Irrational Rationalism - Part 2

How Rationalism Ate Itself—and Took the Culture With It

A briefer version this review of Harvey Mansfield’s The Rise and Fall of Rational Control, was published in the Spring 2026 issue of the always excellent Claremont Review of Books.

In Part One, I outlined Manfield’s account of the origins of the modern conception of reason in Machiavelli’s immoral and anti-Christian project that joined the satisfaction of basic appetites with the stupefaction of those who continued to believe in God and the Good. We saw that, beginning with Rousseau, this strategy of reliance on material necessity gave way to the idea of progressive history as the basis of modern reason. In this second and final installment, we will see that the soullessness of modern reason necessarily leads to its fall, and we will briefly consider the alternatives to modern rationalism that Mansfield suggests.

Modernity Against the Soul

What if Machiavelli, and therefore modernity, were never lucid, never free of self-deception concerning the point of the whole project? Leo Strauss had already concluded that “what is greatest in [Machiavelli] cannot be properly appreciated on the basis of his own narrow view of the nature of man.” Machiavelli’s teaching is “soulless,” Strauss said. Are we not therefore authorized to question the very rationality of Machiavelli’s project? And, if the modern battle against God and the good is not governed by reason, then just how are we to understand its motives?

Manfield’s deepest investigation of modernity as conspiracy can be found in his magisterial Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders, which Mark Blitz has rightly praised as “the most searching of Mansfield’s writings.” Here the question arises, how can the prince, who has forsworn reliance upon God or the good, engage and motivate followers in order to extend his influence? Consider Mansfield’s answer:

Machiavelli causes men to think sinful thoughts, each according to his own capacity. To cause men to sin in thought or intention is to put t hem under threat of God’s punishment, and thus to impel them to face that punishment or join Machiavelli’s conspiracy. They must make this “choice” under the pressure of “the necessity that does not give time,” their mortality.

An essential feature of Machiavelli’s rebellion against God and the good is his assertion of transformative power through the conspiratorial recruitment of co-conspirators, or of ministering rebels. Lacking any inherent reference to the good, the alleged “cosmic truth that man is alone” requires great resolution of will and great spiritual compulsion to sustain.

This may be the only answer, finally, to the question of the motivation of modernity, a question we should press regarding the strange and perplexing comedy with which Mansfield began his account of modernity’s rise and fall. He ends his reading of the Mandragola in this volume with an observation that seems to leave the Machiavellian victory equally to the shrewd patriarch Messer Nicia (who might teach us “how to maintain a state”) and to the lusty young Callimaco (who shows how “to become a new prince in a new state.” But in a longer essay entitled “The Cuckold in Machiavelli’s Mandragola” (ch. 4 of Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth), Mansfield gives the prize to the cuckold himself, and thus to Machiavelli as intellectual cuckold.

Machiavelli, he suggests, doesn’t mind being cuckolded if this means that his seeming “impotence” can be remedied by the ambition of his followers, who will generate students for him. But does the suggestion that Niccolo Machiavelli’s project be explained by his mirror image Messer Nicia really advance our understanding of the actual motives driving modern rationalism? Supposing our philosophical imagination to master or negate our natural inclinations sufficiently to enter into the thought experiment of Mansfield’s Mandragola, can we in fact humanly understand the souls of Machiavelli’s protagonists? For example, is the radical, perfect, and stable subversion of feminine piety and morality in the person of Lucrezia quite believable? We know, alas, that a woman, as much as a man, can be utterly corrupted, but can she at the same time be reliably convinced of her piety and virtue? I will leave for now to my female philosophical fellows the question of the realism of Lucrezia’s character, only pausing here to ask whether the perfect rational control of Lucrezia’s character is consistent with Mansfield’s Nietzsche’s observation that “women have a nature more natural than a man’s nature, more instinctual, more vulnerable and in need of love, … more subject to tragic fear and pity.”

