[The Rise and Fall of Rational Control: The History of Modern Political Philosophy by Harvey C. Mansfield. (Harvard University Press, 2025; xi + 324 pp.)]
Harvey C. Mansfield tells us that “this book is based on lectures from the Harvard University course History of Modern Political Philosophy (known as Government 1061) that I delivered in alternate years at Harvard from 1968 to 2022.” The course was a famous one, and, after reading the book, one can see that the course deserved its high reputation. (By the way, in its initial decades, Mansfield was known as a hard grader, and he was nicknamed “Harvey C- Mansfield”).
Mansfield argues that modern political philosophy began with Machiavelli, and it was centered around the notion of “rational control.” He covers eight thinkers—besides “old Nick,” they are Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche—who developed the idea of rational control or reacted against it. As he explains the idea:
Machiavelli lived from 1469 to 1527, a long time ago. Can the modern idea be this old? Yes, that is the thesis of the book. With Machiavelli was born a single idea with many aspects, versions, currents and countercurrents—the idea of rational control. Reason is to be used not merely to understand our problems but to control them. Rational control is most obvious in the modern science familiar to us, where knowledge brings power. Take the discovery of DNA as the program of life: when you know what a being’s DNA is, you can control it, at least in principle. The modern sciences of medicine, physics, chemistry, economics, psychology, etc., all have the aim of improving our lives by using human reason in a new form of science that links it with technology. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), after Machiavelli, stated it with beautiful clarity: “Enlarging the bounds of human empire to the effecting of all things possible,” and doing this “for the relief of man’s estate” (The New Atlantis, 1626). Rational control would also come in the form of political science—a new political science to bring that idea to politics. There, this new politics would manage and reduce conflict, dependence, and slavery; it would make humans strong by making them free.
Mansfield’s account of Machiavelli is open to objection on several grounds. First, although he is without doubt correct that Machiavelli opposed both Plato and Aristotle and the medieval Church by rejecting appeals to what ought to be, either based on man’s essence or God’s law, and instead supported a “realistic” explanation of politics concerned with the expansion of power, it by no means follows that he would have supported the expansion of rational control through science “for the relief of man’s estate.” (He died before the onset of modern science). Mansfield cites nothing to show that Machiavelli had any interest in this issue.
Second, he devotes enormous attention to showing that Machiavelli was an atheist. (Mansfield is a follower of Leo Strauss, for whom all the great thinkers turn out to be secret atheists, except, of course, for the overt atheists). Mansfield has written a long book, Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders: A Study of the Discourses on Livy (University of Chicago Press, 1979) that tries to show that nearly every sentence of Machiavelli’s Discourses was an attack on God or the Church. But he never asks whether Machiavelli had any good arguments, or even arguments at all, for atheism. Rather, since Machiavelli was a great thinker, we are to treat anything that he says, or that can be teased out of what he says by a Straussian reading, as a repository of wisdom, to be challenged only by an appeal to another on the certified list of great thinkers.
The problems with the book are not confined to the discussion of Machiavelli, and in fact there is a central weakness that vitiates Mansfield’s entire approach. He rightly notes that Aristotle and the Church condemned the pursuit of money for its own sake and criticized usury. But he does nothing to show that the development of modern science and the use of technology to produce an abundance of consumer goods is inconsistent with premodern philosophy and theology. (The classic work of Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination (Princeton University Press, 1986) should be consulted in this connection. Suffice it to say that Funkenstein was not a fan of Strauss).
Mansfield gives a good account of Hobbes and Locke, but his strident insistence on taking Locke to be a secret atheist leads him to offer a misleading account of what Locke says. He argues that when Locke affirms the right of self-ownership, he brings into question the view that God is our owner:
The other preparation for Locke’s theory of property is its necessary premise that man is his own property rather than God’s property. Recalling the conclusion in the First Treatise that political power cannot be derived from God and the doubt raised whether man has an inheritance from God for which he must be grateful, we can ask how this applies to property. It appears that property raises a religious question more fundamental than the question whether some humans have a right to property against other humans. Before we decided whether property is private or social, humans themselves must be justified to hold property—and this is disputable. Is man a creature that belongs to his Creator together with everything that belongs to man? . . .but the religious question had to be faced and resolved first. Locke, being the cautious man that he was, both affirms and denies that man is the property of God. He says that man is the “workmanship” of God (FT §53; ST §§6, 56), but he also says that man has property in his own person (ST §§27, 44, 123).
But his discussion ignores a crucial passage from the Second Treatise:
For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker; all the servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the world by His order, and about His business; they are His property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during His, not one another’s pleasure. Every one, as he is bound to preserve himself, and not to quit his station wilfully [sic].
Given Mansfield’s detailed knowledge of the text of Locke’s major works, his failure to cite this passage suggests that he has his own agenda to promulgate.
When we get to Rousseau, a problem arises similar to one that we raised in the discussion of Machiavelli. He tells us that Rousseau questions whether the growth in scientific knowledge has been to man’s benefit. He maintains that it had not been and that man in his primitive state was happier than he is now, although we cannot return to our condition of primeval ignorance. He devised a speculative anthropology that threw the universality of reason into question:
For Rousseau there can be nothing in nature, including human nature, that inclines men to improve themselves. Human reason is perfected by the passions, and passions are created by needs; yet at this stage men have no needs. One must conclude that reason is not natural to humans. The early moderns, Hobbes and Locke, had used reason against nature; natural law consisted of rules of human reason. Rousseau points out that one cannot rely on rules of reason—that is, progress in intelligence shown in the sciences and arts—because the discovery of truth is not necessarily good for humans. Thus, when you go back far enough, you see that reason is not part of human nature.
Mansfield gives a lovingly-detailed account of what Rousseau has to say in his First and Second Discourses, but he never asks why we should take Rousseau’s speculations seriously. Granted that Rousseau says what Mansfield attributes to him, who cares? And—dare one say it—the same goes for Nietzsche as well.
Mansfield has a sharp mind, and his book is worth reading; the chapter on Marx is especially well done. But those who prefer philosophical argument to exegesis of the texts of the “great thinkers” are well-advised to turn elsewhere.
