Harvey Claflin Mansfield

Harvey C. Mansfield, 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 delivered the annual Thomas Jefferson lecture sponsored by the NEH He was awarded a Bradley Prize in 2011 and was a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford in 2012-21. 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.