Taming the Prince has a claim on our attention not only for its theoretical qualities and for its politics but because at one time both would have been considered extreme. As a theory it is possibly the first attempt to compose a philosophical discourse about a singular political office, variously named kingship, prince, executive, or president, and to situate it within the con-text of (what used to be confidently called) “the history of political philosophy.” Mansfield's treatise is distinctive, not as a history of an idea or of a concept, indeed not historical in the usual understanding of that term, but as the passionate assertion of an expansive conception of the executive, virtually Gaullist in its grandeur, in its contempt for interest-politics, its dismissive silence about parties, and its scorn for democracy.