The ORB Interview for the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Ipswich, Massachusetts
“Men dressed very well there in the 1950s,” says Harvey Mansfield, recalling a visit he made to England as a graduate student in 1953. “And I liked their articulation. The way they pronounced their vowels and didn’t ever slur their speech.”
The mind of a 94-year-old sage can be a cocktail of lucidity and reminiscence. Especially at dinnertime.
Mr. Mansfield is sipping a small Scotch in the dining room in his country house while two grad students tend to a grill on the patio. Looking past their functional ineptitude, so common in male Twentysomethings in the 21st century, he voices some sympathy for them. To be in the open air in rural Massachusetts in the early evening in June is to offer yourself as a gift to mosquitoes.
Mr. Mansfield, a political philosopher, was until 2023 the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard. He knows more about Machiavelli, Montesquieu and Tocqueville than any man alive. With his retirement—and the departure to the University of Florida last December of the historian James Hankins—the humanities at ultra-liberal Harvard have lost their last two avowed conservatives. (“There are secretive ones who won’t come out of the closet,” Mr. Hankins told me earlier this year.)
Even after retirement, Mr. Mansfield has Harvard on his mind. In May, Encounter Books, a conservative imprint, published the latest of Mr. Mansfield’s numerous books, titled “Where Harvard Went Wrong: Fifty Years of Commentary That Fell on Deaf Ears.” In the Preface he writes: “It is 2025, and Harvard is in a bind. Its policy of diversity, equity, and inclusion, reigning for recent decades, is losing out.” Donald Trump is hounding Harvard.
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“He knows more about Machiavelli, Montesquieu and Tocqueville than any man alive.”
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I’m spending the weekend with Mr. Mansfield and his wife Anna Schmidt, an academic philosopher from a small town north of Hamburg who’s a half-foot taller than he and 43 years younger. I am on assignment for the Wall Street Journal, for whose editorial page I write. The Mansfields have been married for 16 years. He was 78 when they wed (he for the third time, she for the first); she was 35.
My editor wants a piece that distils Mr. Mansfield’s thoughts on America at 250 years old, to run in the newspaper in advance of July 4. We’re going to talk about those themes in the morning, the time at which—per the mindful Mrs. Mansfield—the old professor is at his sharpest. And so, for the Olney Review of Books, I propose to him that we chat about what’s left of the “Special Relationship” in this year of American national consequence. That phrase, so larded with wishful thinking and a certain English postwar neediness, was deployed by Winston Churchill in 1946 in a speech in Fulton, Missouri. Churchill, speaking in the presence of President Truman, was describing the bond—as he imagined it—between the United States and Britain (“the English-speaking peoples”).
How paradoxical, I observe to Mr. Mansfield, that a special relationship should be thought to exist between a formerly colonised people and their colonisers. The Portuguese have never spoken that way about Brazil, nor the Spaniards about Mexico, or of any number of other places in Ibero-America. And how remarkable that the tables have been so completely turned today, with the erstwhile colonisers (the British) now being the unquestioned minnows in a bilateral relationship. Even in the dark days of the Suez Crisis, when Eisenhower turned his back on the British, these Britannic islands still had dozens of colonies and protectorates in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. But with a timorous post-Brexit Britain under Keir Starmer and a belligerent U.S. under President Trump II, an imbalance of power that’s existed since the end of World War II couldn’t be starker.
Mr. Mansfield is somewhat sceptical of the very notion of a Special Relationship and seems not to want to talk about it. I suspect he finds the topic dull, even as he acknowledges that the assertion of such a relationship has become harder to make with the rapidly changing demographics of the United States. Put simply, many fewer Americans than ever before regard Britain as the Mother Country. Anglo-America is in eclipse.
But Mr. Mansfield does, he says, like “England and the English, Britain and the British.” Nostalgia is a blessed thing, and he tells me of the time he went there after he graduated from Harvard in 1953. A Fulbright Scholarship took him to the London School of Economics, where he spent “a wonderfully enjoyable year.” That was before he returned to Harvard for his Ph.D. dissertation, which was later published as “Statesmanship and Party Government: A Study of Burke and Bolingbroke” (1965).
