Harvey Mansfield, the Harvard political philosopher who wrote the book on manliness - literally, his 2006 work was titled Manliness - has refined his diagnosis after two decades. The problem, he has argued, is not that manliness is disappearing. It is that manliness has gone into eclipse: still there, still powerful, but hidden from view and increasingly channeled into destructive forms.
Speaking on the Conversations with Tyler podcast, "Hvylya" reports, the 93-year-old Mansfield connected this distinction directly to contemporary violence. "The decline in manliness is also a rise in bad manliness," he said. The assassinations and political violence that have marked recent American life - attempts against Trump, the killing of a healthcare CEO - can be partly "accounted for by the bad education that we get and, to some extent, the influence of points of view that deny manliness, particularly feminism."
The core of Mansfield's argument is that masculinity, as a feature of human nature, cannot be legislated or educated away. "This part of human nature that men are different from women and want to be and need to express that is something that we need to hold onto. That can't be repressed without trouble arising," he said.
In his 2006 book, Mansfield ended with a chapter called "Unemployed Manliness." Twenty years later, he considers that framing still accurate: masculine energy that has no legitimate outlet does not vanish - it finds illegitimate ones. The Bronze Age Pervert phenomenon, which Mansfield discussed elsewhere in the same interview, is one example of what happens when manliness goes underground. It re-emerges in forms that are "vulgar" and "uncivilized."
Asked by Cowen whether he had seen manliness change among his students over 61 years of teaching at Harvard, Mansfield said he had not. The students themselves - their character, interest, and ambition - "have not been that different," even as women, Black students, and Asian students joined the classroom. "Those were all differences of ethnicity. In character, I find them remarkable and easily attracted," he said. He tells every one of them the same thing: "Do something that you can be proud of."