Harvey Mansfield: evaluation

Transcript context

…How did that go? I was at a meeting of people, and somebody asked about Nietzsche. I discoursed for a while. He sat there listening with a smile and never commented. I was actually pretty good friends with him on a political basis because we both had conservative political opinions. We belonged to the senior common room at Elliott House, so I would fairly frequently have lunch with him. Then, on a later occasion, I once invited Tom Stoppard, the playwright, to come give a talk at Harvard. Afterwards, we had a dinner to which I invited Quine. He came because Quine had figured in one of Stoppard’s plays. That’s Quine. Now, Rawls is slightly decayed liberalism. I think Strauss would have liked to introduce John Locke to Rawls and show him how Locke set up things better than he had, that Locke’s state of nature was a better picture of the fundamental principle of liberalism than Rawls’s original position. Rawls is much closer to Locke, of course, than Quine to Nietzsche. There’s no just appropriation in Rawls in the same sense, right?…

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