CRB editor Charles R. Kesler recently sat down with Harvey C. Mansfield at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In a wide-ranging conversation, the distinguished Harvard professor of government, who retired from teaching last year at age 91, discussed his life, Harvard’s woes, Leo Strauss, Niccolò Machiavelli, the two greatest books on American politics, and more.

CRB: Although you’ve been famous, and to your critics infamous, for decades as Harvard’s only or at least best-known conservative, when you came to Harvard as a freshman in 1949 you were a Democrat. Why were you a Democrat, and what kind of Democrat were you?

HCM: I was a Democrat because my father was a Democrat and my mother too, but especially my father. He was a political scientist who taught at Yale and Columbia and was chairman of the political science department at Ohio State from 1947 to 1959. He was a New Deal Democrat, a liberal who had an aversion to the Left. He was never attracted to the Left, certainly not to Communism, which was in the air in those times. I remember in high school I went to a couple of meetings of the summer program of the Telluride Association run by my uncle, Clarence Yarrow, in Pasadena. He took me in together with a bunch of other students and first presented to me a view of the extreme Left in America. A couple of the speakers were from the embassy