Consider now the perhaps slightly simpler question of male motivation. Can we really represent to ourselves, can we in fact concretely imagine -- or ought we concretely to imagine -- for our own part, the motivation of rational control through willing cuckoldry attributed to Messer Nicia? Can we really make sense of the master cuckold’s soul? Can the thrill of mastery really compensate the renunciation of every natural desire for love, truth, and honor? Do we really want to be like MN, or for that matter, like NM? Is the prince in his pure form not in fact soulless and in that sense properly unintelligible? The desire for “rational” mastery at the cost of all natural desire is in the fullest sense unnatural, anti-natural. The natural “necessity” which provided leverage to Machiavelli’s founding attack on nature as a whole, on soulful nature, proves, Mansfield shows, to be a temporary instrument for the motivation of sheer mastery itself, which finally sustains no content but negation, the hatred of nature and of God.

I conclude, going perhaps a little further than does my teacher, Harvey Mansfield, in his critique of modern rationalism: If Machiavelli is the founder of modernity, then moderns are at best manipulated dupes, when they are not devils or possessed by devils. And how can we exempt Machiavelli himself from the infernal logic of his own conspiracy?

Kolnai on Sex and the Foundations of Morality

Given the importance that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints attribute to eternal marriage and procreation, and thus to the deep spiritual significance of sexuality, Aurel Kolnai’s argument for the fundamental status of sexual morality should be very illuminating. How can the perversion of reason, of man’s capacity to know and choose wisely, fail to result in the subversion of the male-female bond and of the holiness of procreation?

Is the Mandragola’s assault on love, including its violent manipulation of our sexual natures, not inherent in this logic of conspiratorial rebellion? We late moderns, cool as cucumbers, like to imagine that sex has nothing fundamental to do with morality, as long as it involves “consenting adults.” But the too little-known Hungarian-British philosopher Aurel Kolnai (1900-1973) has pointed out the critical importance of sexual morality in humanity’s moral constitution. Sexual immorality, Kolnai reminds us, has an inherently transgressive dimension – like stealing for excitement alone. And the idea of sexual purity, however high, even sublime, a moral and religious ideal, points to the link between natural moral experience and religious mystery.

Goodness, in this view, depends ultimately on holiness, and thus the collapse of sexual morality threatens morality as a whole. The destruction of sexual morality, Kolnai argues, uproots the very categories of good and evil, virtue and vice, and flattens morality to a purely instrumental plane from which it is soon swept away. (“The Humanitarian vs. the Religious Attitude, 1944.)

Nietzsche was not wrong, as quoted by Mansfield, that “The degree and kind of a man’s sexuality reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit.” Mansfield is therefore right to begin his account of the rise and fall of modern “rationalism” with the strange case of the Mandragola.

A Way Forward

This, then, is the arc of Mansfield’s story of modernity as the project of rational control:

Machiavelli’s “escape from God and nature” delivered us into “the bondage of human necessities.” Later moderns were left to understand freedom of the escape from human necessities into “history.” History soon collapsed into the Will to Power, an impasse that still defines us. But what then is the moral of the story? If liberalism’s center is indeed empty, as I learned from my first day in Mansfield’s class, and this from its very foundations, then what avenue is now open to human choice and human thought? Machiavelli’s modernity is, we have seen, at its heart a conspiracy against “our religion,” against the successful Christian “propaganda” that is strong enough to undermine effective rule, but not strong enough to rule effectively. But just what would it mean in practice for us late moderns to defect from this conspiracy? Does Mansfield’s account invite a return to the ancients, that is, to pre-Christian, classical political philosophy? In fact, the author expresses reservations about the option for a simple “return,” and “escape … back into the arms of God and nature”: “Isn’t there something dubious about an escape into our original prison.” His deconstruction of Machiavelli’s motivation does not, after all, disqualify the Florentine’s trenchant political critique of the Church: “For all its enormous power, it can do no more than weaken the strong.” He does venture, in his concluding “Envoi,” to suggest “a reworked liberalism to serve as a rescue (not a replacement) for modern rational control,” a way to make rational control “reasonable” by grounding it in “honor rather than gain, … virtue rather than survival.”

Is the way forward, then, not an “escape” towards God, but a return to Nature? Mansfield indeed concludes by proposing the classical idea that “our freedom comes from nature,” which corresponds to the teaching that “man is a political animal by nature.” He does not conceal the limitation inherent in the classical priority of nature to freedom: If the full definition of man is “political animal by nature,” then it follows that “most humans can be free only through politics.” A liberalism based on our political natures would go beyond the “unnatural” limitation of self-interest to material necessity to include “a concern for nobility and sacrifice.” But what is the horizon of this “nobility and sacrifice”? Is there no freedom that transcends the city? In other words, does the classical framing of “nobility and sacrifice” in terms of the intrinsic good of the soul, ultimately consummated in the self-sufficiency of the philosophic life, do justice to the nobility of sacrifice itself?

