Manliness by Harvey Mansfield (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006)
MICHAEL HENRY teaches philosophy at St. John’s University in New York. He is also the Series Editor of Transaction Publishers’ Library of Conservative Thought.
One could succinctly phrase the dilemma that Harvey Mansfield addresses in this book by borrowing a blunt observation by Eric Voegelin from The New Science of Politics that “the death of the spirit is the price of progress.” The specific progress at issue for Mansfield is the contemporary more or less “gender-neutral” society that represents “a very new justice, long overdue.” Unfortunately, the nature of reality is such that attaining this justice seems to entail regarding sex (or, in contemporary parlance, “gender”) as “an irrational hindrance to freedom because it subordinates women to men,” which, of course, means that all that is implied by “manliness” must be suppressed in the name of equality. But is the death of manliness an acceptable price for what would have to be called “gender-neutral justice”?
Although it may have come to seem in the modern world that equal justice for women requires men to be less testosterone- driven and more like women in their psychology and social roles, human nature, as Mansfield observes, is simply not very malleable, and men stubbornly insist on differentiating themselves from women in whatever ways they can, even though, as he also notes, men are mostly willing to give women equal justice. Since he believes that “we have lost the name we used to have for what mainly resists gender neutrality, which is ‘manliness,’ ” Mansfield has set for himself the twofold task of providing an analysis of manliness, mainly through the study of literature and philosophy, and arguing for its cultural reinstatement as a real and essential component of human nature and happiness.
It is ironic that this long-overdue “gender neutrality” comes just as scientists are recognizing more and more the actual physiological and psychological differences between men and women, so that the much stronger male urge to manly self-assertion has acquired scientific vindication. And, although Mansfield discusses contemporary feminism as providing much of the impetus toward gender neutrality, he also sees this new justice as the outcome of “the enterprise of modernity…[which] could be understood as a project to keep manliness unemployed,” because modernity has focused increasingly on the pursuit of self-interest, in the sense of self-love and security, while manliness pursues self-love differently, through the assertion of power implicit in its hunger for risk, conflict, and self-sacrifice. While all this might suggest that his book simply advocates a revived emphasis on manliness, Mansfield’s position is considerably more complex and thoughtful.
Mansfield is no male chauvinist— merely a realist. While he recognizes that manliness is an inexpugnable part of human nature and a quality that can be as much vice as virtue, he also acknowledges that it is inherently a challenge to the now equally inescapable gender-neutral society (even though men vary considerably in their degrees of manliness and women can also be manly, although less frequently and to a lesser degree than men). Therefore, contrary to the “enterprise of modernity,” he has to defend the sort of manliness that is a genuine asset to modern society while showing how it can be rendered compatible with gender neutrality.
Although manliness is often equated with aggression, Mansfield elevates it to the more politically relevant category of assertiveness, an egocentric self-assertion that has advantages as well as disadvantages. Just as Aristotle recognized that too much courage was not a virtue but the vice of recklessness, Mansfield finds excessive manliness a defect that can have “disastrous consequences,” since manly men seek risk. But, in the more positive sense, he does not so much define manliness as characterize it as “knowing how to be confident in situations where sufficient knowledge is not available.” It is, politically, the quality of the soul necessary for challenging authority to get justice done, for raising issues in free speech with our fellow citizens. It demands justice and the recognition of the individual’s importance in the universe.
The manly man stubbornly insists on himself, and when he does that, he stands for stubborn insistence on himself. Not only is he manly, but he also represents the need for manly men. He does this against any rational arrangement— including that of our gender-neutral society—by which one might wish to dispose of the irritating self-centeredness of manly men….What we must understand now is the combination of stubbornness and rationality in manly assertion.
Manliness is driven by what the Greeks called thumos, a quality of soul that in Plato is often translated as “spirit,” but which Mansfield more graphically characterizes as “the bristling snappishness of a dog” in defense of “itself, its master, and its turf.” “As a dog defends its master, so the doggish part of the human soul defends the human ends higher than itself”; that is, thumos defends, and thus asserts the value of, reason. He believes, in fact, that the assertion of human importance, both of the individual man and of those whom he protects, is among the “higher functions” of manliness, even though thumos is the rougher side.
Mansfield derives his analysis of manliness from fiction, philosophy, and the writings of feminists. Although he discusses manliness in the reflections of the ancient Greeks, to whose poetry and philosophy he believes “we must have constant recourse,” most of his analysis is devoted to the modern Zeitgeist. He believes that the ground of modernity’s project of keeping manliness unemployed is the emphasis on a kind of self-interest that is inconsistent with the manly “thirst for risk.” However, as Mansfield frequently notes, the modern project has periodically met with resistance. For example, about a century ago, thanks to Darwin, there was a “great explosion of manliness” as a “particular assertion by the very manly male,” such as Theodore Roosevelt, who became a kind of icon of manliness, and writers such as H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Rudyard Kipling, who produced novels of imperialism in which manliness reverts to the primitive.
