The Male Calling.

Manliness, by Harvey C. Mansfeld (Yale, 304 pp., $27.50)

ASKED by Harvard Magazine to comment on a former professor of his, Harvey Mansfield replied, "What impressed all of us about him was his manliness." "There was," Mansfield relates, "silence at the other end of the line, and finally the female voice said: 'Could you think of another word?'"

He doesn't reveal his answer, but in effect his new book is a bracing explanation of why no other word will do. Manliness is an essay in definition, defense, and due criticism of the spirited assertiveness that men have in their nature and that a few men (and a very few women: think Margaret Thatcher) have in spades. Many conservative tomes have squared off against radical feminism and its goal of a gender-neutral society. But this one goes deeper and flies higher, tracing and refuting that feminism's philosophical sources, puncturing the scientific pretenses that obscure our view of manliness, and devoting sustained philosophical attention to the good and the bad in manly self-assertion. Through it all, he shows that coming to terms with manliness is essential to both sexes' happiness.

Mansfield is a professor of government at Harvard, where he is well known as the gadfly who campaigns against grade inflation (Harvey C-minus Mansfield, as he's known on campus, though actually he doesn't grade all that hard; I know, I was his student). He is notorious for opposing affirmative action and women's studies, too. When the latter came before the faculty for approval, several hundred voted in favor, a handful abstained or did not vote, and one professor voted against. That was Mansfield. More important, he spoke against the proposal, pointing out, among other things, that "women" are not a discipline like economics or archaeology, and that women are always found in societies with men and hence should be studied alongside men. Oh yes, and that considering the contents of the proposed reading lists, the department should not be called women's studies but feminist studies. Clearly, Mansfield is no stranger to manly deeds.

He makes no mention of this skirmish in his book, which like all of his writings operates at a remarkably high and dispassionate level of scholarship. Mansfield's lifework has been to trace the principal institutions and practices of modern politics to their inspiration in modern political philosophy--to let us see how new and revolutionary these actually are.

Thus in Statesmanship and Party Government, his first book, a penetrating study of Burke and Bolingbroke, he explained how political parties became respectable parts of everyday political life. (They didn't use to be; ask George Washington.) In The Spirit of Liberalism and other essays, Mansfield outlined the character of modern "indirect" or representative government, as well as the peculiarities of the "media world," which claims somehow to be representative, too. In a series of powerful studies of Machiavelli's political thought culminating in Taming the Prince, Mansfield exhibited the origins of executive power together with Locke's and the American Founders' domestication of it. Along the way, he translated (inter alia) Machiavelli's Prince and (with his wife, Delba Winthrop) Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

In Manliness, too, Mansfield deals with politics' debt to political philosophy, though he acknowledges that modern technology has had its own profound impact on relations between the sexes. For in the past half-century, America has gone where no society has gone before--pursuing a thoroughgoing sexual equality, and abjuring the older view that, even in a democracy, men and women are beings of equal worth but different fates. The revolution shows in our speech. Etiquette demands that 17-year-old college coeds are women, not--ever!--girls. "All the man-words," Mansfield notes, "have been brought to account and corrected. Mankind has become humankind," person of the year has replaced man of the year, and the lowly "he" has been roundly condemned as sexist.

The new feminists sought an equality that went beyond having the same formal rights, e.g., to be chairman of the board. They sought effective equality, which implied that they were "similar to, or virtually the same as, men," and thus that they should be as independent of men as possible, and as professionally successful, too. Mansfield does not distinguish between equity feminists and gender feminists, the former who sought equal opportunity and the latter equal results, perhaps because he thinks the distinction finally untenable; but he acknowledges that most feminists nowadays want to make a career, not a revolution. That still leaves them with a dilemma: whether to conceive of themselves as gender-neutral persons (no different from men) or as women struggling in a man's world. Many feminists, he writes, "do not believe in sex roles (since you mustn't think of yourself as a woman) but do believe in role models (since you must think of yourself as a woman)."

