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Quotes from How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science — Harvey Mansfield

born 1932 United States

← All quotes by Harvey Mansfield

9 quotes

Sociobiology reduces the human to the animal instead of observing how the animal becomes human.

How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)

The demand for more civility in politics today should be directed toward improving the quality of our insults, seeking civility in wit rather than blandness.

How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)

The simplified notion of self-interest used by our political and social science cannot tolerate the tension between one’s own and the good, for that tension leaves human behavior unpredictable.

How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)

To overcome the resistance to truth, literature makes use of fictions that are images of truth.

How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)

People want to stand for something, which means opposing those who stand for something else.

How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)

Science, according to science, ought to be the most important attribute of human beings.

How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)

Identity is as foreign to science as the good, and just as the good is reduced to something palpable, one’s own is raised to something vaguer but shareable.

How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)

The self is a simplification of the notion of soul, created to serve the purposes of the modern sciences of psychology and economics, both of which want you to be happy in a simple, straightforward way they can count.

How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)

Self-interest, when simple, is universal; I would do the same as you. I would be propelled toward an obvious good, or toward a good I thought obvious. If self-interest is obvious, it is not really your very own; it has been generalized, perhaps artificially.

How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Harvey Mansfield (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.