Harvey C. Mans​field, a professor of government at Harvard from 1962 until his retirement from teaching in 2023 at the age of 91, has never shirked any opportunity to burnish his reputation as a conservative ogre. His interventions in the campus culture wars have been plentiful, memorable and clumsy. One particular cause of ire is grade inflation, which he blames on greater racial diversity in the student body. Mansfield refused to go along with the fashion for more generous grading, earning the nickname – in which he revelled – Harvey ‘C minus’ Mansfield. Towards the end of his teaching career he relented: he reasoned that his students – most of them devoted to him despite his harshness – should not have their prospects dimmed because of his marking. His solution was to award two grades: what he called an ‘ironic’ grade, inflated to meet contemporary expectations, which was submitted to the university registry and appeared on the student’s official transcript, and the real – usually much lower – grade, communicated privately to the student.

Mansfield deliberately courts public controversy. In 1993 he gave testimony in court in favour of Amendment 2 of Colorado’s state constitution – later struck down by the US Supreme Court in Romer v. Evans – which prevented its municipalities from enacting gay rights ordinances. Homosexuality, according to Mansfield, was ultimately subversive of ‘civilisation’ itself. He caused further outrage with his assault on gender-neutral society in his book Manliness (2006). The offence derived not only from his attempts to resurrect a lost ideal but also from his encomiums on ladylike modesty. He became a target for cancellation, disinvited in 2019 from speaking at a gala at Concordia University in Canada because of his views on gender. But when he was offered a job elsewhere, his departmental chair at Harvard beseeched him to stay, with the backhanded compliment: ‘Harvey, you mustn’t go. You are our balance.’ Mansfield puts this another way: the very fact of an outspoken conservative’s continued presence provides apparent proof that everything he says about the university’s radical drift must be wrong.

Remarkably, given this combative public profile, what most stands out from Mansfield’s books is his talent for probing the ambivalence that inheres in superficially obvious concepts. Despite the anti-feminist coat-trailing, his position on manliness was more circumspect than some of his critics noticed. While reluctant to abandon the social utility of traditional masculine assertiveness, Mansfield was equally wary of the macho excesses to which it gave rise. Manliness inspired responsibility, without which any political system was imperilled; but male swagger could all too easily degenerate into forms of misrule characterised by overconfidence and aggression. He never forgets that the manliness he wants to defend is dangerously double-edged. The same attentiveness to ambiguity stands at the core of his shrewd exploration of executive power in Taming the Prince (1989). His topic – one that has become alarmingly central to America’s current predicament – is the long-term transformation of traditional rulership into modern executive authority, which embodies the energy needed for tackling crises but is qualified by constitutional constraints on the untrammelled exercise of raw might. While Mansfield is a proponent of a strong executive, he also recognises that executive authority is different in kind from traditional rule and that the limitations placed on it are an essential facet of its ambiguous character.

Mansfield is a conservative of a rarefied kind, a disciple of the émigré German-Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss, who came to the United States in 1937, eventually becoming a professor at the University of Chicago. Without some awareness of the Straussian interpretation of intellectual history, Mansfield’s book The Rise and Fall of Rational Control will be baffling, if not misleading. At the core of Strauss’s thought was the quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns. According to Strauss, political philosophy began to curdle as early as the Renaissance. From the early 16th century, the moderns corrupted the legacy of ancient philosophy, surrendering to a base view of human nature and contrived political systems that aimed no higher than the accommodation of sordid self-interest. A curious problem arises here for American conservatives: the American constitution, whose checks and balances were designed so that competing interests counteracted one another, derives from this stunted vision of humanity. How can patriotic conservatism be reconciled with a view of the country’s foundational charter as at best ‘a low but solid’ foundation? The issue has divided Straussians: the purists, mainly from Chicago and the East Coast, accept this dismal reading; a second strain, most prominent in southern California at the Claremont Institute (which publishes the Claremont Review of Books), solves the problem by emphasising the high ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence. Mansfield was a friend of the late Harry Jaffa, the leader of the Californian sect, who is best known outside Straussian circles for the spectacularly misfiring line he gave Barry Goldwater during a stint as his speechwriter in 1964: ‘Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice.’ Mansfield and Jaffa also had their disagreements, particularly over the former’s dismissal of the ideal of equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as a ‘self-evident half-truth’.

