At age 93, the magisterial Harvey Mansfield of Harvard has given us a splendid new book, The Rise and Fall of Rational Control . The title will be perplexing to most people. "What is ‘rational control’?" they will ask. And "how can such a thing, whatever it is, ‘rise and fall’?" Professor Mansfield provides a hint in the work’s subtitle: "The History of Modern Political Philosophy." Mansfield’s thesis is that modernity, at least in the intellectual domain, the domain of thought, has a