Teaching and the Effectual Truth

In his 2023 book, Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World, recently retired Harvard University professor Harvey C. Mansfield articulates what he describes as Machiavelli’s “effectual truth”: “Effectual truth looks to the effect of one’s actions as opposed to the imagination of it,” he says, distinguishing between the good that we imagine results and what actually results from our actions. Machiavelli, he tells us, brought about the modern world by insisting on the effectual truth of things and by wrapping his teachings for princes and potential princes to discover in The Discourses on Livy and The Prince.

But, true to the concept of effectual truth, what are prophets without arms, princes without soldiers, or philosophers without students? For, as Machiavelli says, “all armed prophets conquered, and all unarmed prophets were ruined.” Machiavelli’s enterprise was accomplished, Mansfield argues, not just with ideas, as though the imagination of the thing could be sufficient. It came about through an “army” of princes, peoples, and above all, his students, the philosophers who read and work in the tradition Machiavelli inaugurates. In a word, one might consider the effectual truth of a philosopher or of a teacher to be not just his ideas, but his students.

Earlier this year, Professor Mansfield published The Rise and Fall of Rational Control: The History of Modern Political Philosophy. In April, he followed it up with the essay collection Where Harvard Went Wrong: Fifty Years of Commentary that Fell on Deaf Ears.

Though always actively writing, Professor Mansfield never failed to prioritize teaching, even in his nineties. Now, the broader public receives the benefit of his wisdom, as The Rise and Fall of Rational Control is based on his Harvard course, History of Modern Political Philosophy. This book is intended for and “is dedicated to those who could not or did not take the course,” in other words, the potential students of Professor Mansfield.” 

In his methodical, exacting, and teacherly prose, Mansfield presents the insight that “modern” is something new with a changed idea of reason, of nature and the natural world, and therefore of science, including a science of politics. “Modernity began with a new politics” of rational control, he writes, in which knowledge is power. A new science of politics would, by replacing the classical models of rule and the medieval Christian models that built upon them, provide for the relief of man’s estate and, through a political science, liberate him.

The project of rational control takes various twists and turns through Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. It suffers crises in the forms of Rousseau and Nietzsche. The prose reads as Professor Mansfield speaks, built sentence by sentence with care, provocation, and humor. Systematically building on each author, he makes clear the daylight (or lack thereof) between them, inviting strange realizations (perhaps you do prefer Hobbes to Rousseau!). These minds jump off the page with urgency, and he leads the reader to see the stakes involved in embracing Hobbes’s naturalism, or Rousseau’s contract, or Nietzsche’s “party of life.” One reason, undoubtedly, that Professor Mansfield’s lectures were so well-regarded at Harvard is that his account of the history of modern political philosophy engages the intellect and the passions. When he presents Machiavelli’s tawdry play Mandragola not merely as cheap sexual comedy (as many scholars do) but as offering vital insights into rational control, how could a student, how could a reader, not be enthralled?

He applies that same spirit of fascination even to authors who may seem familiar to us. In the chapter on Locke, Mansfield dedicates a section to Locke’s “silence” on Hobbes. With Mansfieldian understatement, we learn that Locke was in many respects a chameleon. “It appears Locke profits from an inconsistency that could not have escaped his notice … Locke made himself a very secretive man,” writing in invisible ink and shorthand, and not objecting to the occasional “deliberate misdirection.” Mansfield succeeds in making Locke strange and new, and this is fruitful: Locke may be “easily the closest” to our modern American politics, but he, with his seeming caginess, should not escape a critical eye.

The chapter on Rosseau represents the first crisis of rational control. In Mansfield’s terms, “Rousseau’s Second Discourse is the hinge of modern political philosophy and of this book, by which reliance on reason is replaced by reliance on history.” Rousseau is “more consistent, more Machiavellian, and more radical” than Locke. He feels like a crisis, asking questions—like whether the “science” of the enlightened classes is in fact good for us—that have proven as provocative today as in his own. This inquiry into the nature of science and of progress is one of the central throughlines of the book: “the solutions of the troubles of science are more science, as for example with climate change.” But, as Mansfield asks, “Will science save us from science?” The move to get “back to nature” still makes use of science; it also leads Rousseau to reject what Hobbes and Locke retain from older traditions, the “special status of man in nature as the only reasonable being.” In the end, for Rousseau, “right and nature exclude each other.”

Nietzsche represents both the final crisis and a culmination of this long journey. For Nietzsche, “Man’s highest creativity is to will nature to return eternally.” A culture of creativity is impossible, for real creativity must be “more than a fluffy pretense of greatness within reach of all, the grade inflation that results from relativism.” Where Machiavelli’s creativity is to call evil good and thereby revolutionize classical virtue, Nietzsche’s “twist,” Mansfield writes, is to call good evil. Who is more creative, Machiavelli or Nietzsche? Who is more destructive in his creativity? Though the project of rational control tries to free man from necessity, Mansfield writes that “every attempt to free man from these necessities has failed.” The only alternatives are to legitimate them by managing them through political science or to reject them through creativity as freedom. What makes Nietzsche dangerous, in his day and in our own, is the rejection of any common good of justice, going further even than those members of the modern project who rejected the pursuit of a summum bonum in the hope of avoiding a summum malum.

In the end, we find ourselves at an impasse: how do we get beyond the modern project? Mansfield suggests the answer may not be a matter of progressing beyond by building upon the criticism of Nietzsche and postmoderns. The answer may instead be restoring what has been obfuscated, perhaps by emphasizing the soul, honor, and virtue, and by supposing that “perhaps man is a political animal by nature.” Yet these are “dangerous perhapses, more difficult today than in Nietzsche’s day,” Mansfield writes. (In this, I hope we find a promissory note that Professor Mansfield will not leave his new and potential students hanging and will therefore publish his lectures on Ancient and Medieval Political Philosophy. For Professor Mansfield is, at heart, an Aristotelian.)

At the end of the book, however, the new Mansfield students are yet “untested students” of political philosophy who must now decide what to do with those ideas, for “the way we think is the way we live.” Those of us who are professors hope that what we teach will outlive our presence in the classroom, perhaps in books but mostly through our students. What the effectual truth of our writing and teaching will be, most of us can only imagine; what will be the effectual truth of ideas in a student’s life, that too is unclear. What we imagine almost certainly will [MF1] not be.

But in all this, as with all great teachers, Professor Mansfield is the exception. He is a teacher whose commitments to rigor, to plucky and puckish truthfulness, to political philosophy, and to Harvard University have become suitably legendary. And his effectual truth includes generations of students whose ways of thinking and indeed ways of living he has influenced. In The Rise and Fall of Rational Control, Professor Mansfield keeps teaching.

Image by Gage Skidmore and licensed via Wikimedia Commons. Image resized.