On his last page, Mansfield points us to Tocqueville as well as Aristotle. Similarly, in the last chapter of his Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth (based in part upon an unfinished essay by his late wife, Delba Winthrop), he concludes by quoting Tocqueville’s brandishing of the “vice” of pride:

“Moralists constantly complain that the favorite vice of our period is pride. … I would willingly trade several of our small virtues for this vice.” But Tocqueville’s is a Christian pride that had made its peace with democracy, that has embraced the fundamental justice of democracy, of the spiritual dignity of every human soul. In a sense, Tocqueville, like Machiavelli, is a modern, since he joins the author of The Prince, as Mansfield writes, in “deprecating the need for philosophy.” It was the rare possibility of the natural perfection of philosophy that allowed the ancients to trace the limits of politics and thus the natural bounds of freedom “for most people.”

The priority of nature to freedom is grounded in the supremacy of philosophy. But our natural openness to the nobility of sacrifice, the possibility of a freedom beyond both politics and the philosopher’s self-possession, a possibility amplified and articulated by Christianity, already exceeded the classical categories. The friend is not just another self, as Aristotle’s conceptual grid brings him to affirm, but a distinct personal being of incalculable worth.

Has not the modern project of mastery, in fact a project of compulsive conspiratorial rebellion, shown the untenability of the classical idea of nature as prior to freedom? Mansfield himself embraces (in MET) the non-classical idea of “the free will [that] liberty requires” (emphasis added). For Tocqueville, the “ ‘honor of the world’ can be sustained only by the honor of the other world, because religion accords to “each one” the benefit of a divine soul as opposed to Machiavelli‘s license to satisfy necessity” (MET). Machiavelli’s project of unnatural mastery is the inversion of the biblical notion and promise of a freedom not finally subordinated to nature.

But the subordination of nature to freedom has also been tried and found wanting, first by Christianity’s affirmation of Divine Freedom, and then, as Mansfield shows, by modernity.

Mansfield in the end proposes a Tocquevillean understanding of liberalism that rejects unnatural mastery without returning to the idea of absolute divine freedom that provoked it. He thus arbitrates between Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of divine omnipotence, which implies that God “could or could not have created the world,” and Hegel’s argument that God’s concrete incarnation in history is a rational necessity. Tocqueville combines or coordinates natural pride with an awareness of a freedom beyond nature. He “combines democracy, Christianity, and ancient nobility.”

In a deep sense, then, for Mansfield the “spirit of liberalism” has the last word. Modernity’s fall reminds us that animo depends upon anima, noble ambition depends upon awareness of a higher Good . But Modernity first arose because creedal Christianity neglected the need of the anima for animo – the importance for the soul of individual choice. To speak in the idiom of the Restoration, creedal Christianity had neglected the centrality of moral agency to the eternal destiny of each and every human being. Today more than ever we must be proud of having eternal souls, we must be able to stand up for the divine significance of our choices and of our procreative capacities. As my teacher once wrote of his teacher, the great political philosopher

Leo Strauss: every time I believe I have made a new discovery, I come across a sign that says,

“Mansfield was here.”

About the Author

Ralph Hancock is Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University, where he teaches the tradition of political philosophy as well as contemporary political theory. He is the author of Calvin and the Foundations of Modern Politics (Saint Augustine’s Press, 2011) as well as The Responsibility of Reason: Theory and Practice in a Liberal-Democratic Age (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011) and Love and Virtue in a Secular Age: Christianity, Modernity, and the Human Good. (Notre Dame University Press, 2026) He is also the editor of America, the West, and Liberal Education (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999) and (with Gary Lambert) of The Legacy of the French Revolution (Rowman & Littlefield 1996) and translator of numerous books and articles from the French, including Pierre Manent’s Natural Law and Human Rights (Notre Dame University Press, 2020). He has published numerous articles in academic journals, as well as public scholarship, on the intersection of faith, reason, and politics. Dr. Hancock is also co-founder of Fathom the Good, which provides a history and humanities curriculum grounded in the Western tradition of political philosophy for home schools and independent schools.