The Hero System of George Soros

Posted on June 20, 2026 by Luke Ford

Budapest, the spring of 1944. A boy of fourteen carries papers that name him someone else. His father, Tivadar Soros (1894-1968), has bought the documents, split the children among separate households under separate names, and taught them the one rule that holds in an occupied city: the man who clings to a single fixed identity dies of it. Survival belongs to the man who holds his self loosely, who treats the name on the page as a wager and not a fact. The Germans want Jews who answer to their names. The boy learns to answer to another. He watches his father move through the catastrophe the way a card player moves through a bad hand, folding here, bluffing there, never confusing the cards in his fist with the truth of the game.
George Soros (b. 1930) spends the rest of his life building a cosmology out of that year.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argues in The Denial of Death that man is the animal who knows he will die and cannot stand it, so he enrolls himself in a project larger than his body, a scheme of meaning that tells him he counts for something the grave cannot cancel. The scheme is the hero system. It tells a man what courage is, what contribution is, what a good life adds up to, and it pays him in the only currency that answers death, the sense that he is an object of primary value in a universe that will keep him. In Escape from Evil Becker adds the dark half. We buy our significance at a price, and someone else pays it. The men who carry our terror for us become our scapegoats. The man who threatens our scheme threatens our life, and we treat him the way men treat a plague.
Most hero systems answer death with a fixed thing. The nation that does not fall. The God who does not change. The race that endures, the canon that stands, the revolution that arrives and stays. The promise is permanence, and permanence reads as certainty. You know the truth, you serve the truth, the truth outlives you, and so you outlive yourself through it.
George Soros builds the rare hero system that answers death the other way. His permanence is the permanence of the open question.
At the London School of Economics after the war he reads Karl Popper (1902-1994), and Popper hands him the word for what his father practiced in the occupied city. No theory holds the final truth. Every theory is a conjecture that stands until something refutes it. The closed society freezes one answer and kills the men who doubt it. The open society keeps the answer revisable, keeps the doubt legal, treats fallibility as the price of staying alive. Soros carries this into markets as what he calls reflexivity. The trader’s belief alters the thing he means to predict, so certainty is foreclosed, and the man who admits this beats the man who forgets it. In September 1992 he sells the pound short against the conviction of the Bank of England and takes roughly a billion dollars from a government that thought it knew what its own currency was worth. The trade is the philosophy in one motion. He wins because he treats the official certainty as a conjecture ripe for refutation, and he is right.
Then the fortune turns to the work. The hero system acquires a budget, more than thirty-two billion dollars over four decades, poured into the Open Society Foundations: scholarships for Black students under apartheid, fellowships for East European dissidents, money for the open question wherever a state tries to slam it shut. A man who began by surviving a closed society spends his old age trying to refute closure on every continent at once.
Here the trouble starts. The word at the center of his life, “open,” means one thing to him and the opposite to almost everyone he funds against.
For Soros, open means revisable. The door you keep ajar so the next correction can come through. For a Hong Kong bookseller watching the colophon of a banned title disappear from his own shelves, open means the shop not yet padlocked, the page not yet pulled, one more month of trading before the men come. For a Salafi preacher, the open society is fitna, the flood that follows when the fixed law dissolves, and openness names the disease, not the cure. For a Hindutva organizer in Delhi, open is the solvent that eats dharmic order, the profanation of what should stay bounded by caste and rite, and the foreign foundation that funds “openness” funds the dissolving of a sacred form. For a hesychast monk on Athos, openness is the world’s noise pressing on the cell, and the shut door of the cell is the open gate to God, so the two men use one word and point it in reverse directions. For a quant at a London fund, open is an open position, raw exposure, the thing you close before the weekend so the risk cannot eat you overnight. For a Texas pastor preaching to four thousand on a Sunday, the open society is open borders and the open marriage and the unguarded door the enemy walks through. For a retired Stasi file clerk drawing his pension in Leipzig, open is the Western word for the acid that ate his country, his work, his sense that his life had served a structure, and he hears “open society” as the name of the thing that erased him. For a Singaporean administrator who delivers housing on schedule to five million people, open means disorder, the society that cannot keep its promises because it keeps reopening its own decisions.
Five letters. Eight men. Eight sacred charges, several of them aimed at his throat.
“Speculation” splits the same way. For Soros it names a discipline of humility, the practice of a man who knows he cannot know and sizes his bet to his ignorance, who treats every position as provisional and gets out when the world refutes him. For the English pensioner whose savings thinned the autumn he broke the pound, speculation is theft that wears no mask, a foreigner taking money out of the air and out of her account in the same stroke. For the men who later build a worldwide story about him, “speculator” hardens into a code word, the rootless money that owes no flag, the wealth that comes from nowhere and answers to no nation. The discipline he is proudest of becomes the proof of his crime.
So he draws the oldest assignment a hero system hands out. Becker calls it the scapegoat, and the casting is exact. Picture the rally in a small European capital, the posters with one old man’s face blown up and lit from below, the chant, the man near the front who has lost his factory job and cannot say why, who turns to the man beside him and says the financier did this, the financier wants no borders, no nation, no church, no us. The financier is everywhere and nowhere, has no homeland, melts what is solid for profit. Tell me his name and I will tell you what is wrong with the world. The man feels his terror find a shape, and the shape has an address.
The story is the ancient template with a checkbook drawn into it: the Jew as the agent of dissolution, the cosmopolitan who unmakes the nation from within. The conspiracy about Soros is the product of a hero system, the defense thrown up by men whose immortality rests on fixed forms, on the nation and the bounded people and the unchanging law. Their scheme cannot survive a world that keeps reopening, and rather than mourn the world they are losing, they locate the loss in one financier and tell themselves that removing him restores the solid earth. Soros funds groups that fight antisemitism and has become the century’s chief object of it. Becker read this coming half a century ago without knowing the name. The man who carries your terror gets treated as the cause of it.
The apostle of fallibility cannot be fallibilist about fallibilism. A man who says no one holds the final truth, and then spends thirty-two billion dollars advancing one vision of the good society, has built a fortress and called it a clearing. The open society arrives with a roster of approved outcomes attached, and the openness stops at the edge of the roster. His critics are not wrong to notice the program inside the procedure. Becker might say the trouble is not Soros and not hypocrisy. No man lives inside pure doubt. Doubt cannot hold the terror, cannot answer the grave, cannot get a man out of bed against the certainty of his own death. So even the doubt-hero smuggles in a certainty, names it openness, and defends it the way men defend a god. The most honest fallibilist alive still needs a floor to stand on, and the floor is a faith he does not examine, because if he examined it he would fall through.
In December 2022 the board of the foundations elects his son chair. By the summer of 2023 Alexander Soros (b. 1985) holds the controls, and the father, in his nineties, hands down the project the way a man hands down an estate. Consider what this does to a hero system built on the open question. The open question becomes an inheritance. The thing whose whole virtue was that it stayed unsettled gets settled on an heir, with a name fixed to the building and a fortune fixed to a board, which is among the most closed things a man can do with anything.
The boy who survived 1944 did it by holding his self loosely, by treating his name as a wager he could fold. The old man leaves behind an institution that has fixed his name to the wall for as long as the endowment lasts. He spent a life proving that the loose self lives and the fixed self dies in the occupied city, and he ends by building the most fixed thing he could afford, so that the proof might outlast him. That is the wager underneath all the others, and the grave does not let anyone fold it.

Attitude to the USA

The George Soros attitude toward the United States runs two ways.
He owes the country a debt and says so. America took him in, let him build a fortune, and gave him the base from which he funds his work across the world. He treats it as the strongest open society on the map and the power best placed to lead others toward the same. He has said the U.S. occupies a hegemonic position and sits in a better place than any other country to reform international institutions. The hope under the praise is that America might choose to lead a global open society rather than rule as a lone superpower..
The criticism grows from the same root. He fears America the empire even as he backs America the open society. In The Bubble of American Supremacy he argued that the administration of George W. Bush (b. 1946) built its foreign policy on unilateralism and military might over international law, and that the approach failed. He told audiences that the Iraq war weakened the United States. He warned that preemptive war claimed by America alone strips American power of its legitimacy, and that branding protesters unpatriotic eats at the foundations of the democracy..
Soros calls market fundamentalism a threat to the open society greater than communism or socialism, because of the faith that free competition cures every ill. By 2008 he was arguing against market fundamentalism and for more government involvement in the American economy..
He stands among the largest donors to the Democratic side of American politics. He spent heavily to defeat Bush in 2004 and funded groups such as MoveOn. He warned his own supporters against Donald Trump (b. 1946) and Ted Cruz (b. 1970) at the end of 2015. Later he put money into local contests, district-attorney races among them, to push criminal-justice reform from the bottom up.
His critics read the whole record as hostility to the country. They see a man who treats America as institutionally oppressive, funds open borders, and works against national sovereignty. He reads himself the other way, as a patriot of the open society who attacks America hardest where it betrays its own promise, the refugee who loves the place enough to tell it hard things about its power.
The short version of his view: America is the best hope for an open world and the largest danger to one, depending on which America shows up.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If David Pinsof wanted a single man to stand for the misunderstanding myth, he might pick George Soros. No one has spent more money on the premise that the world’s troubles come from closed minds.
The open society is the misunderstanding myth with an endowment. Popper’s idea, which Soros took as his life’s text, holds that the closed society freezes one answer and the open society keeps the question alive, that dogma and false certainty are the enemies, and that inquiry, a free press, education, and deliberation are the cure. Read Pinsof’s catalog of intellectual complaints next to the program of the foundations and you find the same sentence written twice. Polarization is misunderstanding. Authoritarianism is closed-mindedness. Disinformation is a virus to inoculate against. Bigotry is ignorance of the ordinary humanity of the other group. Soros funded the cure for each of these, on six continents, for forty years.
Pinsof’s wager runs the other way. Humans are savvy animals who understand what they have an incentive to understand. The trouble is not bad beliefs but bad motives. People are not confused. They are competing, mostly over the coercive apparatus of the state, the thing that puts men in prison at gunpoint. Run Soros through that lens and the open society stops reading as an error-correction project and starts reading as what Pinsof says all such projects are, coalition-building with a mission statement bolted on top.
Look at where the money goes. Progressive NGOs, immigrant-rights groups, the press, and, closest to home, district-attorney races and criminal-justice reform. The part of his giving that sounds most high-minded, the reform of who gets prosecuted and who walks free, is the part aimed at the coercive apparatus of the state. Pinsof says this is no accident. The district attorney decides who goes to prison. A man who funds district-attorney races is not curing a misunderstanding about justice. He is competing for the lever. The stated goal is a fairer system. The actual goal, on this reading, is the lever, and the stated goal is the thing a man says while reaching for it.
Then fallibilism. Soros says no one holds the final truth, himself among them. Pinsof reads the humility as a signal and a weapon. The bias bias: I am less biased than the closed-minded men I oppose. The posture lets a man push a definite program while disclaiming dogma, a stronger spot than open dogma, because it puts the opponent in the wrong for being certain while you advance your certainties under cover of doubt. Thirty-two billion dollars is a strange sum to spend by a man with no settled view of the good.
Reflexivity, the market theory, reads as self-serving in Pinsof’s plain sense. Overconfidence helps a man make money and convince people he knows what he is doing. Soros’s theory holds that markets run on the fallible beliefs of their participants, that consensus is often wrong, that the man who spots the flaw cashes in. This is the theory of a man who got rich betting against the Bank of England. It flatters the speculator and supplies a built-in excuse, because when the world refutes him, fallibility was the premise all along. Self-serving going up, self-serving coming down.
If effectiveness means a more open world, the scoreboard for Soros is mixed. Hungary, his birthplace, drove out his university and ran against his name and won elections doing it. If effectiveness means status, a permanent name, a global coalition, and a seat among the men who decide what counts as legitimate opinion, the giving worked well. Actions over words. The thirty-two billion bought a great deal of what he was after.
Now the enemies. Soros treats the hatred against him as a misunderstanding. If only they read Popper. If only they saw that an open society threatens no decent man. Pinsof says bigotry is not a brain-fart and partisan hatred is not a senior moment. The men who hate Soros are not confused about him. They have noticed, correctly, that he funds their rivals, that his money flows to the coalition trying to take the lever from theirs. They are fighting, and demonizing the competition is what men do in a high-stakes fight. The antisemitic story they tell, the rootless financier melting the nation, is false as history and useful as a weapon. The hatred is strategic. So is Soros’s reply that the hatred springs from ignorance, because calling an enemy ignorant is a move in the same fight.
Then the layer that keeps this from a cheap shot. Pinsof does not need Soros to be a liar. The frame works better if the man believes every word. We deceive ourselves about our motives because denial is a weapon, and the sincerest believer carries the strongest cover. Soros, on this reading, is a savvy animal who understands what he has an incentive to understand and no more, who feels the warmth of saving the world and does not feel, because he has no incentive to feel, the coalition war running underneath. The mission statement is no cynical cover he keeps in a drawer. It is the thing he sees when he looks in the mirror, and that is what makes it work.
Soros spent a fortune studying the hole the species is stuck in, the closed minds, the bad information, the failures of reason, and called the study a rescue. Pinsof’s answer is that there is no rescue and no misunderstanding, that the men fighting Soros understand the stakes, that Soros understands them too at the level where it counts, and that the open society is the most expensive mission statement ever printed.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

John J. Mearsheimer (b. 1947) wrote The Great Delusion against a type of man, and the type is George Soros.
Political liberalism, in Mearsheimer’s account, is individualist at the core. It treats people as atomistic actors carrying a set of inalienable rights, and because the rights are inalienable they are universal, the same for every human on the planet. That universalism does not sit still. It pushes the liberal to remake the world in its image, to carry the rights abroad, to pursue an ambitious foreign policy on behalf of mankind. Mearsheimer thinks the project a delusion, because man is not the rights-bearing atom liberalism imagines. Man is a social animal, tribal at the root, formed by his group long before he can reason, and the deepest of the social forces, nationalism, beats liberalism whenever the two meet.
Soros is liberalism with a checkbook and no country. The open society is political liberalism stated as a universal destination. Every people, everywhere, is entitled to the open question, the free press, the civil society, the rights. Popper supplied the creed and Soros supplied the foreign policy, thirty-two billion dollars of it, run from a foundation rather than a state but aimed at the same target as American liberal hegemony after the Cold War: democracy promotion, dissident scholarships, the rule of rights, the world made open. A private man behaving as a liberal great power.
Mearsheimer’s quarrel begins with the atom at the center. Soros’s ideal citizen is the man who thinks for himself, doubts his tribe, holds his identity loosely, revises his beliefs against the evidence. Reflexivity is a theory of that man’s mind. The open society is built for him. Mearsheimer says he barely exists. People do not come into the world as lone wolves choosing their values off a menu. They are born into a group that stamps them in childhood, before the reasoning faculty wakes, and by the time a man can reason the value infusion of family and nation and faith and tongue has already set. Reason, Mearsheimer ranks last of the three sources of what we want, behind innate sentiment and well behind socialization. Soros bet his fortune on the faculty Mearsheimer ranks last.
Watch what this does to the open society’s tools. The free press, the funded university, the human-rights NGO all assume a man who updates his beliefs when you hand him better information. Give people facts and arguments and access, the theory runs, and they reason their way toward openness. Mearsheimer says the value infusion got there first. A Hungarian or a Russian is a Hungarian or a Russian before he is a reasoner, and the open society arrives to argue with something childhood already wrote. Soros funded inquiry against socialization and lost, because socialization had a thirty-year head start in every head he hoped to reach.
The defeats line up with the theory. Hungary, his birthplace, is the clearest case. Viktor Orbán (b. 1963) built a career on the figure of the rootless cosmopolitan financier who would dissolve the nation, drove Central European University out of Budapest, ran against the Soros name in election after election, and won. Russia branded the foundations undesirable and threw them out. Across Europe and in America the nationalist right made Soros the face of everything it meant to defend the nation against. Soros reads the resistance as authoritarian backsliding, as a failure to grasp what an open society offers. Mearsheimer reads it as nationalism doing what nationalism does, the thick old loyalty defending the bounded group against the thin new universalism that wants to open it. The backlash is no misunderstanding and no bigot’s accident. It is the deeper force surfacing against the shallower one, on schedule.
Here Mearsheimer turns the frame on Soros. The universalist is socialized too. Soros’s open society did not descend from pure reason. It grew from a particular boy in a particular city in 1944, a Jew who watched a closed, tribal nationalism try to exterminate his people and built his life’s creed against the tribe. His cosmopolitanism is the survival doctrine of a man from a hunted minority, a social-group identity and not a view from nowhere. Mearsheimer’s law holds even here. The values came from the catastrophe and the community, not from a syllogism. The open society is the history of a hunted people turned into a program for all peoples. That origin gives the creed its moral weight and also explains why the nationalists sense tribe under the universalism and why the universalist cannot sense it in himself.
Soros believed, as the liberal must believe, that his values are universal and exportable, that the open society is where all men are headed once the closed regimes blocking the road are cleared. He spent a fortune clearing the road. The road did not lead where he thought. Nationalism rose in the places he funded most, and it rose in part by pointing at him. Mearsheimer might say Soros could not have seen this from inside his creed, because liberalism cannot admit that man is tribal without ceasing to be liberalism, so it keeps crusading and keeps drawing the backlash and keeps calling the backlash a misunderstanding.
The boy survived 1944 by holding his identity loosely. He spent the rest of his life trying to teach a tribal species to do the same, and the species, Mearsheimer says, was never going to learn.

30 Useful Concepts About Bullshit

Pinsof’s eleventh concept is the sacred value, a cover story for status-seeking built to keep a status game from collapsing. We deny we want dominance and claim we want honor, wisdom, equality, the betterment of mankind. The open society is that, almost to the letter, and it is the strongest sacred value a man can hold, because no one can cash it out. No one can say when a society is open enough. The work never ends, the funding never stops, and the status the work confers never has to settle a bill.
Compare the weaker covers. A man who fights for democracy can be embarrassed by an election, by the wrong party winning fair and square, by Hamas at the ballot box or a nationalist with a supermajority. A man who fights for equality can be handed a chart. Openness takes no chart. It names a direction and arrives nowhere, so it can never be falsified, never be completed, never be caught failing. The genius of the cover is that no one can check it. Soros chose, or was chosen by, the perfect sacred value, the one with no settlement date.
Now the game under the cover. Money by itself runs low-status among the people Soros wanted to impress. The intellectuals, the editors, the men who decide what counts as knowledge, hold the vulgar rich in quiet contempt. A speculator who broke the Bank of England is a sharp operator and nothing more, and sharp operators do not get invited to lecture at the LSE or publish theories of history. The open society launders the fortune. It converts money, which buys contempt, into moral seriousness, which buys a seat. The man who might have stayed a clever gambler becomes the philosopher-philanthropist, the financier with a conscience, the funder of the good. His books, which no house takes from a billionaire with opinions, become required reading from the patron of open society. The sacred value bought him the one thing the money could not, a place among the people whose seriousness he craved.
Fold in the eighth concept, anti-status, the status you draw from looking like you chase no status. Fallibilism is the polish on the apparatus. The line that no one holds the final truth, himself included, is the highest posture a man of his wealth can strike, because it disarms the envy that great money draws. The humble billionaire is harder to hate than the proud one, and the humility advances the program while disclaiming the ambition. He pushes a definite vision of the good and calls it doubt.
So far this reads as the frame on a man who is winning. The richer part is the tenth concept, status-game collapse, and it explains the thing that puzzles Soros most, the hatred.
Pinsof says a status game collapses when the players gain common knowledge that it is a status game. They see each other all at once as vain, self-serving, hiding dominance under virtue, and the sacred value stops working in the room. The nationalist right reached that common knowledge about the open society years ago. They stopped arguing with its content. They named it as a move. They said the benevolence is a cover, the universalism a flag, the philanthropy a bid for power dressed as a bid for the good. Once a coalition sees the halo as a move, it does not debate the halo. It shoots at it.
The shape of the attack follows from the collapse. When you collapse a sacred value, you charge the holder with seeking dominance under cover of virtue, with pursuing his own tribe’s power while claiming to serve all mankind. That is the form every collapse takes, and it is the exact form of the antisemitic libel thrown at Soros, the rootless cosmopolitan whose talk of humanity masks a hidden particular interest. The libel is false as history and true to the template. The attackers did not invent a new charge. They reached for the oldest one and found it fit the slot the collapse had opened, because the collapse always alleges the same thing, that the saint is a striver in disguise.
Soros cannot concede the collapse, because conceding it ends his game. If he admitted that the open society is a status move, the move dies, since a sacred value the holder sees through is a dead value. So he reads the attack as bigotry and confusion, as men who fail to grasp what an open society offers. He has no choice in this. The twenty-second concept, the social paradox, holds that the signal stays hidden from the signaler as much as from the audience. The virtue signaler does not know he is signaling. Soros does not experience the open society as a bid for status. He experiences it as the good, and the experience is load-bearing. The sincerity is no flaw in the cover. The sincerity is the cover. A man who knew his halo was a tool could not wear it convincingly, so the species built minds that believe their own press.
When a game collapses, Pinsof says, the players scramble to a new game, and the scramble drives cultural change. The right built its new game on the rubble of the old one. The points now go to the man who sees through the cosmopolitan, who is not fooled by the benevolence, who knows the financier’s real designs. Soros became the sacred value of one coalition and the sacred scapegoat of the other, the positive totem here and the negative totem there, and the two are the same engine seen from opposite ends. Both tribes feed off his name. One sells salvation through him and one sells salvation against him, and neither sale clears, because the value at stake on both sides cannot be cashed any more than openness can.
The open society holds as a sacred value because it never settles, and the proof sits on both sides of the war over Soros. He cannot lose the open society, because no defeat counts as its defeat. His enemies cannot finish him, because no exposure counts as his exposure. The believers and the haters are bound to the same uncashable thing, drawing status from it for as long as they live, and the man in the middle, ninety-five years old, funds the believers and feeds the haters with the same dollar, and the dollar never comes due.

Dark Idealism

Pinsof’s nineteenth concept is dark idealism, the heartfelt conviction that we are pure and noble and benevolent, which fuels dark morality by blinding us to our own biases and making the men who reject our ideals look evil or subhuman. Soros is the hardest case the concept faces, and the most revealing, because he built his life on doubt. Dark idealism feeds on certainty of one’s own goodness, and here is a man whose whole creed holds that no one owns the truth. So how does the apostle of fallibilism end up the purest case of dark idealism alive?
He exempts one thing from the doubt. He doubts every empirical claim, every market call, every theory of history, his own among them. He does not doubt that he means well. Fallibilism runs across the whole board and stops at the door of his own benevolence. The purity has to live somewhere, and in a man who disclaims certainty it cannot live in his beliefs, so it migrates to his intentions. He no longer says I am right. He says I want the good. Wanting the good is the purest claim a man can make and the one that blinds him hardest, because doubt cannot reach an intention. A man can be shown his facts are wrong. He cannot be shown his heart is wrong, not from the inside, and Soros lives inside.
Watch the blinding to his own biases. He funds one coalition, the progressive NGOs, the reform candidates, the editors and lawyers and activists of a single political family, and he experiences none of it as partisan. He experiences it as funding the open question, civil society, human rights, the neutral goods of mankind. The idealism turns a side into a service. The man who pays for one side of every fight believes he pays for no side, only for openness, and the belief is sincere, which is what makes it dark. An ordinary partisan knows he is a partisan and can be reasoned with on those terms. Soros cannot locate his own tribe, because his creed has told him he rose above tribe into humanity. He funds his allies and calls them civilization.
Now the men across from him. Run the Soros vocabulary for his opponents and you find no opponents in it. You find authoritarians, demagogues, the closed society, the forces of reaction, the illiberal, the backsliding, the fearful, the manipulated, the not-yet-open. Never a rival coalition with interests as real as his own. Always a moral category. Once a man’s cause is mankind, the men who block him are not blocking a man, they are blocking mankind, and that licenses him to treat them as defects rather than parties, as the unenlightened rather than the opposed. The Soros register runs softer than Pinsof’s word subhuman. He does not call the Hungarian villager an animal. He calls him afraid, closed, misled, a man who would choose the open society if he understood it. The softer charge does the same work and lasts longer, because it denies the opponent a legitimate interest while sounding like compassion. The man is not wrong. He is benighted. He does not disagree. He misunderstands.
Downstream sits the dark morality the idealism feeds, Pinsof’s eighteenth concept, the conviction of doing right that fuels censorship and bullying and contempt. The funding of campaigns against disinformation, which is the funding of one coalition’s power to name the other coalition’s speech a disease. The branding of arguments for national sovereignty as bigotry. The pouring of a fortune into the elections of other countries, felt by the giver as help and by the country as intervention. Soros opposed the Iraq war and funded democracy promotion, and could not see that the two share a spine, the conviction that one’s values are universal and that carrying them abroad is a gift. He saw the war as dark and his own work as light. Dark idealism is the inability to see that they run on the same engine.
The fallibilist’s blind spot inverts what people expect. We assume the dangerous man is the one sure he is right. The more dangerous man is the one sure he is good while professing to doubt that he is right, because the doubt buys him innocence and the goodness sanctifies whatever the doubt permits. Soros built the maximum version of dark idealism, a purity that survives his own skepticism, because he parked the purity in his motives where skepticism does not go. A man certain of his benevolence and uncertain of all else is the purest specimen of the thing alive. The uncertainty is real and wide, and it certifies the one certainty that poisons.
The frame turns on his enemies in the same stroke, and on me. The nationalists run their own dark idealism in reverse. They are the defenders of the nation, the pure, the rooted, and Soros is the demon eating the homeland. Two idealisms face each other across Europe, each sure of its own light, each casting the other as evil, neither able to see its own coalition as a coalition. Pinsof says this is the ordinary human condition and no special failing of either man. The symmetry is the point. The writer does not escape it. To file Soros under blinded by idealism is a moral judgment, and moral judgment is the ground dark idealism grows in. The cynic who exposes the idealist feels the pleasure of the undeceived, a purity of its own. I sort Soros the way he sorts his Hungarian, and the sorting feels right to me the way his feels right to him, and that match is the concept at work on the man who wields it.
The open society promised a man who could doubt his way out of the tribe, who could hold his beliefs loosely enough to see his enemies as men and not monsters. Dark idealism is the proof that no creed sells that exit. The surer a man grows of his good will, the blinder he goes, and the apostle of doubt kept one article past all doubting, his faith in his own light. That faith is the thing that makes the dark.

