Harvey Mansfield on the Wisdom of The Federalist

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 8 September 2018

⏱️ 80 minutes

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Summary

Harvey Mansfield reflects on The Federalist and why it should be read seriously as a great work on politics. Mansfield’s discussion calls our attention to the subtlety and complexity of the argument of The Federalist, as a whole, and explains why it remains an indispensable guide for thinking about American government. Mansfield and Kristol also consider how The Federalist draws on, but also differs from, works of ancient and early modern political science in its analysis of good government and republicanism.

Transcript

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0:00.0	And the Hi, welcome to conversations. I'm Bill Crystal. I'm joined again today by
0:19.8	Harvey Mansfield, Professor of Government at Harvard. Hello.
0:23.0	And we're going to discuss the Federalist,
0:24.6	which you've been teaching and speaking about
0:27.4	and writing on.
0:28.2	And I suppose the obvious question is most of my life.
0:31.9	Most of your life, yeah, but you teach political philosophy
0:35.4	and Aristotle and Machiavelli and Tocville,
0:38.6	and you argued maybe it comes to that level,
0:41.2	but why the Federalist Papers, which seem to be 85 papers written for an occasion,
0:47.0	but you treat it more like those other things,
0:50.0	not quite like them.
0:52.0	It's more of a political work, obviously,
0:54.0	or a work conditioned by the times.
0:55.7	But you didn't talk you gave recently.
0:57.1	You said, the wisdom of the Federalist
0:59.2	brings the politics of liberalism to a height
1:01.3	it had not reached before, was not to keep so defend that
1:06.4	I mean defend the proposition that the wisdom of the Federalist is you know is
1:10.8	that high a level and that you can think about it as a as the federalist
1:15.4	instead of just the federalist papers. It's a work of political science the
1:20.2	federalist. It's a practical work, but then maybe political science is a practical
	...

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