Shots In The Dark: Harvey Mansfield Fights Back

Monday, August 28, 2024

Harvey Mansfield Fights Back

A few weeks ago, I wrote of Martha Nussbaum's devastating New Republic review of Harvey Mansfield's new tome—well, sort of—called Manliness. (I'd link to it, but TNR online is subscriber-only.)

Now Mansfield has responded in the letters section of TNR. I reprint his letter, in full, in the interests of fairness.

Among the many errors and misrepresentations in Marha Nussbaum's review of my book on manliness is the statement that I have retired from a chair at Harvard. Not so. Apart from that, I say that I did not follow her instruction for writing my book because I did not want a product quite as earnest as the books she has done lately. Nor do I desire the servile future of caring males listening raplty to righteous females that she has in mind for us.

That sure does sound like a grim future. One wishes, though, that Mansfield would follow up the accusation that there are "many errors and misrepresentations" in Nussbaum's review with more than one specific.

If only, of course, because it would make for a more entertaining letter.

¶ 12:11 AM

Comments:

Harvey Mansfield has become a caricature of course, and his levity is for him a good distraction from the fact that he is, for instance, the teacher of neocons of the likes of Bill Kristol, whose disastrously failed theories have caused tens of thousands of deaths in Iraq -- that is deaths of real people, probably twenty times the number that died on 9/11/01 at the least. On the floor of the FAS in 2003 Mansfield celebrated the "victory" that he saw after the battle for Baghdad. He's amusing, or at least was until we have come to see where his mad Straussian neocon doctrine has led us.

# posted by Anonymous : 1:22 AM

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