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Walter J. Ong and the Technology of the Word

Posted on June 20, 2026 by Luke Ford

Walter Jackson Ong (1912-2003) was an original Catholic intellectual of the twentieth century, and his career joined vocations that most scholars keep apart. He was a Jesuit priest, a literary historian, a philosopher of communication, and a founder of the field now called media ecology. Across five decades he pursued a single question through many disciplines: how the technologies by which men speak, write, print, and broadcast reshape the mind that uses them. Long before networked computing and the rise of social media, Ong argued that speech, script, print, and electronic media are not neutral containers for the transmission of information. They alter how men think, remember, imagine, and understand themselves, and his work carried that claim into rhetoric, literary studies, education, theology, anthropology, communications, and intellectual history.

He was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on November 30, 1912, the son of Walter Jackson Ong and Blanche Eugenia Mense Ong. He graduated from Rockhurst High School in 1929 and entered Rockhurst College, where he studied Latin and founded a chapter of the Catholic fraternity Alpha Delta Gamma. After earning his bachelor’s degree in 1933 he spent roughly two years in printing, publishing, newspapers, and business before entering the Missouri Province of the Society of Jesus in 1935. Those early years inside the trade left a mark on the scholar he became. Few students of communication had handled the physical apparatus of print whose cultural consequences they would later try to read, and Ong had set type and watched newspapers come off the press before he ever theorized about them.

His Jesuit formation reached unusually wide. He took licentiates in philosophy and in sacred theology while completing a master’s degree in English at Saint Louis University, and he was ordained a priest in 1946. He kept his pastoral and spiritual work close to his scholarship for the rest of his life. For decades he said Mass at St. Francis Xavier College Church in St. Louis and led others through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556). Where many academics happen also to hold a faith, in Ong the priesthood and the scholarship formed a single vocation, since his questions about language, presence, community, and the human person rose directly out of theology.

At Saint Louis University he came under the influence of a young professor named Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980). Ong’s master’s thesis examined the sprung rhythm of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), another Jesuit whose writing stayed with him across his career. McLuhan urged his student toward the sixteenth-century French educational reformer Peter Ramus (1515-1572), a suggestion that redirected the course of Ong’s intellectual life. What began as a piece of historical inquiry grew into a sweeping account of the tie between communication technologies and consciousness.

Ong went to Harvard for doctoral work under the intellectual historian Perry Miller (1905-1963). He finished his dissertation on Ramus and earned his Ph.D. in English in 1955. The result stands among the more remarkable scholarly achievements of the postwar humanities. His Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958) appeared alongside the Ramus and Talon Inventory, a vast bibliographical catalog of more than seven hundred and fifty Ramist works. Together the two volumes set Ong among the leading historians of Renaissance thought.

The Ramus project reached well past intellectual history. Ong argued that Ramus helped recast Western habits of thought by fitting education to the openings that print created. Medieval learning had turned on oral disputation, dialogue, memory, and public debate. Ramus organized knowledge instead through visual diagrams, charts, classifications, and outlines, so that logic took on a spatial form and knowledge moved from the spoken exchange of ideas to the arrangement of concepts on the printed page. For Ong this shift went deeper than schooling. It changed the shape of the mind. Visualized thought encouraged the modern picture of the mind as an interior space holding mental objects, and it fed the abstract, detached, visual reasoning that men came to associate with René Descartes (1596-1650) and Isaac Newton (1642-1727). Print, on this account, did more than spread ideas. It helped make new ways of thinking.

After the doctorate Ong returned to Saint Louis University and stayed for roughly three decades of teaching and writing. He held the William E. Haren chair in English and a professorship of humanities in psychiatry. His courses became known for crossing the lines between literature, philosophy, psychology, theology, history, and communications, and students are said to have called them “Onglish.” His own scholarship showed the same refusal to honor the borders between fields.

Through the 1960s and 1970s he produced a steady run of books, among them Frontiers in American Catholicism (1957), American Catholic Crossroads (1959), The Barbarian Within (1962), The Presence of the Word (1967), In the Human Grain (1967), Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (1971), Why Talk? (1973), and Interfaces of the Word (1977). Many began as lecture series before a broad educated public. The Terry Lectures at Yale became The Presence of the Word, and the Messenger Lectures at Cornell became Fighting for Life. Ong belonged to a generation of public intellectuals who worked out major theoretical claims in front of a room.

His most widely read book came in 1982 with Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, which became a standard text across the humanities and social sciences. Ong argued that societies built on oral communication differ from societies shaped by writing. Oral cultures lean on memory, repetition, formula, narrative thinking, and communal participation, since knowledge cannot be stored outside the mind and so must be held there. Speech in such cultures tends to run rhythmic, redundant, and warm. Writing changes the situation. It moves memory outside the body, invites abstraction, allows analytical reflection, and builds up the sense of an inner self. Print presses these tendencies further by standardizing texts, settling knowledge into place, and rewarding systematic order. Literacy, on this reading, works not as a simple tool but as a technology that restructures consciousness.

One of his lasting contributions was the line he drew between primary and secondary orality. Primary orality belongs to cultures that have never known writing. Secondary orality describes the electronic environment built by radio, television, the telephone, and later by digital media. Secondary orality recalls oral culture in its taste for immediacy, participation, conversation, and shared experience, yet it rests on literacy, on machinery, and on large institutions, and so it remains a different thing. The distinction anticipated the world of social media by decades. Ong saw the approach of an electronic life that would revive forms of collective participation resembling oral culture while staying technologically mediated, and the point sits near the center of present arguments about online communication.

Readers often pair him with McLuhan, but the two worked from different premises. McLuhan held that the medium is the message and treated media as extensions of the human senses. Ong fixed his attention on the technologizing of the word and on the ways communication practice reshapes consciousness. The men stayed close, and McLuhan leaned on Ong’s early research for The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), yet their paths parted as Ong reached for a more historically grounded and psychologically careful account of media change. He also kept clear of a crude technological determinism. Communication technologies carried great weight in his account, but they did not stamp out cultural results on their own. They worked through social institutions, religious traditions, schools, and human psychology, and the outcome often surprised.

Another side of his thought surfaced in Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (1981), where he traced the place of conflict in human culture. Oral societies, he argued, often build social life around contests, verbal combat, ritual insult, heroic story, and the public display of skill, and this agonistic habit reflects deep biological and anthropological ground, since men fix identity through difference, competition, and struggle. Literacy and print, he suggested, slowly tamed many of those public contests. Conflict moved from spoken confrontation toward silent reading, private reflection, and written argument, so that a change in communication technology altered not only how men traded information but how they met conflict, status, and identity.

Beneath the whole project lay theology. As a Jesuit, Ong took communication to belong to the structure of reality. The Judeo-Christian tradition opens with divine speech, for God creates through His spoken word, and Christianity rests on the Incarnation, the belief that the divine Word became flesh in Jesus Christ. Communication, in this light, was no side activity of human life. It was woven into existence. The theological frame shaped his reading of media history. He declined to treat the movement from speech to writing to print to electronic media as a plain story of progress or of decline, and he read it instead as part of the long growth of human self-awareness and community. Each technology brought losses with its gains, yet across the whole he saw a fuller realization of man’s capacity for relationship and shared understanding. The view helps explain his guarded hope for secondary orality. Where many critics read electronic media as engines of fragmentation, Ong thought they might feed new and wider forms of human community, and though he never turned utopian, he held that technologically mediated communication might draw men into larger and more inclusive bonds.

His reach extended past his books. He served on President Lyndon Johnson’s (1908-1973) White House Task Force on Education from 1966 to 1967. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971. He led the Milton Society of America as its president and the Modern Language Association as its president in 1978. The French government named him a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques in 1963 for his Renaissance scholarship, and Saint Louis University gave him the Sword of Ignatius Loyola in 1993.

He stayed at work into old age. His last major article, “Digitization Ancient and Modern” (1998), set the invention of writing beside the arrival of computing and read both within the long history of communication. The essay later took the Media Ecology Association’s Walter Benjamin Award. By his death in St. Louis on August 12, 2003, Ong had published more than four hundred and fifty pieces, among them roughly sixteen books, hundreds of articles, and more than a hundred reviews. His work has been translated into many languages and still moves through scholarship in several fields, and the Walter J. Ong Center for Language, Media, and Culture at Saint Louis University carries his name.

Histories of the field now place Ong among the founders of media ecology and among the central theorists of communication in the modern age. The labels catch only part of him. He was a scholar of consciousness. By following the lines among speech, writing, print, electronic media, culture, and religion, he tried to say how men come to be the kind of creatures they are, and few writers have taken up that question with his depth, range, or historical imagination.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

In Fighting for Life, Ong described the agon at the base of oral culture: contest, verbal combat, ritual insult, the public display of skill, identity fixed through competition and struggle. A Jesuit named the hierarchical, coalitional primate in 1981, with care. He saw the animal.
Ong’s arc says that literacy and print tamed the contest, that conflict moved out of the shouting match and into silent reading and written argument, and that the long history of communication trends toward fuller self-awareness and a wider, more inclusive human community. Pinsof reads the same sequence and reaches the opposite end. The contest did not soften. It changed venue and weapon. Written argument, the citation, the endowed chair, the learned society, the prize from a foreign government are the new ground for the old fight. The presidency of the Modern Language Association is a trophy. The Palmes Académiques is a trophy. What Ong narrated as domestication, Pinsof narrates as the same primate fighting with quieter tools. The spear becomes the footnote, and the footnote draws blood at less risk to the man who throws it. Ong supplied a redemption story on top of a competition he had already described with accuracy. He got the diagnosis and then talked himself out of it.
The optimism about secondary orality runs the same way. Ong hoped that electronic communication might draw men into larger and more inclusive bonds, a wider consciousness. Pinsof would answer that the attention economy is zero-sum competition for eyes, and that men take up electronic media because it serves status and coalition, not communion. The hope of a wider bond is the sweet stated goal laid over the actual one. And the hope flatters its author by the logic Pinsof flags. If communication carries men toward self-realization and toward God, then the scholar of communication, the priest of the Word, studies the very substance of salvation. That is a central seat for a man to assign the work he gave his life to. The misunderstanding myth here wears a theological dress: not “if only men understood” but “if only men communicated more fully,” with the student of communication standing at the door.
So Pinsof keeps Ong’s description and cuts Ong’s teleology. The agon is the engine; the communion is the mission statement.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

Mearsheimer’s central charge against liberalism is that it mistakes the atomistic, rights-bearing, reasoning individual for human nature, when man is social first and reasons last. Ong hands Mearsheimer a genealogy for that error. The bounded interior self, the mind as a private space holding its own objects, the detached reasoner who weighs and chooses, is not the human default. It is a deposit left by writing and print, recent and local, mistaken by liberals for the universal man. So liberalism’s error runs double. It overrates reason, as Mearsheimer says, and it takes a print-made experience of selfhood for the nature of the species. Ong, read through Mearsheimer, becomes the media historian of the liberal delusion. The two reinforce each other.
Now the part that dies, and it is Ong’s hope. Ong looked at secondary orality and saw the chance of a wider, more inclusive human community, a fuller communion carried on electronic wires. Mearsheimer reads that hope as the same universalism he spent the book attacking. Man is tribal at the core, embedded in the group because embeddedness is how he survives, and the group does not dissolve when the channels of contact widen. More communication arms the tribe and breeds new tribes in competition. It does not melt parochial attachment into one human family. Ong’s global consciousness belongs to the family of liberal dreams, the dream that some universalizing force, rights for the liberal and the word for the priest, overcomes the social and tribal floor of human life. On Mearsheimer’s account, the floor holds. The dream does not.
The taming thesis in Fighting for Life weakens along the same line. Ong saw the agon at the base of oral culture and then argued that literacy and print domesticated it, moving conflict into silent reading and written argument. Mearsheimer would keep the agon and drop the domestication. The competitive, group-bound, sacrifice-for-the-tribe man does not get tamed by a change of medium. He carries the same core under whatever technology of the word he happens to inherit. The contest goes quiet on the page. It does not leave.
The frame then turns on Ong. Mearsheimer says a man has limited choice in his moral code, since so much of it arrives through inborn sentiment and through the social group before he can think for himself. Ong is a clean case. Born Catholic, formed by the Church and then the Society of Jesus across the long childhood and the longer Jesuit training, he received his moral code more than he reasoned his way to it, and his theology of communion, the Word made flesh, men bound to one another and to Him through the act of communication, is the value infusion of his group raised to a metaphysics. Mearsheimer would not call this a flaw. He would call it the human condition working as it always works. Ong’s sense that human community reaches toward God is, on this reading, the sacralized form of a fact, that the lone wolf dies and the embedded man lives, so men band together and their children learn to love the band.
If Mearsheimer is right, Ong’s anthropology stands and even gains, because it tells Mearsheimer how socialization does its work and where the liberal individual was manufactured. Ong’s teleology falls, because the tribal and social core does not yield to a wider word. And Ong’s faith, which he held as the truth about reality, becomes for Mearsheimer one more instance of the rule that a man’s deepest commitments come to him from his group before he is in any position to weigh them. The two men agree that we are social to the bone. They part over whether anything, the word or the rights of man, can carry us past the bone.

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Bruno Latour: The Anthropologist of the Moderns

Posted on June 20, 2026 by Luke Ford

Bruno Latour (1947–2022) was an influential and divisive figure in the social theory of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Trained as a philosopher, drawn toward anthropology in method, and disposed toward the study of institutions by temperament, he reshaped how scholars approach science, technology, law, politics, religion, and the environment. His work helped found science and technology studies, supplied the early framing for Actor-Network Theory, and pressed against assumptions that had long organized modern intellectual life. By his death his influence reached sociology, anthropology, geography, architecture, legal theory, the environmental humanities, media studies, design, political theory, museum curation, and philosophy.

His central argument was simple in statement and disruptive in consequence. Modern societies picture themselves as split into separate provinces called nature and society, facts and values, objects and subjects. Latour holds that the split is largely fictional. In practice men assemble hybrids that bind together people, technologies, institutions, ideas, animals, instruments, and material things. Reality consists not of isolated entities but of networks of relation. Social inquiry, on this view, does not explain events by appeal to large abstractions such as society, culture, or technology. It traces the concrete links through which actors come to be joined.

He was born on June 22, 1947, in Beaune, in Burgundy, the youngest of eight children of a prosperous Catholic family whose winemaking house, Maison Louis Latour, reached back across centuries. He grew up among commerce, religious observance, and a deep sense of history. He kept his attachment to Catholicism through his life and sustained an interest in theology, biblical interpretation, and the workings of religious language.

Latour studied philosophy at the University of Dijon from 1966. He did well in the competitive agrégation and established himself early as a promising philosopher. In 1975 he completed a doctoral dissertation at the University of Tours, Exégèse et ontologie: une analyse des textes de resurrection (“Exegesis and Ontology: An Analysis of the Texts of Resurrection”), under the supervision of Claude Bruaire. The dissertation read biblical resurrection narratives and carried themes that stayed with him: the making of truth, the reading of texts, and the construction of meaning.

A turn came during anthropological fieldwork in Côte d’Ivoire, carried out as part of his military service for ORSTOM, a French development research body. There he studied decolonization, industrialization, race relations, and the contact between French engineers and African technicians. He noticed that when machines broke, French engineers traced the failures to the culture, psychology, or habits of local workers, while the workers blamed the machines. The pattern held his attention. Technical trouble never stayed technical. It turned at once into social judgment. The episode shaped a conviction he carried for the rest of his life: technology, knowledge, and society cannot be pried apart.

This led him toward anthropology and toward the study of science. Rather than treat science as a privileged source of objective truth set beyond sociological view, Latour proposed to study scientists as anthropologists study any other community. With Steve Woolgar he carried out an ethnographic study of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, centered on the laboratory of the Nobel laureate Roger Guillemin (1924–2024). The result, Laboratory Life (1979), stands among the founding texts of science and technology studies.

The book argues that scientific facts emerge through a tangle of researchers, instruments, funding, publications, laboratory routine, and material objects. Facts are not simply found. They harden through networks of practice and institution. Critics often read the argument as an assault on scientific truth. Latour insisted that he sought to explain how facts grow robust and command assent, not to deny that they are real.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation at the Paris School of Mines, Latour worked out the ideas that made his name. With Michel Callon and John Law he helped form Actor-Network Theory.

Actor-Network Theory set aside the usual line between active human subjects and passive objects. A scientist, a bacterium, a computer, a legal document, a microscope, and a government office could each operate as an “actant” within a network. The question was not whether an entity counted as human or nonhuman, but whether it exerted influence and changed the conduct of other entities. Social explanation, then, calls for tracing associations rather than positing hidden structures that settle outcomes in advance.

Several ideas came out of this work. One is “black-boxing,” the process by which complex systems pass into the taken for granted. Once a technology runs reliably, men stop noticing the intricate network that made it work. Another is “translation,” the process by which actors enlist allies and recast interests to build a stable network. These notions left a mark on organizational study, management theory, information systems research, and the study of science.

The major books of these years secured his international standing. Science in Action (1987) traced how scientific claims win acceptance as fact. The Pasteurization of France (1988) retold the rise of microbiology as the joint work of scientists, microbes, institutions, and political actors. We Have Never Been Modern (1991), his best known philosophical book, argues that modernity rests on the illusion that nature and society stand apart, while modern societies keep producing the hybrids that breach the line.

Aramis, or the Love of Technology (1996) examined the failure of an ambitious French transit project. Mixing sociology, philosophy, the history of engineering, and literary experiment, the book showed how technical success and failure hang on the stability of social and material networks rather than on technical merit alone.

The 1990s drew Latour into the science wars. The physicist Alan Sokal (b. 1955) and others charged him with relativism and with eroding confidence in scientific truth. Latour rejected the charge. His position was never that scientific knowledge runs arbitrary. He argued that scientific authority follows from the building of networks that link instruments, observations, experiments, institutions, and communities of researchers. Facts hold because those networks hold.

His answer to the controversy appears most clearly in Pandora’s Hope (1999), which defends scientific inquiry while it keeps rejecting any picture of objective knowledge cut loose from practice.

From the late 1990s and across the next two decades, Latour widened his attention past science. He wanted to grasp how different institutions make different kinds of truth. One major project studied the Conseil d’État, the highest administrative court of France. After years of observation he produced The Making of Law, an ethnography of legal reasoning. Latour argues that legal truth differs from scientific truth at its root. Scientists settle facts by extending chains of reference outward into the world through instruments and experiment. Judges settle legal truth through carefully kept chains of documents, precedents, files, and procedural continuity. Legal objectivity comes not from reaching external reality but from holding the integrity of legal reasoning within an institutional tradition.

The study showed that his larger project was not the sociology of science alone but a general inquiry into how institutions make authority, legitimacy, and truth.

His most ambitious attempt to order these findings was the Inquiry into Modes of Existence, a research program funded by the European Research Council. Published as An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2012) and paired with an extensive digital platform, the project set out to identify the distinct logics that govern different provinces of human life. Latour holds that science, law, politics, religion, economics, fiction, technology, and morality each carry their own standards of verification, their own procedures, their own kinds of truth. Confusion arises when one province is judged by the standards of another. Many critics misread science, he thought, because they treated it as if it should work like theology, demanding fixed certainty in place of ongoing chains of empirical check.

Religion held a particular place in his thought. Unlike many secular intellectuals of his generation, he never cast religion as a primitive belief bound to fade. In Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech he argues that religious language runs on principles apart from scientific description. Religion seeks transformation and renewal, not the recording of empirical fact.

After 2000 Latour turned toward environmental thought and the politics of climate. He came to hold that climate change exposed the poverty of the old political categories. The line between nature and society, troubled in his eyes from the start, could no longer hold in an age when human activity reshaped planetary systems.

Politics of Nature (2004), Facing Gaia (2017), and Down to Earth (2017) worked out a new ecological philosophy. Drawing on the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock (1919–2022), Latour set aside the image of nature as a stable backdrop. He described the Earth as an active party to human affairs.

His concept of the “Critical Zone” carried his ecology forward, the thin film of soil, air, water, organisms, and human activity that holds life on the planet. Rather than place humanity on an abstract globe, Latour argued that political thought has to begin from the fragile ecological systems that make existence possible.

In the later writing, politics turns from a contest among ideologies toward a contest over habitation. The central political question is no longer which social system should rule, but how men might learn to live within a finite and vulnerable Earth. He came to describe the future as a struggle between those who stay attached to ecological reality and those who keep chasing fantasies of limitless growth and escape.

Alongside the scholarship, Latour became an institutional builder and a curator. After his move to Sciences Po in 2006 he served as Vice-President for Research from 2007 to 2013. He founded the Médialab, which pursued digital methods in social science, and helped start SPEAP, an experimental graduate program that joined politics, art, and public engagement.

His interests reached the gallery as well. Working often with Peter Weibel (1944–2023) at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, he co-curated Iconoclash (2002), Making Things Public (2005), Reset Modernity! (2016), and Critical Zones (2020). These exhibitions turned philosophical argument into visual and spatial form, treating artworks, scientific instruments, political artifacts, and technological objects as parties to shared networks. He also co-curated the 2020 Taipei Biennale.

In his last decades his influence ran well past the academy. Architects, designers, artists, urban planners, environmentalists, and legal scholars drew on his work. He became a precursor of the postcritique movement tied to thinkers such as Rita Felski (b. 1956). In his essay “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” (2004) he argues that intellectuals should move past endless debunking and toward construction, composition, and care.

He grew uneasy, at the same time, that parts of social constructivist thought, including readings of his own work, were finding use among climate-change denialists and conspiracy theorists. He answered by defending scientific institutions with vigor while he held to his conviction that scientific knowledge is made through networks.

Honors came across his career: the Bernal Prize, the Unseld Prize, the Holberg Prize in 2013, the Gifford Lectures, the French Légion d’Honneur, the Spinozalens Prize, and the Kyoto Prize in 2021. In keeping with his habits, he gave the monetary portion of the Kyoto Prize to Sciences Po.

Bruno Latour died of pancreatic cancer in Paris on October 9, 2022, at the age of seventy-five. He left his wife Chantal, their children Chloé and Robinson, and several grandchildren. His papers went to French archives, so that later scholars might trace the growth of a body of work that changed many fields.

His legacy stays contested. Admirers regard him as an original thinker of the first rank, a scholar who changed how intellectuals understand science, technology, law, politics, and ecology. Critics hold that his refusal of the old line between facts and interpretations risks breeding confusion about truth. Even many critics grant the scale of what he did.

Few thinkers of the twentieth century did more to unsettle inherited categories. Across philosophy, anthropology, sociology, law, religion, environmental thought, and art, Latour returned again and again to a single question: how do humans and nonhumans come to be connected in ways that produce durable realities? His answer, that reality emerges through networks of relation, reshaped whole fields and set his place among the consequential social theorists of his time.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

Latour’s whole frame is a misunderstanding claim raised to civilizational scale. Modernity, he says, rests on a confusion, the split between nature and society that the moderns enforce while breaking it at every turn. We have never been modern, which is to say everyone misread what they were doing the entire time. The science warriors misread him. The critics misread critique. The deniers misread how facts get made. The moderns commit category mistakes, judging one mode of existence by the standards of another. Wherever Latour looks he finds a confusion, and wherever he finds a confusion he offers the cure, which is to trace the networks and sort the modes the way he traces and sorts them. The man who understands becomes the man the confused world needs.

Pinsof would point at the demand side first. Who buys this product? Intellectuals who want to feel like saviors. Latour sold them the most sophisticated version on the market. The critic gets to unmask. The diplomat of modes gets to compose. Either way the intellectual is the one repairing a confusion the rest of us cannot see. Self-flattery sells, and Latour priced it for the high end, the museum, the lecture hall, the European research grant.

Then the wrinkle. Latour attacked the savior-intellectual himself. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” says stop unmasking, stop debunking, the critic has run dry. For a moment Latour sounds like a man about to admit that the understanders understand nothing the rest of us do not already use. He does not stop there. He swaps one savior role for a grander one. In place of the critic who exposes, he installs the diplomat who composes and the curator who cares. The intellectual still repairs the world’s confusion. He repairs it with a finer instrument. The attack on the misunderstanding myth becomes a higher version of the misunderstanding myth.

Now read the stated motive against the likely one. Latour’s stated mission is clarity: dissolve the false split, calm the science wars, teach the moderns their own hybrids, defend the planet. The savvy reading watches what a coalitional primate does while saying these things. He builds a school. He coins translation, a word that names the recruitment of allies and the bending of their interests, and he calls it metaphysics. He founds the Médialab and SPEAP and takes an office at Sciences Po that hands out recognition. He derogates rivals, the positivists, the Sokal camp, Bourdieu, the moderns as a class. He gathers a following and a stack of honors. Pinsof’s test asks whether the man is failing at his stated goal of changing minds or succeeding at his real goal of climbing, allying, and outranking. By the stated measure the science wars were a sad misunderstanding. By the savvy measure Latour won status, built a coalition, and ended decorated. He was not confused. He was effective.

For decades Latour loosened the authority of the bare fact and taught that science is allies and instruments rather than nature speaking. Then constructivism turned up in the mouths of climate deniers and the populist right, and Latour reversed, defending scientific institutions with heat. The misunderstanding-myth version says he corrected an error, that the deniers had abused his ideas. The savvy version says his coalition’s interests moved. His tribe, the progressive academy and the climate-anxious elite, now needed facts shored up, so the man who spent his prime destabilizing facts pivoted to defend them. No confusion cleared. A coalition served, on schedule.

Put Pinsof’s hardest question to Latour’s central villain. What if the moderns understand their hybrids all too well? Latour treats the split between nature and society as a confusion the moderns maintain without seeing it. The strategic reading says the split is no confusion. It pays. It lets science claim a neutral authority above the fray. It lets politics claim it merely follows nature. It lets each camp launder its interests as objective necessity. The disavowal of hybrids is a savvy move, not a senior moment. Latour half saw this. He wrote that the modern constitution multiplies hybrids while denying them, which sounds like strategy. Then he filed it under misunderstanding and offered to renegotiate the constitution, as though a clever enough diplomat could talk men out of an arrangement that pays them.

And the deniers he ended up fighting. The misunderstanding myth says they failed to grasp how science works. Pinsof says they grasped their incentives. An oil interest understands the science it has reason to understand and funds the doubt it has reason to fund. A populist understands that fighting the experts wins the votes of people who resent the experts. No exhibition at Karlsruhe and no diagram of the Critical Zone moves a man who is winning under the present arrangement. The world Latour wanted to save did not want saving. It wanted what it was already getting.

Latour spent his life on a beautiful claim, that reality is made through the patient work of connection, and that we misread our own modernity from the start. The cynical close turns the claim back on him. The split was never an error. It was a working arrangement that served the men who kept it. The deniers were never confused. They had incentives. The science wars were not a tragic mix-up. They were a status fight he won. The one thing the moderns got wrong, on this reading, is the belief that anyone got anything wrong. Latour built the most refined misunderstanding myth of his age and sold it to the people whose standing rose by buying it. In the end the only misunderstanding is that there was a misunderstanding.

Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002)

Bourdieu built a sociology that reads a man’s ideas against the position he holds in a structured field of rivals, the capital he carries into it, and the strategies he uses to climb. Bruno Latour spent a career refusing that sociology. He rejected the hidden structures, the determining forces, the whole habit of explaining a thinker by his place. Reading Latour through Bourdieu does what the subject would have hated, and does it on ground he left undefended. The aim is not debunking. The conditions of the work’s making and its welcome trace without touching whether it is true.

Bourdieu starts with the field, a space of positions held by men who compete for a stake they all believe in. A newcomer with little accumulated standing has one good strategy, heresy. He cannot win by mastering the existing terms better than the men who set them, so he refuses the terms and proposes new ones. Latour enters French intellectual life from the side. He trains in philosophy at Dijon and writes a dissertation on the resurrection narratives at Tours. He comes to the study of science through anthropology and a stint at a development-research body in Côte d’Ivoire, not through the consecrated centers of Paris sociology. That entry from the margin is a handicap and a license. He owes the reigning schools nothing, and he makes his name by saying that the reigning schools have it wrong from the ground up.

What he brings to the young field of science studies is capital earned elsewhere. Theological training in the reading of texts. Philosophical equipment from the agrégation. The ethnographer’s eye carried back from West Africa to a California laboratory. He also carries the durable dispositions of a prosperous Catholic Burgundy home, the long historical sense and the religious seriousness that a winemaking family across centuries lays down in a man before he chooses a single idea. In a settled field these imports count for little against the home currency. In a field still forming its rules, foreign capital trades high. Laboratory Life turns the anthropology of distant peoples on the men in white coats, and the move lands because no one owns the right to describe the laboratory yet. Latour converts the capital of the outsider into the founding capital of a discipline he helps invent. The man who insists on flat description, on following the actors wherever they go, arrives carrying a heavy inheritance that shapes what he can see and say.

The deepest contest of his life is with Bourdieu himself. Both men want the same prize, the authoritative account of how science makes truth. Bourdieu offers a reflexive sociology: the scientific field, its own capital, the struggle for the monopoly of competent speech. Latour offers networks, actants, translation, and a flat world with no structure hiding behind the actors. To take the prize he has to displace the dominant figure in his national field, and he does it by the route open to a challenger, by declaring the dominant method dead. His essay “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” reads, in this light, as a strike at the Bourdieusian habit of unmasking, the move that finds a hidden interest behind every stated reason. Latour says the critic has run out of road and the time has come to compose rather than expose. The essay is a bid to retire the reigning weapon and arm the field with his own.

To unseat Bourdieu, Latour plays the game Bourdieu described better than most of its open believers. His concept of translation is recruitment, the enlistment of allies and the bending of their interests toward a shared end. That is the building of social capital under another name. He founds the Médialab and helps start SPEAP, bases from which to train followers and consecrate their work. He moves to Sciences Po and takes the office of Vice-President for Research, a seat that hands out recognition. He crosses into the art world and co-curates large exhibitions at Karlsruhe, where he turns intellectual standing into curatorial authority and trades it back as cultural weight. Each step is a position-taking, an accumulation, a conversion of one capital into another. The theorist of the flat network climbs a structured ladder with a sure foot.

Bourdieu holds that the refusal of the economic is the high play in the economy of symbolic goods. The man who gives money away buys something dearer than money. Latour wins the Kyoto Prize in 2021 and gives the cash to Sciences Po. The gift reads as disinterest, and disinterest, in Bourdieu’s account, is the gold coin of the academic world. The honors gather across the late years, the Holberg Prize, the Légion d’Honneur, the Gifford Lectures, Kyoto. These are the marks of full consecration. The heretic has become the canon.

This is the law Bourdieu states and Latour lives. The boldest heresy, once it wins, hardens into the new orthodoxy. The young man who refused “the social” is now taught as doctrine across sociology, anthropology, geography, law, design, and the environmental humanities. We Have Never Been Modern is assigned, not argued with. Actor-Network Theory is a method with handbooks. The refusal of method has become a method. Students learn to follow the actors the way an earlier cohort learned to find the hidden interest behind the stated reason. What began as a strike against orthodoxy now sets the terms that the next challenger will have to refuse.

Bourdieu drew an axis from the autonomous pole of a field, where peers judge peers, to the heteronomous pole, where outside powers, the market, the state, the press, set the terms. He warned that intellectuals lose their own capital when they drift toward the heteronomous side and court the wide public. Latour’s late turn to climate, to the politics of habitation, to the role of planetary prophet, moves him toward that pole. He does not lose by it. He converts the move into a fresh consecration, the sage of the Critical Zone, read by architects and activists who never opened a sociology journal. The conversion works because his stock of standing is large enough to spend.

Bourdieu demanded that the sociologist turn the instruments on himself, account for his own place in the field he studies. Latour refused that reflexivity. He read it as the critic’s trap, another turn of the unmasking he wanted to leave behind. By refusing it he left the door open. The man who taught a generation to trace every actor’s interests declined to trace his own, so the tracing falls to others.

A theory holds or fails on its own ground, and Latour’s network world has changed how serious men think across many fields. The field reading does something narrower and harder to dodge. It shows that the man who said reality is relation all the way down, with no structure crouched behind the actors, was carried by a structure he could read in everyone but himself, and that he reached the summit of a hierarchy he spent his life denying was there. He played the field as well as anyone alive. He declined to admit there was a field to play.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

Mearsheimer’s social man is tribal. His group is bounded. It has members and outsiders, kin and rivals, and he will sacrifice for the first and fight the second. Latour’s social man is a node in an open web that runs through bacteria, instruments, documents, and the Earth, a web with no boundary, no enemy, no blood. Strip the vocabulary and Latour’s relational man is the liberal universal man in new dress, connected to everything, bound to no one in particular, owing his loyalty to a network that takes in the whole planet and therefore no tribe at all. Mearsheimer would call this the delusion under fresh paint. The cosmopolitan web is the liberal dream of universal belonging, rebuilt out of actants. Man as Latour draws him has no people to die for. Man as Mearsheimer finds him has little else.

Now turn the anthropology on Latour. Mearsheimer holds that a worldview comes mostly from the value infusion of childhood, with reason arriving late and weak to dress what socialization already installed. Look at the infusion. A prosperous Catholic family in Burgundy, a winemaking house with centuries behind it, deep historical sense, the rhythms of the Church. The boy is steeped in a world where bread becomes body, where matter carries spirit, where nothing stands alone and everything connects through a sacramental order. Then the grown man writes a doctoral thesis on the resurrection narratives, and after that a life’s work telling us that the modern split between matter and meaning is false, that hybrids run everywhere, that the world is relation rather than dead stuff. Mearsheimer’s reading is plain. Latour did not reason his way to a relational, anti-secular, connected world. He took it in at the family table before he could argue, and he spent sixty years giving the infusion an argument. The resurrection dissertation is the tell. Reason came last and did the dressing.

This is the human condition. Every theorist runs on the same two engines and rationalizes after. The charge against Latour is that a thinker who built his name on tracing every connection missed the connection that formed him, the one running back through the cradle and the parish. He could see the link binding a scientist to a microbe. He could not, or would not, see the link binding the man to the faith of his fathers, because that one had shaped the eye doing the looking.

The politics fares worse. Late Latour calls men to land on the Earth, to share an attachment to the fragile Critical Zone, to form a politics around a common planet. The call asks for a planetary we. Mearsheimer’s anthropology says there is no planetary tribe and there never will be. Men feel for kin and group what they cannot feel for the species. Loyalty is bounded by its nature. A politics that asks a Frenchman, a Texan, and a Chinese farmer to sacrifice for the same globe asks each to extend to strangers and rivals the devotion he keeps for his own. That is the universalist error of liberalism moved from human rights to ecology, and it loses to nationalism wherever the two meet, which in climate politics is daily. The Earth cannot be a tribe. Latour wanted it to be one and called the wanting realism.

Reason ranks last, so the science wars look different through this glass. Latour spent decades on how facts get made and how men should argue over them, as though the quality of the reference chains decided what a population believes. Mearsheimer puts reason third. What a man accepts about the climate or the vaccine comes mostly from his group and his gut, with argument trailing behind to justify a verdict already reached. The deniers Latour fought in his last years do not reject the science because they misread how it is built. They reject it because their tribe rejects it and reason is the weakest faculty in the room. Latour half felt this when his own tools turned up in enemy hands, and he answered with more epistemics, a defense of institutions, a sorting of modes. Mearsheimer would call the answer hopeless, since it brings the weakest faculty to a fight the other two are running.

Latour’s group was the European progressive academy, the anti-positivist humanities, the climate-anxious elite. He stayed in it from start to finish. When the populist right seized constructivism, the in-group man defended the in-group’s institutions, the science he had spent a career unsettling. Mearsheimer reads that pivot without strain. It was no fresh conclusion reached by reason. It was a member protecting his people when a rival picked up their weapon. He never left his tribe. He defended it on schedule.

So what for Latour, if Mearsheimer is right? Two dissolutions. As a man, he is a French Catholic of a certain class and century who received his world before he could weigh it and gave it an elegant argument after the bell. As a theorist, he is the last and finest of the liberal universalists, the man who abolished the lone individual only to put in his place a self bound to everything and so to no people. The thing he shared with Mearsheimer, the death of the atom, turns into the blade. Mearsheimer’s social being is tribal, bounded, and real. Latour’s is connected, boundless, and a dream. The theorist of connection built his life on the one connection that does not govern us and walked past the two that do.

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Adam Tooze: A Historian of Material Power

Posted on June 20, 2026 by Luke Ford

Adam Tooze (b. 1967) is an English-American historian of capitalism, war, political economy, and global power, and over the past two decades he has emerged as a central figure in the writing of modern economic history. His reputation rests on a method that joins archival scholarship to large-scale analysis of finance, energy, geopolitics, and state capacity, and on a body of books that has reshaped understanding of Nazi Germany, the postwar settlement after the First World War, the rise of American global power, and the financial crisis of 2008. Through his books, essays, public lectures, the Chartbook newsletter, and the Ones and Tooze podcast, he has also become an influential interpreter of the interlocking economic and political crises of the twenty-first century, a writer who moves between the scholarly monograph and the public essay without surrendering the analytical seriousness of either.

What sets his work apart is a consistent focus on material power. Rather than treating politics, ideology, or diplomacy as autonomous spheres governed by their own internal logics, he asks how states are constrained and enabled by resources, energy systems, industrial production, financial institutions, demographic pressures, and administrative capacities. His scholarship draws on economic history, international history, political economy, and historical sociology, and it engages extensively with the Marxist traditions and the writers associated with the New Left Review milieu, though he is not an orthodox Marxist. The work blends historical materialism with liberal political economy and institutional analysis, seeking to explain how modern states navigate the tension among capitalist accumulation, national sovereignty, and geopolitical competition.

Tooze was born in London on July 5, 1967. His full name is John Adam Tooze. His father, John Tooze, was a distinguished molecular biologist, and his maternal grandparents, Arthur Wynn and Margaret Wynn, were prominent social researchers whose work touched on poverty, nutrition, and public policy. When Tooze was a child the family moved to Heidelberg, where his father worked for many years, and growing up between Britain and Germany gave him an early familiarity with German language, culture, and history that would later prove foundational to his scholarship. He has recalled a boyhood fascination with engineering, technology, and race-car design, and his intellectual interests developed early, extending past the conventional curriculum into economics and public affairs.

He has described the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe as formative. Having begun postgraduate study in Berlin during the period around the fall of the Berlin Wall, he encountered at close range the political and economic transformations that would remake Europe after 1989, and that experience left a mark on a body of work preoccupied with the limits states confront and the suddenness with which settled arrangements can break.

Tooze read economics at King’s College, Cambridge, taking a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1989. Although he trained formally as an economist, he gravitated toward historical questions, and he completed his doctorate at the London School of Economics in 1996, building expertise in German economic history and the history of state administration. His fluency in German and his command of archival sources let him work directly with the statistical and bureaucratic records of the Weimar and Nazi eras, an advantage that would shape both the texture and the authority of his early scholarship.

After his doctorate he joined the faculty of the University of Cambridge, where he became Reader in Twentieth-Century History and Gurnee Hart Fellow at Jesus College. In these years he established himself as a leading scholar of modern German history and of the history of economic governance, and he began to develop the questions that would run through everything he wrote afterward.

His first major book, Statistics and the German State, 1900–1945 (2001), examined the growth of statistical knowledge and administrative capacity in modern Germany. The book traced how governments came to rely on quantitative information to make society legible and manageable, and it argued that statistics were not neutral instruments but tools of governance that helped define populations, set economic priorities, and fix state objectives. The themes introduced there recur across his later work: the relationship between information and power, the weight of administrative institutions, and the place of quantitative knowledge in modern government.

His international breakthrough came with The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006), a book widely regarded as an indispensable account of Nazi Germany among those published in the twenty-first century. It challenged interpretations that stressed ideology while neglecting economic constraint. Tooze argued that the Nazi leadership grasped Germany’s relative weakness against the immense industrial and resource capacities of the United States and the Soviet Union, and that Hitler’s drive toward expansion and war reflected not only ideological ambition but a perceived need to overcome that structural disadvantage before the gap grew unbridgeable.

A central insight of the book concerns the place of the United States in Nazi strategic thought. Hitler and his planners saw American industrial power as both model and threat, and that observation foreshadows a recurring feature of Tooze’s scholarship, the argument that the European history of the twentieth century cannot be understood apart from the overwhelming economic weight of the United States. The book won the Wolfson History Prize and the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Prize, and it established Tooze among the foremost historians of political economy and modern Europe.

In 2009 he moved to the United States to become Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Director of International Security Studies at Yale University, succeeding the historian Paul Kennedy, whose work likewise stressed the relationship between economic strength and geopolitical power. The appointment reflected his growing interest in international history and grand strategy, and it marked the point at which his scope widened from the German nation-state to the international system as a whole.

That widening produced The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931 (2014). The book argued that the First World War transformed global politics by installing the United States as the world’s dominant economic power, leaving European governments heavily indebted and increasingly dependent on American capital, while American leaders proved reluctant to assume the responsibilities that sustained international leadership demanded. Tooze traced how that mismatch between economic dominance and political restraint fed the instability of the interwar years. The Deluge won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and confirmed his standing as a historian who could link national histories to shifts in the global balance of power.

In 2015 he joined Columbia University as Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History and Director of the European Institute, and from that position he extended his reach past academic history into contemporary political and economic analysis. He also became a nonresident scholar affiliated with Carnegie Europe.

His most widely read book, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018), examined the global financial crisis of 2008 and its long aftermath. Rejecting accounts that fixed on Wall Street misconduct or regulatory failure alone, Tooze portrayed the crisis as a structural breakdown within an interconnected global financial system, and he stressed the central place of the dollar system and the extraordinary interventions of the Federal Reserve. An influential argument of the book holds that the Federal Reserve served as a lender of last resort for much of the world economy through emergency liquidity operations and swap lines, a claim that recast the crisis as a global event sustained by American monetary power rather than a national American failure. Crashed won the Lionel Gelber Prize, became a definitive history of the crisis, and carried his reputation far past the academy, making him a prominent commentator on economics, central banking, and globalization.

During the COVID-19 pandemic Tooze launched Chartbook, a newsletter that became a widely read forum for historically informed analysis of current events. Joining statistical evidence, economic reasoning, geopolitical analysis, and historical perspective, Chartbook let him respond in real time to unfolding developments while holding to the structural approach of his scholarly work. His book Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy (2021) analyzed the pandemic as a distinctive economic shock, one in which governments deliberately suspended large sections of activity in answer to a public-health emergency, and he argued that the pandemic accelerated trends already reshaping the world economy, among them expanded state intervention, technological transformation, and geopolitical rivalry.

Since 2021 Tooze has turned increasingly to what he calls the interconnected crises of the present era, and he has become a leading interpreter of the idea of “polycrisis,” a condition in which several crises interact and reinforce one another. Financial instability, climate change, geopolitical conflict, energy transitions, democratic strain, technological disruption, migration pressure, and public-health emergencies cannot, on his account, be understood in isolation, because each shapes the others.

Climate change and decarbonization have grown into central themes of his recent work. He approaches climate as a problem of political economy and state capacity, arguing that the scale of investment the global energy transition demands blurs the inherited boundary between markets and governments. Decarbonization, in his view, calls for new forms of coordination among states, financial institutions, corporations, and international organizations, and through Chartbook and a series of essays often called his “Carbon Notes” he has explored how climate policy reshapes capitalism.

A transatlantic perspective that places American power at the center of modern history runs through the whole of his scholarship. In The Wages of Destruction Nazi Germany is measured against American industrial supremacy; in The Deluge Europe struggles to adjust to American financial dominance; in Crashed the dollar-centered financial system reveals the continuing reach of American power beneath the surface of globalization. Across the books he maintains that modern European history cannot be told apart from the economic and strategic position of the United States.

In September 2021 he launched the Ones and Tooze podcast with the journalist Cameron Abadi. The program extends many of the themes of Chartbook, taking up international politics, economics, technology, and global governance in conversations that bridge academic scholarship and public affairs.

His honors include the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2002), the Wolfson History Prize (2006), the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Prize (2007), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History (2015), the Lionel Gelber Prize (2019), the Hans-Matthöfer-Preis für Wirtschaftspublizistik (2019), and the Preis für Wirtschaftspublizistik der Keynes-Gesellschaft (2023). In early 2025 he became a United States citizen after many years living and working in America, and he is often described now as an English-American historian.

What distinguishes him from many historians is the movement between archival detail and the analysis of global systems. A study of German statistical agencies becomes a meditation on modern governance; an examination of central-bank swap lines becomes a reinterpretation of globalization; an analysis of carbon emissions becomes an argument about the future of capitalism. Across his career he has insisted that political life rests on material foundations, on energy, finance, production, technology, administrative capacity, and the institutions that organize them. As scholar and public intellectual, Adam Tooze stands among the defining historians of contemporary political economy, a writer whose work seeks to explain how modern societies meet the limits set by resources, institutions, and power, and how those limits shape what politics can do in an increasingly interconnected world.

Adam Tooze in the Field

Tooze has Cambridge and LSE training, the archival and quantitative authority of the economic historian, then a conversion of that capital into public-intellectual standing through Chartbook, the podcast, and the trade press. His hedged relation to Marxism reads as position-taking inside the field rather than as a settled doctrine. He sits near the New Left Review milieu, draws on its prestige, and keeps the liberal-institutionalist credibility that lets Yale and Columbia name chairs after him. Field theory explains the trajectory, the move from monograph to newsletter, and the careful distance he holds from orthodoxy as a stance that buys him both audiences.

To read him this way, follow Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) and treat the intellectual world as a field, a structured space of positions defined against one another, where each producer holds a stock of capital and stakes claims that the field’s logic makes possible. Capital in this space takes several forms. There is embodied cultural capital, the disposition trained into a man before he can name it. Tooze grew up between Britain and Germany, the son of a molecular biologist, the grandson of social researchers, and he carries a fluency in German and a feel for statistical and bureaucratic records that few of his Anglophone peers possess. The disposition came first, and it makes his later choices feel less like calculation than like instinct. He reaches for the material substrate of politics because his formation taught him to trust numbers, archives, and the slow accumulation of administrative fact.

On top of that sits institutionalized cultural capital, the credentials that the field recognizes without argument: the Cambridge degree, the LSE doctorate, the Cambridge readership, the chairs at Yale and Columbia. When Tooze succeeded Paul Kennedy at Yale, he inherited a position already marked as the seat of the historian who reads power through economic strength, and the field registered the continuity. Symbolic capital, the recognition that turns competence into authority, accrued through prizes: the Wolfson, the Longman-History Today award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Lionel Gelber. Social capital came through the networks, the New Left Review orbit on one side and the chaired professorships and Carnegie affiliation on the other. The point of naming these forms separately is to see that Tooze holds an unusual spread of them, and that the spread, not any single asset, gives him his room to move.

Bourdieu distinguished an autonomous pole of the field, where producers win standing through the judgment of peers and the slow rhythm of scholarly recognition, from a heteronomous pole, where reward comes fast through the market and the press. Tooze front-loaded the autonomous accumulation. The Wages of Destruction and The Deluge are works addressed to other historians, judged by the standards of the guild, consecrated by its prizes. He banked that capital before he spent it. Crashed sits at the hinge, a scholarly book that found a mass readership during a moment the public wanted explained. Chartbook and the Ones and Tooze podcast carry him toward the heteronomous pole, the field of journalism that Bourdieu studied in On Television and treated with suspicion, the arena of the fast producer who trades depth for speed and visibility. The interest of Tooze’s case is that he enters that arena carrying a vault of autonomous capital. The newsletter reads as scholarship because the man writing it has already been consecrated as a scholar. He converts standing earned slowly into reach gained fast, and the rate of exchange favors him because so few writers at the journalistic pole hold the credentials he holds at the autonomous one.

In field terms the question is orthodoxy against heterodoxy. The orthodox hold the doxa, the unexamined ground of the game, and they pay for purity with marginality. The heretic challenges the doxa and risks exile. Tooze takes neither pure position. He draws on the prestige of the radical tradition, engages the New Left Review writers as serious interlocutors, and keeps the critical edge that lets the left intelligentsia claim him. He also declines the doctrinal commitments that would close the Yale chair and the financial-press readership to him. He blends historical materialism with liberal political economy and institutional analysis, and he calls himself no orthodox Marxist. A pure orthodoxy could not command the chairs or the trade audience; a pure liberalism could not command the respect of the New Left Review milieu. The hedge is the position that maximizes convertibility across subfields, and a man with his particular capital spread is the man best placed to occupy it.

Tooze’s signature claim, that finance, energy, industrial capacity, and state administration drive history while ideology and diplomacy run downstream, is a position-taking within the historical field. To assert the primacy of the material base is to bid against the autonomy of ideas and to elevate the kind of evidence Tooze commands above the kind his more culturalist rivals command. The claim and the career rhyme. The historian of material power is the writer best read through the material structure of his own field, through his capital, his position, and the exchange rates between the subfields he crosses. He explains states by their resources and constraints. The same lens explains him, and he seldom turns it on himself. That silence is the blind spot the frame predicts, since the rules of the game stay invisible to the players who profit from them.

Movement toward the heteronomous pole pays in attention and erodes, over time, the autonomous standing that made the attention valuable. The “Carbon Notes,” the polycrisis essays, the high-frequency commentary live close to the market, and the peers who consecrated The Wages of Destruction judge such output by a different and harsher standard. The vault is large, but he spends from it with every dispatch. Whether the rate of exchange holds depends on whether he replenishes the autonomous account with new work that the guild will recognize, or whether the newsletter becomes the main product and the scholar dissolves into the commentator. Bourdieu watched that dissolution happen to others and named it. Tooze has the capital to delay it longer than most. He cannot suspend the logic that governs the trade.

Tooze is neither a pure scholar nor a pure pundit but a man who has assembled a rare combination of capitals and found the position that converts them at the best available rate. The hedged Marxism, the move from monograph to newsletter, the insistence on material power, and the chairs that carry old names all belong to a single strategy, whether or not he experiences it as one. The strength of the reading is that it explains the choices without crediting them to either cynicism or pure conviction. The strategy works because the habitus makes it feel like the only honest thing to do.

Holding the Collapse

He builds the dashboard before the world wakes. The European numbers land first, then the American open, then the Asian close folds back over the top of the next morning. He keeps the tabs lined up: a central-bank balance sheet, a freight index, a yield curve, a gas price denominated in three currencies, a chart of cases climbing in a country he has never set foot in. Coffee. The cursor moving. He is reading the body of the world economy the way a clinician reads a chart at the foot of a bed, looking for the place where the line breaks. When he finds it he writes it down, and when he writes it down a few thousand people across a dozen time zones feel, for the length of a newsletter, that the thing has been understood.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives us the lens to see what the dashboard is for. In The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil Becker argues that man is the animal who knows he will die and cannot bear the knowing. Culture answers the terror with a hero system, a structure of belief and work that lets a person feel he counts, that his days add up to something the grave cannot cancel. The hero system hands each man a way to earn symbolic immortality, a place in a scheme larger and more durable than his own flesh. The accountant balances the books. The soldier holds the line. The scholar comprehends. Each fetishizes a narrow field of mastery and treats it as the ground of significance, because the alternative, the open creatureliness of an animal that rots, cannot be looked at for long.

Tooze’s hero system is comprehension, and the spine of his work is collapse. Read the books in order and the same dread runs under all of them. The Wages of Destruction turns on a closing window: the Nazi planners measure Germany against the industrial weight of the United States, see a gap that widens every year they wait, and gamble on war from a sense of structural doom. The Deluge watches Europe sink into debt and dependence while the new American giant declines to hold the weight it has won. Crashed puts a hand on the patient at the moment the pulse nearly stops, and finds the Federal Reserve pushing dollars through swap lines into the veins of a system that, left alone for another week, might have seized. Then the polycrisis, the late work, where catastrophe stops arriving from one direction and arrives from all of them, finance and carbon and contagion and war braided into a single advancing front. The career is a long study of the moment the surface gives way and the suddenness underneath shows through.

To comprehend that moment is the project. Not to predict it, which no archive permits, and not to prevent it, which no historian can. To hold it at a readable distance. The chart, the indicator, the comprehensive account: these are the talismans of a man who has stared at systemic death longer than most and has built, against it, a discipline that converts formless dread into legible structure. When the gas price and the freight index and the balance sheet line up in a single frame, the collapse acquires a shape, and a thing with a shape can be carried. Becker’s word for the work the hero system does is the vital lie, the necessary fiction that lets a man act in the face of what he cannot survive. Tooze’s vital lie is that the whole can be seen.

The value at the center is understanding, and here the frame opens onto its strangest country, because the word does not hold still. Understanding, for Tooze, means grasping the interconnected whole, the way energy bleeds into finance and finance into geopolitics and all of it into the administrative capacity of states. The whole is the unit. A man who has understood is a man who has refused the parochial, who has seen the board entire while smaller minds counted their own corner. That is his immortality bid: to be the one who saw it all and wrote it down before it fell.

Carry the same word into other rooms and it changes shape in the mouth.

On a macro desk in Greenwich a portfolio manager runs two screens and a phone wedged on his shoulder. He has read Crashed. He liked it. He says so while he works. “Tooze gets the plumbing,” he says, and clicks. “But understanding is the trade or it’s a hobby. If I can’t express it in a position by the close, I didn’t understand anything, I read a book.” For him understanding means an edge that prints, a view the market has not yet priced, comprehension cashed before it decays. The whole system is wallpaper. The next eight ticks are the world. His hero system rewards the man who was right with money, and the money is the proof he was here.

