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# Mansfield and the Philosopher Who Would Rule
- URL: https://www.rubiconmag.com/library/mansfield-and-the-philosopher-who-would-rule/
- Published: 2026-08-07T15:32:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-09T22:15:00.000Z
- Description: It was the Greeks, specifically the democratic Athenians, who first argued and debated about man’s inherent nature and how best that nature can be controlled by rational actors (i.e., princes and legislators).
- Author: Rubicon
- Tags: #online-only, #featured, #pos-5

Justin Geoffrey

*The Rise and Fall of Rational Control: The History of Modern Political Philosophy* by Harvey Mansfield, 2026, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 323 pp.

The exact origins of philosophy are unknown. As pointed out early in Harvey Mansfield’s latest book, *The Rise and Fall of Rational Control*, Socrates did not create philosophy whole cloth—multiple schools, thinkers, and students predated the Athenian moralist who was forced to drink hemlock by the first democracy for corrupting the minds of its youth. Socrates belonged to an older Greek tradition, but it was his work, along with the contributions of Plato and, especially, Aristotle, that laid the foundations for modern political philosophy. It was the Greeks, specifically the democratic Athenians, who first argued and debated about man’s inherent nature and how best that nature can be controlled by rational actors (i.e., princes and legislators). Thus, political philosophy was born as a discipline within the realm of Hellenic philosophy.

Mansfield belongs to this school of Western political philosophy, and despite being a rare conservative on Harvard’s campus, he has continued to enjoy support, respect, and prestige since being appointed as a full professor in the radical year of 1969\. *The Rise and Fall of Rational Control* is Mansfield’s latest contribution to his chosen (and dour) science. Based on decades of lectures dating back to 1968, *The Rise and Fall of Rational Control* argues that the first modern political philosopher is the perennially despised Machiavelli. It was the Florentine republican who, through both his brilliant *The Prince* and his plays like *Mandragola*, articulated a philosophy that de-emphasized Christianity and Aristotle—the two most powerful forces of the mediaeval world—in favor of a kind of “situational” ethics that embraces the necessity of evil, or at least immoral deeds for moral ends. Mansfield argues that Machiavelli was the first to reimagine man’s natural state as devoid of original sin, and it was Machiavelli who articulated methods of rational control (or, more simply, politics) predicated on something other than the pursuit of absolute good or the absolute truth.

*The Rise and Fall of Rational Control* expands from Machiavelli and dissects the work of seven other great philosophers of Western history: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Each one of these philosophers takes the genius of Machiavelli and reshapes it, thus producing different conclusions. Hobbes and Locke, for example, saw in natural man a base desire for protection and security from the troubles of existence. Hobbes saw the state as the answer to this dilemma, while Locke argued for private property. Both men, however, agreed that natural rights come before natural law, and thus both are the founders of Anglo-American liberalism.

Rousseau, on the other hand, wrote of natural man as pure and uncorrupted, and for individuals to return to that blissful existence, there must exist a broad, irreligious humanism and a socio-political order that is so total as to render disorder impossible. The German philosophers of Mansfield’s work come across as the great disruptors of the Renaissance-to-Enlightenment epoch, with Hegel centering history above philosophy, and Marx and Nietzsche pushing for complete revolutions in both the material world and the mental landscape.

*The Rise and Fall of Rational Control* serves as a good introduction to modern political philosophy. Mansfield is adept at discussing the key points of each subject, and although he is prone to using jargon and unnecessarily complex prose, his points are nevertheless clear so long as the reader is paying attention. In a similar vein, this book makes several important assertions about political philosophy: 1) its origins are anti-Christian, 2) it intentionally upholds the creative and individualistic philosopher as the only person equipped to rule justly, and 3) it, as a discipline, is concerned with how best to rationally control nominally free individuals within a society ruled via constitutions, whether republican or monarchical. Thankfully, Mansfield discusses these developments without too much presentism or interjections, although he is guilty of making jokes about grading papers and Nietzsche’s “dangerous” appeal to the right.

*The Rise and Fall of Rational Control* is a thorough primer—an introductory monograph—on the history and complexities of Western political philosophy. Mansfield is a master of his craft, and his truest mastery lies in his ability to distill centuries of philosophical thought down into thoroughgoing debates that connect Machiavelli to Marxist communism, and Lockean liberalism to Nietzschean vitalism.