Harvey C. Mansfield

Harvey C. Mansfield is the Kenan Research Professor of Government at Harvard. He has written books on Edmund Burke and the nature of political parties, on Machiavelli and the invention of indirect government, in defense of a defensible liberalism,and in favor of a constitutional American political science. He has also written on the discovery and development of the theory of executive power, and he has translated Machiavelli and Tocqueville. In 2006 he published Manliness, and in 2010 a short work on Tocqueville. His most recent books are Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World (2023) and The Rise and Fall of Rational Control: The History of Modern Political Philosophy (2026).

Chairman of the Government Department from 1973 to 1977, Mansfield has held Guggenheim and NEH fellowships and has served on the advisory council of the NEH. In 2004 he received the National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush, and in 2007 he delivered the annual Thomas Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities sponsored by the NEH. He was awarded a Bradley Prize in 2011 and was a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford from 2012 to 2021. He has hardly left Harvard since his first arrival in 1949 and was on the faculty there from 1962 until retiring as research professor in 2023.