In a storefront church off a ring road in Lagos a pastor leans into the second hour of a Sunday. He has heard of the polycrisis. He does not need the chart. Understanding comes down, it is given, the Spirit opens what study only circles. “The professor counts the harvest and the storm,” he tells the room, and the room answers him. “God sends the harvest and the storm. To know the world and not know Him is to know nothing and call it everything.” For the pastor comprehension that does not end in salvation is the cleverest form of vanity, a man cataloguing the flood while the ark pulls away. His immortality is not symbolic. It is promised, and it is forever, and the archive cannot touch it.

In a meditation hall a Sōtō teacher hears the project described and almost smiles. To him the dashboard is the disease wearing the mask of the cure. The hunger to comprehend the whole, to hold catastrophe at a readable distance, is the grasping self refusing the one fact it most needs to accept. “You want to understand the collapse,” he says. “The collapse is that everything you are holding will be taken. Understand that and put the charts down.” Where Becker says man builds the hero system to deny death, the teacher says the building is the suffering, and understanding means the release of the grip, not its perfection. He stands the whole frame on its head. Tooze’s cure is, to him, the sickness named.

In a trauma bay a surgeon has thirty seconds and a body that is losing pressure. She has no time for the interconnected whole. Understanding is the bleed she can find and the bleed she cannot, the airway, the next decision, the actionable now stripped of everything that does not move her hands. “Tell me what’s killing him in front of me,” she says to the resident reaching for a fuller picture. “The system can wait. The man can’t.” Her hero system honors the save, the one life held back from the edge by a clean cut, and the global frame that thrills the historian reads, on the floor, as a luxury of people who are not bleeding.

A theoretical physicist is gentler and more dismissive at once. He grants that Tooze knows an enormous number of true things. He withholds the word understanding all the same. To understand, in his system, is to reduce, to find the law beneath the cases, the equation that makes the particulars fall out as consequences. A historian who assembles ten thousand facts into a rich account has, by his lights, described, not understood. The old jibe runs through his mind, that everything outside physics is the collecting of stamps. He means no insult. He means that comprehension, for him, lives at the level of the principle, and that the human aggregate is too dirty to yield one.

These are five rooms. There are more, and one could go on: the trade unionist for whom understanding is solidarity tested at the picket, the diplomat for whom it is the read of the man across the table, the farmer for whom it is the soil and the season and the price at the gate while the global figure is noise. Becker’s point survives all of them. The same word names a different transcendence in each, because each hero system fixes a different thing as the doorway out of the grave. Tooze’s “understanding” is not larger or truer than the trader’s or the pastor’s. It is the one his hero system consecrates, and it carries his terror the way theirs carry theirs.

Turn the lens back on the man. The historian who studies systemic death at closest range may be the one who needs his project most. The dashboard does for Tooze what the doctrine does for the pastor and the position does for the trader. It is the work that lets a creature who knows he will end feel that he counts, that he is not merely swept off in the next deluge but the one who named the deluge while it ran. Comprehension at the scale of systems is a large ambition for symbolic immortality, large enough to be mistaken for selflessness, which is part of why it works. Becker would call the chart the fetish and the comprehensive account the causa sui project, the bid to be the author of one’s own meaning against a universe that grants none.

The cost is the blind spot. A man who converts dread into structure comes to trust the structure, and the trust hides the part of the world that no indicator catches, the contingent, the stupid, the human act that no balance sheet sees coming. The vital lie that the whole can be seen is the lie that the hero cannot examine without dissolving the thing that holds him up. He studies everyone’s hero system but his own. The dashboard stays lit. The next morning’s numbers land, and he reads the body of the world for the break in the line, and the reading holds the collapse, one more day, at a readable distance.

What the frame shows is the dread under the discipline and the kinship between this hero and the others he would never compare himself to. What it cannot show is whether the account is true. A man may build his immortality project out of correct propositions. The terror that drives him to assemble them says nothing about whether they describe the world. That question belongs to a different room than this one.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

Turn Tooze toward the polycrisis and the decarbonization, and the tone shifts from explanation to a quieter hope. The energy transition, he argues, demands new forms of coordination among states, financial institutions, corporations, and international bodies. The interconnection must be grasped whole, the silos broken, the scale of the needed investment understood across the boundaries that keep finance from climate and climate from geopolitics. Hear the structure of the claim. The transition stalls because the players have not yet comprehended the interconnection, and comprehension, followed by coordination, opens the road. That is the misunderstanding myth in a materialist register. The trouble has moved from the citizen’s head, where Tooze refuses to put it, to a coordination failure among elites, which is the same animal in a better suit. Once again a problem turns out to be a thing people have failed to understand, and once again the man who understands it stands ready to help.

Pinsof’s blade goes in here. The transition does not stall because petrostates, incumbent firms, exposed workers, and coal-burning electorates fail to understand the interconnected whole. They understand their incentives well. The Gulf producer knows what the barrel is worth and what a stranded asset costs him. The exporting power knows that controlling the supply chain for the transition is a lever over rivals, not a contribution to a shared future. The voter in a heating town knows which party promises to keep his job and his fuel cheap, and he is not confused about it. No one in this picture waits for a chart that shows how finance bleeds into carbon. They pursue goals the present arrangement serves, and the persistence of the carbon economy is the visible shape of many savvy players getting much of what they actually want. Comprehension does not dissolve a conflict of interest. It describes one. Stupidity, where it appears, is strategic. The man who claims he cannot understand the case for the transition is the man whose paycheck depends on not understanding it, and his refusal is the smartest move on his board.

Pinsof reads the gap between stated motives and actual motives the way he reads a corporate mission statement set against a profit line: a firm that speaks of nurturing the human spirit while it maximizes earnings is not confused about its purpose, and neither are the players in Tooze’s transition. Their stated goals, sustainability and cooperation and a livable future, sit beside their actual goals, advantage and rents and cheap power, and the gap between the two looks like a misunderstanding only to the man who takes the stated goals at face value. The intellectual mistakes the mission statement for the motive. He sees people falling short of what they say they want and concludes they have failed to understand, when they have understood all along and wanted something else.

Why does a materialist this careful keep reaching for the hopeful version? Because the myth is the story that keeps his vocation alive. If the carbon economy persists not from confusion but from a conflict of interest that no amount of comprehension can talk away, then the comprehending historian has nothing to offer the problem but a description of it. The alternative to the myth is the bracing conclusion Pinsof presses on anyone who studies a problem this thoroughly. You can map the polycrisis to the last molecule. You can chart the swap lines, the freight indices, the carbon budgets, the balance sheets, and trace each thread into the next. When you finish you will understand the hole with a completeness no one has reached before, and you will still be in the hole, because the hole is not a misunderstanding. The world Tooze chronicles does not want to be saved by a newsletter, and the proof is that it subscribes to the newsletter and changes nothing. Not every problem has a solution. The primary cause of the trouble is not bad beliefs. It is the motives the beliefs serve, and the motives are working as designed.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

Read Tooze forward, toward the polycrisis and the energy transition, and the materialist who documented the defeat of liberal internationalism begins to hope for its revival under a new name. The transition, he argues, calls for coordination among states, financial institutions, corporations, and international bodies, for the breaking of silos and the grasping of the interconnected whole. The Federal Reserve, in his account of 2008, already acts as a central bank for much of the planet, and the suggestion runs that this reach prefigures something larger, a managed globalism adequate to crises that respect no border. Behind the analysis sits a subject Mearsheimer says does not exist: a global we, a humanity capable of recognizing a shared predicament and coordinating against it. The carbon problem, in Tooze’s forward gaze, becomes a coordination problem, a thing that better comprehension and better institutions might solve.

Mearsheimer’s anthropology denies the subject the hope requires. There is no humanity that coordinates. There are great powers that weaponize the supply chains of the transition, petrostates that defend the barrel, electorates socialized into national loyalties that no chart of interconnection touches, and a security competition under anarchy that turns every shared problem into an arena of relative advantage. The same forces that broke the order in The Deluge are not a contingency of the 1920s. On Mearsheimer’s account they are the permanent condition, because they grow from what man is. The historian who wrote the defeat of the universal order reaches, a century on, for its next attempt, and the anthropology says the next attempt fails for the reason the last one did.

Why does a man this attentive to power keep the hope? Here Mearsheimer’s frame turns on Tooze. Reason is the least of the three forces that form a man’s preferences. Socialization and innate sentiment do the heavy work, and they do it early. Tooze grew up between Britain and Germany, the son of a scientist, the grandson of social researchers, trained at Cambridge and the LSE, formed inside the transatlantic progressive intelligentsia and the New Left Review milieu, settled across chairs in two countries, and naturalized as an American in his late fifties. That is a post-national formation. The value infusion he received was the infusion of the cosmopolitan clerisy, the class that moves between capitals and reads the world as a single board because its own life is lived on a single board. To that class the global we feels real, not because reason demonstrates it, but because socialization installed it before reason arrived. Mearsheimer would say the man’s anthropology is his autobiography. The reader with no single nation reads nations as obstacles to be coordinated away, and mistakes his own mobility for the human condition.

This is the liberal delusion in its economic dress. Mearsheimer aims his book at the political liberal who universalizes rights and so crusades abroad. Tooze universalizes the system. He treats the interconnected world economy as the frame inside which a rational humanity could, with enough comprehension, act as one. The crusading impulse becomes a managerial one, the dream of a coordinated transition standing where the dream of spreading democracy once stood, and both dreams rest on the same missing subject. The man does not pursue liberal hegemony. He pursues liberal coordination. The anthropology defeats them on the same ground.

Mearsheimer says the surest path for an individual is embeddedness in a group and loyalty to its members, and that a man’s reasoning serves the group that formed him before it serves the truth. Tooze is embedded. His audience is the progressive transatlantic intelligentsia, and his work returns the conclusions that tribe holds dear: more state, a central bank that backstops the world, coordinated public investment, a politics of global responsibility against national parochialism. The man who insists on power everywhere else describes his own coalition as the party of comprehension and its rivals, the nationalists and the parochials who cannot see the whole board, as the party of confusion. Mearsheimer would not call this dishonest. He would call it socialization working as designed. The reason serves the tribe. The cosmopolitan clerisy is a tribe like any other, and its universalism is its tribal banner, the flag it carries into its own competition for status and the coercive instruments of the state.

Alliance Theory

Adam Tooze presents a worldview built from the archive. Read it forward and it looks like a philosophy: a materialist who follows energy, finance, and state capacity wherever the evidence runs, and arrives at his politics because the record forced him there. Alliance Theory tells you to read it backward. In “Strange Bedfellows,” Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton argue that political belief systems do not grow from abstract values or from a cool reading of the world. They grow from alliance structures. A man supports the principles that mobilize support for his allies and damn his rivals, and the thread that ties his beliefs together is not a logic but a roster. To test the theory on Tooze you do not ask whether his materialism is true. You ask whom it serves, and you watch for the places where the same cold eye that he turns on his rivals goes soft when it reaches his friends.

Start with the roster the paper hands you. The contemporary American alliance structure split the upper class along a status rivalry, the highly educated knowledge workers on one side, journalists and academics and the credentialed expert, and the business elite on the other, the corporate executive and the man whose power runs through capital rather than through a university. The knowledge-worker faction landed inside the progressive super-alliance. Tooze sits at the center of that faction. He is the academic who became a public analyst, the historian read by the people who staff the institutions, the man whose authority runs through comprehension and the chair and the byline. Alliance Theory predicts that his belief system will track the interests of that faction against its rival, and that the tracking will hide behind the language of evidence.

Watch the attributional bias first. The paper describes a self-serving pattern in which a man attributes his allies’ advantages to internal causes, talent and merit and effort, and his rivals’ advantages to external causes, luck and rent and circumstance. Tooze the materialist runs this pattern at the scale of classes. When the powerful actor is the business elite, the corporate executive, the hedge fund, the Wall Street operator, the financier, the materialism turns cold and indicting. Their power is structural, extractive, a function of the dollar system and deregulation and rent. When the powerful actor is his own faction, the central banker, the technocrat, the expert manager, the administrative state, the same materialism softens into appreciation. The Federal Reserve pushing dollars through the world in 2008 reads, in his account, as the responsible adults stepping in, an improvisation by people who understood. The business class holds power it did not earn. The knowledge class holds authority it did. Same structural lens, applied to two factions, and it returns the verdict each faction would write about itself.

That asymmetry is the signature, because a consistent materialist would turn the lens on his own side. He would ask what the knowledge-worker faction has at stake in a politics that elevates the credentialed analyst over the vulgar businessman, what the expert class gains from a world managed by experts, what the central banker’s prestige does for the standing of the men who write admiringly about central bankers. Tooze rarely asks. His materialism is a weapon pointed outward, and it falls quiet when it reaches the interests of the people who share his allegiances. Alliance Theory predicts the silence. The propagandistic biases support allies and attack rivals, and a man’s own coalition is the one structure his analysis will not reduce to interest.

The perpetrator and victim biases run the same way. The paper describes how a partisan rationalizes the transgressions of his allies and embellishes the grievances of those his allies protect. Tooze refines the popular story of 2008, which blamed greedy bankers, into a story about structure, and the refinement is real work. But notice which actors the structural story exonerates and which it indicts. The market, the deregulators, the business-class arrangement carry the failure. The regulators and the central bankers, his own faction, emerge as the ones who saw clearly and acted. The crisis becomes a morality play with the technocrat as the figure who understood and the financier as the figure who broke it, and the casting follows the alliance line. When austerity does damage he names the damage sharply, because austerity is his coalition’s rival policy. When state intervention does damage he reaches for mitigating circumstances, because the expansive state is his coalition’s instrument. A transgression by an ally finds its context. A transgression by a rival finds its verdict.

The strange bedfellows give the game away. Tooze blends the analysis of the New Left Review milieu, which damns capital, with the policy world of the central bank and the European institution and the climate-finance summit, which rescues capital. A purist on the left would call the Fed’s rescue of the banking system what it was, a salvage operation for the owners of capital, and condemn it. Tooze praises it as the system’s salvation. The two positions do not cohere as philosophy. Hostility to Wall Street and admiration for the institution that exists to save Wall Street belong to no single doctrine. They cohere as an alliance. The cosmopolitan progressive intelligentsia is anti-business-elite and pro-technocratic-state at once, and the contradiction Tooze carries is not a flaw in his thinking but the fingerprint of the coalition he speaks for. The paper’s whole point is that you should expect this. Belief systems are patchworks stitched from the loyalties of complex alliances.

Now the values, the part Tooze would defend hardest. He speaks of comprehension, the public interest, global responsibility, the duty to take interconnection seriously while smaller minds count their corners. Alliance Theory does not call these lies. It calls them banners. The paper argues that moral claims in politics serve to draw third parties to one’s side and to signal loyalty to one’s allies, and that the most engaged partisans wave the brightest flags. Tooze’s sober, responsible, cosmopolitan register is the loyalty signal of the knowledge-worker clerisy, the vocabulary that tells his allies he is one of them and tells the uncommitted that his side is the side of the serious and the decent. The rival appears, in this vocabulary, as the parochial, the vulgar, the man who cannot see the whole board. Casting the rival as small and oneself as responsible is the oldest propaganda there is, and the archive lends it the authority that the bare claim could not earn on its own.

His use of inequality runs the same course. The paper shows that egalitarianism is not a stable orientation a man carries into every case but a flexible tactic he reaches for when it helps his allies. Tooze deploys the language of exploitation and unfair advantage against the business class and against austerity, where it mobilizes support for his coalition’s disadvantaged allies, the precariat, the global south, the climate-exposed. His actual program, technocratic management and central-bank backstops and coordinated public investment, entrenches the authority of his own credentialed faction. The egalitarian rhetoric serves the allies. The policy serves the analyst’s class. Allegiance comes first, and the equality talk arrives afterward as the tactic that dresses it.

The theory offers a test, and the test is the discipline that keeps this from being a slur. Substitute the group and hold the structure fixed. Take a single fact, great power held by a small number of actors who shape the system to their advantage, and watch Tooze’s reading move with the identity of the actor. When the actor is the financier or the corporate chief or the petrostate, the reading is indictment. When the actor is the Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank or the expert manager, the reading is appreciation of capacity. The power is the same. The structural fact is the same. Only the allegiance changes, and the verdict changes with it. That is the prediction Alliance Theory makes, and Tooze’s work confirms it case by case.

What the frame takes from him is the self-image, the picture of a man whose politics fell out of the archive rather than out of his roster of friends and rivals. The materialism is real. It is also selective, and the selection follows the alliance line with a fidelity the man does not see, because the one power his analysis never reduces to interest is the power of the class that reads him.

Is he a Marxist?

Tooze calls himself no orthodox Marxist, and the disavowal is accurate. So the question is what work the label does when people attach it to him, and the answer splits into a few different things that get bundled under one word.
In the first sense, calling him a Marxist is a claim about method. He explains the world from its material base. Power rests on energy, finance, production, and the administrative capacity of states, and ideology and diplomacy run downstream of that base. This is historical materialism as a way of reading history, and on this count the label fits. But the method is not the property of Marxists alone. Weberians, realists, and economic historians of no left commitment work the same ground. And Tooze’s version is eclectic. He gives weight to geopolitics, central banking, and state administration that a stricter Marxism treats as secondary to the relations of production. He uses Marx as one tool beside Keynes, Weber, and Polanyi, not as the master key.
In the second sense, the doctrinal one, he holds almost none of it. He does not write in terms of surplus value or the labor theory of value. He does not cast the working class as the agent of history. He does not hold the stagist march toward communism. He does not predict or call for revolution. Strip Marxism down to its distinctive content and little of it survives in his pages. What survives is the materialist disposition and the seriousness about capital, which is the part Marx shares with anyone who studies money and power closely.
In the third sense, the label is an address rather than a creed. It tells you where he stands in the room, whom he reads, whom he argues with, which venues print him. He lives near the New Left Review world and treats its writers as serious interlocutors. To his admirers on the left the word is a credential. To his critics on the right it is an indictment. Either way it places him more than it describes him, and it tells you as much about the speaker as about Tooze.
A Marxist wants capitalism to end. Tooze wants it stabilized and steered. His enthusiasm for the Federal Reserve pushing dollars through the world in 2008, his case for fiscal expansion, his hope for a coordinated green transition managed by states and central banks, all of it aims at saving the system and improving its management. To a Marxist the rescue of the banks is the propping up of the thing that should fall. Tooze reads it as competent crisis management by people who understood the stakes. That gap is the whole difference between Marxism and the reformist left liberalism he practices.
So what does it mean that Tooze is a Marxist? Mostly it means he is a materialist who admires Marx as the great analyst of capitalism’s restlessness and keeps the method while discarding the value theory, the revolutionary subject, and the goal. The honest term is the older French one, marxisant: Marx-inflected, conversant with the tradition, useful to it and used by it, and not a Marxist in any sense Marx would recognize. The man wants to run capitalism well. That is the one ambition his materialism never turns its cold eye on, and it is the ambition that settles the question.

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Quinn Slobodian: Historian of How Capitalism Is Governed

Posted on June 20, 2026 by Luke Ford

Quinn Slobodian (b. 1978), a Canadian intellectual historian, has remade the study of neoliberalism, globalization, international economic governance, and the contemporary right, and over the past decade he has become an influential historian of political economy writing in English. His central claim cuts against the familiar picture of neoliberalism as a creed of deregulation and laissez-faire. Neoliberal thinkers, he argues, cared above all about building legal and institutional orders that could shield markets from democratic pressure. Across several books he reconstructs the intellectual architecture of globalization and shows how many of the institutions that govern the modern world grew out of efforts to insulate property, investment, and commerce from political interference.

He was born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1978, and his childhood ranged across continents. His father practiced medicine, and the family moved often. After Vancouver Island they relocated to Lesotho in southern Africa in 1984, then to Vanuatu in the South Pacific in 1992, before returning to Canada in 1993. These years placed him among postcolonial societies, international development projects, and the realities of global inequality while he was still young. The themes that later organize his scholarship, decolonization, international institutions, sovereignty, and global economic governance, trace in part to this early life beyond North America.

Slobodian studied at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and took a bachelor’s degree in history in 2000. He then entered graduate school at New York University and completed his Ph.D. in history in 2008 under the historian Molly Nolan. His training joined intellectual history, international history, and political economy. From the start he resisted the national frame and preferred to follow ideas, institutions, and networks across borders.

After the doctorate he joined the faculty at Wellesley College. Over more than fifteen years he became a prominent scholar there and took the title of Marion Butler McLean Professor of the History of Ideas in 2021. In January 2024 he moved to Boston University as Professor of International History in the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies.

Alongside these appointments he held a wide range of fellowships and visiting posts. He served as a Residential Fellow at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs in 2017 and 2018. He has held positions at Harvard University, Brown University, Harvard Business School, the Free University of Berlin, Chatham House in London, and Roma Tre University in Italy. These affiliations mark both the interdisciplinary reach of his work and the broad audience it draws among historians, economists, political scientists, and legal scholars.

His influence runs past his own writing. From 2020 to 2024 he served as co-editor of Contemporary European History, a leading journal in the field. He also co-directs the History and Political Economy Project, which brings historians into conversation with economists and political scientists. Through these roles he has helped shape a generation of scholarship on capitalism, globalization, and economic governance.

Slobodian first drew wide scholarly notice with Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (2012). The book examines how anti-colonial movements, liberation struggles, and Third World politics shaped political life inside West Germany. Rather than cast Europe as the sole engine of postwar history, he shows how actors from Africa, Asia, and Latin America shaped European argument. The work reflects his long interest in reading European history through a global lens.

His international standing rests on Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2018), which won the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize and became an influential work on neoliberalism.

At the center of Globalists sits his concept of the Geneva School. Historians, he argues, have given too much attention to the Chicago School of Milton Friedman (1912-2006) or the Austrian School of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992). He identifies instead a transnational tradition centered in Geneva and tied to institutions such as the League of Nations, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and later global economic bodies. Hayek, Mises, Wilhelm Röpke (1899-1966), and their allies cared less about domestic economic policy than about building a legal order for the world economy.

The Geneva School, on his account, faced a historical problem: the collapse of European empires and the rise of newly sovereign nation-states. Neoliberal thinkers feared that democratic governments might nationalize industry, restrict foreign investment, expropriate property, devalue currency, or raise barriers to trade. Rather than abolish government, they sought supranational institutions that could constrain it.

A central distinction in his work separates imperium from dominium. Imperium names the sphere of political sovereignty, territorial rule, and state authority. Dominium names the sphere of property rights, contracts, and market relations. Many neoliberals, he argues, accepted the end of formal empire so long as a global order of dominium survived. States might keep political sovereignty, yet legal and institutional structures protecting capital, investment, and property across borders would hold them in check.

This reading leads him to dispute the common assumption that neoliberalism wants weak government. Neoliberal thinkers, he argues, wanted strong institutions that could protect markets from political interference. He describes the process with terms such as encasement, encirclement, and immunization. Markets were to sit enclosed within protective legal structures and immunized against democratic demands for redistribution, regulation, or economic nationalism. They aimed to redesign governance rather than remove it.

Globalists also helped redefine method in the field. Rather than lean on published books and articles, Slobodian worked in archival collections that intellectual historians had often passed over. He drew on the records of the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris, the League of Nations in Geneva, the Mont Pelerin Society, and personal papers held at the Hoover Institution and elsewhere. By tracing correspondence among economists, lawyers, policymakers, and international officials, he showed how abstract ideas settled into treaties, trade agreements, and international organizations.

After the success of Globalists, Slobodian widened his agenda through several edited volumes: Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World (2015), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (2020, with Dieter Plehwe and Philip Mirowski (b. 1951)), and Market Civilizations: Neoliberals East and South (2020, with Plehwe). These books carried the study of neoliberalism beyond its older focus on Britain and the United States and stressed its global growth.

His next monograph, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (2023), examined efforts to break political authority into special economic zones, offshore jurisdictions, charter cities, tax havens, and semi-sovereign enclaves. Many market radicals, he argues, came to see democracy as a threat to economic freedom. Rather than reform democratic institutions, they sought to carve out spaces beyond democratic control. The book ranges across Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, seasteading projects, and contemporary charter-city proposals.

Where Globalists tracked authority moving upward toward supranational institutions, Crack-Up Capitalism tracked it breaking downward into fragments. Together the two books map complementary strategies for protecting markets: lift authority up to international bodies, or splinter it into smaller units where capital holds greater leverage.

In Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (2025), Slobodian turned to the tie between neoliberalism and the contemporary far right. The book disputes the popular belief that right-wing populism amounts to a revolt against neoliberalism. Important strands of present-day reactionary politics, he argues, grew from within neoliberal and libertarian traditions.

Much of the book traces what one might call an anarcho-capitalist mutation. Thinkers such as Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) and Hans-Hermann Hoppe (b. 1949) reworked the earlier neoliberal project. Where Hayek and his generation often sought to guard markets through international institutions, later libertarians grew suspicious of those institutions and feared that global bodies might fall under democratic or progressive control.

Some libertarian thinkers therefore embraced secession, micro-states, gated jurisdictions, private governance, and forms of cultural conservatism meant to stabilize property relations. Slobodian shows how claims about race, intelligence, immigration, cultural hierarchy, and civilizational decline braided together with market radicalism in certain circles. He argues for strong continuities between some libertarian traditions and modern ethnonationalist politics, while stopping short of the claim that neoliberalism produced the far right on its own. The book drew wide public attention and confirmed his standing as a leading interpreter of the intellectual roots of contemporary right-wing movements.

Across his career Slobodian stands apart from historians who treat ideas as self-contained philosophical systems. His work is institutional in character. He asks not only what thinkers believed but how they tried to turn belief into organizations, treaties, courts, constitutions, and international regimes. This attention to implementation marks him off from more textual intellectual historians.

His scholarship also carries the stamp of global history. He treats political ideas less as products of single nations than as the outcome of exchange among intellectuals, policymakers, and institutions across continents. Decolonization, globalization, and international governance run through all of it.

Beyond the academy he has become a prominent public intellectual. He writes for The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, The New Statesman, and other major outlets. His essays take up neoliberalism, globalization, technology, populism, libertarianism, and democratic decline, and in recent years he has turned increasing attention to the meeting point of technological power, billionaire influence, and governance.

Grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation have supported his work. By the mid-2020s he had become a much-cited historian of political economy in the English-speaking world.

