Harvey Mansfield on America’s Constitutional Soul

Conversations with Bill Kristol

Government, News, Politics, Society & Culture

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 1 August 2016

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The ninth in our ongoing series with Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield focuses on the Constitution and what Mansfield calls “America’s Constitutional Soul.” In this conversation, Mansfield discusses the jurisprudence of the late Justice Antonin Scalia and his focus on the wisdom of the Constitution. Mansfield reflects on why America has a “Constitutional Soul” and how our political parties treat the Constitution. Finally, Kristol and Mansfield consider the relationship of the Constitution to the Declaration of Independence.

Transcript

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0:00.0	And the Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations. I'm very pleased to have to be with me today again.
0:21.0	Harvey Mansfield, Professor of government at Harvard and
0:24.6	frequent participant in conversations and we'll have many more
0:28.6	just discuss this so many many topics about which you can instruct us so I thought we today we would talk about
0:36.7	constitutionalism something you've written on
0:39.8	Book of your essays is called I assume that was your choice America's constitutional soul yes and and we were reminded of
0:47.6	the Constitution with the recent death of justice
0:50.8	Nino Scalia the piece we had in the weekly standard on it, it was entitled, one of the pieces,
0:57.0	the American constitutionalist.
0:59.0	And I was thinking that I guess you really couldn't, one can't really imagine a piece about a lawyer or a judge from another nation with that kind of, you know,
1:08.0	the constitutionalist is somehow very American.
1:12.0	So since you wrote the American's constitutional soul? is somehow very American. It is very American.
1:13.0	So you wrote the America's constitutional solve, explain.
1:17.0	How do we start?
1:19.0	Well, Justice Scalia was one of America's greatest justices.
1:24.0	He's associated with a doctrine,
1:28.0	originalism, I think, in the way that most Supreme Court judges
1:32.0	are justices are not. Also, he wasn't known especially for
1:37.2	landmark cases, but especially for his dissents, his stinging or blistering dissents in the terms that were often used and so he's a
1:49.1	man of dissent he wanted to bring the Constitution back and back to its origin.
1:56.2	And that meant bringing it back
1:58.2	from its present abuse by the progressives or the Democrats or the liberals or those who understood
	...

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