Much of the book is devoted to thoughtful and insightful discussions of the various treatments of manliness to be found in Western literature, from Homer and Aristophanes to Hemingway, Henry James, Mark Twain, and Tom Wolfe, among many others. But the core of the book lies in his discussion of nihilism, not only the nihilism of unrestrained manliness, but also the womanly nihilism of radical feminism. Mansfield has much to say about feminism, much of it critical, despite his support for the sort of gender equality advocated by feminists. The current gender-neutral society is, of course, due in large part to the crusade of radical feminists and to their claims that sex differences are the product of nurture or social conditioning rather than nature. The resulting efforts to eliminate nascent manly instincts from boys have simply collided with the reality of human nature.
Regarding manly nihilism, “The most dramatic statement of manliness would be the one where the man is the source of all meaning, where nothing else has meaning unless the man supplies it. That is the condition of nihilism—a state in which nothing in itself has meaning.” Not surprisingly, Mansfield finds Nietzsche “the philosopher of manliness in modern times,” the philosopher who ascribed to the quintessentially manly Übermensch the prerogative of asserting the meaning of all things as he sublimates the irrational life-force of assertiveness. When he quotes Nietzsche’s assertion that “man would rather will nothingness than not will,” it is not diffi- cult to discern that when such manliness becomes all it is indistinguishable from demonic pride, so that we might categorize Original Sin as also the first act of excessive manliness. Similarly, in the Iliad, Achilles’ insistence that the restoration of his honor was worth considerable harm to his fellow Greeks betrays the true nature of manliness run amok as hubris. Mansfield implicitly acknowledges this when he notes that “German nihilism in action at its worst was Hitlerism, and Hitler deliberately incited a low, worse-than-vulgar manliness with no finer features and no restraint, a manliness that was nothing but manliness.”
The manliness that Mansfield defends as a virtue is an irrational self-assertion moderated by rationality and a due consideration for justice and the interests and welfare of others. It also emphasizes and asserts the importance of the individual and thus defends the human dignity ignored by “postmodern social constructionists.” That is, it asserts the importance of human beings, not only the manly individual but also those for whom he speaks and acts. Mansfield’s point that “the danger in unemployed manliness comes from too little manliness and too much of it” succinctly states his own intermediate position that he presents as the way to restore manliness while maintaining gender neutrality: we need to respect modern liberalism and its political requirements while, at the same time, both respecting and ignoring sex differences. Gender neutrality should be public policy, but sex differences should be recognized and respected in private life.
This concluding generalization-as-solution is so vague, however, that it does not provide much guidance. Would Mansfield support a public policy of drafting women and sending them into combat on an equal basis with men? Should educational institutions be required to reduce athletic programs for men to bring them into parity with athletic participation by women? Should employers give “paternity leave” for fathers at the birth of a child on an equal basis with maternity leave for mothers? Does gender neutrality in public policy require that sex differences be ignored? This type of question is unaddressed in the book.
I would also question his assertion that “Our nature is partly determined by us.” I doubt that we have any power to determine the substance of our nature. We can only choose how that nature will be expressed. As Mansfield recognizes, manliness is part of human nature, and the question is whether the energy of manliness will be channeled into socially constructive and humanely nurturing projects, such as the defense of the weak and the promotion of justice or driven to egocentric, nihilistic self-assertion. We cannot decide whether or not selfishness is part of human nature but only what priority self-interest will have in motivating our actions.
Also, although Mansfield covers an enormous amount of ground in this book there is one important question which he ignores, namely the relation between manliness and Christianity. This was, after all, at the core of Nietzsche’s contempt for what he considered Christianity’s repression of the manly self-assertion of the master morality. How can manliness be reconciled with a faith that preaches self-denial and turning the other cheek? Has manliness ever appeared in the list of Christian virtues? Because I think that the kind of manliness that Mansfield wants to defend is not only entirely compatible with, but even essential to, Christian virtue (Christ seems to me to be the epitome of virtuous manliness), I think his book would have benefited from an analysis of the manly aspects of the Christian understanding of virtue and the soul, particularly since one of the criticisms of contemporary Christian churches is that they have succumbed too much to the feminine and have alienated manly men.
And, in the last analysis I would argue that Mansfield’s enterprise is bedeviled by an internal contradiction, because he wants to find a way in which a supposedly genderneutral society can accommodate a quality that is highly gender-specific. It is, after all, called “manliness,” not “personliness.” His solution is to be politically correct, that is, gender-neutral, in public to uphold the modern sense of equal justice while realistically maintaining the attitude of “Vive la différence!” in private. But if sexual differences are inescapably part of reality, then how can it be just to ignore that reality by promoting a public policy of “gender neutrality”? I think that public policy would be more in accord with justice if it promotes as much equality (rather than neutrality) as is reconcilable with the undeniable differences between men and women.
Nevertheless, after decades of feminist assaults we can be grateful to Mansfield for providing an eloquent and much-needed defense of manliness, which is, after all, clearly essential for the flourishing of human nature and the survival of Western civilization.
