And the Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome to Conversations, and it's a great pleasure to

welcome back Harvey Mansfield. It's good to be here.

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the publication of your excellent book,

Manliness.

Thank you.

So we should talk about manliness the topic and also manliness the book.

Yeah. How did you write? Why manliness?

Well, I've been sort of, I'd had it in mind pretty much all my career you could say. I had as a kind of model of manliness My mentor or professor at Harvard named Sam

Beer, both as an undergraduate and undergraduate student I studied with him and he

was a kind of model of manliness. Once when he was being honored by Harvard, the Harvard Gazette called

me up, a woman reporter and he said, well, what was special about Sam Beer and I said always his manliness and there was a pause and

finally her female voice said could you think of another word.

And yeah, and so that's the situation right now.

People want to think of another word.

So this is a kind of assertive, you could even say possibly manly title that I wanted,

also without a subtitle, just out there by itself.

What does that mean?

Then I also, another influence on this book

was my late wife Delva Winthrop, who was a graduate student wrote a dissertation on Aristotle

in which he developed the notion of assertiveness in philosophy especially.

So that manliness is assertive,

and that's for sure.

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