Deconstructing the Administrative State by John Marini

Author:John Marini [Marini, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Reference & Language, Law, Administrative Law & Regulatory Practice, Constitutional, Social & Cultural Studies, Political Science, Government
ISBN: 9781641770248
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2019-01-29T05:00:00+00:00

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On Harvey Mansfield’s Jefferson Lecture: How to Understand Politics

HARVEY MANSFIELD WAS GIVEN the high honor of delivering the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities in Washington in 2007.1 That privilege, not often given to a political scientist, is the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities. This panel, in a much smaller way (and with the blessing of the American Political Science Association), is also an attempt to honor his achievement. We here, I think, understand and appreciate the importance of Harvey Mansfield’s contribution to our understanding of politics. This discipline, which is perhaps reluctant to praise its most severe and honest critics, too, owes him a debt of gratitude not only for his scholarship, but for his extraordinary influence as a teacher as well. I need only look at the other presenters on this panel—I believe nearly all of them were his students at various times. Consequently, we have not only his work, but his influence on the many contributions of his students as well. In his lecture, Mansfield raised the question of how to understand politics by asking “How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science.” In doing so, he expressed his reservations concerning the dominant way of trying to understand politics—the scientific study of politics. The fundamental problem of a political science that seeks to be scientific in the manner of natural science is that it must ignore the question of importance, which he says “is the central question in politics.” “Politics is about who deserves to be more important: which leader from which party with which ideas. Politics assumes that the contest for importance is important: in a grander sense it assumes that human beings are important.”

In the attempt to establish scientific truth as the ground of objective knowledge, political science has become dependent upon a method that seeks to comprehend only behavior, and only in the aggregate, and only on behalf of universal abstractions. In doing so, scientific political science alienates itself from what is of paramount importance in political life: the individual human being. “Human beings and their associations always have names,” Mansfield says. “They maintain their individuality by the use of proper names.” They might even have souls and may sometimes insist upon their own importance. Mansfield offers some suggestions for improving our understanding of politics. First, he thinks that political science should “recapture the notion of thumos” (spiritedness, a philosophic concept derived from Plato and Aristotle), which refers, he says, “to a part of the soul that makes us want to insist on our own importance.” The “second improvement,” he tells us, “is the use of names—proper to literature and foreign to science.” “Literature,” he says, “tells stories of characters with names, in places with names, in times with dates.” We come to understand in the course of his lecture that the humanities, understood broadly as philosophy, and history as well as literature, knows something that science does not: “the human resistance to hearing the truth.

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