Harvey Mansfield on Machiavelli, Straussianism, and the Character of Liberal Democracy

Hey, listeners. This is Dallas, one of the producers of Conversations with Tyler. On April 14, join Tyler at the 92nd Street Y in New York City for a live taping of Conversations with Tyler featuring Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist and Craig Newmark Philanthropies. Tyler and Craig will discuss trust, cybersecurity, and the building blocks of resilient civic institutions in the digital age, along with plenty more, I'm sure. Tickets are selling quickly, so be sure to grab yours before they're gone. You can find the link to buy tickets at the top of the show notes. Hope to see you there. Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to conversations with Tyler. Today, I'm speaking with the great Harvey Mansfield, and Harvey has a new and excellent book out called The Rise and Fall of Rational Control. Harvey, welcome. Thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here. Now given that Machiavelli had no real sense of modern science and its fruits, What ends up being missing from his political thought? Well, he didn't have no idea of modern science. In fact, I would say that his notion of effectual truth is the beginning of modern science. The effectual truth, he says, is what comes out of the truth, or what is, the effect. If you say to somebody, I love you, the effectual truth of that is I want something from you. So the effectual truth is the upshot, sometimes not necessarily the intent of the statement. So you must judge then from cause to effect. The word effectual was brand new. We're actually invented by Machiavelli. It comes from the Latin, which has to do with fact. Today, we use the word fact all the time as if it were something that always existed. But it was Machiavelli and some later thinkers who developed that notion of fact. So the fact of a thing is what it is without any wish or intent attached to it. So that means you can go from cause to effect. And that, I think, is the fundamental notion behind modern science. Modern science isn't based on wish or speech, as with Plato and Aristotle. It's based on fact. Galileo didn't go around asking people, does the Earth move or not? He looked for the fact, said it was not a matter of public opinion or philosopher's opinion, but for the effectual truth. But say when it comes to technology, Machiavelli understood gunpowder. But the idea that our lives could be so safe, nuclear weapons, modern effective birth control, modern media, don't all those things mean that modernity is in fact quite irreversible? Not so much those things, but, the first thing you mentioned, gunpowder. Gunpowder means the defense of the state. …