Political philosophy ought to be taken seriously, but not too seriously. Aristotle stresses the importance of the discipline in his Politics, and on his masterful definition, political theory inquires into the good of the “state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.” This would seem to elevate the insights of political philosophy to not only a high, but the very highest level. And perhaps so. But this ought to be chastened by Aristotle’s reminder in The Nichomachean Ethics that we ought only to expect as much precision as a subject matter permits. If ethics becomes ambiguated by the complexity of individual human nature, then political philosophy is an even murkier enterprise whose wisdom often lies in exposing how little we can know with certainty about what we have the most reason to care about. Where Aristotle was comfortable with this ambiguity, many moderns aspired to a much more exact science of politics.
These meta-issues were very much on my mind while reading Harvey Mansfield’s stately The Rise and Fall of Rational Control: The History of Modern Political Philosophy. It is a very serious book, indeed, and one of the few that lives up to such a haughty tone. Mansfield was a Professor at Harvard University for decades and was famous for introducing generations of well-heeled Political Science students to the empyrean heights of political philosophy. Very heavily influenced by Leo Strauss, whose imprint on his student is clear decades on, Mansfield is famous for being one of the few remaining academics who unabashedly affiliates with the political right. This has made him something of an icon for conservatives, who look to Mansfield as the sage of the GOP par excellence. He’s also something of a bugbear for liberal philosophers like Martha Nussbaum, who was famously acidic towards Mansfield’s genteel sexism and cavalier pooh-poohing of feminist philosophy in her New Republic review of the latter’s Manliness.
Now retired and aged 93, The Rise and Fall of Rational Control is based on lectures from Mansfield’s Modern Political Philosophy course, taught over more than half a century between 1968 and 2022. It’s a comfortable swan song from the Professor’s professor, demonstrating a combination of deep learning and reverence admirably lightened by familiarity. Its eight chapters discuss the thinking of the rarefied set of political philosophers known by their last name: Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. More than just a scholarly exegesis, the book situates them as thinkers in the broader political discourse of modernity.
This book is a comfortable swan song from the Professor’s professor, demonstrating a combination of deep learning and reverence admirably lightened by familiarity.
Reasoning About Rational Control
Even for a relatively canonized discipline like political philosophy, there are serious risks in trying to narratively summarize and unify it. Focus too much on the Western canon’s often striking pluralism, ranging from communists like Marx to aristocratic radicals like Nietzsche, and you end up with a nominalistic story that has little to say about its unity. This is usually the approach taken by introductory texts aimed at undergrads. On the other hand, try to force an artificial unity on the material, and you end up distorting what makes a philosopher’s contribution distinctive. Even worse, the latter approach is very common for those of us who want to agitate rather than just explain. It is no coincidence that grand stories about the unity of Western thought usually intend to make a partisan point. Sometimes this means insisting everyone is just a predecessor step on the road to the most rational (typically your own) system ala Habermas’ recent epic and very whig Also, A History of Philosophy. Alternatively, one can tell a decline and fall story à la Strauss’ Natural Right and History, where everything is, to a degree, a regression from core insights of the past that have been abandoned and that our wise sage has rebirthed from the ash heap.
Mansfield largely carves a middle path between these two modes, while gently leaning towards the latter. He concludes that modern political philosophy, beginning with Machiavelli, is defined by the titular idea of rational control:
With Machiavelli was born a single idea with many aspects, versions, currents, and countercurrents—the idea of rational control. Reason is to be used not merely to understand our problems but to control them. Rational control is most obvious in the modern science familiar to us, where knowledge brings power…Rational control would also come in the form of political science—a new political science to bring that idea to politics. There, this new politics would manage and reduce conflict, dependence, and slavery; it would make humans strong by making them free.
There is an overarching story in the book, with recognizably conservative contours.