The change in mores and law was epochal, and Mansfield wonders at the lack of resistance to it. "There was no George Wallace, no Bull Connor, no massive resistance to oppose the women's movement. No men of our time had the nerve to make fun of the feminists as men did of the suffragettes a century ago.... The American patriarch, if you want to call him that, was perhaps at this stage nothing more formidable than Dagwood Bumstead, bumbling husband of Blondie, manly only when tackling his hero sandwich." Mansfield may have forgotten the arch-anti-feminist Archie Bunker, but the point of All in the Family was not merely to laugh with but to laugh at Archie, bringing him closer, at least, to Dagwood's level. So Mansfield's point survives.

Feminism's victory was greater in public than in private, however. Despite their public capitulation, men still don't like to do the dishes or split the housework 50-50, and men still gravitate disproportionately to risky, highly competitive, and high-profile jobs. When the firemen and policemen swarmed up the Twin Towers as everybody else was rushing desperately down them, Americans were reminded of manliness's nobler side--and of the continuing need for it.

But what is manliness, exactly? Mansfield begins from common sense or ordinary opinions about the sexes. These tend to be dismissed today as stereotypes (a scientific putdown), but Mansfield shows that science, in the form of social psychology and evolutionary biology, confirms the stereotypes again and again. Men are more aggressive, women more caring; men like to take the lead and show off, women are contextual and modest; male athletes spit, women athletes don't. (Did you know science proves that women fear spiders more than men do?) But Mansfield shows that these sciences distort the sex roles by trying to measure and quantify them, splitting men and women into discrete behaviors but never reassembling these into a whole. Evolutionary biology, based on Darwinism, is especially guilty of this simplification, and Mansfield pours cold water on Darwinism's conclusions and its premises. He shows, in a few tightly argued pages, that not necessarily an intelligent design but an intelligible design is presupposed by all of Darwin's evolutionism.

The sciences tend to reduce manliness to aggression, when really it is more of an assertion, that is, spiritedness accompanied by a reason or justification. Too little of this assertiveness and you end up with the "men without chests" diagnosed so brilliantly by C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man: the sensitive men who are supposed to inhabit the gender-neutral society, Nietzsche's "last men." Too much assertiveness and you get what Mansfield calls "manly nihilism," the notion that all meaning is created by human beings, specifically by super-manly supermen.

Many post-Darwinians flirted with this idea (Theodore Roosevelt among them, and Mansfield has amusing criticisms of him), but Nietzsche thought it through. And strange to say, radical feminism's chief theorist, Simone de Beauvoir, turned Nietzsche's doctrine to her own account, creating "womanly nihilism." This is Mansfield's term for radical feminists' manly attempt to overcome their nature and nurture in the direction of an indefinite freedom. Though undefinable (otherwise it would be limited), this freedom has a telltale political marker: the attack on the family, which separates today's radical feminists from their moderate sisters.

By now it is clear that our world suffers not only from too little genuine manliness (as in gentlemanship) but also from too much nihilistic manliness, whether practiced by women or men. So Mansfield finishes his inquiry by examining the political and moral forms that discipline and encourage manliness at its best: the liberal state (based on the "rights of man" but depending often on manly men to vindicate those rights) and classical philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle, who show how primitive thymos or spiritedness may be cultivated into the virtue of courage, and transcended by the philosophical courage that reminds manly men of the limits of the active life. Here philosophers reinforce women's stereotypical virtues of reminding their men of their limitations, and urging them to listen and think before acting.

Readers of Manliness (especially educated women, to whom Mansfield would like particularly to appeal) will be alternately charmed and exasperated, but they will be challenged to think, and as a result may well view the world differently than they did before. They will recognize manliness, or the lack of it, or a perversion of it, all around them. In this sense, Manliness deserves to be compared to Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind as an unforgettable wake-up call to our slumbering liberal society.

Mr. Kesler is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute and editor of the Claremont Review of Books.