The Harvard Salient -- 12 March 2007

The Harvard Salient
20 April 2007

The Manliness of Mansfield’s Erudition

By Daniel J. Nadler, Associate Editor

Rarely does a scholar exhibit the essence of his subject as he studies it. When the subject under review inescapably invokes many of the chorus notes from the sanctimonious lullaby, Progressive Values: How Far We’ve Come – that ecstatic jingle that goodbye bleak yesterdayers sing after a cup of organic fair trade coffee and a hearty game of chess (in which the gender-loaded labels “King” and “Queen” are good-naturedly replaced by “people’s delegate-person 1" and “people’s delegate-person 2", with the respective numeration assigned randomly before each match) – a candid treatment might ini-tially seem downright socially masochistic. In writing Manliness, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Govern-ment Harvey Mansfield’s authorial act itself stands steadfastly as an illustrative anecdote of the subject-phenomenon, as instructive as any reference to some martial instance of courage in the face of a barbarous and indulgent onslaught. Mansfield wants both men and women to start talking again about “Manliness” - something neither sex has shown in a long time. Manliness, which for Mansfield is precisely intangible, but nevertheless roughly defined as “confidence in a risky situation,” is a notion he wants modernity to revisit for its own good. It is a quality not exclusive to men, but rather hovering above that gender like a cloud over the center of a football field – some men on the field are left uncovered as the winds shift, but a few find themselves under that formidable Aegis. Thus, even some women can occasionally be manly - think Margaret “Iron Lady” Thatcher reacting to some poor usher unknowingly addressing her as “miss”. Mansfield argues that over the last century, feminists have worked to create a ‘gender-neutral’ society, in which a person’s gender has no sig-nificant political or economic rami-fications. To a large extent they have succeeded, al-though any die-in-the-wool feminist will tell you that “there is still much to be done.” Reviewing the history of political thought, Mansfield argues that “We are embarked on a great experiment in our society, something very radical: to make the status of men and women equal, or, better to say, the same.” But this project is ruinous for both genders, since it not only emasculates men, but dis-empowers women, working against its stated aim. Mansfield fluidly argues that women and men are not equal in any factual or empirical sense, nor could they ever be - a fact which is confirmed by biologists and behavioral psychologists, who have shown that while men tend to be more abstract and ag-gressive in their thinking and be-havior, women tend to be more contextual and conciliatory. All that Mansfield really adds (and this is a world) is that this fact of nature has, and can never escape returning to, its political and phil-osophical imp-lications. The most important of these is that de jure equality bet-ween men and women will never come to mean de facto equality, and will in the process only create greater disparities across that latter measurement.

But don’t let the lonely cour-ageousness of the book fool you. If you are simply curious as to what David’s sling would look like in an ultra-modern political polemic, then you will be in over your head – you will likely feel tied to the floor of a water-filled submarine at the bottom of the pacific ocean. Although the subject matter of the book is deceptively simple, the author’s argumentation is quite complex. While Harvard has (d)evolved into an institution where the most popular undergraduate courses have names like “Organic Chemistry 10,” or “Global Finance, Governance, and Non-Profit Management 130,” Mansfield teaches a course entitled “Democracy and Inequality” and attracts a veritable throng of the brightest and most masochistic undergraduates in America. Manliness is nothing less than a rigorous exposition of the relation between the theme and the ‘great’ ideas of ‘great books’ – the “books worth reading,” the “books you read more than once.” For Mansfield, Achilles is the archetype of a manly man: “He challenged his boss, Aga-memnon, who had taken his girlfriend from him. He didn’t so much make a complaint against him as to say that what Agamemnon had done was the act of an inferior person, and that only true heroes, the men of virtue like Achilles, are fit to rule.”

Like Agamem-non, dogmas – even popular, academic ones – need chal-lenging, especially when they steal from students the passionate inc-linations that only art, music, literature, and philosophy can offer. Manliness is a book worth reading for both those who know which books have value, and for those who want to find out.