And the I'm Bill Crystal.

I'm Bill Crystal.

Welcome back to Conversations.

Our guest today is Harvey Mansfield,

longtime professor of political philosophy at Harvard,

and my teacher teacher I'm thrilled

to happen with us today. Harvey, why political philosophy? You've been teaching it

for 50 years but I think you started off intending to be a political scientist.

Well that's true.

I went from political science to political philosophy at Harvard.

As you mentioned, I went to Harvard.

And I went to Harvard in a more significant way than most people because I never left Harvard.

All the jokes about Harvard are about what happens to you after you leave Harvard.

For example, you'll never regret going to Harvard, others may, but you won't.

So I learned it there because I've always been there.

And I started with this wonderful teacher, Sam Beer, who was

professor of comparative government. We studied especially political parties and that was political science which had a certain relationship to what was called political theory.

They thought that because Sambier was with others like him,

that political science needed theoretical background or

foundation underneath it and the foundation that he went to and others too at that time was Max Faber.

So when I was an undergraduate as a senior I wrote a

senior thesis on political parties and Max Faber has backed up.

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