Harvey Claflin Mansfield, Jr. is a Professor of Government at Harvard University.

He has held Guggenheim and NEH Fellowships and has been a Fellow at the National Humanities Center; he also received the National Humanities Medal in 2004 and delivered the Jefferson Lecture in 2007. He is a Carol G. Simon Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is notable for his generally conservative stance on political issues in his writings.

Mansfield is the author and co-translator of studies of and/or by major political philosophers such as Aristotle, Edmund Burke, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Thomas Hobbes, of Constitutional government, and of Manliness (2006).

Among his most notable former students are: Andrew Sullivan, Alan Keyes, Robert Kraynak, John Gibbons, William Kristol, Nathan Tarcov, Clifford Orwin, Mark Blitz, Paul Cantor, Delba Winthrop, Mark Lilla, Arthur Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, Francis Fukuyama, Shen Tong, and James Ceaser.