Harvey Mansfield is now 89 and a political philosophy professor at Harvard, considered a leading authority on Tocqueville. He wrote a 60 page introduction to Democracy in America in the 2000 Chicago Press edition. The intro alone is worth the price of the book.

From Persuasion, The Conservative Case for Philosophical Liberalism, Yascha Mounk interviews Harvey Mansfield.

The problem that the conservatives are dealing with is their sense that they are losing, that conservatives can’t win. And that, in the first place, I think, is exaggerated. It’s like a remark made by Yuval Levin: the liberals think they’re losing, because they’re not winning the economic issue—capitalism is thriving and they care less that they’re winning the cultural values question. Whereas conservatives are the opposite: They think they’re losing because they’re losing on the culture, and they forget that they’re winning on economics, to which they attach somewhat less importance.

So each thinks it’s losing, because it’s losing what it most wants. But if you look at those two things—economics and culture—that just goes back to the two rights in Locke: economics, private property; and culture, toleration. I think we’re still within the liberal mantra. And we should hold to it and, I think, perhaps we would a little more if we understood it better.

print