Harvey Mansfield: evaluation

Transcript context

…Say, even after the Cold War ends, there’s plenty of years since then. Do you think of current politics in terms of conspiracies? Yes, because it’s always possible. It is always necessary for government to be secret. Some of the work I did on executive power, I had that for a thesis, that you can’t ever speak without holding back something. To this extent, Machiavelli is right. If you’ve ever been in charge of someone or something, you know that you can’t say everything that you know. Even a babysitter can’t say everything to the baby. You have to say something which is understandable, or won’t cause grief or trouble. All politics has that kind of need for equivocation. In addition, anything that you’re doing, you need to plan first. If you make all your plans open and public, then I think whoever it is that you’re acting on, even if it’s a friend or a friendly power, will react and perhaps foil what you plan to do. Execution requires secrecy, and secrecy includes conspiracy. In the end, you could say the truth comes out. After the plan has been executed, then people see what was underway the whole time. At that time, you’ve got to show that what you did was according to your principles. Now, Machiavelli would say people can be impressed by power or by the fact of a display of power, especially a sensational use of it, as we just had with the capture of Maduro in Venezuela. That impresses people regardless of principle, and they begin to think that because it succeeded so well, it must have been right. You could even say maybe God intended it and justifies it. In this way, I’m coming back to the other side for the question you raised on Machiavelli, that maybe conspiracy is always there and always justifiable. My Americanism or my American principles, my liberal principles, rebel against that. I do think that America can be seen to have done good things in a very major way throughout the 20th century. Are we entering a new age of political assassination? If so, what insights can we get from earlier political theorists?…

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