Strauss’s conservative followers are very influential in certain quarters of American academia, politics and punditry. Decades before Donald Trump’s assault on the universities, Allan Bloom – a pupil of Strauss’s – launched a devastating attack on trends in higher education in his unexpected bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind (1987). Another pupil, Paul Wolfowitz, played a central role in George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq as Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy at the Pentagon. And the ‘Claremonsters’, as they are sometimes known, are prominent in the MAGA movement – which is not, contrary to received opinion, entirely populated by anti-intellectual rednecks. Rather, as Laura Field has shown in her recent book Furious Minds, three main intellectual tributaries feed into Trumpism: postliberal social Catholicism, national conservatism and Straussianism.* In September 2016, Michael Anton’s piece in the Claremont Review of Books on the stakes of that year’s presidential election was read out on air to fifteen million listeners by the right-wing talk-radio personality Rush Limbaugh. Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, is a disciple of Straussianism, and his protégé J.D. Vance has spoken at Claremont Institute events. The attempted election grab of 2020-21 has been described as ‘a coup in search of a legal theory’: John Eastman, the director of the Claremont Centre for Constitutional Jurisprudence, provided the theory in a legal memo that exaggerated the constitutional role of the then vice president, Mike Pence, in the congressional counting of Electoral College votes. Mansfield himself, however, is decidedly ambivalent about Trump. Although he voted for him in 2020, with ‘many misgivings’, he parses Trump’s boorishness as manliness of the dangerously wrong sort.

Straussianism has gone through various mutations, and its current MAGA iteration constitutes a glaring perversion of Strauss’s legacy. Strauss himself was never part of the conservative movement, despite his laments over modernity’s disastrous divergence from classical values. This declinist version of philosophy’s history is one of the many peculiarities in his work. Whereas the dominant contextualist school of political thought – best represented by the likes of Quentin Skinner and the late J.G.A. Pocock – reads texts historically in terms of their function in past political debates or through the idioms of former political languages, Strauss severed the connection between philosophers and their environments. Philosophy, in his reading, was a noble, daring and self-contained enterprise that stood at a remove from a society’s norms. Philosophers veiled their findings – especially when they implied atheism, Strauss seems to insinuate – both in order to avoid persecution and from a concern that the seepage of dangerous truths might corrode the bonds of convention and religion which, they recognised, held societies together. According to Strauss, the interpretation of philosophical texts required the capacity to read between the lines, to decode hidden truths and to sift an outwardly visible message from esoteric meaning. This meant paying keen attention to the interstitial minutiae of texts. ‘The real opinion of an author’, Strauss claimed, was ‘not necessarily identified with that which he expresses in the largest number of passages’. If an author contradicted himself at a certain point in his argument, it wasn’t because he had made a mistake – this was most unlikely, Strauss reckoned, in the case of a philosopher – but was evidence of the effort to signal some semi-hidden insight. Most people read the beginnings and ends of books with the most attention; sly snatches of subversion were therefore most likely to be found in the middle chapters. Strauss took this method to preposterous lengths, counting the number of chapters in a book and searching for numerological patterns – multiples of thirteen, for example – in the structure of the books he read.

Are we confronted then with a Wizard of Oz whose smoke-and-mirror deceptions gull his disciples? That was certainly the view of the eminent ancient philosopher Myles Burnyeat forty years ago in a celebrated demolition job published in the New York Review of Books under the title ‘Sphinx without a Secret’. If Strauss’s argument that Plato’s Republic meant the opposite of what it appeared to say – that it embodied a coded conservatism rather than the radical utopianism it purported to offer – is wrong, then, Burnyeat perceived, the splendid architecture of Straussianism crumbles. And it’s hard to disagree with his observation that much of Straussian literature appears to consist of interminable exegesis in lieu of proper argument. Pocock too complained that Straussians dodge the accountability that conventional standards of logic and evidence impose on other academics.

