This is a magnificent book and absolutely hilarious -a tour de force of intellectual history featuring the ever popular Burke, Tocqueville, Publius trio so beloved of conservatives. Mansfield delves into the rest of the Western canon - Nietzsche, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Rousseau, Spinoza, Plato, Aristotle, Mill and my favourite - Epictetus! and unusual suspects like Mary Wollstonecraft, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer and Naomi Wolf and nice cameos by Teddy Roosevelt and ever clever William James and other popular literature I am sure means more to Americans steeped in these memes. Mansfield is an unparalleled provocateur and his cause du jour is manliness - courage and responsibility in risky situations - and irrational manliness and the only woman he concedes as having this incontrovertible virtue is Margaret Thatcher. There is an electric quality in Mansfield's writing - it's unabashed and intellectually combative - chewing out more than it can bite! I stayed up all last night reading it as I immediately recognized that he was describing the quality that defines all the important men in my life who each make me feel so much safer and happier thanks to each of their respective manlinesses - and all of whom are too busy to read this erudite and highly amusing book as they are out in the world being manly IRL :) Mansfield inspires us to appreciate what we owe to manly heroes vilified in modernity's hegemony of rational control and his pet antagonists - feminists. I also suggest the book as a blueprint for how to deploy a liberal arts education in everyday life to dazzling effects. I will conclude with a quote from the book that is a neat direction how he needs to be read especially by his detractors (I'm looking at you Nussbaum :)
"I don't mind giving you advice but I don't want to rob you of your duty to think and your freedom to choose."
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