GORDON BROWN doesn’t seem to have much of it. George Bush certainly thinks he has it but there’s something ever so slightly ersatz about it. Tony Blair has acquired it. David Cameron probably has it in spades but is trying hard to pretend that he doesn’t. Margaret Thatcher had more of it than any recent leader on either side of the Atlantic. Hillary Clinton is loaded with it. John Wayne epitomised it but almost no leading Hollywood male star today has it, with the possible exception of Mel Gibson. It goes without saying that the courageous men who rescued three hostages in Iraq yesterday had it in spades; I’m less sure about the men they rescued.

“It” is manliness. The combination of psychological, emotional and mental characteristics that traditionally defined what it was to be male.

It would be wrong to infer from the list above that manliness is necessarily and always a virtue. The firefighters and police who rescued people from the collapsing towers on September 11 had it, but so too did the terrorists who flew the planes into the buildings, demonstrating that a surfeit of manliness, or manliness applied in the wrong cause, can be deeply immoral.

But good or bad, manliness as the fundamental, defining characteristic of human sexual distinction exists, and one of the largest problems with our modern feminised society is that we have tried very hard to suppress it.That at least is the view of Harvey Mansfield, the Harvard philosopher. Professor Mansfield has caused quite a stir in American literary and sociological circles in the last week or two with a new book, called, simply enough, Manliness.

Mansfield, a provocative conservative, bemoans what he calls our “gender-neutral society”. He says the feminist movement has over the past 40 years largely succeeded in demonising manliness. It is blamed for the evil of inequality, as well as the ills of war, crime and violence. It is virtually forbidden to use the term in polite conversation today, it having been replaced by the more neutral “masculinity”. As illustration, Mansfield cites a recent conversation he had with a journalist. He was asked to give the reporter a quote about a colleague who was receiving some honour. “What impressed all of us about him was his manliness,” he said. After an embarrassed silence, the female voice asked: “Could you think of another word?”

Mansfield argues that in pursuit of the gender-neutral society we have inverted human reality by claiming that manliness is no more than a confected, post-hoc justification for man’s domination of woman over millenniums of existence. There is no real gender-specific quality, they say, just a stereotype of manliness that justifies men giving themselves the best jobs, the highest pay, the most power.

But he thinks this is nonsense. In a book that is replete with scientific and cultural allusions, he explains how manliness is an inextinguishable trait, found principally, but not exclusively, in men. Real men, from Achilles to Theodore Roosevelt to Gary Cooper in High Noon, demand our attention not by their sensitivity or even their reason, but by their manliness.

So what is manliness? In Mansfield’s view it is “confidence in the face of risk”, an “easy assumption of authority”. Manliness seeks drama and prefers times of war, conflict and danger. It is certainly not all benign; and it is irrational, of course: the gender-neutral society is the product of the triumph of arid reasoning over instinct.

Manliness is related, he says, to the quality of man that the Greeks called thumos, roughly translated as “animal spiritedness”. The Greeks understood well that too much untrammelled thumos could be as destabilising to society as too little. So they sought to balance it with the virtues of reason and self-control. But, thanks to nihilistic manliness as exemplified by men like Nietzsche (and perhaps by extension the Nazis) the modern world steadily turned its back on this idea and instead trapped the thumos in a web of gender-equal reasoning.

Yet, despite the steady emasculation of today’s male, manliness remains a characteristic embedded in the modern male personality. It has been blurred but not eliminated. It is the reason men still drive trucks and fighter planes. It is why men refuse to ask for directions when they are lost.

The danger in our modern society, in Mansfield’s view, is that of unemployed manliness. Manly man has been replaced by the bourgeois. Men who behave according to the norms of this new society are accorded the highest honour: they are deemed professional. Manly behaviour at work, the failure to resist the occasional impulse to punch someone, is regarded as the ultimate sin: “unprofessional”. If we try to eliminate manliness we risk a dangerous imbalance: a society that loses its capacity to protect, defend and even to regenerate itself.

I couldn’t help but notice, while reading Mansfield’s persuasive book this week, that B&Q, Europe’s biggest DIY store, announced a sharp fall in its UK profits, and that MFI is closing 11 stores and pulling out of the bathroom market. Other companies, such as Homebase and Wickes, have reported declining business too. City analysts attribute the difficulties to declining interest in home “makeovers” but I think they may owe just a little too to the declining appeal of the spanner-wielding guy with the irresistible urge to make something big.

Now, where’s my hammer? I feel the need to go out and hit a nail into a piece of timber before my wife comes home and wants to know why I haven’t changed the baby’s nappy.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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