Manliness (book)

Manliness is an influential academic work written in 2006 by Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield. In it, he laments the decline of "manliness" in modern Western society, and singles out feminism as the key culprit in its disappearance.

Overview

Manliness presents a scholarly evaluation of the concept of "manliness" as it has evolved over the course of Western civilization. Drawing on his knowledge of classical philosophy, literature, and science, Mansfield argues that manliness is a virtue particular to and contingent upon the male sex which ought to be promoted in a world increasingly dominated by gender-neutral societal organization.

Beginning with appeals to modern scientific discoveries, Mansfield appropriates these insights to offer essentialist claims that innate biological realities exert a determining influence upon gender and the expression of traits related to that gender. Mansfield then proceeds to literature, drawing on Homer, Kipling, and Hemingway to support his thesis that "manliness" has been a perpetual component of the male psyche and behavior. Mansfield then offers an analysis of the historical forces in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, signaling out Simone de Beauoir, Betty Friedan, and Germaine Greer as the central villains in the dismantling of manliness. In Mansfield view, all these feminists shared two common insights that were in fact stolen from earlier philosophers: from Marx they drew the theory of economic exploitation, and from Nietzsche their flirtations with nihilism. Finally, Mansfield turns to Aristotle as the archetypal expounder of manliness to identify the quality of "philosophical courage," which Mansfield concludes is the ideal understanding of manliness.

Reception

The book met with a sharply divided response, generally splitting the politically conservative audience and garnering virtually monolithic criticism from liberal and feminist leaders.

From the conservative media, the Weekly Standard commisioned a positive review by Christina Hoff Sommers, a self-described equity feminist. In it, she writes, "Mansfield's amusing, refreshing, and outrageous observations must already be causing distress for his Harvard collegues. But many reader will be grateful to him for his candor and bravado...Women would be foolish not to pay close attention to Mansfield's subtle and fascinating argument." Though Sommers admits that "his description of "feminist nihilism" rides roughshod over many distinctions within feminist theory and the women's movement," she concluded that the work amounted to offering the "truth and wisdom" of an "elegant treatise."

On the whole, however, Mansfield's book was met with intense criticism. Writing for the Boston Globe, Christopher Shea called Mansfield's definition of manliness "maddeningly imprecise," relying on "common stereotypes" long since exposed as erroneous by contemporary scholarship. Likewise, New York Times critic Walter Kirn dismissed Mansfield as "stuck in a semantic time warp" for his gross ignorance of modern culture, sweeping and anachronistic generalizations, and deliberate misinformation.

The most trenchant and well-ciculated analysis, however, was printed in the New Republic by respected Greek philosopher Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum charges Mansfield with being wholly disconcerned with fact and openly hostile to logic. "Mansfield is horrendous when he reads feminist thinkers," Nussbaum writes, but soon reconsiders, "But Never mind. It turns out that Mansfield is an equal opportunity misreader. Male philosophers get the same slipshod treatment." Ultimately, Nussbaum comes to wonder:

"It seems appalling that Mansfield has spent decades teaching great philosophical texts to undergraduates who cannot easily tell a careful reading from a careless one, or how standards from high ones--especially when the teacher keeps portraying himself as the bold defender of standards. How did someone whose every paragraph is a stake in Socrates heart come to be an exemplar of philosophical seriousness?"