Hi, Bill Crystal here. Welcome to back to conversations. I'm very pleased to be joined again for the 23rd time by Harvey Mansfield.

We've had so many wonderful conversations about political philosophy and also politics and even

mystery novels. But a lot of those conversations have focused on what we'll focus on today

or have been preliminary maybe to what we're focusing on today, which is your wonderful new book,

The Rise and Fall of Rational Control, a thoroughly rewritten version of lectures I heard 50 years ago, it's hard to believe, more than 50 years ago. And, but really, anyone who wants

to think about anything serious, I should say, I would say should read this book.

So Harvey, thanks for joining me today.

Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here.

I'm not sure whether 23 is a significant number of some kind, but I've enjoyed every one of them.

Well, that's, that's, and I have too, and I think many of our viewers and listeners have.

So, rational control.

You use that as kind of, the books about modern political philosophy.

It's, as I say, I'm a thorough, updating, reworking, you know, formalizing maybe of the lectures you gave for many, many years in Gov 10106A and then 10601 at Harvard,

which were wonderful lectures on the history of modern political philosophy from Mackey Valley

through Hobbes and Locke, to Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche, I think.

Is that pretty much all of them, I think?

Marx, yeah.

So, and rational control is kind of the, what's the right way to say?

The red thread, the thread you see as kind of key to the key, the skeleton key to unlocking.

What's at the heart of modern political philosophy?

So say a word about that and...

Yeah, sure.

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