Taken together, his books form a sustained effort to explain how modern capitalism is governed. He portrays markets as built legal and political orders rather than natural or spontaneous phenomena. From the collapse of empire to the rise of globalization, from offshore finance to charter cities, from neoliberal internationalism to libertarian ethnonationalism, his scholarship tracks the continuing effort to shield economic life from democratic control. Whether a reader accepts or rejects his conclusions, Slobodian has reshaped debate about neoliberalism, sovereignty, and the future of the global economic order.

Slobodian’s Field

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) treats an intellectual life as a series of moves within a structured space of positions. A field holds its own stakes, its own currencies, and its own gatekeepers. A scholar rises by gathering the capital the field recognizes and by taking the positions its structure leaves open. Read this way, Quinn Slobodian’s career shows the shape of a field strategy carried through with skill, and his chosen subject turns back on him in a way that rewards Bourdieu’s method.

Begin with trajectory, since habitus comes from a path. A physician’s son carried from Vancouver Island to Lesotho to Vanuatu and back acquires a set of dispositions the national historian rarely shares. The world arrives early as a single connected place, and the nation looks like a small container. When Slobodian later refuses the national frame and follows ideas across borders, he draws on a disposition laid down young, and he turns that disposition into a position. Against a historiography organized by country, the global lens marks him off. Distinction, in Bourdieu’s sense, begins as difference from rivals, and the transnational method supplies it.

The founding move comes with a name. Slobodian calls a cluster of thinkers the Geneva School and sets it beside the Chicago School of Friedman and the Austrian School of Mises and Hayek. The older schools sit consecrated, worked over by many hands. Geneva he constitutes himself. To name a thing is to claim the power to impose a vision and a division on the world, and the man who names an object holds the first claim on the authority to interpret it. He does not enter a crowded position. He builds one and occupies it alone. Whoever wants to argue about the Geneva School argues on ground Slobodian cleared.

Around that move he accumulates the capital a field rewards. The monographs carry cultural capital. The archives at the International Chamber of Commerce, the League of Nations, the Mont Pelerin Society, and the Hoover Institution supply the rare material that marks serious labor and raises the cost of disagreement. The edited volumes with Dieter Plehwe and Philip Mirowski bring social capital and borrow the consecration of established names. The co-editorship of a leading journal and the founding of the History and Political Economy Project place him at a node where he confers legitimacy on others. The convener gains a capital above the ordinary kind, the power to consecrate, and that power compounds.

The field’s gatekeepers then return their verdict in symbolic capital: the George Louis Beer Prize, the Guggenheim, grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies, a residential fellowship at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center, a named chair at Wellesley, and a professorship in international history at Boston University. Each is a stamp from an authorized hand. The named chair crystallizes the process. The field tells the man that he embodies its values, and the title travels with him.

Slobodian also plays at two poles at once, and Bourdieu studies this game in Homo Academicus and The Rules of Art. The autonomous pole judges work by the field’s internal standards, the archive and the monograph and the peer. The heteronomous pole answers to demand from outside, from the market and the press and politics. Slobodian writes for The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, the Financial Times, and The Atlantic, and the traffic runs both directions. Academic standing lends weight to the essay, and the essay lends visibility to the scholar. The resonance of his thesis in the wider argument about markets and democracy rewards a particular position-taking from outside the discipline, and that outside reward shapes a career no less than the inside one. Bourdieu marks the risk in the bargain. The more the journalistic field rewards a scholar, the more it pulls the work toward its own tempo and its own questions.

The largest stake sits in the word neoliberalism. The term is a classification, and classification is a struggle. Whoever fixes the legitimate sense of neoliberalism controls a currency that spends across history, political economy, journalism, and activism at once. Slobodian’s redefinition does the work. Neoliberalism stops meaning deregulation and starts meaning encasement, the construction of legal armor around markets. Imperium and dominium give the redefinition a portable shape. He imposes a vision and a division on a contested object, and the field begins to see through his categories.

A heresy that succeeds becomes an orthodoxy. Slobodian enters by correcting a settled belief, the picture of neoliberalism as a creed of weak government and free markets. The heretic gains by exposing the doxa and naming what the orthodox missed. Yet the prizes and the citations convert the heresy into the new received view. Students now reach for encasement and the Geneva School as the obvious starting point. The challenger becomes the authority he challenged, and the position he cleared fills with followers who take it for the natural order.

Slobodian’s body of work studies how a set of thinkers built institutions, treaties, journals, and societies to encase markets and shield them from democratic pressure. He traces the Mont Pelerin Society as a machine for reproducing a position. Run the same lens over the man who wrote the books. He too builds institutions, a project and a journal and a network, to encase a position and shield a body of work, and to reproduce a way of seeing across a generation of students. The historian of durable orders constructs a durable order inside his own field. Bourdieu calls this the common condition of the player who refuses to see the game while playing it well, and he grants the rare scholar a further distinction for naming his own stakes out loud.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

Slobodian depends on the misunderstanding myth. Look at the books in a row. Globalists tells you that you misunderstood neoliberalism, that it never meant deregulation, that the neoliberals wanted strong institutions and legal armor around markets. Crack-Up Capitalism tells you that you misread the zone and the enclave, that these were attempts to escape the voter. Hayek’s Bastards tells you that you misunderstood right-wing populism, that it grew from neoliberalism rather than rebelled against it. Each book opens the same way. You had it wrong. Here is what was happening behind your back. The serial corrector.

The premise carries the heroism. If the trouble Slobodian describes, markets walled off from majorities, comes from a public that failed to grasp what was done to it, then the historian who lays the architecture bare performs a service close to rescue. The archives become consciousness-raising. See the cage and you might break it.

Pinsof turns the premise over. There was no misunderstanding. Start with his rule that people understand what they have an incentive to understand. The neoliberals Slobodian studies understood their aim. They wanted property shielded from majorities, and they wrote it down in letters and treaties and society minutes, which is the only reason Slobodian can quote them at such length. His evidence is their candor. The men in Geneva were not confused about what they built.

Nor were the publics who lived under the result. A voter has scant incentive to trace a legal order assembled in Geneva across decades, and tracing it would change nothing in his week. He understood neoliberalism the way he needed to and spent his attention elsewhere. Call that ignorance if you like. Pinsof calls it strategy. Stupidity is usually strategic, and the loose talk of deregulation served the people who talked that way well enough.

If markets constrain democracy, the cause is that men with the means wanted them to and worked to make it so, and not that the rest of us flunked a reading test. Better understanding leaves the motive untouched. You can hand every voter an account of imperium and dominium, and the men who built the order keep their reasons for building it, and the voter keeps his reasons for looking away.

Slobodian’s work carries the quiet hope that exposure leads somewhere, that a public shown the hidden order can contest it. Pinsof denies the step. You can study the hole you are stuck in to the last handful of dirt and remain at the bottom. The understanding was never the missing piece. The voters who would have to act gain nothing by acting, and the powerful who built the order lose everything by dismantling it, and no monograph rearranges that arithmetic. The world Slobodian maps does not want to be saved, and it would not be saved by being understood.

What if the capitalists understood what they were doing? Slobodian answers yes for his villains. His argument credits the neoliberals with clear sight and firm intent, which means he has conceded half of Pinsof’s case before it starts. He keeps the misunderstanding only for the audience, the public that supposedly mistook the project for laissez-faire. What if the cause is bad motives rather than bad beliefs? Then the misunderstanding frame adds nothing to the history except a hero, the man who arrives to clear up a confusion.

Slobodian found a misunderstanding, corrected it three times, and made himself the one who understands. His neoliberals understood. His publics understood as much as they cared to. The trouble he describes was never confusion in the first place. The only misunderstanding is that there has been a misunderstanding.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

The order Slobodian anatomizes belongs to liberalism’s family. The Geneva School wanted a global legal frame that would lift the market above the nation and shield property and contract from the democratic majority. Dominium over imperium. Treaties and courts above the voter. That is reason and law set against the social group, the cosmopolitan instrument built to discipline the tribal one. Mearsheimer’s anthropology says the bet is a losing one. Nationalism is the strongest political faith on earth, stronger than any creed of rights or any architecture of markets, because it runs on socialization and innate sentiment rather than on argument. A treaty is a product of reason. A nation is taught in the cradle. When the two collide the cradle wins.

Read Slobodian’s three books in order and the contest shows through his own evidence. Globalists is the dream of encasement, reason building the cage. Crack-Up Capitalism is the move to fragment sovereignty, the same flight from the national majority by other means. Hayek’s Bastards is the eruption, ethnonationalism rising out of the libertarian tradition that meant to transcend the nation. Slobodian reads the last as a kinship inside libertarianism, a hidden tie between market radicalism and the racial right. Mearsheimer reads it as the return of the repressed. The globalist project tried to suppress the social nature of man, and the social nature of man came back as nationalism. The bastards are not a scandal in need of a villain. They are what Mearsheimer predicts when a cosmopolitan order forgets that people are tribal to the bone.

Slobodian gives you clever men in Geneva building a cage and a public that failed to notice. Mearsheimer gives you a contest between two forces of unequal strength. On one side the reason of jurists and economists, the encasement, the immunization. On the other the socialization and sentiment of national peoples, the oldest and deepest pull in political life. The cage frays not because a historian exposed it but because the weaker force was always going to lose to the stronger. Slobodian supplies the law and the institutions. Mearsheimer supplies the reason they never held.

Reason is the weakest of the three drivers for the scholar as much as for the voter. Slobodian’s frame treats the nation as a small container to see past and prizes the transnational view as the clear one. Where does that disposition come from? Not from reason alone. A man carried as a boy from Vancouver Island to Lesotho to Vanuatu, schooled in the cosmopolitan precincts of the American university, takes on a value infusion no less than the nationalist who gets his at the village fair. The globalist optic is a socialization, the creed of a particular group, the transnational professoriate, with its own attachments and its own loyalties. Mearsheimer’s man is tribal, and the cosmopolitan intellectual has a tribe too. He looks past the nation because his people taught him to, not because reason compelled it.

So if Mearsheimer is right, Slobodian wrote the natural history of a delusion while standing inside a cousin of it. He chronicled the cosmopolitan dream of walling the market off from the people, and the dream broke for the reason Mearsheimer gives for every such dream. The people are not atoms. They are a tribe, and the tribe outlasts the treaty. The historian who sees past the nation belongs to the one group that believes the nation can be seen past, and that belief is a socialization like any other.

Alliance Theory

Alliance Theory holds that a political belief system is not a philosophy built from values like equality or liberty. It is a patchwork of justifications, grievances, and attributions assembled to support a coalition’s allies and damage its rivals. The values come second, as banners. The alliance comes first. David Pinsof and his coauthors add that elites are no more coherent than the masses. They are better attuned to the contingent alliances of their time, and their training lets them dress the coalition’s narrative in finer cloth. Read Quinn Slobodian through this lens and the body of work looks less like a discovery about capitalism and more like the learned propaganda of a coalition.

Begin with the map. Slobodian’s allies and rivals sit on the page once you look for them. The allies are the democratic public, organized labor, the postcolonial states of the global South, and the redistributive arm of government. The rivals are capital, the neoliberal economists, the libertarians, and the contemporary right. His sentences carry the allegiance. Markets get encased, immunized, shielded from the people, walled off. Democracy gets constrained, hemmed in, denied. The first set of verbs names a perpetrator. The second names a victim. Alliance Theory predicts the pairing before you open the book.

Transitivity comes next, the rule that the enemy of my ally is my enemy and that we favor allies who share our rivals. Slobodian’s coalition counts the libertarian as a rival and the ethnonationalist as a rival. Hayek’s Bastards binds the two into a single cluster. The book argues that market radicalism and the racial right share a lineage, that the gold cranks and the IQ obsessives grew from the same root as Hayek’s heirs. Alliance Theory reads the continuities he traces as the scholarly form of transitivity. Partisans fuse their rivals into one enemy, and a historian fuses them with footnotes. The claim wears caution. He does not say neoliberalism produced the far right, only that strong ties run between them, and the caution is the tool that lands the charge while keeping the hands clean.

Three propagandistic biases run through the corpus. The perpetrator bias falls on the rival. Slobodian grants the neoliberals clear intent and long foresight, men who knew what they wanted and built it on purpose. Their order is no accident of history but a contrivance, drawn up to defeat the voter. The victim bias falls on the ally. The subtitle of Crack-Up Capitalism names the dream of a world without democracy, which is competitive victimhood on behalf of the demos, the embellished grievance of the wronged party. The attributional bias recodes outcomes. A working global market becomes not a thing that emerged but a cage that someone welded shut. The rival’s advantage gets traced to scheming and design, never to merit or use. Alliance Theory names each move and expects all three.

Alliance Theory also insists that coalitions are historically contingent and need no deeper pattern. The pairing of libertarian economics with Christian fundamentalism in America came from a deal struck in the 1970s, not from philosophy. Slobodian does the reverse with his rivals. He reads the neoliberal coalition as a coherent project with a traceable logic, a Geneva School, an imperium and a dominium, a doctrine carried across decades by allied minds. He grants his rivals a designed machine. His own coalition’s strange bedfellows go unexamined. The defender of the global South sits beside the defender of the Western regulatory state. The friend of the demos recoils when the demos votes for borders. Alliance Theory expects this. We see our rivals’ beliefs as a system and our own as principle.

The banner over the whole project reads democracy. Alliance Theory treats a value of that kind as a flag run up to rally support, raised when it serves the allies and furled when it does not. Watch what happens when the demos votes the wrong way. The majorities who chose Brexit, who backed the populists, who number among the losers of globalization, do not count as democracy vindicated. In Hayek’s Bastards they turn into a pathology to explain, a contamination traced back to the libertarian root. The democracy Slobodian defends is the democracy that returns his coalition’s preferences. When the vote runs the other way it becomes manipulation or false consciousness. Pinsof’s coauthors found the same pattern with equality. Support for the value tracks whether the value benefits the allies. Support for democracy tracks the same way.

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Jamie Martin: Historian of Sovereignty, Empire, and the World Economy

Posted on June 20, 2026 by Luke Ford

Jamie Martin is an American historian of international political economy whose scholarship traces the origins of global economic governance to the imperial conflicts and economic crises of the early twentieth century. He holds a joint appointment as Assistant Professor of History and of Social Studies at Harvard University, where he teaches and advises in the history of international political economy, the world wars, and modern empire. His work draws together diplomatic history, economic history, intellectual history, and the history of international institutions, and it asks how governments, experts, and international bodies came to exercise authority over the domestic economic life of formally sovereign states.
Martin received his B.A. from Yale University in 2007 and an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge in 2008, and he completed his Ph.D. in History at Harvard University in 2016. Before returning to Harvard as a member of the faculty, he served as an assistant professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Department of History at Georgetown University. His training brought together international history, political thought, and economic history, and his writing treats markets, financial systems, and international organizations as political creations shaped by conflict, ideology, and contests over legitimacy rather than as neutral technical arrangements.
His reputation rests on his first book, The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance, published by Harvard University Press in 2022 and the recipient of several scholarly prizes. The book challenges the familiar account that modern global economic governance began at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944. Martin argues instead that the institutional forms later associated with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank took shape during the interwar decades, through experiments conducted by the League of Nations, the Bank for International Settlements, and related bodies. He follows the political conflicts these experiments provoked across a wide geography, from Weimar Germany and the Balkans to Nationalist China, colonial Malaya, the Chilean nitrate fields, and Wall Street.
At the center of the book stands a reinterpretation of the years between the two world wars. Martin shows that international organizations of the 1920s acquired powers far beyond consultation or coordination. They supervised national budgets, shaped central-bank policy, structured reconstruction loans, intervened in commodity markets, and attached conditions to the credit extended to borrowing governments. Through close study of the Austrian and Hungarian financial stabilization programs, he traces how international officials built forms of oversight that anticipated what later became IMF conditionality. A new model of governance followed, one where states that remained politically independent accepted substantial external supervision in exchange for financial assistance.
A central concern of his work is the distance between political independence and economic autonomy. Martin traces how techniques of debt control first developed within imperial settings, in places such as the Ottoman Empire and China, migrated into the supposedly sovereign states of postwar Europe. In his account, international governance altered the working meaning of sovereignty. A nation could keep its formal independence while surrendering much of its authority over fiscal and monetary policy to foreign experts and international institutions.
Martin pays close attention to how these organizations justified their authority. The League of Nations and bodies like it presented themselves as neutral, scientific, and technical. He shows that their decisions carried political priorities and reflected unequal distributions of power, and that the language of expertise often concealed imperial hierarchies and the asymmetry between creditor and debtor states. His analysis ranges across Europe, the Balkans, Latin America, China, colonial Southeast Asia, and the United States, and it places the institutions of global governance within a wider world ordered by empire and geopolitical inequality.
Where earlier histories cast international institutions chiefly as solutions to shared economic problems, Martin gives resistance a central place. Nationalists, anti-imperial movements, political radicals, and governments wary of foreign interference fought attempts at international supervision again and again. For Martin the history of global governance is a history of recurring disputes over legitimacy, accountability, democracy, and self-government. International authority emerged through conflict, and it stayed contested as it grew.
Beyond The Meddlers, Martin has published on the economic history of the world wars, the history of international institutions, the history of commodities, and the intellectual history of crisis. He examines how disruptions in trade, finance, transport, and production created pressure for new forms of international cooperation, and he writes about wartime mobilization, the management of shortages and surpluses, and the responses of policymakers to economic emergency. His historiographical essay “Globalizing the History of the First World War: Economic Approaches,” which appeared in The Historical Journal in 2022, surveys recent scholarship on the global economic side of the war and presses for closer attention to finance, inflation, commodity production, and the colonial economies outside Europe.
War as an occasion for institutional innovation runs throughout his scholarship. Rather than treat international governance as the fruit of idealistic visions of peace, Martin stresses the role of wartime necessity. His current book project examines the global economic consequences of the First World War, with a focus on the conflict’s effects on trade, shipping, supply chains, and finance beyond the principal theaters of fighting in Europe and the Middle East. In this work he argues that wartime coordinating bodies such as the Allied Maritime Transport Council built some of the earliest infrastructure of international economic planning. These bodies regulated shipping capacity, allocated scarce resources, coordinated procurement, and managed logistical networks across the globe, and they supplied precedents for the international regulatory structures of the later twentieth century.
The project widens the geographic frame of First World War history, turning attention away from the battlefield and the negotiating table toward the worldwide economic transformations the conflict set in motion. Martin studies how wartime disruption reached regions far from the main fronts, and how the war reshaped the world economy as a whole. The work forms part of a broader effort among historians to globalize the history of the world wars and to bring non-European experience into narratives long centered on Europe.
Alongside his academic scholarship, Martin writes for a general audience on economic history and contemporary international affairs. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the London Review of Books, The Nation, Dissent, The Guardian, Boston Review, n+1, and Bookforum. This public writing applies historical perspective to current debates over central banking, sovereign debt, globalization, financial crisis, economic nationalism, and the future of the IMF and the World Bank. As in his scholarship, he doubts narratives that present today’s economic arrangements as natural, inevitable, or merely technical, and he insists on their contingent origins and the political struggles that produced them.
Martin belongs to a wider movement of historians, among them Adam Tooze and Quinn Slobodian, who have worked to reconnect economic history, diplomatic history, and intellectual history and to recover the political character of institutions often treated as administrative or technical. His own contribution has been to show that arguments over sovereign debt, central-bank independence, international lending, and economic coordination are arguments about power, legitimacy, and democratic self-government. The institutions that govern the world economy, on his account, came not from historical inevitability but from particular political choices made amid war, imperial decline, and economic instability. By tracing the origins of global economic governance to the interwar years and to the wider upheavals of the First World War, Martin has offered a consequential reinterpretations of the history of international political economy, an account of how international institutions gained their authority, how that authority met resistance, and how the unresolved tension between sovereignty and global governance shapes the present.

Position and Distinction: Jamie Martin in the Field of History

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) treats intellectual life as a field, a structured space of positions where producers compete for a particular kind of capital and where every move a scholar makes gains its sense from its relation to the other moves available at that moment. Read through this lens, Jamie Martin becomes legible twice over: once as a man occupying a position in the field of academic history, and again as an analyst whose object mirrors the structure of the field he works in. The same tools open the historian and the history.
Begin with trajectory, because Bourdieu insists that a position cannot be read apart from the path that brought a man to it. Martin moves through Yale, Cambridge, and Harvard, then Georgetown, then back to Harvard. Each station deposits capital. The degrees furnish cultural capital in its institutionalized form, the credentials that the field recognizes without further argument. The languages and the archive work furnish cultural capital in its embodied form, the dispositions that mark a man as a serious practitioner. The Harvard appointment, joint in History and Social Studies, furnishes the institutional capital that lets a scholar consecrate students and referee the work of peers. His habitus forms at the consecrated centers of the discipline, and that formation shows in the ease with which he plays the game, the feel for which questions carry stakes and which do not.
The book is the position-taking. Bourdieu’s term, prise de position, names the act by which a producer stakes out ground against the ground already held. The Meddlers does this against a settled account, the doxa that locates the birth of global economic governance at Bretton Woods in 1944. Martin moves the origin back to the interwar decades and routes it through empire, conditionality, and the resistance these provoked. The move carries the structure of distinction. He marks himself off from the prior generation that told the postwar story, and he does so by reclassifying the object, by drawing the boundary of his subject in a new place. A field rewards the producer who shifts the frame and forces others to answer him.
No producer invents his position from nothing. Bourdieu calls the available range the space of possibles, the set of moves the field makes thinkable and rewardable at a given time. Martin’s reframing becomes available because the field has already turned. The revival of political economy after 2008, the global turn in the writing of the world wars, the renewed attention to empire and to the colonial roots of liberal institutions, all of these open a slot for an account that ties global governance to imperial debt control and to wartime coordination. Martin fills the slot with command, yet the slot precedes him. His originality lies in the execution and the archive, not in the invention of the question, and Bourdieu would read even the sense of a fresh question as an effect of position rather than a private spark.
Capital accumulates through consecration by the already consecrated. The book carries endorsements from Adam Tooze, Susan Pedersen, Patricia Clavin, David Edgerton. Each blurb transfers symbolic capital from a holder to a newcomer, and each act of transfer is also an act of classification, a way of placing Martin inside a particular camp and against others. Harvard University Press supplies the publisher’s imprimatur, the prizes supply collective recognition, and the citation traffic supplies the slow scientific capital that decides whether a book becomes a reference point or a footnote. The man rises as the field’s authorities lend him their authority, and they lend it because his project extends a position they already hold.
Here the cohort enters. Tooze and Slobodian anchor an ascending group that reconnects economic, diplomatic, and intellectual history and recovers the politics in institutions once filed under administration. Martin’s alignment with this group is a strategy in Bourdieu’s sense, a placement within the field that draws on a rising current rather than a fading one. Membership is reciprocal. The cohort gains a third strong book and a Harvard position, and Martin gains the shelter and the visibility of a recognized school. The group consecrates the individual, and the individual thickens the group.
Bourdieu separates the autonomous pole of a field, where producers write for other producers and prize peer recognition, from the heteronomous pole, where producers orient toward outside publics and outside rewards. Martin works both. The monograph and the journal article address the autonomous pole. The essays in the London Review of Books, The New York Times, The Nation, n+1, and Dissent address a literate public and a current politics. The two registers run on different capitals, and Bourdieu would track the rate at which a man can convert one into the other. Public visibility can raise a scholar’s profile inside the discipline, yet it can also draw the suspicion of colleagues who guard the autonomous pole against the pull of the journalistic. Martin’s standing rests on getting the academic capital first and adding the public capital after, the order that protects a man from the charge of trading rigor for reach.
The frame pays a second time on the content, because Martin’s object is a field. States hold positions defined by their relations to one another. Creditors and debtors face each other across an asymmetry of capital, and the asymmetry sets the terms on which the weaker party borrows. The expert authority of the League and the Bank for International Settlements operates as symbolic capital, a competence that licenses command over budgets and currencies. The claim to neutral, scientific, technical judgment performs what Bourdieu calls misrecognition, the process by which an arbitrary power wins acceptance as legitimate necessity. When a stabilization program presents austerity as the verdict of disinterested science, the domination hides inside the technique. Bourdieu’s name for domination that succeeds by being taken for something other than domination is symbolic violence, and Martin’s interwar officials practice it whenever they convert a political demand into an apparently technical condition. The historian, without the vocabulary, narrates a Bourdieusian story.
Reflexivity completes the reading, since Bourdieu demands that the analyst turn the instrument on his own position. Martin exposes the interest concealed behind others’ claims to neutrality. A reflexive account asks what interest his own debunking serves inside his own field. The position of the scholar who strips the mask from technical authority is itself a rewarded position now, consecrated by the very cohort and the very presses that reward it. His skepticism toward disinterested expertise is produced, in part, by a field that has come to prize that skepticism. This does not falsify his findings. It locates them. The argument that no institution stands above the field applies to the man who makes the argument, and Bourdieu would count the willingness to face that recursion as the test of whether a scholar has understood his own tools.
What holds the whole reading together is illusio, the shared belief that the game deserves the effort, that the date and the genealogy of global economic governance carry stakes worth contesting. Martin has invested in that belief and helped renew it for others. A field stays alive only while its players agree that its prizes are real. Martin plays as a man who finds the prizes real, and the field, for now, agrees with him.