Mr. Mansfield went to England that first time with his favourite Harvard professor and mentor, Samuel Beer (1911-2009), “a great student of Britain who wrote what was the leading text on British government.” Beer was a Midwesterner who’d gone to high school with Barry Goldwater. Mr. Mansfield has spoken to me of his debt to Beer many times before, and he reminds me that although the latter was a Democrat, he “made no attempt to impose a partisan view, or any sort of view, on us, his students.” (Beer wrote speeches for FDR, and advised JFK.)
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“Put simply, many fewer Americans than ever before regard Britain as the Mother Country. Anglo-America is in eclipse.”
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Beer, says Mr. Mansfield, “knew English politics extremely well, and was always praised by the people whom he met in England. He took me around with him. He took me, in fact, to the two British party conferences in 1953, both of which were in Margate.” The Conservative conference saw the triumphant return of Churchill. Labour, by contrast, was wracked by internecine strife between the party’s left and right.
Mr. Mansfield’s eyes light up when he recalls his attendance at these events. “In one of them I got to shake the hand of Clement Attlee and at the other I got to hear Winston Churchill. So that was a lifetime experience.” What did he think of Attlee? “Well, I just played the American. I just walked up to him in a hotel lobby, holding out my hand, and said I was an American Fulbright student. And he shook it.” Mr. Mansfield was 23. He recalls Attlee’s bemused reaction. “All he said to me was, ‘Rather, rather.’” After that, the pushy young American was bought a drink by Aneurin Bevin, then the health minister in the Labour government. “It was whiskey,” he recalls. “Not beer.”
Did Mr. Mansfield feel that the British were especially inclined to be friendly and welcoming to a young American? “They were,” he says, “but that was partly because I was inclined to be forward with them.” He was staying at a B&B with other members of the Labour Party, all of whom were in the lower echelons. “I got to talk with them, and I said, ‘You know, the main conference is down in the Saint George’s Hotel. Why don’t we all go there?’ And they said, ‘Oh, we would never go down there. Those are the muckety-mucks. We wouldn’t want to get in their way.’ Compare that to an American party convention where people would want to get in their way, and a big politician would have a whole crowd of people around him trying shake his hand and pat his back and so on.”
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“He was perfectly willing to recognise the Confederacy, if he thought they were going to win. It was Realpolitik. There was no special relationship.”
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That incident, he says, introduced him to “a big difference between us and the English. I noted the deference of the English toward their government, as opposed to America.” He’s not sure if this difference between the peoples persists, because he hasn’t been to England “for a long time.”
Mr. Mansfield tells me about a book he’s reading, “Battle Cry of Freedom” (2003), by James McPherson, professor emeritus of history at Princeton. “Something I read there sheds light on the relationship between us and the British.” In the course of the American Civil War, the Confederacy tried to get recognition as a separate government from the British. “That would be a great advantage to them, and so Lincoln tried to prevent that in all ways he could. And after an event in which a couple of Union ships were taken by the British, an overenthusiastic American general said, ‘This is a terrible thing. We must go to war to avenge this. And Lincoln looked at him reprovingly and said, ‘One war at a time.’” Lord Palmerston was the British Prime Minister, and he “was by no means just going to take the side of the Union because it was on the side of the abolition of slavery. He was perfectly willing to recognize the Confederacy, if he thought they were going to win. It was Realpolitik. There was no special relationship.”
Mr. Mansfield would like to go back to Britain for one last trip. But he doesn’t think a visit is likely—at least not an academic one. “One thing that’s kept me away from England is that England doesn’t like Straussians—people like me.” He means scholars who are influenced by, and who work in the tradition of, the German-American philosopher Leo Strauss (1889-1973).
There was, he tells me, a splashy review attacking Strauss’s “Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy.” It was in the New York Review of Books, and was written in 1985 by an Englishman named Myles Burnyeat, then a senior research fellow in philosophy at All Souls. He damned Strauss as a “remote and rebarbative” conservative eccentric.
“That had a great effect on English academia,” says Mr. Mansfield. “So much so that, to be a Straussian like me is terribly frowned upon. They use the word ‘unsound’.”
Tunku Varadarajan is a writer for the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. He is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
