本網誌此前發佈了哈佛大學教授Harvey Mansfield論男子氣概書的消息，現在美國政治學會的Perspectives on Politics (2006), 4: 759-761由賓夕凡尼亞大學Anne Norton教授寫書評。Harvey Mansfield是美國政治哲學界史特勞斯派的代表人物，Norton則著有Leo Strauss and the politics of American empire，和這派人物鬧得很僵；或許下一期Perspectives on Politics就會有Mansfield的回應了(附帶補充：Mansfield和Norton的書都由耶魯大學出版社出版，台灣兩位西洋政治思想史巨擘江宜樺和蕭高彥老師都是耶魯大學博士，受教於另一位史特勞斯派大將Steven Smith)。

Manliness. By Harvey C. Mansfield. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. 304p. $27.50.

Harvey Mansfield gives the book to us, in the first instance, as a response to feminism. Feminism, he argues, has sought to erase all differences between the genders, a project which must ultimately fail, for those differences are founded in nature. Feminism has succeeded, however, in diminishing the value and suppressing the practice of the virtue of manliness. The author sets himself the task of restoring that virtue.

Harvey Mansfield gives the book to us, in the first instance, as a response to feminism. Feminism, he argues, has sought to erase all differences between the genders, a project which must ultimately fail, for those differences are founded in nature. Feminism has succeeded, however, in diminishing the value and suppressing the practice of the virtue of manliness. The author sets himself the task of restoring that virtue.

Mansfield's contentious relation with feminists and feminism is known well beyond the academy. For many years, he has been a veritable Parsifal of manliness, searching for the spear that would heal and complete the wounded men of his time. One might expect the book to be familiar and so, in the first instance, it is. Nevertheless, there are some surprises here. Not least of these is the author's considered judgment of the use and worth of manliness.

Mansfield's conservative colleagues may be surprised to see how many examples of manliness are drawn from popular culture and how closely his method parallels their conception of postmodernism. Looking for manliness? Look at Tarzan. Look at John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Ted Nugent, Jesse Ventura. Mansfield appears to have taken the signifier for the signified, the simulation for the Real Thing.

Readers of the Iliad will be surprised to see an account of Achilles nearly as bowdlerized as Hollywood's Troy: Agamemnon steals Achilles' “girlfriend” (p. 61). They should also be surprised to see Achilles cited as the apex of manliness. Achilles, after all, is not quite a man at all, being half divine on his mother's side, and brought up by a teacher who (though very wise) was a bit of a horse's ass.

Is Achilles manly? Achilles is certainly a fabulous performance of the masculine—and the feminine. So beautiful that he was dressed as a girl, Achilles has all the passionate, possessive sexuality that Nietzsche saw in women. He is unrestrained, he is impulsive, he wants attention, he runs to mama. He rants, he whines, he sulks in his tent. Achilles is a man, a lovely man, beautiful and beloved, but he is not manly. Hector is manly. Hector does not seek out war, but he takes on the burdens of war when the mistakes of others bring war on his city. Hector is responsible: for his family, his soldiers, his people. He is called to “endure the hard work of fighting without respite” with no expectation of divine aid (Iliad Book 13:3). He is respected by his enemies. Yet his is not the manliness Mansfield calls us to admire.

Mansfield writes that “the manly man struts and boasts” (p. 50), and he cites, in defense of this surprising assertion, a surprising source, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in “The Negro Family”: “The very essence of the male animal, from the bantam rooster to the four-star general, is to strut” (251, n.1; U.S. Department of Labor, March 1965, ch. 3). They should have watched those John Wayne movies more carefully, those professors. Cowards, villains, and the callow young are the ones who strut and boast.

Perhaps this is one of Mansfield's provocations, to be filed with the section in praise of imperialism. In each case, race and empire, Mansfield turns to an exceptionally rich field of inquiry but restricts it to accord with the political correctness of the Right. One might look at the examination of the link between manliness and violence drawn with such force by Richard Wright. One might ask why manliness shows itself so vividly among African Americans and the working class; why white slaveholders, colonists, and the wealthy are so often depicted as effeminate. One could also read the material more thoroughly. Kipling's “Ballad of East and West” does indeed make manliness the moment of equality between the imperial power and the subaltern, but it does far more. Kipling shows the sacrifice of sons in a patriarchy, the erotics of colonial dominion and military camaraderie, and the constrained strategies of the subaltern.

The back of Mansfield's book mentions “the courageous police and firemen in New York City on September 11, 2001.” (I could not find them in the text, but I may have managed to miss the passage somehow.) That is manliness, but it is incomplete. Police and firemen display that courage every day. There is nothing particular to 9/11 about it: It is the ordinary pattern of their lives. We should praise them for that, men for their manliness, the women for their courage and their devotion to duty. Perhaps the men would rather be praised in that way. They are all likely to shrug off such praise.

I think Mansfield knows this. He knows some of the same men I know, though I was sorry to see no allusion to their courage, their steadfastness, their manliness. These professors, growing old now, fought in Europe and the deserts of North Africa, led their men in the invasion of Italy, flew fighter planes in the Pacific, fought for Jerusalem in the '48 War, and never spoke much of it. Why talk about John Wayne and Ted Nugent, when you know men like these? They remind me of my father, a veteran of three wars, who commanded ships and holds infants with a more than maternal gentleness. They remind me of Hector, who removed the shining helmet that frightened Astyanax (Iliad Book 6:467–79).

One might suspect that Mansfield's reticence was occasioned by a sense of the modesty of these, his exemplary colleagues, or the men (if not the women) whose vocation is not strutting or boasting or Achillean self-assertion, but to serve and protect. I think, however, that it is instead a consequence of the argument. Mansfield's admiration for manliness is more limited (and his conception of manliness more utilitarian) than the title of the work—or the initial chapters—might suggest. The portrait of manliness as aggressive, competitive, and boastful prepares the way for a subordination of manliness to higher virtues, and the manly to higher beings.

As he turns, in the later chapters of the work, to Plato and Aristotle, the author gives manliness, as he sees it, a subtle treatment and less elevated place. Manliness is an effect of the governance of certain natural and “brutish” capacities: “As the dog defends its master, so the doggish part of the human soul defends the human ends higher than itself. In this defense the paradox is that the lower defends the higher and thus asserts the value of the higher” (p. 206). A constrained and cultivated thumos [spiritedness] becomes courage and a principled self-assertion. The manly man is to be governed by the less manly, but more philosophic, man—or woman.

Mansfield's return to an indifference to gender and his subordination of manliness to higher virtues would be more welcome if it were less connected to the production of social hierarchies, less likely to reduce service to the commons to contemptible womanliness. Manliness becomes the virtue of cannon fodder. The conviction that it is natural, right, and just that the “lower defends the higher and thus asserts the value of the higher” falters before the example of Hector. In epics, in history, in quotidian experience, we have all seen the higher prove its value in defense of the lower.

One might wonder if the study of manliness is a task to which the author—or any (at least any straight) man—is well suited. I have a high regard for the abilities of Harvey Mansfield. He is, among other things, an eminent and admirable scholar of Machiavelli. He should not need me to remind him of Machiavelli's precept that the people, not princes, know princely rule best.

When Homer sought to describe the character of Achilles, he turned to the feminine: “Sing goddess, of the anger of Peleus's son Achilleus/ and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,/ hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting of dogs.” We have seen many men, some no doubt with the strong souls of heroes, hurled to Hades. We have seen other men given to dogs. If one thinks of these things, it is difficult to regard a manliness of strutting, boasting, and self-assertion without shame.