Delba Winthrop Mansfield was a remarkable woman. Her many friends (and I was one) liked and respected and admired her. But no one could have been prepared for the inner reserves of strength she showed in her last years. She was diagnosed with cancer in 2002 and advised that she might have only months to live. She told very few people about the diagnosis, continued her teaching and writing–and she fought. She fought quietly and valiantly. She went through the most difficult medical treatments–and she continued teaching, every term, and almost every class, unless she was confined to home or hospital by doctors’ orders. And as her husband, Harvey Mansfield, said at the funeral, she never complained.
One mutual friend–by no means a sentimental or effusive type–responding to news of her death, put it this way: “The courage, grace, and dignity Delba displayed is almost as impossible to forget as it would be, in like circumstances, to emulate.”
Delba Winthrop grew up in Chicago and attended Cornell as an undergraduate, where she was a student of Allan Bloom. She came to Harvard in 1967 for graduate school, worked with Harvey Mansfield and Judith Shklar, and received her doctorate in 1974. She and Mansfield married in 1978.
Delba and Harvey’s life together in Cambridge was marked, of course, by a shared life of the mind. It also featured Delba’s gracious and generous hospitality. She took pleasure in her guests’ (and Harvey’s) appreciation of her spectacular cooking, and relished the sharp and witty discussion at her dinner table. She also enjoyed watching her manly husband do the dishes afterwards.
Should married couples try to work together? Sometimes. Delba and Harvey produced, in 2000, the best English translation and edition of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Writing in this magazine, Daniel Mahoney judged their translation to be far superior to the efforts of their predecessors. As for the volume’s 86-page introduction, Mahoney commented that it was simply “the best introduction to Tocqueville’s life and thought available.”
How did they do this? Mansfield told C-SPAN in December 2000: “This is our first project together, and we approached it very warily because we thought we might get into fights, but we didn’t. That was a great discovery we made, and I can then offer it to other authors who are afraid of working with their wives–or with their husbands. It can be done. The way to do it is not to spend too much time cheek to cheek, but you work on something, then you give it to the other and then she works on it, corrects what you’ve done, hands it back and you correct. And only at the very end, if you fail to agree, so to speak, in writing, do you actually discuss. You’ve got to keep the discussion to a minimum because discussion means arguing. But, nonetheless, it came out perfectly well for us.” And so it did, for the rest of us as well.
Delba’s scholarship focused primarily on two authors in addition to Tocqueville–Aristotle and Solzhenitsyn. In the case of all three, she made important arguments and suggested innovative interpretations of their work. Her doctoral thesis, on “Aristotle: Democracy and Political Science,” won the first Leo Strauss prize for the best dissertation in political philosophy from the American Political Science Association in 1975. The depth of her interpretation of Solzhenitsyn far surpassed that of other commentators in the 1970s and early 1980s. And it captured even more impressive recognition than a prize from political scientists: After her masterful 1983 article in the Independent Journal of Philosophy, Delba received in the mail one day an admiring letter from Solzhenitsyn himself.
Delba’s scholarship–and her teaching, at the University of Virginia, then, for 27 years, in the extension program at Harvard–was a contribution to understanding these thinkers. But Delba also had a broader interest in defending America and ennobling liberalism.
This was perhaps most clear in her work on Tocqueville, whom Delba admired almost unreservedly. Like him, she was (as she described him) “an unabashed lover of liberty and a hesitant admirer of democratic equality.” In that spirit, Delba once observed: “For Tocqueville, democracies must think about honor and greatness in addition to justice and interest because meaningful democratic self-government cannot long survive without this thoughtfulness.” Through her own work, Delba demonstrated such thoughtfulness.
And in her last illness, she showed a greatness of heart that was more impressive yet. One friend commented, “She proved so much tougher than anyone could have expected that you almost began to believe she might not die.” But she did, as we all do. She lived a life worth living.
WILLIAM KRISTOL
