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In a 1975 essay exploring Leo Strauss’ interpretation of Machiavelli, Harvey C. Mansfield asserts that “no paragraph in The Prince and the Discourses has been understood until you have found something funny in it.” Consequently, advises Mansfield, “If you are not in more or less constant amusement when reading Machiavelli’s books, you should consider yourself bewildered.” Mansfield’s amusing observations about the philosophical importance of amusement to Machiavelli’s exploration of serious matters apply to Mansfield’s many writings, certainly his amusingly titled new book, “Where Harvard Went Wrong: Fifty Years of Commentary that Fell on Deaf Ears.”

This is not, as he cautioned about Machiavelli, to suggest that Mansfield’s “true meaning is a joke.” It is to recognize that the playfulness suffusing his diagnosis of Harvard’s ills and, more broadly, those of liberal education in America, colors his trenchant observations, stringent criticisms, and provocative reform proposals. That his faculty-meeting speeches, occasional contributions to The Harvard Crimson (the student newspaper), and very presence on campus typically bewildered when they didn’t appall his colleagues bespeaks their humorlessness and moralism, blindness to intellectual excellence, and indifference or hostility to liberal education’s imperatives.

Mansfield arrived at Harvard in 1949 as a freshman. He earned his Ph.D. in government in 1961, joined the Harvard faculty in 1962 after a brief stint at the University of California Berkeley, and retired from Harvard’s government department in 2023. A premier scholar of the history of political philosophy, Mansfield’s wonderful writings on Burke, Machiavelli, the spirit of liberalism, constitutional government, electoral politics, executive power, manliness, feminism, the continuities and complexities of modern political philosophy, and more, can be dense, intricate, and elusive. They always entice.

Mansfield’s writings depart from the professional norm. Most political scientists, applying natural-science methods to human affairs, produce technical work fit for consumption only by fellow political scientists. And most political theorists publish scholarship of studied abstraction that requires many years of specialization to decipher. In contrast, Mansfield explores the different orientations toward politics of citizens, politicians, and statesmen, and their characteristic opinions, actions, and aims. His scholarship on the history of political philosophy and commentary on public affairs employ terms that in some cases have acquired an archaic ring – interest, spiritedness, honor, pride, ambition, regime, rule, virtue,........

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