Society: Harvey C Mansfield opens with a punchy anecdote. Recently, he took a phone call from a female reporter asking Mansfield for a comment on a former professor. "What impressed all of us about him was his manliness," responded Mansfield. There was a pause, before the reporter asked: "Could you think of another word?"
This is a book that has caught the imagination of the American media. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that its title has caught the imagination. Mansfield is interested not in masculinity, manhood or maleness, but manliness: that specifically male quality, he explains, which requires a man to be selfless, to take risks, to not only have convictions but to assert them. It's a quality he says has been made redundant in a society rendered "gender-neutral".
Manliness, suggests Mansfield, has become embarrassing; a quaint, unseemly relic of a pre-feminist age. It has lost the battle with a nihilistic form of feminism most forcefully promulgated by Simone de Beauvoir ("Nietzsche in drag") and its insistence on "transcendence" of sexual divisions. All of which mightn't have become so much of a problem if it hadn't been allowed free passage by well-meaning liberals.
It needn't be that way, he argues. There is room for manliness, if not in public then in private at least. Manliness, he says, is "thumos", a Greek notion of animal spiritedness. But no matter how much it's been degraded and emasculated in recent decades, it remains innate in the male of the species.
In the age of the metrosexual, Mansfield has undoubtedly tapped into something, a degradation of a certain quality belonging solely to half the population. And he occasionally makes a very persuasive argument. But you can be sure that the breakfast TV hosts and radio DJs who have interviewed Mansfield have not actually read too much of the book. If they had, they'd have required at least another cup of coffee before interviewing him. Manliness is often terribly dull. Mansfield is a Yale professor, a 73-year-old veteran of the front-line in the battle against misguided liberalism, and too often his book reads like a lecture being imparted by a teacher who thinks himself rather funnier and sharper than he actually is. Perhaps it was never really meant for a wider audience, because it often drags along, weighed down in the somewhat turgid language of academia.
At other times, he chips in with second-hand observation. Mansfield admits to relying on a stereotyping of the sexes for much of his argument - he never claims to be using scientifically measurable standards. Nonetheless, it's pretty stunning to see him blithely drop in a sentence such as: "Even conservative women, I have been told on good authority, want two items from the collection of innovations in the new society: the two Cs, career and contraception. If that's all they want, it's still a lot." On good authority? If we wanted this kind of basis for a complex argument, we'd drop into the pub a couple of minutes before closing time.
A sentence such as that betrays the fact that while Mansfield draws on a rich variety of sources - Aristotle to Tocqueville and Hemmingway - there is a sense of a writer too certain in his knowledge of the past to bother learning much about the present. His view of the battle of the sexes is of one which takes place on the campuses of American universities, and there is little clarity about what manliness might mean to a new generation, emerging into a world which is, without the hang-ups of their elders, arguably re-establishing natural divisions between the sexes. "Feminism," he writes, "has no understanding of womanhood; it leaves women without a guide and even tries to convince them they need no guide. What womanhood should be in our society I leave to a new feminism less fascinated with manliness than the feminism we have."
But where he most misses his opportunity is in tackling the topic of manliness without mentioning the man whose swagger has so shaped the history of our times. George W Bush, by Mansfield's standards, must be a prime example of manliness. He's a man who backs up his swagger with actions - his pursuit of the so-called War on Terror has always smacked of an exercise in manliness as much as one in coherent geo-political policy. But whereas Mansfield finds time to mention Islamic terrorism as an example of how unchecked manliness can too easily develop an irrational violent streak, Bush is nowhere to be found. The book might be a treatise on how American society reached the point that it has, but to ignore Bush's wanton appropriation of manly virtues undermines the entire exercise.
Shane Hegarty is an Irish Times journalist
Manliness By Harvey C Mansfield. Yale University Press, 289pp. £18.50