What Jamie Martin Has an Incentive to Understand

David Pinsof (b. 1985) builds his work on a simple separation: stated motives against actual motives, words against deeds, the mission statement against the profit. He aims the separation at intellectuals first, because intellectuals run the most flattering racket of all. They blame the world’s troubles on misunderstanding, on bias and ignorance and tribalism, and the story rewards them, since it casts the people whose trade is understanding as the people who might save the world. Turn this frame on Jamie Martin and the reading splits in two, because Martin is half a fellow traveler and half a captive of the myth Pinsof attacks.
Start with the half that travels alongside Pinsof. Martin unmasks stated motives for a living. The League of Nations, the Bank for International Settlements, and the creditor powers of the 1920s presented themselves as neutral, scientific, technical. Martin reads through the presentation to the power underneath. He shows austerity sold as debt relief, conditionality dressed as expert advice, imperial control rebranded as cooperation. This is motive-unmasking of the kind Pinsof praises. Martin refuses to treat the bankers and the officials as confused do-gooders who misunderstood the consequences of their loans. He treats them as men who knew the terms they were imposing and who profited from the asymmetry. In Pinsof’s terms, Martin grasps that the creditor states understood what they were doing all too well, that their stupidity, where it appeared, was strategic, and that their talk of neutral technique was a weapon rather than a confession. So far Martin and Pinsof agree.
Now the other half. Pinsof insists that the analyst turn the same instrument on himself and on his own side, and that is where Martin’s account starts to carry the structure Pinsof distrusts. Martin’s history has heroes and villains. The villains are the empires, the creditors, the technocrats. The heroes are the nationalists, the anti-imperial movements, the governments and publics that resisted foreign supervision. Pinsof might ask why the resisters earn the warmer light. The resistance-as-virtue story flatters a present-day coalition, the academic left and the heterodox political-economy cohort and the readers of the London Review of Books, The Nation, Dissent, and n+1. Those readers buy status by siding with the resisters against the technocrats, and Martin supplies the merchandise. Pinsof’s question presses: does Martin side with the resisters because the evidence compels it, or because the field he works in pays for that side?
Pinsof’s central charge against intellectuals is the misunderstanding myth, and Martin reproduces a refined version. The crude version says people are biased and ignorant and need correction. Martin’s version says the world has swallowed a false origin story, the comfortable tale that global economic governance began at Bretton Woods in 1944, and that the real genealogy, rooted in empire and the interwar experiments, has been forgotten or suppressed. The recovery-of-suppressed-truth posture is the intellectual’s oldest self-portrait. The historian sees what the textbooks missed. The reader who absorbs the corrected genealogy gets to feel less naive than the people still reciting the official story. Pinsof would name the transaction: the scholar sells enlightenment, and the price the buyer pays is the warm sense of having seen through a deception that fools lesser minds. The product is the feeling of insight.
The deeper trouble for Martin, on Pinsof’s terms, sits in his normative vocabulary. Martin frames the history of global governance as a long argument over legitimacy, accountability, democracy, and self-government. That vocabulary carries a hope, the hope that the institutions failed a standard they might have met, that a more accountable and more democratic arrangement was available and might be available again. Pinsof reads that hope as the fixability myth in a new coat. The creditor and debtor asymmetry is not a legitimacy deficit waiting to be repaired. It is zero-sum competition over resources and over the international coercive apparatus, the machinery of debt enforcement and conditionality that puts a government’s budget under foreign command. Strong states dominate weak ones because they can, and they wrap the domination in technical language because the wrapping works. Martin sees the wrapping. Pinsof would press him on the next step. To call the result a crisis of legitimacy implies a cure, and the implication of a cure is the thing Pinsof denies. The competition has no cure. It has winners and losers, and the losers resist because resistance sometimes pays.
Consider the field rivalry Pinsof keeps returning to, where men compete hardest with their nearest rivals in the hierarchy. Martin’s cohort fights the centrist economists and the institutional defenders who hold the rival claim to authority over how the public understands global capitalism. The empire-and-resistance frame is the cohort’s bid to displace the older technocratic narrators and to seize the seat of the authoritative voice on the world economy. Pinsof’s antiracism example runs parallel. Foregrounding empire and colonialism confers elite academic status now, and the men who confer it resent the technocrats and the market-friendly historians who sit one rung over, because those are the men they are trying to unseat. The contest looks like a contest over truth. Pinsof reads it as a contest over standing.
Then the matter of cynicism, which Pinsof says we suppress because cynics look like assholes. Martin cannot write the pure-power story without cost. He cannot say creditor states crushed debtor states because power is zero-sum and that ends the matter, because the field codes that flat realism as either too cold or too close to the right, the Mearsheimer register that earns suspicion in his quarters. So Martin softens the power story with the sweetie words, legitimacy and accountability and democratic self-government, and the softening signals that he is one of the good ones, a scholar who cares about justice rather than a mere anatomist of domination. Pinsof would call the soft vocabulary the signal, the tribute a man pays to look like a sweetie while telling a story about how the strong eat the weak.
Last, the hole. Pinsof ends with the man who studies the hole he is stuck in, who examines the dirt to the last molecule and remains stuck. Martin’s project promises that exposing the contingency of the present, showing that today’s arrangements came from political choices rather than nature, opens room for alternatives. Pinsof doubts the promise. Showing that the institutions were political rather than technical changes nothing in the distribution of power that made them. The book gives the reader the experience of seeing through authority while leaving the authority in place. That experience is the good on sale, and it sells because the buyers want it. The world Martin describes does not want to be saved by being better understood. It wants what it has always wanted, and it understands its wants well enough.

Fix the Talk, Fix the World: Jamie Martin and RightTalkism

Robin Hanson (b. 1959) named a doctrine that Pinsof later sharpened. RightTalkism holds that bettering the world means changing how people talk. Get them to say the right things and the problems dissolve. The doctrine has an obvious appeal for the people whose trade is talk, because it places the cure in their hands. Jamie Martin carries the doctrine, though he carries it in one register and refuses it in another, and the split between the two registers tells you where his conviction lives.
Martin’s public writing turns on a single reproach. Contemporary economic arrangements get presented to us as natural, technical, and inevitable. Central-bank independence arrives as a law of sound finance. Sovereign-debt discipline arrives as arithmetic. The authority of the IMF arrives as the verdict of expertise. Martin’s essays in the London Review of Books, The Nation, Dissent, and Boston Review answer that these arrangements are political, contingent, the residue of choices and conflicts that might have gone another way. The answer carries a promise folded inside it. Once we stop calling the order natural and start calling it political, the order loosens, alternatives grow thinkable, and a better arrangement comes into reach. The promise is RightTalkism. Rename the thing correctly and you have begun to change it.
The temptation runs deep for a man with Martin’s subject, because his craft consists of showing that talk did work in the past. He documents how the language of neutral expertise served the creditors of the 1920s, how a loan with crushing terms went out under the name of technical assistance, how imperial supervision wore the dress of scientific advice. His scholarship shows description operating as a weapon in the hands of the strong. From there the slide is short and smooth. If the bankers’ talk helped them dominate, then our corrected talk might help the dominated. If naming a loan technical concealed its power, then naming it imperial might break the spell. A historian who spends his days on the politics of economic language stands closer than most men to the belief that better language can shift the world, because he has watched worse language hold it in place.
His own evidence cuts against the belief, and this is the trouble. The resisters in The Meddlers did not lose for want of the right vocabulary. They lost because they were weak. The Austrians and the Hungarians accepted foreign supervision because they needed the money, and they would have needed the money whatever name they gave the terms. A Hungarian official who called the stabilization loan imperial out loud, in the plainest words available, still faced the same choice between the loan and ruin. The creditor held the debt, the leverage, and, behind the leverage, the older memory of the gunboat. Naming the arrangement did not move the arrangement. Power moved it. Martin’s archive shows what the resisters lacked, and what they lacked was force and money, not the courage to describe their position. RightTalkism asks us to believe the missing thing was words. The book Martin wrote shows the missing thing was strength.
The doctrine rests on a category error that Martin, in his careful mode, knows to avoid. RightTalkism mistakes a description for a lever. To show that an arrangement is contingent rather than natural feels like loosening it, since a thing that could have been otherwise might yet become otherwise. Contingency, though, does not bring fragility with it. Plenty of arrangements come from particular histories and stand for a long time, held up by the men who profit from them. The creditor’s leverage, the dollar’s reach, the gap between strong states and weak ones, each came from a specific past, and each persists because powerful actors want it to persist. Renaming these things political leaves the interests that maintain them untouched. The order does not run on a misunderstanding that a better word can correct. It runs on advantage, and advantage does not yield to vocabulary.
RightTalkism flatters the talkers. If the world’s troubles trace to bad talk, then the people who supply good talk become the agents of repair, and the historian who corrects the public’s vocabulary performs a political act by writing. Martin’s public essays carry that self-understanding. They cast the corrected genealogy as more than scholarship, as a contribution to the contest itself, and they offer the reader a share in the work. Absorb the better description, see through the language of neutrality, and you have done something for a better world. The offer is pleasant, and it costs the reader nothing past a change of words. No tax, no risk, no surrender of any advantage the reader holds. The reader buys the feeling of having acted and pays only with assent.
Strip the RightTalkism away and a colder Martin remains, the Martin of the monograph. That Martin says the institutions were political, the neutral language was a weapon, the strong wrote the terms, and the historian’s job ends with the showing. What comes next depends on who holds power, not on who holds the better description. This version sells worse. It hands the reader no task and no hope, only an accurate picture of a hard arrangement. The public essay cannot live on it, because the genre wants forward motion and the audience wants a job, so the essay supplies the RightTalkist charge that the monograph withholds. The forward motion comes from the promise that naming the contingency opens a path, and the promise is the thing the scholarship will not sign.
The split is the proof. A man who believed that re-description changes the world would carry the belief into his strongest work, into the book his peers read with their guard up. Martin keeps it out of the book. He lets it into the column, where the readers want hope and the reviewers will not police the overreach. The conviction shows itself where it pays and hides where it would be caught. Pinsof’s rule applies. The lean toward RightTalkism appears at the heteronomous edge of Martin’s output, the public-facing essays, and that is the lean, and the lean is the tell. The historian knows that words did not free the debtor states of the 1920s. The essayist writes as though better words might free us now. Both men sign their names Jamie Martin, and only one of them is reading his own evidence.

Sacred Value: Jamie Martin and the Cover Story That Holds the Game Together

David Pinsof defines a sacred value as a cover story for status-seeking, a tale we tell to keep a status game from collapsing. We deny that we chase dominance or rank. We say instead that we serve honor, wisdom, equality, morality, or the betterment of mankind. The cover works only while the players believe it, and it does a precise job. It stops the men in the game from arriving at common knowledge that the game is a game. Once they see that everyone is competing for standing, they start to read one another as vain and grasping, and the contest tips toward collapse. The sacred value is the thing that holds it together. Read Jamie Martin through this concept and his moral vocabulary stops looking like the heart of his project and starts looking like the wrapping that keeps the project respectable.
Martin’s sacred words are legitimacy, accountability, democracy, and self-government. The history of global economic governance, in his telling, becomes a long argument over whether the international institutions answered to anyone, whether they respected the self-rule of the nations they supervised, whether their authority rested on consent or on force. These are the warm words, and they recur across the monograph and the essays. They give his work its moral temperature.
Consider what the warm words do for the material underneath them. Martin’s archive holds a hard story: strong states crushing weak ones, creditors dictating terms, empires recycling their old techniques of debt control, technocrats taking command of other men’s budgets. A scholar could tell that story as pure anatomy. Here is who held the leverage. Here is how he used it. Here is who submitted, and why he had no better choice. That telling is cold, and the cold telling has no hero. The sacred vocabulary changes the genre. By naming the crushing a breach of legitimacy and a violation of self-government, Martin turns a description of power into an indictment of injustice, and an indictment carries a man who delivers it. The anatomist becomes the friend of the weak. The same facts, recast in sacred terms, lift the storyteller from clerk to advocate.
The status game sits beneath the sacred words. Academic history runs on competition for standing: the chair, the prize, the citations, the right to be the voice other scholars must answer when they write about global capitalism. Martin competes in that game and wins. Pinsof’s point is that he cannot say so, and neither can his rivals. Suppose Martin’s colleagues reached common knowledge that the empire-and-resistance frame, beyond whatever truth it holds, is a bid for rank, and that the moral heat in his prose is partly a competitive weapon. The recognition would sour the room. They would see the moralism as appetite dressed up, and the game would lurch toward the collapse Pinsof describes. The sacred value forestalls the recognition. As long as the agreed stakes are legitimacy and democratic self-government, nobody has to notice that the stakes also include whose name goes on the authoritative account of how the modern economic order was born.
The choice of these particular sacred words fits the field as it stands now. Pinsof lists equality and the betterment of mankind among the consecrated covers, and Martin’s set belongs to the same family, with anti-imperialism standing behind it. They are the words that confer standing in his corner of the academy. A man who built his work around the efficiency of conditionality, or the stabilizing service of creditor discipline, would forfeit standing in that corner, because those are not its sacred words. Martin reaches for the terms that cover the status-seeking and, by covering it well, earn the status. The cover and the prize point the same direction, which is what you might expect, since a field selects its sacred values for exactly that double service.
The obvious defense is sincerity. Martin believes in legitimacy and self-government. The values are heartfelt. Pinsof’s answer is that sincerity is the design rather than the refutation. A cover story held consciously as a cover fails, because the strain leaks through and the listeners feel the calculation. The thing works only when the man feels his values as conviction while the values quietly do the competitive labor. So the question is never whether Martin means it. He almost surely means every word. The question is what the heartfelt conviction achieves that a cold report could not, and the answer is that it keeps the contest for rank decent, hidden, and safe from collapse.
A simple test exposes the double service. Take each sacred phrase and render it in the language of power. The institutions lacked legitimacy becomes the weak states had no way to make the strong states stop, and they resented it. Democratic self-government was overridden becomes foreign creditors beat local majorities because the creditors held the money. The translations keep every fact and lose every degree of warmth. Martin holds onto the warm phrasing because the cold phrasing strips the halo from the man telling the tale. The sacred vocabulary marks the distance between an indictment from a friend of justice and a memo from a functionary of power. The functionary earns no standing. The friend of justice earns a great deal.
Give Martin his due inside the frame. Legitimacy and accountability name real troubles in the history of international institutions. He did not invent the questions, and the questions reward asking. Pinsof’s concept does not call the sacred values hollow. It says they carry two loads at once. They name true concerns, and they cover a competition for rank, and the second load is the one no member of the field may mention aloud. The best evidence that the second load is real lies in the reaction a man draws when he names it. Tell a roomful of Martin’s peers that the moral language of legitimacy and self-government also serves their jockeying for position, and the temperature drops. The chill is the sacred value defending itself. A cover story that nobody minded seeing exposed would not be covering anything.
So the sacred vocabulary is what keeps the game playable. Without it the contest shows itself as open jockeying, and open jockeying looks ugly and bleeds status. With it the same jockeying proceeds under the colors of justice, and the players keep their dignity and their halos while they fight. Martin writes in those colors because a scholar in his field must speak that language to compete, and, harder still, to compete without appearing to compete. The sacred words are sincere, and they are useful, and Pinsof’s whole teaching is that in a status-seeking animal the two travel together. The sincerity is the thing that lets the usefulness pass unseen.

Carrying the Line Forward: Jamie Martin and the Succession of Cohorts

David Pinsof builds intergenerational competition theory on top of a darker premise he calls the desire problem. Most of what we want is to stand above the people near us, which means we cannot all be satisfied, conflict comes built in, and a world where everyone gets what he wants cannot exist. The theory offers the one near-escape a status animal can manage. Each generation rises above the last, and the old tolerate the climbing because the young are their own line carried forward. The arrangement is the closest thing to peace the species reaches, since it lets the contest for rank run without tearing itself apart. Jamie Martin gives the theory a test.
The discipline of history sits inside the desire problem. There is a fixed amount of authoritative standing on any subject. One man at a time gets to be the voice that others must answer when they write about the origins of global economic governance. The seat holds one. The discipline cannot hand the same centrality to every able scholar, and so the want for it produces the steady, low-grade conflict that the desire problem predicts. The discipline survives the conflict by metabolizing it across generations. Cohorts succeed one another. The young surpass the old, the old give way, and the giving way passes for progress rather than for theft.
A young historian who wants to surpass his elders faces a constraint. He cannot do it by calling them fools. The discipline punishes patricide, because a man who insults his teachers signals that he might be insulted in turn, and the whole succession depends on the insult being withheld. So the surpassing takes a quieter form. The young man reclassifies the object. He moves the boundary of the subject so that the elders’ account, true as far as it goes, becomes a special case, a late episode, a downstream result of something he now places upstream. Martin does this with a date. He does not say the historians of Bretton Woods were wrong about Bretton Woods. He says Bretton Woods came late, that it crowned a structure already built, and that the birth of global economic governance lies earlier, in the interwar experiments and the imperial regimes of debt control. The elder’s monument keeps standing. It loses only its rank, demoted from origin to sequel. The young man has climbed over his teachers without raising his voice.
The reclassification forces the elders to answer, and the forcing is the transfer of standing. Once Martin relocates the origin, the scholars who told the 1944 story have to place themselves relative to his earlier date. Their work turns into a reply to his frame, even the work written before he wrote. To answer a man is to grant that he sets the terms, and the grant moves the center of the conversation from the elder to the heir. The elder keeps his books and his chair. The young man takes the question that everyone must now address. In a contest for rank, holding the question beats holding the chair, because the chair is yours alone while the question commands everyone else’s labor.
Now the part of the theory that explains why the elders allow it. Pinsof says the old accept being surpassed because the young carry their line forward. In a family the line is genetic. In a discipline the line runs through students, advisers, and schools, and through the territory a man spent his career defending. Martin’s elders include the historians of the League of Nations, the mandates, and the interwar economy, men and women who labored on the period Martin now crowns as the origin. He does not bury their territory. He elevates it. The interwar decades, their life’s ground, become the birthplace of the modern order rather than a prelude to the postwar main event. So his surpassing flatters one set of elders while it demotes another. The senior historians whose ground he raises bless him, and the blessing arrives as the blurb, the senior scholar lending his name to the heir. Susan Pedersen and Patricia Clavin, who built the field of interwar international history, endorse the young man who makes their field the foundation of everything after. The theory predicts that act exactly. The elder tolerates, even celebrates, the young man who carries his line up the hierarchy and over the heads of his rivals.
Martin does not climb alone, and the theory has room for the cohort. Adam Tooze and Quinn Slobodian lead the same generational push from neighboring fronts. Tooze surpasses the older narrators of financial crisis and wartime economy. Slobodian surpasses the older intellectual historians of the market order. Martin surpasses the older account of where governance began. Three fronts, one motion, a single cohort lifting itself above the generation that held the prior story of capitalism and its institutions. A cohort climbs better than a man, because a group can make a reframing stick where a lone scholar gets ignored. The wave carries Martin, and Martin thickens the wave, and together they do to the prior generation what the prior generation once did to the one before it.
Underneath the orderly succession the desire problem keeps grinding. The standing Martin gains comes out of someone. The historians who owned the 1944 origin lose centrality at the rate Martin gains it, and no settlement gives the origin to both camps, because the origin is a single seat. Pinsof says this conflict admits no solution inside a generation. The intergenerational form is the nearest thing to a solution, because the demoted elders draw partial compensation from their own heirs rising elsewhere, and because the whole discipline agrees to read the succession as the advance of knowledge rather than as one man taking another man’s place. The progress story is the discipline’s version of the toleration the theory requires. Martin’s victory looks like the field learning more about the past. The look is what keeps the loser from naming it a defeat.
The theory predicts Martin’s own future. He is now the heir who surpassed, which means his own surpassing waits in the next cohort. Some younger historian will reclassify Martin’s object, push the origin earlier still, or move it sideways into a frame Martin did not foresee, or declare the search for an origin the wrong question altogether. Martin will then face the choice every elder faces. He can fight the heirs and lose standing as a reactionary who could not let go, or he can bless them and be carried forward as their progenitor. The theory says he blesses them. He writes the blurb, lends his name, and accepts the demotion from author to ancestor, because ancestry is the closest thing to permanence the contest offers. The men who fight their heirs lose twice, once in rank and once in the line.
So the career reads as a textbook case of Pinsof’s almost-utopia. Martin rose by surpassing the generation that held the origin of global governance. He did it by reclassifying rather than insulting, which is the only method the discipline permits. The elders whose interwar ground he raised blessed him, while the elders he demoted were left to answer him. His own heirs sit in the future, sharpening the frame that will carry them up and past him. The discipline calls the whole sequence progress. Pinsof calls it the desire problem solved the only way a status animal can solve it, one generation at a time, each cohort buying its share of peace by climbing over its teachers and pledging, in turn, to be climbed over.

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Strange bedfellows: the Alliance Theory of political belief systems

Posted on June 20, 2026 by Luke Ford

By David Pinsof,* David O. Sears, and Martie G. Haselton
Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, United States
*[email protected]
David Pinsof is a postdoctoral scholar who received his PhD in Psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2018. David’s research focuses on evolutionary psychology, political psychology, public opinion, and sexual behavior. His empirical work explores individual differences in mating psychology and their relation to political attitudes, mathematical models of alliance formation, and the origins of political belief systems.
David O. Sears is Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Political Science, former Dean of Social Sciences, and former Director of the Institute for Social Science Research, all at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published articles and book chapters on a wide variety of topics, including attitude change, public opinion, mass communications, ghetto riots, political socialization, voting behavior, and race and politics.
Martie G. Haselton is a Professor in the Departments of Communication, Psychology and The Institute for Society and Genetics. Haselton’s research focuses on evolution and human behavior, social psychology, interpersonal communication, and social endocrinology. Empirical work explores intimate relationships, sexuality, reproductive decision making, and the origins of sex and gender differences.

Strange bedfellows: the Alliance Theory of political belief systems

What explains the contents of political belief systems? A widespread view is that they derive from abstract values, like equality, tolerance, and authority. Here, we challenge this view, arguing instead that belief systems derive from political alliance structures that vary across nations and time periods. When partisans mobilize support for their political allies, they generate patchwork narratives that appeal to ad-hoc, and often incompatible, moral principles. In the first part of the paper, we explain how people choose their allies, and how they support their allies using propagandistic tactics. In the second part, we show how these choices and tactics give rise to political alliance structures, with their strange bedfellows, and the idiosyncratic contents of belief systems. If Alliance Theory is correct, then we need a radically different approach to political psychology—one in which belief systems arise not from deep-seated moral values, but from ever-shifting alliances and rivalries.

Keywords: political psychology; evolutionary psychology; social identity; group behavior; belief systems

Political belief systems in the United States can be confusing. According to public opinion polls, conservatives believe that we ought to have more respect for authority (but business owners should disobey regulations they believe are unfair), that people should be allowed to express their political opinions freely in the workplace (but athletes should not be allowed to kneel during the national anthem), that nobody deserves a free handout from the government (but the government should do more to help small, working class towns in America’s heartland), and that we ought to be more suspicious of foreigners (but we should trust Vladimir Putin when he said that he did not interfere in the 2016 election; Pulse of the Nation, 2018a, 2017a, 2018b, 2017b). On the other hand, liberals believe that it’s unfair for CEOs to make millions of dollars a year (but it’s fair for Hollywood movie stars to make millions of dollars a year), that we should stand in solidarity with labor unions (but not police unions), that we should not blame all Muslims for Islamist terrorist attacks (but we should blame all Trump voters for the 2017 killing in Charlottesville), and that it’s wrong to endorse negative stereotypes about a group of people based on their place of birth (but people from the south are racist; Pulse of the Nation, 2018c, 2017c, 2018d; Gallup, 2020).
What is the moral thread that ties all these beliefs together? We suggest a novel answer: there is none. Each moral standard in the above paragraph, together with its apparent violation, serves a strategic function, namely mobilizing support for a specific political ally, or mobilizing opposition to a specific political rival. The more heterogeneous one’s allies and rivals, the more heterogeneous one’s political beliefs will be. Whenever such a wide variety of groups and individuals form alliances, such inconsistencies are bound to arise (for additional inconsistencies, see table 1). These inconsistencies are some of the key predictions of our approach, which we call Alliance Theory.
Alliance Theory leverages decades of research in political science showing that, with the exception of political elites, most Americans lack consistent ideological beliefs (Campbell, Converse, Miller, & Stokes, 1980; Achen & Bartels, 2016; Kinder & Kalmoe, 2017). However, we depart from these approaches by stressing that political elites are in many ways just as inconsistent as the masses; they are merely better attuned to (or more loyal to) the historically contingent alliances that arose in their society. These alliances are no more conducive to intellectual consistency than any other set of alliances, historical or contemporary (and there are many; Gunther & Diamond, 2003; Deegan-Krause, 2007; Karol, 2009). It is therefore misleading to characterize elite opinion as more “coherent,” “sophisticated,” “organized,” “deep,” or “thoughtful” than mass opinion (Kinder & Kalmoe, 2019, pp. 2-17). After all, the combination of libertarianism with Christian fundamentalism did not emerge from philosophical analysis. The only reason these philosophies go together in the United States is because of the strategic alliance between pro-life evangelicals and wealthy Republicans in the 1970s—an alliance that is uncommon in other countries (Karol, 2009, chapter 3; Malka, Lelkes, & Soto, 2017; Chen & Lind, 2007; see also Lewis & Lewis, 2022).
Indeed, we argue that political belief systems are not so much “philosophies” as collections of ad hoc justifications, rationalizations, moralizations, embellishments, and rhetorical tactics designed to advance the interests of complex political alliances in competition with their rivals. Moral principles are not so principled. Core values are not so core. Ideological worldviews are not designed to literally view the world but to serve strategic functions like signaling allegiance or mobilizing support (Williams, 2021).
Alliance Theory also leverages decades of research in social identity and intergroup relations (Hornsey, 2008). But we propose a reframing of this literature. Rather than using the terms “ingroup” and “outgroup,” we refer to “allies” and “rivals.” We use these terms to emphasize that forming an alliance with a group does not require being in that group. For example, one can feel allegiance to African Americans or police officers without being an African American or a police officer. Likewise, one can feel resentment toward white people or “poor people,” despite being a white person or a relatively poor person (Kuziemko, Buell, Reich, & Norton, 2014). These phenomena are easier to understand in terms of alliances and rivalries—which can occur both within and between groups—than in terms of identities.
To be sure, there may be broader ideological or partisan identities that encompass these phenomena. But to focus on these broader identities is to lose sight of the key explanatory factors of political belief systems. People do not simply cheer for ideologies or parties as monolithic entities: they advocate for, and rally opposition to, a variety of distinct ethnic, religious, economic, occupational, and cultural groups (in addition to specific individuals) situated in unique conflicts. It is these conflicts that explain political belief systems, defining—and continually redefining—what it means to be a liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat.
The Social Identity tradition has another flaw we seek to remedy: its lack of functional plausibility. Scholars in this tradition claim that the function of ingroup biases—e.g., viewing one’s ingroup in a positive light and one’s outgroup in a negative light—is to maintain a positive self-image (Hornsey, 2008). This intrapsychic function, disconnected from external outcomes that could affect fitness, is implausible on evolutionary grounds (see Kurzban & Aktipis, 2007). A more plausible function is to mobilize support for one’s allies—and opposition to one’s rivals—in social conflicts (Petersen, 2015; Tooby & Cosmides, 2010). We will therefore refer to “ingroup biases” as “propagandistic biases,” both to highlight their outward-facing function, and to emphasize that they are applied to specific allies—and not just one’s broader partisan or ideological ingroup.
Alliance Theory makes two assumptions: 1) humans possess cognitive mechanisms for forming and detecting alliances, and 2) humans use propagandistic tactics to support their allies and oppose their rivals in conflicts. We provide theoretical and empirical support for these two assumptions in the following section. Next, we use assumption 1) to explain the origins of alliance structures across nations and time periods, arguing that contemporary alliances in the United States reflect historical accidents. Then, we use assumption 2) to explain the idiosyncratic contents of political belief systems in the United States, mapping specific beliefs to specific propagandistic biases. Finally, we tease apart Alliance Theory from other approaches, arguing that the primary difference between liberals and conservatives is not what values they hold, but whom they view as their allies.

