Harvey Mansfield, Harvard’s most prominent conservative on the faculty, is a few weeks away from his final seminar and retirement. It is doubtful the Harvard government department will replace him with someone like him. But partly that is because there is no one else like him.

Prof. Mansfield has just taken to the pages of National Affairs with a typically challenging essay on the topic of “common good conservatism,” which is one of the new schools of conservative thought and a first cousin to the “national conservatism” movement that sprung up a few years ago. Mansfield’s essay employs his full erudition in his usual way—with compact sentences packed with deep currents of thought stretching back to the classics (in particular, to Aristotle in this case), but mainly on refining our understanding the liberal tradition of the Enlightenment, which “common good conservatives” have come to reject nearly as much as postmodern leftists.

Here’s the set up:

Promoting the common good sounds too tame to cheer a charge against the enemy. Hearing it, one wants to nod in agreement and remain seated. It comes nonetheless from a new conservatism tired of losing to liberals and looking for a new and better organizing purpose that will bring the satisfaction of victory. . .

The common-good conservatives, by contrast, are disgusted with the debate on abortion and every other issue that they always, or typically, lose. That debate does not result in a sensible or tolerable alternation of power between the parties; it’s always liberals win and conservatives lose. Or this is how it seems, for liberals take the initiative and conservatives are forced to fight on defense. The common-good conservatives think it’s time to leave that aspect of the game, go on offense, and seek permanent victories. This is what liberals wish for when they demand that their victories must never be reversed: They mean that progress goes in one direction only — theirs.

By winning, common-good conservatives want to rule.

While Mansfield expresses considerable sympathy for the impulses and goals of common good conservatives, he is not quite ready to give up on liberalism rightly understood. Thus from the conclusion:

[C]ommon-good conservatives . . . should not exaggerate their plight. It seems now that both parties, and especially conservatives, forget where they are winning and think mainly of where they are losing. As Yuval Levin has said, conservatives care more for culture, where they think they are losing, while liberals care more for the economic issues, where they think they are losing. Both parties forget their indebtedness to our tried and true liberalism, which gives them partial victories dimmed by partial defeats.