One could succinctly phrase the dilemma that Harvey Mansfield addresses in this book by borrowing a blunt observation by Eric Voegelin from The New Science of Politics that "the death of the spirit is the price of progress." The specific progress at issue for Mansfield is the contemporary more or less "gender-neutral" society that represents "a very new justice, long overdue." Unfortunately, the nature of reality is such that attaining this justice seems to entail regarding sex (or, in contemporary parlance, "gender") as "an irrational hindrance to freedom because it subordinates women to men," which, of course, means that all that is implied by "manliness" must be suppressed in the name of equality. But is the death of manliness an acceptable price for what would have to be called "gender-neutral justice"? Although it may have come to seem in the modern world that equal justice for women requires men to be less testosterone-driven and more like women in their psychology and social roles, human nature, as Mansfield observes, is simply not very malleable, and men stubbornly insist on differentiating themselves from women in whatever ways they can, even though, as he also notes, men are mostly willing to give women equal justice. Since he believes that "we have lost the name we used to have for what mainly resists gender neutrality, which is 'manliness,'" Mansfield has set for himself the twofold task of providing an analysis of manliness, mainly through the study of literature and philosophy, and arguing for its cultural reinstatement as a real and essential component of human nature and happiness.