Cognitive systems for alliance formation

Alliances are a crucial feature of social life among a variety of social species including chimpanzees, baboons, macaques, dolphins, and hyenas (Harcourt & De Waal, 1992). Why has evolution selected for alliances in so many different species? The answer is that there is strength in numbers: two individuals are stronger than one, three are stronger than two, and so forth, leaving individuals without allies “nakedly at the mercy of everyone else” (Tooby, 2017). Alliances can occur between high-ranking individuals to maintain their rank (called conservative alliances), between low-ranking individuals to advance their rank (called revolutionary alliances), and between high and low-ranking individuals to achieve both of these ends (called bridging alliances; Chapais, 1995). These decisions give rise to an alliance structure, defined as the network of supportive or antagonistic relationships between members of a society (DeScioli & Kimbrough, 2019). Given the adaptive advantages of forming alliances, the crucial decision is not whether to form an alliance, but whom to choose as one’s allies (Tooby, 2017; DeScioli & Kurzban, 2009; Chapais, 1995).

Criteria for choosing allies

Similarity

All else equal, more similar individuals make better allies. Sharing the same beliefs, preferences, and expectations allows for more efficient and fluid coordination (Efferson, Lalive, & Fehr, 2008; McElreath, Boyd, & Richerson, 2003). People use “tags,” “markers,” or “identities” to assort with likeminded individuals (McElreath et al., 2003; Smaldino, 2019), and they alter their appearance to signal commitment to a particular group over alternative groups (Sosis, Kress, & Boster, 2007; Fessler & Quintelier, 2013; Kuran, 1998). Observable markers of similarity are also useful as coordination devices or “focal points,” creating common knowledge of existing alliances (Schelling, 1980, chapter 3). As a result, when people are split apart based on arbitrary labels, it creates a self-fulfilling expectation that possessors of each label will favor each other as allies, known as a “minimal groups” effect (Balliet, Wu, & De Dreu, 2014).

Transitivity

Individuals who exhibit transitivity—i.e. who share the same allies and rivals—make better allies as well. Transitivity mitigates two risks: 1) infighting, where one’s allies enter conflicts against one another, and 2) betrayal, where one’s allies side with one’s rivals (Nakamura, Tita, & Krackhardt, 2011; Hiler, 2017; Pietraszewski, 2016). Individuals therefore benefit from favoring transitive allies, and by adopting their allies’ social preferences—as in the saying “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” or “any friend of yours is a friend of mine” (Tooby & Cosmides, 2010, pp. 208-209; Pietraszewksi, 2016). Mathematical models have shown that transitivity gives rise to clusters of individuals with shared loyalty toward one another and shared rivalry toward other clusters—a natural definition of what “groups” are (Hiler, 2017; Pietraszewski, 2016; Gray et al., 2014). Alliances can also occur between groups, called “super-alliances,” and can vary in terms of their transitivity with other groups (Connor, Heithaus, & Barre, 2001; MacFarlan, Walker, Flinn, & Chagnon, 2014). Research indicates that transitivity plays an important role in both individual and intergroup alliances, including in adolescent friendships, gang rivalries, religious conflicts, and international relations (Heider, 1958; Rambaran, Dijkstra, Munniksma, & Cillessen, 2015; Huitsing, Snijders, Van Duijn, & Veenstra, 2014; Berger & Dijkstra, 2013; Nakamura et al., 2011; Hugh-Jones & Ron, 2019).

Interdependence

Individuals who are interdependent—i.e. who reliably provide benefits to one another—make better allies as well. For example, individuals might reliably share knowledge (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001), offer protection from aggressors (Snyder et al., 2001), or provide help in times of need (Tooby & Cosmides, 1996). Consistent with evolutionary theories of interdependence (Aktipis et al., 2018), people feel allegiance to people who are instrumental to their goals (Orehek & Forest, 2016), and they feel enmity toward those who threaten their goals (Cottrell & Neuberg, 2005). People also support political parties that advance their personal and group interests (Weeden & Kurzban, 2014), creating interdependence with co-partisans who share the same interests.

Stochasticity

All of the above cues for choosing allies (i.e. similarity, transitivity, and interdependence) are self-reinforcing and partly stochastic. Similar people favor one another as allies, but allies also imitate one another, increasing their similarity. People favor transitive allies, but allies also adjust their loyalties to accommodate new allies, increasing their transitivity. Interdependence gives rise to allegiance, but allies also provide benefits to one another, increasing their interdependence. Small variations in initial social conditions can feed on one and another snowball into seemingly arbitrary alliance structures (e.g., Macy, Deri, Ruch, & Tong, 2019).

Supporting allies in conflicts

After choosing one another, allies must support one another in conflicts—for instance, by defending their allies’ reputations, attacking their rivals’ reputations, and mobilizing support from third parties. We propose an array of biases—which we refer to as propagandistic biases—that may have evolved to serve these functions. We will later argue that these biases, when applied to the American political alliance structure, explain the contents of political belief systems.

Perpetrator biases

Perpetrators of wrongdoing commonly use propaganda to defend their interests. They downplay their personal responsibility for the transgression, emphasize the role of mitigating circumstances, embellish their good intentions, and minimize the severity and duration of the harm inflicted on their victims (Baumeister, Stillwell, & Wotman, 1990; Stillwell & Baumeister, 1997; Kowalski, 2000; Kearns & Fincham, 2005; see also Schutz and Baumeister, 1999). Importantly, people also apply perpetrator biases to their allies, rationalizing their allies’ transgressions in precisely the same way—a finding which has been replicated across cultures (Bocian & Wojciszke, 2014; Schiller, Baumgartner, & Knoch, 2014; Gino & Galinsky, 2012; Valdesolo & DeSteno, 2007; Shamir & Shikaki, 2002; see also Bilali, Tropp, & Dasgupta, 2012; Doosje, Zebel, Scheermeijer, & Mathyi, 2007).

Victim biases

Victims exhibit the opposite set of biases as perpetrators. They emphasize the perpetrator’s personal responsibility for the transgression, deny the role of mitigating circumstances, attribute the perpetrator’s motives to irrational malevolence, and embellish the severity and duration of the harm inflicted on them (Stillwell & Baumeister, 1997; Baumeister, Stillwell, & Wotman, 1990; see also Baumeister 1999, chapter 3). Importantly, people also apply victim biases to their allies, embellishing their allies’ grievances in precisely the same way (Linke, 2012; Lieberman & Linke, 2007; Brown, Wohl, & Exline, 2008; Schiller et al., 2014; Noor, Shnabel, Halabi, & Nadler, 2012; Bilali et al., 2012; Andrighetto, Mari, Volpato, & Behluli, 2012). Across cultures, victim biases on both sides of a conflict can lead to “competitive victimhood,” wherein groups strive to “establish that their in-group was subjected to more injustice at the hands of the out-group than the other way around” (Noor et al., 2012; p. 7; Bilali et al., 2012; Andrighetto et al., 2012; Noor, Brown, & Prentice, 2008). We note that victim biases, which call attention to one’s critical disadvantages, are difficult to reconcile with the function of enhancing one’s self-image. They make better sense as tactics for mobilizing support.

Attributional biases

Well-off people also use propaganda to defend their interests. They assume their social and material advantages derive from internal dispositions (talent, hard work) rather than external causes (luck, circumstances). Worse-off people exhibit the opposite bias: they assume their disadvantages derive from external causes (misfortune, mistreatment) rather than internal dispositions (incompetence, low effort). This general pattern of results, observed within the same individuals, is known as the “self-serving attributional bias” (Bradley, 1978). People also apply this attributional bias to their allies, attributing their allies’ advantages to internal causes and their disadvantages to external causes (Rantilla, 2000; Sherman, Kinias, Major, Kim, & Prenovost, 2007; Hewstone, 1990; Klein & Kunda, 1992; Sherman & Kim, 2005; Pettigrew, 1979; Forsyth & Schlenker, 1977; Taylor & Doria, 1981; Lau & Russell, 1980). Similarly, the “linguistic attributional bias,” in which people alter their word choices to make attributions favorable to their allies, has been replicated across cultures (Maass, Salvi, Arcuri, & Semin, 1989; Von Hippel, Sekaquaptewa, & Vargas, 1997; Maass, Milesi, Zabbini, & Stahlberg, 1995; Maass, Ceccarelli, & Rudin, 1996; Hunter, Stringer, & Watson, 1991; Taylor & Jaggi, 1974).

Section summary

Humans, like other social animals, possess an alliance psychology. This psychology includes mechanisms for choosing allies (based on similarity, transitivity, and interdependence) and supporting allies in conflicts (by using victim, perpetrator, and attributional biases). We expect these mechanisms to be symmetrical across political lines—indeed across all humans—as they are part of our species’ basic cognitive toolkit. In the next two sections, we will demonstrate the explanatory power of these assumptions. We will first show how mechanisms for choosing allies can explain the contingent origins of the alliance structure of the United States. We will then show how mechanisms for supporting allies can explain the precise contents of political belief systems in the United States. We focus on the United States because it contains the highest quality data on existing alliance structures and political beliefs, enabling the most precise tests of Alliance Theory.

The contingent political alliance structure of the United States

Figures 1 and 2 represent a sketch of the American political alliance structure, taken from online samples and nationally representative datasets (Chambers, Schlenker, & Collison, 2013; Bartels, 2018). Whereas the American alliance structure used to be more cross-cutting in prior decades, two super-alliances have recently coalesced that combine partisan, ideological, religious, ethnic, regional, and cultural differences, leading to increased polarization (Mason, 2018; Abramowitz, 2018).
Importantly, there is striking agreement about who’s on which side of the divide, particularly among those who are politically engaged (Ahler & Good, 2018; Rothschild, Howat, Shafranek, & Busby, 2018). When asked to rate all the groups in figure 1 as either “liberal” or “conservative” the correlation between liberals’ and conservatives’ ratings was r = .97 (Chambers et al., 2013). These findings suggest that people are acutely sensitive to—and possess common knowledge of—the details of their alliance structure.
What is the underlying pattern to this alliance structure? One possible answer is social status, with high status groups being more conservative/Republican and low status groups being more liberal/Democratic. However, alliances need not form based on status (recall that “bridging alliances” are common; Chapais, 1995), and there are plenty of exceptions to this rule. Highly educated urbanites are perceived as liberal/Democratic (Rothschild et al., 2018), as well as journalists, scientists, Google, Hollywood movie stars, The United Nations, and college professors (see figure 2; Brandt, 2017). There are also the so-called “losers of globalization” that have more recently developed right-wing allegiances in America and Europe, which include agricultural workers, manual laborers, small town inhabitants, and people without a college degree (Teney, Lacewell, & De Wilde, 2014; see figure 2). Then there are the groups whose status is difficult to categorize, like Christian fundamentalists, radical students, Mormons, gun owners, southerners, and environmentalists (see figures 1 and 2; Ahler & Good, 2018). We might wonder, then: is social status an essential variable in predicting which groups partisans will like or dislike? According to several studies (total N = 2,093), the answer is no. Brandt (2017) compared statistical models predicting attitudes toward various social groups and found that the most parsimonious model, which simply included the political allegiances of the group and the participant, was more powerful than alternative models that included the group’s status as a factor.
Regardless, the more important point is that there does not need to be a deeper pattern here, any more than there needs to be a deeper pattern to the network of friendships, rivalries, and cliques at a local high school (see subsection on “Stochasticity”). Indeed, when we take a cross-cultural and historical perspective, we can see that there is nothing inevitable about the configuration of groups depicted in figures 1 and 2. The military is not always “conservative”: many radical left-wing movements in Latin America—e.g., Chavismo in Venezuela, Peronism in Argentina—were led by former military leaders and championed a kind of militaristic socialism (Corrales, 2014; Marchesi, 2017). College professors are not always “liberal”: during the early 20th century, many progressive scholars supported eugenics and opposed the migration of “inferior” races into the country (Leonard, 2017). Christian fundamentalists are not always “conservative”: in many European and Latin American countries with state religions, religious traditionalism (e.g., opposition to abortion) is associated with economic leftism (Chen & Lind, 2007; Huber & Stanig, 2011; Malka et al., 2017). Feminists and ethnic minorities are not always allies: during the women’s suffrage movement, many feminists excluded African Americans and did not consider their voting rights analogous to theirs (Staples, 2018). Environmentalists are not always “liberal”: during the 1980s and 1990s, Green Parties in Central and Eastern Europe arose in opposition to Soviet industrial policy, forming alliances with anticommunists and right-wing nationalists (Auers, 2012; Kwiotkowska, 2019). The dominant ethnic group is not always “conservative”: many political parties have fused economic leftism with ethnic nationalism, including Australia’s Labor Party (prior to the 1970s; James, Markey, & Markey, 2006, pp. 31-12), Slovakia’s Direction – Social Democracy (Mihálik & Jankoľa, 2016, p. 10), and Italy’s Five Star Movement (Emanuele, Maggini, & Paparo, 2020, p. 9). Given the diversity and dynamism of alliance structures across time and space, it is misleading to think of any particular alliance structure (including our own) as the “consistent” one.
To be sure, we are not denying the possibility of cross-cultural regularities. Whenever countries are culturally and economically similar, they tend to converge on similar alliance structures. For example, nations with similar levels of exposure to globalization have exhibited similar political backlashes among the “losers of globalization” (Teney et al., 2014). Nations with similar declines in religiosity have exhibited similar conflicts between secularists and religionists over changing sexual mores (Weeden & Kurzban, 2013). If the losers of globalization tend to be more religious, then anti-globalists and anti-secularists will tend to fall within the same political coalitions across nations. Ethnic minorities, insofar as they are less wealthy and more in need of social safety nets, will tend to favor economically left-wing parties (Teney, Jacobs, Rea, & Delwit, 2010, pp. 278-279), assuming they trust political elites to support them (Holland, 2018). Lower class members of the ethnic majority, however, are more likely to feel resentful of ethnic minorities (and their political allies), viewing them as competitors for status and resources (Kuziemko et al., 2014; Meuleman, Abts, Schmidt, Pettigrew, & Davidov, 2020). An alliance of lower class, religious, and anti-globalist members of the ethnic majority may therefore be more likely than alternative alliances. Alliance Theory can potentially accommodate the similarities, as well as the differences, in alliance structures across nations and time periods. Alternative approaches, by contrast, struggle to explain the differences.

Origins of the contemporary American alliance structure

At the beginning of the 20th century, the south was a Democratic stronghold, African Americans were loyal to the party of Lincoln, and devout Christians were evenly distributed between the two parties (though there were denominational differences; Achen & Bartels, 2016, chapter 9; Karol, 2009). But the latter half of the 20th century brought four major political realignments. First, the Democrats passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, drawing racially conservative southerners into the Republican Party and accelerating the movement of African Americans into the Democratic Party (Abramowitz, 2018, Chapters 2-4; Karol, 2009, chapter 4). Second, the Republican Party took ownership of the pro-life, evangelical movement, causing Christian traditionalists to move into the Republican Party and secular feminists to move into the Democratic Party (Abramowitz, 2018, Chapter 3; Karol, 2009, chapter 3). Third, influxes of immigrants from Latin America—coupled with urbanization and the decline of manufacturing work—gave rise to a rural, white underclass who attributed their declining status to immigration and globalization (Abrajano & Hajnal, 2015; Teney et al., 2014). At the same time, expanding college enrollment produced a new upper class of highly educated “knowledge workers” (e.g., journalists, academics; Brint, 1984), while large corporations commanded an increasingly greater share of wealth and political power (Piketty, 2020). These trends resulted in competition and resentment between intellectual elites (e.g., highly educated professionals) and business elites (e.g., wealthy corporate executives; Brint, 1984; Turchin, 2012; pp. 3-5; Weeden & Kurzban, 2014, pp. 146-150; Bonica, 2014, figure 7; Bartels, 2016, tables 2 and 9; Magni-Berton & Rios, 2018; Piketty, 2020, chapter 15). In other words, the lower class split apart based on ethnic rivalries, while the upper class split apart based on status rivalries, thereby weakening the historical link between partisanship and class.
We propose that other groups—e.g., Muslims, police officers, the military—got ensnared in this alliance structure through perceptions of similarity and transitivity. Conflicts between African Americans and law enforcement may have caused the two parties to split apart in their allegiance to police officers. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may have had a similar effect: that is, the rivals of Muslim extremists (i.e. Christian extremists) may have taken the side of the American military, while the rivals of Christian extremists (i.e. secular liberals) may have eventually, with the exception of the so-called “new atheists,” taken the side of Muslims (i.e. the enemy of their enemy is their friend). Partisanship, and cues from party leaders in support of particular wars, may have also played a role in shaping military attitudes (Zaller, 1992, chapter 6; Karol, 2009, chapter 5; Berinsky, 2007). Regardless of how the American alliance structure changed throughout the decades, we can see that it did change, with political elites rationalizing the changes every step of the way (Lewis & Lewis, 2022).
In the next section, we use figures 1 and 2 as a starting point and begin evaluating predictions entailed by Alliance Theory. We predict that partisans will apply propagandistic biases to their allies—including victim, perpetrator, and attributional biases—which will explain the contents of their political belief systems. We note that some of our predictions converge with existing theoretical approaches, whereas others do not. We will tease apart Alliance Theory from alternative approaches in the section after next.
Explaining political belief systems in the United States

Perpetrator biases in political belief systems

Republicans appear to feel greater allegiance toward white people than they do toward African Americans (see figures 1 and 2). Thus, Republicans are predicted to display perpetrator biases toward white people, which might include downplaying white people’s transgressions against African Americans, including those that have occurred throughout American history. Indeed, polling data reveal that Republicans, together with white people in general, are far less likely to believe that that discrimination against African Americans is currently a problem, that the legacy of slavery contributes to racial disparities in wealth, and that African Americans are entitled to reparations (Moore, 2014). An alternative interpretation of these results is that Republicans are more likely to downplay intergroup oppression in general. However, the same poll revealed bipartisan support of reparations for Holocaust survivors in Germany (Moore, 2014), suggesting that perpetrator biases are specific to one’s local political allies.
Conservatives appear to feel allegiance toward members of the American military (see figures 1 and 2); thus, Alliance Theory predicts that conservatives will be inclined to rationalize military transgressions. Indeed, research indicates that conservatives are less likely to hold the military responsible for unintended civilian casualties, but they are not less likely to hold Iraqis responsible for unintended civilian casualties (Uhlmann, Pizarro, Tannenbaum, & Ditto, 2009; Ditto, Pizarro, & Tannenbaum, 2009; Tannenbaum, Pizarro, & Ditto, 2007). Other data indicate that conservatives are more likely to condone torture perpetrated by the American military; however, they are not more likely to condone torture perpetrated by Iraqis (Norris, Larsen, & Stastny, 2010; see also Crawford, 2012).
One alternative interpretation of these findings is that the military symbolizes “authority” or “security,” which explains conservatives’ allegiance to the military. This entails the prediction that conservatives will be generally supportive of the FBI, which is also symbolizes these values. Yet soon after the FBI began investigating Donald Trump, Republicans became less likely to support the FBI than Democrats, reversing a longstanding partisan divide (Pew Research Center, 2018). Moreover, support for the military at the beginning of the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and the Iraq War was nearly identical between parties until political leaders began to take opposing stances, causing only politically engaged partisans to follow suit (Zaller, 1992, chapter 6; Berinsky, 2007; see also Karol, 2009, chapter 5). The World Health Organization (WHO) also symbolizes authority and security, yet most Republicans distrusted it during the COVID-19 pandemic (Yougov, 2020). These results suggest that attitudes toward institutions are powerfully shaped by partisan allegiance and perceptions of transitivity, and only secondarily (if at all) by the values they symbolize.

Liberals (and Democrats) also exhibit perpetrator biases. When liberals evaluate harms inflicted upon their political rivals (e.g., pro-life supporters, Christian fundamentalists), they are more likely to agree that defacing these groups’ property is “justified,” and that any harassment they suffer is “deserved” (Wetherell, Brandt, & Reyna, 2013). Many strongly identified Democrats justify “mistreatment” of their political opponents, “breaking a few rules” to oppose them, and even using violence as a political tactic (Kalmoe & Mason, 2019). In hypothetical “trolley dilemmas,” liberals are more likely to offer ad hoc moral justifications for killing a white person to save a group of African Americans, but not for killing an African American to save a group of white people (Uhlmann et al., 2009). Liberals (and Democrats) appear to judge a variety of corrupt or dishonest behaviors as less morally wrong when they are committed by Democratic politicians, compared to similar transgressions committed by Republican politicians or corporate CEOs (Coleman, 2013; Solomon, Hackathorn, & Crittendon, 2019; Eriksson, Simpson, & Strimling, 2019; Jasinenko, Christandl, & Meynhardt, 2020). Perpetrator biases are also consistent with examples of liberal intellectuals downplaying, overlooking, or justifying atrocities committed by socialist and communist regimes (Applebaum, 2007, Introduction; Hollander, 2016, p. 58; Hollander, 2017; Stephens, 2017).

Victim biases in political belief systems

Liberals appear to feel allegiance toward a variety of disadvantaged groups (e.g., African Americans, women, gay people, Hispanics; see figures 1 and 2). Thus, Alliance Theory predicts that liberals will apply victim biases to these groups. This idea is consistent with the gradual “concept creep” that has occurred for the definition of “prejudice,” which has expanded to encompass increasingly subtle, indirect, and unintentional behaviors, and has coincided with increasing political polarization (Haslam, 2015; see also Haidt, 2015; Lukianoff & Haidt, 2018). At the same time, liberal college students have become increasingly likely to report microaggressions (i.e. subtle affronts) against the groups with which they identify, which may be due to increasing support from their allies (Campbell & Manning, 2014; see also Lilienfeld, 2017; Lukianoff & Haidt, 2018).
Victim biases may occur among conservatives as well, albeit toward different groups. Since conservatives appear to feel greater allegiance to men, working class white people, Christians, and police officers (see figures 1 and 2), Alliance Theory predicts that conservatives will apply victim biases to these groups, perhaps even engaging in competitive victimhood with liberals. Consistent with this prediction, conservatives are far more likely to believe that discrimination against Christians is a serious societal problem (Jones, Cox, Dionne, Galston, Lienesch, 2016, pp. 16-17), that sexism against men is more prevalent than sexism against women (Bosson, Vandello, Michniewicz, & Lenes, 2012), that most black people are racist against white people (Rasmussen Reports, 2013), and that politicians’ criticism of police officers threatens their safety (Rasmussen Reports, 2015a). Other polling data indicate that 65% of Republicans agree that “people are too easily offended,” despite also agreeing that Black Lives Matter is offensive (Pulse of the Nation, 2017d).

Attributional biases in political belief systems

Since liberals and conservatives appear to exhibit different feelings of allegiance toward “wealthy people” and “poor people” (as well as specific groups associated with them; see figures 1 and 2), Alliance Theory predicts corresponding attributional biases about the causes of wealth and poverty. Indeed, conservatives are more likely to attribute wealth and poverty to internal dispositions (i.e. hard work, lack of effort) than external factors (i.e. circumstances beyond one’s control; Pew Research Center, 2014; Weiner, Osborne, & Rudolph, 2011; Chambers, Swan, & Heesacker, 2015). Echoing these findings, poor people are more likely to attribute their financial problems to external circumstances, while wealthy people are more likely to attribute their financial success to internal dispositions (Pew Research Center, 2014), suggestive of a self-serving attributional bias.
One alternative interpretation of these results is that liberals are generally less likely to make internal attributions to a target. However, a large body of research refutes this hypothesis, showing instead that liberals strategically alter their attributions depending on their allegiance to the target. For example, liberals are more likely than conservatives to make internal attributions to a group of marines who inadvertently killed Iraqi civilians in response to an attack, as well as a police officer who shot an escaped cougar from the zoo (Morgan, Mullen, & Skitka, 2010). Similarly, Democrats are more likely to make internal attributions to a Republican politician (but not a Democratic politician) who committed bribery, as well as a Democratic politician (but not a Republican politician) who made a large donation to charity (Coleman, 2013; see also Malhotra & Kuo, 2008; Sirin & Villalobos, 2011). Democrats are also more likely to blame their Republican president, but not their Democratic governor, for unemployment increases in their state (Brown, 2010). Many liberal Democrats even report that climate change deniers “get what they deserve” when natural disasters strike their homes, suggesting an internal attribution for their misfortune (Webster & Motta, 2019). Crucially, when individuals make attributions about the behavior of politically neutral individuals—i.e. those not widely associated with either political party—researchers find no ideological differences in their attributions (Morgan et al., 2010).
There is also suggestive evidence that external attributions are made by working class white people, who have recently become an important voting bloc within the Republican Party (Pew Research Center, 2016a). That is, rather than attributing their low status to internal causes (e.g., lack of effort or skill), they attribute it to external causes (e.g., immigration, globalization, reverse discrimination). Consistent with this idea, working class white people are more likely to believe that international trade hurts their family’s finances (Pew Research Center, 2016b), that immigrants take jobs away from Americans (Rasmussen Reports, 2015b; Jones et al., 2016), and that white people are disadvantaged by reverse discrimination (Jones et al., 2016, pp. 15-17). These beliefs are also more likely to be endorsed by Republicans more broadly.

Summarizing political belief systems

Political belief systems in the United States include a wide variety of apparently puzzling contents. Conservatives appear to believe that poor people should take personal responsibility for their financial problems (but that working class white people should blame immigration, globalization, and affirmative action), that the infliction of torture and collateral damage is morally permissible (but that Iraqi’s infliction of torture and collateral damage is reprehensible), that we ought to respect the authority of the military (but not the FBI or the WHO), and that people should stop being so easily offended (except Christians, white people, men, and police officers). Liberals appear to believe that poor people are not personally responsible for their financial problems (but that climate change deniers are personally responsible for natural disasters that strike their home), that it is unacceptable to kill Iraqi civilians to save American lives (but that it is acceptable to kill a white person to save African American lives), that Democratic politicians’ corruption is overblown (but that corporate CEOs corruption is reprehensible), and that we ought to protect minority college students (but not police officers in dangerous communities) from feeling unsafe.
What can explain this bewildering variety of beliefs? Alliance Theory suggests a parsimonious answer: liberals and conservatives have different allies and rivals. When they use propagandistic biases to support their allies and oppose their rivals, they generate conflicting narratives that form the contents of political belief systems. In the following section, we compare Alliance Theory to alternative approaches, focusing on where they make diverging predictions. In particular, we compare Alliance Theory to approaches that 1) entail an asymmetry between liberals and conservatives in their moral values, and 2) use this asymmetry to directly explain the contents of political belief systems.

