Harvey Mansfield

Harvey C. Mansfield, Kenan Research Professor of Government at Harvard. He has written 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 favo of a constitutional American political science. He has also written on the discovery and development of the theory of executive power and is a translator of Machiavelli and Tocqueville. In 2006 he published a book on manliness, and in 2010 one on Tocqueville. His most recent book is Machiavelli's Effectual Truth; Creating the Modern World. In production now at Harvard Press, The Rise and Fall of Rational Control; The History of Modern Political Philosophy.

He was chairman of the Government department from 1973 to 1977, has held Guggenheim and NEH Fellowships, and was on the Advisory Council of the NEH. In 2004 he received the National Humanities Medal from the President, and in 2007 delivered the annual Thomas Jefferson lecture sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2011 he was awarded a Bradley Prize. He has also been a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. But he has hardly left Harvard since his first arrival in 1949 and was on the faculty there from 1962, retiring as Research Professor in 2023.