Harvey C. Mansfield is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Government at Harvard University. He was Chairman of the Government Department from 1973–1977, has held Guggenheim and NEH Fellowships, and has been a Fellow at the National Humanities Center.
Mansfield’s first book, Statesmanship and Party Government: A Study of Burke and Bolingbroke, came out in 1965. Since then he has published thirteen more books including three translations of Machiavelli and a translation of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which he co-translated with his late wife Delba Winthrop. Articles and political analysis by Mansfield frequently appear in periodicals such as the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, the National Review, and the Times Literary Supplement.
Mansfield’s numerous awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Humanities Medal. He won the Joseph R. Levenson award for his teaching at Harvard, received the Sidney Hook Memorial award from the National Association of Scholars, and in 2004 accepted a National Humanities Medal from the President. In 2007, he delivered the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Jefferson Lecture. He has hardly left Harvard since his first arrival in 1949, and has been on the faculty since 1962.
He has served as a member of the Council of the American Political Science Association and the National Council on the Humanities, as a fellow of the National Humanities Center, and as president of the New England Historical Association. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
To learn more about Professor Mansfield, visit Contemporary Thinkers: Harvey Mansfield.