understood, in Mansfield’s view, was that liberal democracy has a character — that it is not self-sustaining, that it required someone to hold its dignity together as the aristocratic order gave way to mass democracy and the socialist challenge rose. Churchill was not born aristocratic but was of ‘high society,’ and he used that position to take the country from one dispensation to another without losing its sense of itself.
Related
- Harvey Mansfield — speaker; political philosopher and Straussian
- Tyler Cowen — host
- Enlightenment — concept page; Mansfield’s genealogy of modern science from Machiavelli connects to the broader Enlightenment settlement he both defends and qualifies