There is an overarching story in the book, with recognizably conservative contours. For as much as the idea of rational control was rolled out with considerable pomp and expectation by modern rationalists, it has turned out to be far more challenging to ground it in an intellectually satisfying way than many of its disciples expected. The very diversity that lesser commentators would fixate on testifies to this deeper unifying tension and the enduring efforts to solve it. From Machiavelli through Hobbes and Marx, the “great” thinkers of modern political philosophy each labor mightily to ground a new science of humanity, morality, and politics on firmly rational foundations, all without giving into the abstract metaphysics of the Ancients or the superstitions of the Medieval scholastics.
Mansfield is taciturn about their relative success but makes it quite clear that the project has faltered for good reasons. Nietzsche’s descent into postmodernism is the clearest symptom of that; what Machiavelli began, “Nietzsche brought to an end—and with both a bang and a whimper; modern rational man proved to be what he called the ‘last man.’” Postmodern man “displays an attitude critical of what is modern yet is unable to get beyond it or find a name for it. Postmodern is unable to escape modern.”
One of the mildly disappointing things about the book is that Mansfield has little to say about a way out of the dilemmas he diagnoses.
One of the mildly disappointing things about the book is that Mansfield has little to say about a way out of the dilemmas he diagnoses. The book closes with a short coda, “Envoi,” which predictably suggests returning to a “liberalism attuned to the virtue of citizens in the exercise of their rights. That liberalism would return from an unusually constrained self, interested only in survival, to a reliance on the soul, which contains a concern for nobility and sacrifice as well as survival.” Much as it would be admirable for us to be a little less selfish and a little more noble on a day-to-day basis, the issues of our time cry out for a more comprehensive rethinking than everyone being a bit more blue-blooded. Cross-party scotch and sodas on the green do not meaning make.
Canon Wars
By and large, I truly enjoyed reading Mansfield’s always thoughtful and considerate takes on these eight seminal thinkers. Even so, it is easy for me to push back on this or that detail of his readings of many of them. For instance, I am not convinced by Mansfield’s claim that Kant is “primarily a moral philosopher.” Given Mansfield’s immediate acknowledgement that “this would be contested in favor of his theory of knowledge for which he is best known and most studied,” even he doesn’t seem all that confident about it. Kant insisted in the Critique of Practical Reason that two things filled him with awe and ever-growing wonder: the first was, indeed, the moral law within, but the other was the starry heavens above, which Mansfield does not seem concerned with highlighting. Mansfield’s relative disinterest in the great destroyer’s critique of classical metaphysics and his revolutionary turn to the transcendental has ripple effects on his reading of others.
Primary among these is Marx, whose own “critique” of political economy is largely sidestepped by Mansfield for an analysis of the earlier humanist works. One of the threads that connects Kant, Hegel, and Marx, well described by Allen Wood, is rooting epistemology in processes of human cognition rather than in the objects being apprehended. The reason this is important for understanding Marx is that it’s hard to grasp his innovation without realizing how he essentially historicized and materialized themes that appeared earlier in Kant and Hegel. For instance, by suggesting that the “laws” discovered by bourgeois political economists did in fact help explain the modern economy, but only because they reflected in the mind real processes taking place in the social world. Bourgeois economists categorized the laws of the economy while failing to recognize that they were not eternal or natural, but contingent features of the given mode of production.
But I digress. Ultimately, Mansfield’s learnedness is on display throughout the book. In fact, in today’s day and age, it is pretty remarkable just how charitable and careful he is with the thinkers he examines. Locke is admired for his “signal success,” which has earned him the “reputation of a founder.” Mansfield makes clear that Marx was a “great man” who developed a “brilliant critique” of liberalism and acknowledges that, as “self-named living schools, of the eight only the Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxist establishments remain.” This charitableness is a far cry from the Jordan Petersons or Gad Saads of the world. Mansfield echoes the recent literature on Nietzsche, stressing the latter’s emphasis on “fascism and Nazism in the twentieth century,” reminding us that Nietzsche “remains the most important intellectual source for those vicious movements.” But Mansfield also describes Nietzsche as “the philosopher of excitement, a thrill to read” and is clearly attracted to the self-proclaimed Antichrist’s strange “honesty” and “nobility.”
In today’s day and age, it is pretty remarkable just how charitable and careful he is with the thinkers he examines. But it is disappointing that he doesn’t extend this same level of generosity to contemporary philosophers.
