Mansfield on Bush: Machiavelli Made Me Do It

Guest Blogger
David Luban

The January 16 issue of The Weekly Standard contains a remarkable article by Harvey Mansfield, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of government at Harvard, in defense of broad executive power. Mansfield is one of the best-known followers of Leo Strauss in academic political philosophy - a notable theoretician, conservative publicist, and (not so incidentally) translator of Machiavelli's The Prince.

In brief, Mansfield argues that the U.S. Constitution creates a strong executive because the framers understood that the rule of law won't suffice in an emergency. When the chips are down, the strong executive must seize the reins and do whatever it takes - and (like the Weimar Constitution whose emergency clause inspired Carl Schmitt to identify sovereignty with the "power of the exception") our Constitution builds the power of the exception into the President's role. Unlike the currently notorious arguments of John Yoo, based on (selective) use of founding-era history, Mansfield defends the monarchical executive through philosophical abstractions ("executive power represents necessity", "The Constitution mixes choice and necessity"). The article is loaded with gravitas, and Mansfield obviously wants to sound deep.