Harvey C. Mansfield is a professor of government and political philosophy at Harvard, where he has taught since 1962. He is the author or translator of fifteen books, including The Spirit of Liberalism (1978) and A Student’s Guide to Political …

What is the Left for? This question is an especially complex and problematic one, since it can refer to two very different, and often antagonistic, levels of political action and historical abstraction. On the one hand, it can be a …

Anyone tracing the pedigree of our political ideas must be struck by the importance and the sheer eventfulness of the late eighteenth century. In the course of its final three decades, many of the crucial concepts, divisions and arguments that …

In late March of 2011, a massacre was averted—not just any ordinary massacre, mind you. For had Qaddafi and his forces managed to crush the Libyan rebellion in what was then its stronghold, Benghazi, the aftershocks would have reverberated well …

Note: This is a modified version of an article originally posted on The Niles Files, on October 9, 2011. George Clooney’s The Ides of March is about Hollywood, just as much—if not more so—as it is about insider politics. Clooney …

If nothing else comes from the “Occupy” protests, I really hope the person—or people—who conceived of the “we are the 99 percent” tagline lands a top job at a branding firm. Yesterday was the SEIU-organized Occupy Chicago protest. It was …

The New Left’s insistence on personal authenticity, which drove its passion for freedom and its abhorrence of authority, reduced politics, and especially leftist politics, to a matter of identity.

Wood uses history to take our myths out of the air and secure them, in somewhat humbled form, on a more solid foundation. By giving shape and structure to our idea of America, he allows us to choose well…

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of American sports from a European perspective is that for all their consumerist glitz, the leagues themselves are exemplary not of capitalism but its seeming opposite: socialism.

In the first episode of Sarah Palin’s Alaska, the former governor goes salmon fishing in Big River Lake. The lake, shot from the heights of a seaplane, rests in a crown of glaciers. The scenery is majestic and Sarah Palin, …