America's Constitutional Soul

The Johns Hopkins Series in Constitutional Thought

by Harvey C. Mansfield

In America's Constitutional Soul , one of America's leading political theorists and most penetrating thinkers on the Constitution describes what's wrong with American politics today—and what political scientists can do about it. Beginning with a chronical of the Reagan elections, Mansfield shows how our politics reveals its nature by the way it pictures the Constitution. He takes aim at the haunted "realism" of contemporary political scientists, contrasting it with the real-world successes of those early practitioners of the art who actually helped define a whole new form of government—and with it such concepts as federalism, a strong exective, and judicial review.

Genres: Politics, History

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Harvey Claflin Mansfield, Jr. is a Professor of Government at Harvard University.

He has held Guggenheim and NEH Fellowships and has been a Fellow at the National Humanities Center; he also received the National Humanities Medal in 2004 and delivered the Jefferson Lecture in 2007. He is a Carol G. Simon Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is notable for his generally conservative stance on political issues in his writings.

Mansfield is the author and co-translator of studies of and/or by major political philosophers such as Aristotle, Edmund Burke, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Thomas Hobbes, of Constitutional government, and of Manliness (2006).

Among his most notable former students are: Andrew Sullivan, Alan Keyes, Robert Kraynak, John Gibbons, William Kristol, Nathan Tarcov, Clifford Orwin, Mark Blitz, Paul Cantor, Delba Winthrop, Mark Lilla, Arthur Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, Francis Fukuyama, Shen Tong, and James Ceaser.

Reviews

[Dave Franklin · Rating 5 out of 5]

In “America’s Constitutional Soul,” Harvey C. Mansfield offers a constitutional case for the study of American politics. While Mansfield's arguments are serious and not widely accepted in today’s academy, this book is a thought provoking inquiry into the problems which surround American politics, government, and society. Mansfield, for the most part, proffers views considered to be "conservative" in his interpretation of constitutional form and purpose.

According to Mansfield, “What we need is comprehensive reflection on the nature, and the ways and means, of self-government. This reflection can begin from the wisdom in the Constitution and its practice." One result of our transformation from a natural-rights republic to a constitutional republic is that our politics are much less vulnerable to the kind of destructive utopianism that consumed the French Revolution. The French, in Mansfield’s view, attempted to complete the revolution of modernity- a revolution initiated by adherents of the social compact theory, principally Hobbes and Locke. The French failed to learn from the American Founders; they did not quell their revolutionary fervor by constitutionalizing it.

Mansfield's theory for understanding American politics, based on the Constitution's form and purpose, has been largely abandoned, but remains an instructive framework. Mansfield argues that the adoption of the Constitution was an experiment in republican government wholly different from that of the Ancients. The Constitution, then, as originally conceived, was based on a theory of political science, and not on a previous experience with a successful form of government. The adoption in the Constitution of a specific form of government- illustrated by the separation of powers- was based on the problem which threatened previous republican governments: the willfulness of majority faction. Since 1787, the United States, then, has been a Constitutional people governed by this political science.

Mansfield persuasively argues that America has departed from the form of government outlined in the Constitution, and that government is now perceived as a means to procure entitlements, rather than as a form to protect natural rights. Even as I write, one of Mansfield’s colleagues at Harvard Law School suggests that President Biden simply disregard any Supreme Court decision with which the executive objects. In addition, many Americans today celebrate the habit of the administrative state to circumvent the messiness of the legislative process, and govern by fiat. Mansfield aptly quotes Madison: “The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, few, or many…may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

Mansfield’s concern for, and consideration of citizenship is prescient. Since 2021, some five million illegal immigrants have entered the United States. The legacy media has largely relegated this issue to silence; many interest groups flagrantly advocate open borders, and some-such as my friend, a Special Education Director in Wyoming- believe that it is prudent to reverse any policy position advocated by Donald Trump. Unfortunately, there has been almost no serious discussion as to what this portends. Mansfield, albeit with caveats, cites Aristotle: “ A community of citizens is a regime… they do not merely rule-they rule in a certain way according to a certain order in institutions that make the regime visible. When the order of the regime visibly changes , when the regime takes on a new shape, then the city is no longer the same.” While Locke had a divergent point of view, the problem persists. We may rightly ask: Is it possible for the regime of the Founders to endure in a polity populated by rent seekers who harbor little or no attachment to self-government? This is the open question that is mostly unasked.

That said, we must acknowledge that we now live with a situation unforeseen by the Founding generation. Mansfield's essays provide us with a thought provoking excursion that is by turns elevating, and disturbing.