It is disappointing that he doesn’t extend this same level of generosity to contemporary philosophers, especially those working in schools of thought quite distant from these, like feminism, critical theory, etc. By and large, he tends to see these as lesser instantiations of what came before. That’s an odd attitude to take towards thinkers of the stature of Habermas, Rawls, Nussbaum, Heidegger, Adorno, Hayek, Butler, and de Beauvoir. But even given that, what is here is enough.
The Philosophers Have Only Interpreted Part of the World…
The value in political philosophy comes from not asking too much of it. Sometimes Mansfield asks too much.
Despite what the philosophers think, modernity and postmodernity cannot be understood through modern philosophy. But much like a microscope gives a focused, if reductive, glimpse into the minutiae of life, modern philosophy can reveal a great deal about our condition. Political philosophy, in particular, is often both acclaimed and criticized for its unique combination of depth and theoretical narrowness, as it is applied to grasp the world’s complexities in thought. The value in political philosophy comes from not asking too much of it. Sometimes Mansfield asks too much.
Mansfield follows his mentor Strauss, who in turn often echoed Heidegger, in giving into a kind of idealism. Early in the chapter on Hobbes, Mansfield claims that climate change is “caused by the growth and application of modern science in unrestricted technology. Science wants to be on its own, independent of political control, which it regards as ignorant and invasive. Science should lead, with scientists at the helm, the rest of us following. But science seems not to have correctly considered the consequences of its unrestricted growth for the climate of the earth, the home of human beings.”
It’s hard not to chuckle at the level of abstract removal here. Is it really science that’s primarily at fault for climate change? Mansfield and his tradition are correct that science isn’t simply a tool that is applied neutrally to the world. The analytical and philosophical lenses we use to frame the world help determine our actions, what Marx would call the metabolic relationship, to nature. If you have a hammer, every problem starts looking like a nail. Thinking “scientifically” or “rationally” exists in a self-reinforcing relationship to how we manipulate nature. But there is a massive difference between the climate scientists who are using their knowledge to plead for reform and the engineers working for ExxonMobil who are using it to more efficiently extract and sell a product that is slowly killing us. And a lot of that difference is down to the fact that the engineers working for ExxonMobil are more comprehensively integrated into a capitalist mode of production, which, to invoke Mansfield, is what in fact seems to “have not correctly considered the consequences of its unrestricted growth for the climate of the earth, the home of human beings.” Putting a stop to this process will mean spending less time rethinking our approach to science and a lot more time looking for eco-friendly oil alternatives and making sure that it is Big Oil, rather than another animal species, that goes extinct.
This tendency to live in a world of ideas and values rather than material practices, to put “ideas first” as Laura Field put it in Furious Minds, tends to be characteristic of conservative thinkers. As Terry Eagleton notes in Materialism, it’s a temptation they are far more vulnerable to, since the attraction to nobility, aesthetics, and values draws attention away from the common materiality of our lives, which thinkers like Hobbes and Marx were more intimately familiar with. I suspect this feeds into Mansfield’s dissatisfying solutions to our current woes, as I talked about earlier. Unwilling to follow the Trumpists all the way in calling for “regime change,” or imagining a liberalism that would fundamentally reform itself, he’s left asking us to be more reflective about our personal behavior. That would be nice, but it is (to invoke Samuel Moyn) “not enough.” Not nearly enough in fact.
Unwilling to follow the Trumpists all the way in calling for “regime change,” or imagining a liberalism that would fundamentally reform itself, Mansfield is left asking us to be more reflective about our personal behavior.
Despite these qualms, The Rise and Fall of Rational Control is well worth anyone’s time. Reading it reminded me of being twenty again, taking classes with Waller Newell at Carleton, and spending my time debating Beyond Good and Evil well into the morning. As someone who teaches political theory for a living, it reminded me why I care about what I do—and that is high praise for any book.
Matt McManus is an Assistant Professor at Spelman College. He is the author of The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism and The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, amongst other books.
Image using “Harvey Mansfield by Gage Skidmore,” by Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