But is it all nonsense? Should we dismiss wholesale the Straussian sensitivity to pregnant silences, concealed irony and covert satire? Arthur Melzer’s erudite and unsettling discussion of lost rhetorical techniques in Philosophy between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (2014) gives one pause. Indeed, there’s a contextualist case for this way of reading: according to Skinner, it is precisely because of the obliqueness of certain authors that texts don’t simply speak for themselves. And we shouldn’t overlook what Strauss himself called the main theme of his writings, the ‘theologico-political problem’. The tension between the demands of philosophy and faith, between what Strauss called the claims of Athens and Jerusalem, is intrinsically irresoluble, but it used to be decidedly more pressing. Strategies for camouflaging one’s beliefs were common features of early modern religious life, and the idea of a double doctrine – a refined inner truth for initiates that differed in some degree from an outer superstition propagated to the vulgar – was prominent in 18th-century discussions of ancient civic cults. In Islamic political thought too, another area of Strauss’s expertise, where he first encountered esoteric writing, there were parallel forms of dissimulation, including kitman and taqiyya. Forthright freedom of speech – such as we have enjoyed in the West and are now struggling to preserve – belongs to a short period within the long sweep of political philosophy.

Familiar Straussian​ motifs, including the theologico-political problem and a disparaging view of the moderns, lie at the heart of The Rise and Fall of Rational Control. Ostensibly an introductory survey to modern political philosophy – the book is based, Mansfield notes, on a course he delivered to undergraduates at Harvard between 1968 and 2022 – there is a huge unadvertised backstory here without which the innocent reader will miss much of the book’s contentiousness, polemical bite and idiosyncrasy. Strauss’s influence is mentioned only once, in the acknowledgments on page 308, but his presence lurks throughout.

What exactly does Mansfield mean by ‘rational control’? The idea assumed such a variety of forms between the early 16th and late 19th centuries, including in liberalism and Marxism, that it eludes easy definition. I take it to mean a turn away from a commitment to externally authorised standards of excellence – whether derived from nature or from religious revelation – to a human-centred mode of political thinking whose ultimate goal is human convenience. The function of reason is thereby transformed from a way of understanding the world into a tool for controlling outcomes. We see this most famously in Marx’s remark that the point of philosophy is not to explain but to change the world: ‘a perfect summation’, according to Mansfield, of an idea coined by Niccolò Machiavelli.

Mansfield contends that modernity was not a slowly unwinding process, but emerged at a stroke in Machiavelli’s reframing of philosophy. By pricking the politically counterproductive pieties of Christianity and the equally misguided obsession with the ideal characteristics of ‘imagined principalities and republics’, he brought philosophy down to earth. In addition, Mansfield contends that Machiavelli jettisoned the central tenets of classical political thought, what the Straussians regard as the noble purposes animating ancient polities. Justice and virtue were tossed overboard and replaced with what Machiavelli called ‘effectual truth’. Mansfield understands Machiavelli’s boast that he brought forth ‘new modes and new orders’ to refer to this deliberate shift of focus towards advantageous results. Nevertheless, this tendentious account of modernity rests on the slenderest evidence. As Mansfield concedes in a recent collection of his essays, pointedly entitled Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth (2023), Machiavelli only uses the term ‘effectual truth’ (verità effettuale) once, in the first paragraph of Chapter 15 of The Prince.

Whereas Skinner and Pocock saw classical continuities in Machiavelli’s thought – whether neo-Roman republicanism or a civic humanism underpinned by a Polybian historiography of cyclical corruption and renewal – Mansfield, echoing Strauss, identifies a Machiavellian rupture in political philosophy. Straussians regard ancient and modern republicanisms as utterly distinct, animated by a very different ethos. That’s the reason their version of the Renaissance involves a rejection of classical antiquity, not, as we might suppose, its renewal.

