A wise and nuanced playfulness is Harvey Mansfield’s forte. He’s just turned 86 and has been teaching at Harvard since he was 30, making him one of the longest-running shows in this clever little town. A professor of government, he’s among the foremost experts on Tocqueville and Machiavelli. But since 2006, when he published a book called “Manliness,” the public attention toward him has focused on his uninhibited and mischievous put-down of Western feminists. “I think I’ve got the best critique that exists of feminism, what its nature is, and what it wants,” he says of that book, chuckling immodestly.
Mr. Mansfield’s study of manliness is acutely topical today, what with the #MeToo movement and the cries of “toxic masculinity” on college campuses, coupled with a startling masculine eruption in the White House. One wonders if there is a connection between the near-banishment of manhood from America’s social sphere and its sudden prominence in the political one. Although, it must be said, there are strong men in powerful positions elsewhere, too, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and India’s Narendra Modi.
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