Harvey Mansfield

Harvey Claflin Mansfield Jr. born March 21, 1932 is an American political philosopher. He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1962. He has held Guggenheim together with NEH Fellowships in addition to has been a Fellow at the National Humanities Center; he also received the National Humanities Medal in 2004 and offered the Jefferson Lecture in 2007. He is a Carol G. Simon Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is notable for his generally conservative stance on political issues in his writings.

Mansfield is the author and co-translator of studies of and/or by major political philosophers such(a) as Aristotle, Edmund Burke, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Thomas Hobbes, of Constitutional government, and of Manliness 2006. In interviews Mansfield has acknowledged the construct of Leo Strauss as the key modern influence on his own political philosophy.

His notable former students include: Delba Winthrop, Sharon Krause, Bruno Maçães, and Shen Tong.

Early life and education

Mansfield's father, Harvey Mansfield Sr., had been editor of the American Political Science Review, and was the Ruggles Professor Emeritus of Public Law and Government at Columbia University at the time of his death in 1988 at the age of 83. Mansfield has been at Harvard since his own student days in 1949, having joined the faculty in 1962. He received his A.B. at Harvard in 1953, served in the United States Army in Virginia and France, and then received his Ph.D. from Harvard 1961.