There are further twists. Although everything that goes wrong with modern political philosophy has its ultimate provenance in Machiavelli, he is by no means the straightforward villain of the piece. Mansfield is a connoisseur of Machiavelli’s wit, sophistication and ingenuity. Although the Straussians resurrect the diabolic Machiavelli – Old Nick – of popular caricature, he plays a role similar to Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost: a figure so bright, so captivating, so seductive that he dominates proceedings and – in the case of Strauss and Mansfield – charms his calumniators. Mansfield detects Machiavelli’s fingerprints everywhere among the moderns, even in texts where he goes unmentioned. Where Mansfield’s protagonists diverge from Machiavelli’s particular strategies the effect is somehow to conserve his overall position. According to Mansfield, Hobbes restores a version of natural law after Machiavelli discards it, but then provides the basis for the further elaboration of rational control. The benign features of liberalism are presented as an indirect response to Machiavelli’s shock therapy. Humans resent being commanded, therefore government must take indirect forms. What a cynical Mansfield describes as the ‘swindle’ of representative government – we, the people, ultimately authorise those who govern us – emerges as a sop, first in Hobbes as an ironic premise of untrammelled sovereign authority, then in the more savoury form of liberal constitutionalism. A liberal ‘formalism’ that prizes rights in themselves proves emblematic of Machiavelli’s original sin: the confounding of ends and means.

Because human nature is prey to fears of invisible spirits, Strauss’s theologico-political problem persists. Hobbes deflects this threat to civil peace by making the political sovereign the interpreter of scripture. The turn to philosophies that commence with the state of nature – in Hobbes and in Locke (whom Mansfield reads as Hobbes’s covert disciple) – further disentangles politics from Christianity, since this concept serves as a rebuke to the innocent version of human beginnings found in the Old Testament. Rousseau attempts to introduce a simple civil religion in place of Christianity, while Hegel appears to endorse a free society underpinned by a rational, ‘secularised’ Christianity. Religion endures, but it is domesticated and declawed. The ‘pious frown’ of the authoritarian prelate gradually morphs, as Mansfield notes pointedly, into ‘the fixed, all-consuming grin of the modern cleric’.

But release from obligations to the deity still leaves human freedom constrained by earthly necessities. Rational control of the natural world becomes a central theme of modern philosophy. Because of its indifference to the classical ideals of justice, goodness and nobility, science is a particular Straussian bugbear. If, as Machiavelli thought, acquisitiveness was hardwired in our natures, what alternative was there to a world of looting and counter-looting? Locke’s solution was to make property rights – justified by the input of human labour which transformed nature – ‘the principal object of the state’; Marx’s, from a similar point of departure, was to redefine capital as ‘congealed labour’ appropriated from the workers.

Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, Mansfield believes, marks a major turning point in modern philosophy through its depiction of human nature as a contingent historical artefact. Rousseau disaggregates the state of nature into a series of primeval phases, during which humankind is gradually transformed. Human nature emerges from his account as a hybrid: artifice and convention have blended with our animal natures. Passions and vanity are additions to our original make-up. Since reason itself is no longer an integral part of human nature, philosophers operating in Rousseau’s wake, Mansfield insists, must explain the unfolding of reason in history. Thereafter Kant, Hegel and Marx offer contrasting accounts of the historical progress of reason, until Mansfield’s narrative of the rise of rational control reaches its end point in Nietzsche’s repudiation of rationality itself.

Mansfield’s book is airless and enclosed; modernity is defined by a few canonical authors, while the milieu in which they lived rarely intrudes. History is suspect. Strauss, having witnessed the turmoil of interwar Germany, thought that historicism had incubated the sickness of moral relativism and nihilism. Mansfield worries that the Skinner-Pocock method diminishes the ‘greatness’ of a figure like Machiavelli because it submerges him among ‘the commonplaces of his context’. While the Straussian approach captures the engagement – sometimes at a great distance – of authors with their major predecessors, it fails to explain the particular and immediate forces that motivate their arguments. Straussians place an excessive value on the importance of texts – the tradition of Great Books – but do a major disservice to the works they claim to prize. Sometimes the damage is limited to partial, incomplete readings, but at its worst Straussianism can result in a gross miscategorisation of author and text. Despite this, Mansfield’s work is immensely clever, subtle and thought-provoking. The Rise and Fall of Rational Control merits generous applause of the sort we give to a jazz interpretation whose enchantment lies in its ingenious departure from an original score.