And the Welcome to Conversations, I'm Bill Crystal, and I'm very pleased to have us our guest today, Harvey Mansfield,

longtime professor of government at Harvard University.

Welcome, Harvey.

Thanks, it's great to be here.

Good, good to have you.

Let's talk about party government.

Yes.

We wrote on that 50 years ago.

Great book on statesmanship and party government on

Edmon Burke. You've all lived in had a recent book which you've just reviewed

actually in the Claremont Review of Books. Also, a scribe discussing Burke and political parties that would have somewhat different ways.

So you...

Yeah, my book was about the respectability of political parties.

It had always been thought before Burke, Edmund Burke, who wrote at the end of the 18th century,

that it was a bad thing to have parties.

And if there were parties, there would be the respectable people on one side, the nobles or the gentlemen and the plebs or the plebeians,

the lower class on the other side.

And Burke changed that.

He tried to argue that it was respectable for gentlemen or nobles to disagree and this was the big step toward making party government as a whole as a way of governing a respectable thing to do.

So that was what my book was about.

And why was that a good idea according to work or necessary?

That was a good idea because in fact people do disagree and when they disagree it's good that they

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