The June 8, 2006 issue of the
New York Review of Books is worth a purchase for many articles, one of the most compelling being the review by Gary Wills of Harvey C. Mansfield's
Manliness, an anti-feminist (and anti-human) screed by a Harvard-enshrined lion of "neoconservative thought" (oxymoron understood).
Unfortunately, only a paragraph of the on-line version of the review is available for non-subscribers (you can purchase access to the entire review for $3.00), so some typing mistakes will surface in my attempt at minimally excerpting a long article that is well worth a read. As Gary Wills points out, the "reasoning" in Mansfield's book is irrational, and any intellectual content therein is decidedly anti-intellectual. But Mansfield's line of thinking is born of the same delusional thought patterns that got us into Iraq, that are pushing us into Iran, that are creating a hellish new totalitarianism here at home.
Harvey C. Mansfield, the neocon intellectual seems more mixed up than a dog's dinner. He is a seeming psycho, one to whom President Bush gave a medal. Give the entire alarming review a read, if you get a chance. Some excerpts (by no means the most bizarre) below.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=19052MousinessBy Garry Wills
Manlinessby Harvey C. Mansfield
Yale University Press, 289 pp., $27.50
I once described in these pages a meeting of the Women's Caucus of the American Bar Association at San Francisco in 1992. The woman presiding began by asking attendees to stand if they were the first woman to be an editor of her law school's journal--or the first woman to be made senior partner of her firm, to become a law school dean, to become a judge on her bench, and so forth. There were hundreds and hundreds of women standing by the time she went through her list. That scene is one of many things that bothers Harvey Mansfield--'the willingness of women to claim solidarity with other women.' He claims that 'a man's movement would be more divided against itself, each individual looking out for himself and caring less for the general cause of his sex.' He proves his point by writing a whole book promoting 'the general cause of his sex.' Mansfield objects to claims of women's victimhood by issuing his own lament for men's victimhood. People are trying to prevent him from using the very word 'manly.' It is enough to make a man cry.
Mansfield, the William R. Kenan Professor of Government at Harvard, is a translator of Machiavelli and Tocqueville. He is a Straussian guru in neoconservative circles and the mentor of William Kristol at Harvard. President Bush gave him the National Humanities Medal in 2004. He was the only member of Harvard's faculty to vote against establishing a program of women's studies, and he became one of the most strenuous defenders of Harvard's outgoing President Larry Summers when he suggested that women may be underrepresented in science and engineering in the academy because of intellectual inferiority. Mansfield's new book can be read as a scholarly gloss on the controversy over Summers's remark.
. . .
The book has a weird remoteness from the real world. Like many a professor, Mansfield sees nothing at work around him but theories. He thinks that the double standard in sex is disappearing because feminism "wants to create equality by lowering women's morality to the level of man's." Even if that were true of "feminism" - a term he usually equates with a few extreme theorists - it would not have had much effect on real women's lives but for a concatenation of the many real-world events.
. . .
Mansfield partly stumbles on a reason for not sequestering women exclusively for breeding and nurturing purposes. He says that feminism may be simply an expression of boredom: "For us, perhaps, an argument for women's equality merely adorns and conceals the fact that modern progress has not left much for women to do at home." That sentence shows, again, how little traffic he has with the real world.
. . .
Mansfield claims that manliness has respect for women, but for him this turns out to be a condescending respect, a chivalrous protection of the weak. "Most of the time the gentleman conceals his superiority with chivalric irony; he pretends to defer to his inferiors." This ironic gesture gave women a kind of equality - "the sort of equality that might result from being superior at home if inferior at work." But manly man, the gentleman, has now given way to the "sensitive male," who lets himself be intimidated by feminists. "As opposed to being manly, a defense of manliness requires that a man look a woman in the eye and tell her that she is inferior in important respects. Men cannot do that today." Mansfield yearns for the certitude of Spinoza, who equated might with right, and told women that, lacking the former, they had no claim on the latter: "Here is a man," Mansfield comments, "willing to look women in the eye and tell them what they deserve."
. . .
Mansfield is 100 percent against everything modern. He offers a caricature of the conservative who thinks nothing should change, when he says that patriarchy reigned in every time and culture and therefore should not be abandoned - feminists, after all, "do not explain why patriarchy held sway everywhere until now." He is the very type of the anti-intellectual intellectual and of the frightened "he-man."
He proves the latter point at the very end of the book. Conservative reviewers have praised Mansfield for his courage in facing up to raging women. Christina Hoff Summers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, describes him thus: "Into this world strides Professor Mansfield, loaded for bear, and lethally armed with all the powerful stereotypes thought to be banished from bien pensant society." But after beating his chest for hundreds of pages of Manliness, shouting "Are we men or mice," he quietly slips over into the mousy ranks. Admitting that there is no way to reverse the equal rights movement, he says that we should cede the public sphere to women and try to retain some hold on private life. While knowing that women are not equal, we will just have to pretend they are in the public sphere, since "men are by nature more single-minded, hence more public-spirited, than women, but let's not say that in law." When it comes time to take his final stand, it is a stand for hypocrisy, for nonassertion.