Word: mansfield
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...prevented people who really care about politics from having any voice. People used to be able to have a greater voice by their contributions of time, effort, money and ideas." For better or for worse, the parties and the professionals have lost their grip: the choice, says Harvey C. Mansfield '53, professor of Government, "has gotten out of the hands of responsible characters...
...competing for popular votes and testing their appeals, but the primaries would be only advisory to a convention of party leaders." The Democratic Convention, where the now-famous rule supported by Carter binds delegates to support certain candidates on the first ballot, has effectively nullified a convention's choice. Mansfield believes the convention "should be restored to its central place--delegates should have some power of deliberation...
...back. You could try to persuade people, but I'm not optimistic." Price adds that since "the whole trend of the nation for 200 years has been toward direct democracy, it'd be very hard to rationalize going back to what people would call 'smoke-filled rooms.'" But Mansfield says, "It needs to be explained to people that there's a correlation between the mediocre choices we have now, and the primary process...
...resounds through these lectures. The whole historical and sociological dimension of Dickens' Bleak House, he announces, "is neither interesting nor important." He dismisses Freudian interpretations of The Metamorphosis by saying, "I am interested here in bugs, not in humbugs." As for character study in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, "the worst way to read a book is childishly to mix with the characters in it as if they were living people." Great works of art, for Nabokov, are not so much versions of the real world as new worlds unto themselves, "supreme fairy tales" whose essential harmony...
...Mansfield...