Comparing alliance theory to alternative theories

Intolerance Theory

The idea that conservatives are more prejudiced, ethnocentric, xenophobic, or intolerant of diversity is common in the political psychology literature and has taken a variety of forms. For instance, Haidt (2012) posited that conservatives rely more on the “loyalty/betrayal” foundation, an innate module that evolved to promote group cohesion and intergroup competition (see pp. 161-164). Moreover, Pratto, Sidanius, Stallworth, and Malle (1994) posited that conservatives are higher in “Social Dominance Orientation (SDO),” defined as “the extent to which one desires that one’s ingroup dominate and be superior to outgroups” (p. 742). Other researchers have argued that conservatives are more patriotic than liberals (Schatz, Staub, & Lavine, 1999; Bealey, 1999) and more intolerant of outgroups (Hodson & Busseri, 2012). All of these studies have found correlations between various measures of outgroup antipathy and political conservatism. The claim we will examine, therefore, is that ideological differences in intolerance of outgroups can explain political belief systems.
The above findings, however, are also consistent with Alliance Theory. Rather than disliking outgroups in general, conservatives may simply dislike their specific political rivals, including African Americans, the poor, atheists, and gay people (see figures 1 and 2). For instance, the SDO inventory refers to groups that are “inferior” or “at the bottom,” which may call to mind historically derogatory language applied to African Americans or the poor (see Schmitt, Branscombe, & Kappen, 2003). Measures of patriotism may be confounded with feelings of allegiance to white people, as opposed to a sense of loyalty to the country as a whole (Devos & Banaji, 2005; Peña & Sidanius, 2002). Some researchers’ measures of “outgroup prejudice” are simply measures of antipathy toward African Americans or gay people (e.g., Hodson & Busseri, 2012). Thus, the existing evidence that has been used to support Intolerance Theory, our umbrella term, is also consistent with Alliance Theory: that is, conservatives may simply dislike their political rivals.
One area where the two theories make contrasting predictions is political intolerance. If conservatives are generally more intolerant of outgroups than liberals, then they will show stronger negative attitudes toward their political outgroups than liberals. However, if both groups possess the same alliance psychology, then they will show equally negative attitudes toward their political rivals. Indeed, a wealth of evidence supports Alliance Theory: liberals exhibit equal levels of dislike, discrimination, and support for violence against conservatives as the other way around (Chambers et al., 2013; Wetherell et al., 2013; Brandt, 2017; Kalmoe & Mason, 2019; though see Ganzach & Schul, 2021). Likewise, Democrats are just as negatively biased against Republicans (both implicitly and explicitly) as the other way around, and both groups are equally likely to discriminate against one another in hypothetical job applications (Iyengar & Westwood, 2015; Westwood et al., 2018; see also Pew Research Center, 2016c).
Another area where the two theories make contrasting predictions is attitudes toward groups that are associated with one’s political outgroup. Here, Intolerance Theory predicts that conservatives will show more negative attitudes toward groups associated with liberals (e.g., atheists) than liberals will show toward groups associated with conservatives (e.g., Christian fundamentalists). However, recent evidence from several studies failed to support this prediction. When asked to rate a variety of groups that vary in their political associations—e.g., feminists, businesspeople, atheists, Christian fundamentalists—liberals expressed more negative attitudes toward the groups associated with conservatives, whereas conservatives expressed more negative attitudes toward the groups associated with liberals (Chambers et al., 2013; Wetherell et al., 2013; Brandt et al., 2014; Crawford et al., 2015; Brandt, 2017; see also figures 1 and 2). Crucially, the researchers found no ideological differences in negative attitudes toward outgroup-associated targets.
One might respond that liberals’ negative attitudes stem from a different source than conservatives’ negative attitudes. That is, conservatives are intolerant of outgroups, whereas liberals are merely intolerant of conservatives’ intolerance. However, one problem with this interpretation is that both liberals and conservatives perceive their ideological opponents as intolerant, while perceiving themselves as tolerant (Chambers & Melnyk, 2006; Moore-Berg, Ankori-Karlinsky, Hameiri, & Bruneau, 2020). Indeed, the tendency to view one’s rivals as aggressive, hateful, and unreasonable (i.e. intolerant), and one’s allies as peaceful, friendly, and reasonable (i.e. tolerant), is a common feature of social conflicts across cultures (Brewer & Campbell, 1976; Baumeister, 1999; Noor et al., 2012; Waytz, Young, & Ginges, 2014). Of course, we could say that, in this particular conflict, liberals happen to be correct, and conservatives happen to be incorrect. But then we would need an explanation for why conservatives alone are incorrect. Perhaps conservatives want to make liberals look evil and themselves look virtuous. However, that would imply that conservatives believe intolerance is evil and tolerance is virtuous, which contradicts Intolerance Theory. Alliance Theory avoids this confusion. Since each side has symmetrical propagandistic biases, each side is will naturally justify their own, and magnify the other’s, intolerance.
Another way to tease apart the two theories is by substituting different outgroups on otherwise identical policy issues. For example, if conservatives are generally more threatened by foreigners (i.e. national outgroups), then it should not matter much whether the foreigners are Asian or Hispanic: there should be at least some intolerance of both. However, Hispanics are more likely to be categorized as liberal than Asian Americans (see figure 1), perhaps because Asian Americans are wealthier and/or less stereotypically associated with welfare (Abrajano & Hajnal, 2015, pp. 74-75). Alliance Theory therefore predicts that conservatives (and Republicans) will differentiate between Hispanic and Asian outgroups, exhibiting negative attitudes toward the former but not the latter. Indeed, data from nationally representative datasets indicate that Republicans, compared to Democrats, have more negative attitudes toward Hispanics but more positive attitudes toward Asian Americans (Abrajano & Hajnal, 2015, chapter 2). Other research indicates that negative attitudes toward immigrants crucially depends on the characteristics of the immigrants in question—not on foreignness per se. When immigrants are described as Christian, European, Asian, law-abiding, or highly skilled, a majority of Republicans support immigration, with little or no partisan differences. It is only when immigrants are described as Muslim or Central American that clear partisan differences emerge, with Muslim immigrants eliciting the largest partisan divide (Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2015; Griffin, 2018; Jones et al., 2016, pp. 33-35). Attitudes toward Israelis, moreover, reflect the opposite pattern of ideological differences than would be predicted by intolerance of national outgroups, with conservatives being more likely to view Israel as an ally (YouGov/Economist, 2019).
We might also apply Intolerance Theory to attitudes about Vladimir Putin. Here, Intolerance Theory makes a clear prediction: conservatives will have more negative attitudes toward Vladimir Putin than liberals, because he is the leader of a longstanding foreign adversary of the United States. Yet Donald Trump repeatedly expressed positive attitudes toward Putin, which implies that Republicans, and Trump supporters in particular, may have considered Putin as an ally due to perceptions of transitivity (i.e. the ally of my ally is my friend). Consistent with this idea, Republicans’ support for Putin more than tripled between 2015 and 2017, the time during which Donald Trump rose to power and began praising Putin (Gallup, 2017; YouGov, 2017; see also Pulse of the Nation, 2017b). Similarly, other polling data indicated that Republicans were substantially less likely than Democrats to view Russia’s power and influence as a threat to the United States (Pew Research Center, 2017). Moreover, following the Trump impeachment hearings, Republicans were over four times less likely than Democrats to believe that requesting a foreign government to investigate one’s political opponents was “inappropriate” (YouGov/Economist, 2019). These data are difficult to reconcile with the idea that conservatives are generally more loyal to America or wary of foreigners.
One might respond that conservatism isn’t so much about national intolerance as it is about ethnic intolerance. That is, conservatives are more likely to be ethnocentric, evaluating their ethnic group more favorably than other ethnic groups. However, a large body of research challenges this hypothesis. Ethnocentrism is common across ethnic groups (Kinder & Kam, 2010, chapter 3), and it sometimes predicts more liberal policy preferences, depending on the ethnic group one belongs to. For instance, Among African Americans, ethnocentrism predicts support for affirmative action (Kinder & Kam, 2010, chapter 10), and among Hispanics, ethnocentrism predicts support for immigration (Kinder & Kam, 2010, chapter 6). For a variety of other political beliefs—e.g., abortion, environmentalism, women’s rights, size of government—ethnocentrism plays no role at all (Kinder & Kam, 2010, chapters 3 and 8). Crucially, data taken from a nationally representative sample (N = 4,945) indicate that ethnocentrism is only weakly related to conservatism and Republican identification (Rs = 0.07 and 0.06, respectively; Kinder & Kam, 2010, chapter 3).
Perhaps conservatism isn’t about ethnic intolerance, but about prejudice based on immutable traits. However, according to figure 1, liberal groups are scarcely more likely to possess immutable traits than conservative groups. Four of the 16 conservative groups have immutable traits (i.e. white people, men, Asian Americans, and elderly people), compared to five of the 19 liberal groups (i.e. gay people, women, Hispanics, young people, and African Americans). This is a difference between 25% and 26%. One might respond that liberals only dislike the former set of groups because of perceived political differences, not because of their immutable traits. However, this is an equally plausible explanation for why conservatives dislike the latter set of groups. Indeed, studies show that ideological differences in racial attitudes disappear when perceived political allegiances are held constant (Chambers et al., 2013, studies 2 and 3), and when it comes to particular African Americans (e.g., Tim Scott, Ben Carson) and particular women (e.g., Sarah Palin, Nikki Haley), the expected ideological differences reverse (e.g., YouGov, 2020). Several studies directly compared statistical models predicting dislike of various groups (total N = 2,093). Results indicated that the most parsimonious model, which simply included the political allegiance of the group and the participant, was more powerful than alternative models that included immutable traits as a factor (Brandt, 2017).
Taken together, the results challenge Intolerance Theory, but they offer strong support for Alliance Theory. Liberals and conservatives are equally hostile to their political rivals, and they are equally hostile to the allies of their political rivals. Conservatives are not generally threatened by foreigners, but in fact hold favorable attitudes toward a wide variety of foreigners, including Asian immigrants, European immigrants, Christian immigrants, Russia, Israel, and even Vladimir Putin. Conservatives do not appear to be particularly nationalistic, patriotic, ethnocentric, or prejudiced based on immutable traits. They simply have different allies and rivals than their liberal counterparts.

Authoritarianism Theory

The idea that conservatives are more authoritarian has long been prominent in political psychology. The idea originated in 1950 with the publication of The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950), and was revisited by Altemeyer (1981) who posited that conservatives are higher in “right-wing authoritarianism.” More recently, Graham, Haidt, and Nosek (2009) argue that conservatives rely more on the “authority/respect foundation,” a cognitive module that evolved for conferring social rank. The claim here is that political belief systems can be explained by differences in authoritarianism, or the disposition to obey or exercise authority.
However, rather than disagreeing about authority in the abstract, partisans may simply disagree about which groups’ authority should be respected. Many measures of authoritarianism are, in fact, confounded with group attitudes: for instance, the “authority/hierarchy” subscale of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire contains the statements “Men and women have different roles to play in society,” and “If I were a soldier and disagreed with my commanding officer’s orders, I would obey anyway because that is my duty” (Graham et al., 2009). Measures of “right-wing authoritarianism,” moreover, assess attitudes toward people who “criticize the church” or who strictly follow “God’s laws” (Zakrisson, 2005). Given that men, women, the military, Christians, and atheists elicit diverging allegiances from liberals and conservatives (see figures 1 and 2), ideological differences on these measures are also consistent with Alliance Theory. That is, conservatives may simply respect the authority of specific groups—namely their allies—more than liberals.
How might we tease apart the two theories? If Alliance Theory is correct, then respect for authority will depend on the authority figure in question: conservatives will respect the authority of their allies, whereas liberals will respect the authority of their allies. Moreover, when it comes to groups that are politically neutral (not widely associated with either party or ideology), there will be little or no ideological differences in respect for authority. Authoritarianism Theory, by contrast, predicts that conservatives will show greater respect for a wide range of authority figures, including authority figures that are politically neutral.
Several studies have tested these predictions, and the results strongly support Alliance Theory. Whereas conservatives show more respect for the authority of their political allies (e.g., military personnel, religious leaders) liberals show more respect for the authority of their political allies (e.g., civil rights activists, environmentalists). When it comes to ideologically neutral authority figures (e.g., judges, office managers) there are no ideological differences in respect for authority (Frimer, Gaucher, & Schaefer, 2014). Other research indicates that liberals are more likely to respect the authority of the president, but only when the president in question is Barack Obama (Crawford, Kay, & Duke, 2015). Likewise, Republicans show less respect for authority figures that are plausibly associated with liberals, including the Internal Revenue Service, the national news media, colleges and universities, regulatory agencies, climate scientists, and the Environmental Protection Agency (Pew Research Center, 2015, pp. 61 and 126; Kahan, Jenkins-Smith, & Braman, 2011; Pulse of the Nation, 2018a). As we have seen, Republicans show less support for the FBI than Democrats, likely due to the FBI’s investigations of Donald Trump (Pew Research Center, 2018), and more recently, Republicans showed relatively low respect for scientific and institutional authorities throughout the COVID-19 pandemic (YouGov, 2020).
Perhaps Authoritarianism Theory is less about generally respecting authority figures and more about the desire to exercise authority over others—for instance, by restricting their speech. This version of the theory predicts that conservatives will be more motivated to restrict the speech of their political rivals than liberals. However, many studies have failed to confirm this prediction. Whereas conservatives are more likely to favor restricting the speech of liberal activists, liberals are more likely to favor restricting the speech of conservative activists, and both liberals and conservatives are equally likely to favor restricting the speech of their political opponents (Crawford, 2014; Crawford & Pilanski, 2014; Sullivan, Pieron, & Marcus, 1982; Wetherell et al., 2013; Kahan, Hoffman, Braman, & Evans, 2012; van Prooijen & Krouwel, 2016). Moreover, it is difficult to see how a preference for laissez faire capitalism, laxer gun control laws, fewer precautions during COVID-19, and environmental deregulation—all more prevalent among conservatives—can be reconciled with a general desire to restrict others’ behavior (e.g., Pew Research Center, 2016b; YouGov, 2020).
One might respond that authoritarianism is not a motivation to exercise authority or obey authority per se, but rather an array of psychological dispositions like strict adherence to norms, preference for strong leaders, and/or black-and-white thinking (Zakrisson, 2005; Manson, 2020). Whereas some of these dispositions are important predictors of political extremism (van Prooijen & Krouwel, 2016), they are not unique to conservatives. Recent research indicates that measures of “left-wing authoritarianism” are associated with “preference for social uniformity, prejudice towards different others, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior, cognitive rigidity, aggression and punitiveness towards perceived rivals, outsized concern for hierarchy, and moral absolutism” (Costello, Bowes, Stevens, Waldman, & Lilienfeld, 2021, p. 39; see also Manson, 2020). Other research indicates that, across thirteen European countries, authoritarian beliefs such as that children should be “obedient” and that “strong leaders” should not have to “bother with elections” is just as often associated with left-wing identification as right-wing identification (De Regt, Mortelmans, & Smits, 2011; see also Moore-Berg et al., 2020). Research in comparative politics indicates that, across nations, preference for authoritarian vs. democratic governance does not consistently align with either left-wing or right-wing identification (Deegan-Krause, 2007; Marchesi, 2017; De Leeuw, Rekker, Azrout, & van Spanje, 2020).
One might object that left-wing authoritarianism, even if it has similar psychological correlates as right-wing authoritarianism, is fundamentally different because it is anti-hierarchical. However, left-wing authoritarians do not seek to eliminate the social hierarchy; they seek to rearrange the hierarchy. One of the items on the left-wing authoritarianism scale reads “America would be much better off if all of the rich people were at the bottom of the social ladder,” and another reads “If I could remake society, I would put people who currently have the most privilege at the very bottom” (Costello et al., 2021). These statements illustrate that both left-wing and right-wing authoritarians want their allies at the top, and their rivals at the bottom, of the social hierarchy. Neither are opposed to hierarchy itself.

Egalitarianism Theory

Another prominent idea in political psychology is that liberals are more egalitarian than conservatives—that is, they prefer greater equality between groups. For instance, Graham et al. (2009) propose that liberals rely more on the “equality/fairness foundation,” Sidanius and Pratto (2001) argue that political conservatism is designed to “enhance or maintain the degree of social inequality” (p. 741), and Jost et al. (2003) argue that conservatives are more motivated to “justify inequality among groups and individuals” (p. 340). As one scholar put it, “One major criterion continually reappears in distinguishing left from right: attitudes toward equality” (Giddens, 1998, p. 40). The claim here is that political belief systems can be explained by a general support or opposition to equality.
However, when people think about “equality,” they are likely to call to mind specific political issues (e.g., feminism, gay marriage, affirmative action), as opposed to “equality” as an abstract concept (e.g., Bishop, 2004). When people voice their support for equality, they may not be promoting an abstract ideal so much as attempting to advance the interests of their political allies in specific conflicts. Egalitarian rhetoric is most often employed in political discourse to mobilize support for African Americans, feminists, gay people, liberals, and Democrats. Use of this rhetoric may therefore reflect allegiance to that particular set of groups, as opposed to an impartial moral preference that cuts across group identities. If this is the case, then many widely used measures of egalitarianism may be confounded with political and social allegiances. What might a more valid measure of egalitarianism look like? One possibility is to ask participants to evaluate a set of hypothetical societies that vary randomly in their level of equality, assessing what type of society participants would be most interested in joining.
In fact, in one study using a nationally representative sample (N = 5,522), just such a measure was devised. When Republican and Democratic voters chose between hypothetical societies with randomly determined distributions of wealth, the researchers found no partisan difference in their preference to live in an equal society (Norton & Ariely, 2011; see also Norton, Neal, Govan, Ariely, & Holland, 2014). However, when the task was reframed to be more specific—i.e. referring to preferred levels of equality in the United States—a small partisan gap emerged, with Democratic voters preferring more equal distributions of wealth than Republican voters (Norton & Ariely, 2011). Consistent with these results, other research indicates striking consensus among white Americans in their support for egalitarian principles and ideals (i.e. equal opportunity, equal treatment), but substantial disagreement over items that implicate specific groups—i.e. whether “we’ve gone too far” in “pushing” equal rights for women and African Americans (Sears, Henry, & Kosterman, 2000, pp. 91-95). These findings fit better with Alliance Theory, which posits that political attitudes derive more from group allegiances than from egalitarianism in the abstract.
Another way to tease apart Alliance Theory from Egalitarianism Theory is by determining the direction of causality between egalitarianism and group allegiances. Alliance Theory posits that group allegiances come first, with support for equality arising subsequently as a rhetorical tactic to mobilize support for one’s disadvantaged allies. Egalitarianism Theory, by contrast, posits that support for equality comes first, with group allegiances arising subsequently based on whether the group shares one’s mission to create a more equal society. Evidence from a four-year, nationally representative longitudinal study (N = 759) supports Alliance Theory: prior party identification predicts subsequent egalitarianism, whereas prior egalitarianism does not predict subsequent party identification (Goren, 2005). Moreover, longitudinal research indicates that sudden decreases in social status increase subsequent support for equality (Owens & Pedulla, 2013), and experimental research indicates that people rapidly switch from egalitarian to anti-egalitarian moral judgments—in a matter of minutes—depending on whether equality benefits the group they were assigned to (DeScioli, Massenkoff, Shaw, Petersen, & Kurzban, 2014). Taken together, the evidence suggests that egalitarianism is not a stable, pre-existing orientation, but is instead a flexible tactic designed to support oneself and one’s allies.
Another way to differentiate the two theories is by substituting different groups in otherwise identical scenarios. If liberals only support equality to defend their allies, then their support for equality will depend on whether their allies are at a disadvantage. Consistent with this prediction, when participants evaluated an insurance policy that resulted in larger premiums for a high-risk neighborhood (resulting in unequal pricing), participants’ opposition to the policy strongly depended on the demographics of the disadvantaged neighborhood. When the disadvantaged neighborhood was described as mostly African American, liberals expressed nearly twice as much opposition to the policy as conservatives. But when the disadvantaged neighborhood was described as mostly white, ideological differences were statistically insignificant (Tetlock, Kristel, Elson, Green, & Lerner, 2000, experiment 3). Similarly, when respondents of a public opinion poll were asked whether it was unfair for an advantaged group to be paid millions of dollars a year, respondents’ judgments strongly depended on the identity of the advantaged group. When the group was described as corporate CEOs, liberals were more likely than conservatives to say the amount of pay was unfair. But when the advantaged group was described as Hollywood movie stars, liberals were less likely than conservatives to say it was unfair (Pulse of the Nation, 2018c). Since Hollywood movie stars are commonly associated with liberals (Brandt, 2017), these results imply that support for equality depends on one’s allegiance to the advantaged group in question. Finally, other polling data indicate that when it comes to “small, working class towns in America’s heartland” a clear majority of Republicans (72%) agree that “the government should do more to help” them, suggesting that conservatives are perfectly willing to support disadvantaged groups, so long as they are perceived as their political allies (Pulse of the nation, 2018b).
One might respond that Egalitarianism Theory is less about unequal outcomes between groups and more about unequal treatment of groups. We might call this view the Discrimination Theory. According to the Discrimination Theory, liberals are generally more opposed to discrimination than conservatives, and more willing to trust the experiences of those who claim they’ve been discriminated against. Alliance Theory, by contrast, entails a different claim: liberals mainly oppose discrimination against their allies and trust their allies, whereas conservatives mainly oppose discrimination against their allies and trust their allies. Consistent with this latter claim, nationally representative polling data indicate that liberals express more concern than conservatives about discrimination against atheists, African Americans, and women, whereas conservatives express more concern than liberals about discrimination against Christians, men, and white people (Jones et al., 2016, pp. 15-17; Moore, 2014; Rasmussen Reports, 2013; Miller, 2017; Bosson et al., 2012; Pew Research Center, 2009 ; see also Norton & Sommers, 2011).
Of course, liberals may only care more about discrimination against the former set of groups, because those groups face more frequent and severe discrimination. However, this does not explain why conservatives care more about discrimination against the latter set of groups. If conservatives are generally less concerned about discrimination, then why are they more concerned about less frequent and severe forms of it? If liberals are generally more willing to trust the experiences of groups who claim they’ve been discriminated against, then why are they less likely than conservatives to trust the latter set of groups? Alliance Theory avoids this confusion. People engage in competitive victimhood to mobilize support their allies (Noor et al., 2012), while denying or downplaying mistreatment of their rivals. This is all we need to assume to explain the data.
One alternative possibility is that it is only conservatives that are downplaying discrimination faced by their rivals, whereas liberals are evaluating claims of discrimination impartially. However, the available evidence suggests that liberals are far from impartial. Indeed, some liberals are even willing to obstruct scientific research on discrimination faced by their rivals. When researchers randomly sent varying study proposals to human subjects committees—some examining “reverse discrimination” (i.e. against white men) and others examining conventional discrimination—the committees rejected the proposals on reverse discrimination more frequently, and many committee members explicitly stated that they rejected the proposals for political reasons (Ceci, Peters, & Plotkin, 1985). This lack of impartiality fits better with Alliance Theory than with a general opposition to unequal treatment.
One final possibility is that liberals are indeed more opposed to discrimination as a general principle—it is only that, due to the United States’ long history of racial and gender oppression, discrimination against women and ethnic minorities entails the added harm of perpetuating historical inequities. A better way to disentangle the two theories, therefore, would be to examine ideological differences in discrimination against groups that have not suffered from, or have not benefited from, historical inequities. For example, one might measure discrimination against contemporary partisan outgroups. In this case, the Discrimination Theory predicts that liberals will be less likely to discriminate against partisan outgroups than conservatives. However, Democrats are just as likely to discriminate against Republicans as the other way around (Iyengar & Westwood, 2015), and liberals are just as likely to discriminate against conservatives as the other way around (Wetherell et al., 2013). Liberals are also just as likely to discriminate against groups associated with the conservatives (e.g., Tea Party activists, pro-life people) as conservatives are to discriminate against groups associated with liberals (e.g., feminists, pro-choice people; Wetherell et al., 2013; Sullivan et al., 1982). Hitting closer to home, when social psychologists were asked how inclined they would be to discriminate against a conservative job applicant at their university, fully 82% of liberals admitted that they would be at least a little bit inclined to discriminate against the applicant (Duarte et al., 2015, p. 11; Honeycutt & Freberg, 2017).
In sum, liberals do not appear to be impartial defenders of egalitarianism as a general moral principle; rather, they support equality if, and only if, it benefits specific groups—namely women, atheists, African Americans, feminists, pro-choice people, Democrats, or liberals. When it comes to other groups—namely men, Christians, white people, Hollywood movie stars, Tea Party activists, pro-life people, Republicans, or conservatives—liberals’ support for equality disappears. Political allegiances appear to drive egalitarianism, but not the other way around. When egalitarianism is measured in the abstract—i.e. without reference to local intergroup conflicts—partisan differences disappear. Taken together, the body of evidence fits better with Alliance Theory than Egalitarianism Theory.
[Table 1 near here]

Implications and directions for future research

Alliance Theory is relatively modest in its assumptions. Contrary to other approaches, the theory does not assume—nor preclude—any psychological differences between liberals and conservatives. The theory only makes two assumptions: 1) humans possess cognitive mechanisms for forming and detecting alliances, and 2) humans use propagandistic tactics to support their allies and oppose their rivals in conflicts. These assumptions rest on strong theoretical and empirical foundations. Even more promising, these assumptions alone can explain the diverse contents of political belief systems, including their many inconsistencies and double standards.
Alternative approaches, which appeal to various partisan asymmetries and psychological constructs, face a unique set of problems. For instance, even if partisans validly differed on one or another construct, it would immediately raise the question of 1) where that difference itself came from, and 2) what the precise causal pathways are between this construct and the heterogeneous, contradictory contents of political belief systems (see e.g., table 1). Alliance Theory does not have these problems. Rather, it explains political belief systems by appeal to group allegiances, which have straightforward, causal connections to specific beliefs and policy preferences, namely those that advance the interests of the groups in question (e.g., Nelson & Kinder, 1996).
Our approach can therefore be readily applied to other cultures and time periods, first by mapping the alliance structure of the society in question (see e.g., figures 1 and 2), and then by applying the relevant propagandistic biases to each group within it (see section “supporting allies in conflicts”). Double standards can be discovered by identifying moral principles used to support one group and applying them to rival groups (see table 1). Of course, what qualifies as a group, transgression, grievance, advantage, or disadvantage will vary across cultures, and the nature of the political system may likewise affect how alliances form. But if we are correct, then variation in political beliefs will track variation in alliance structures—and therefore exhibit the same sorts of inconsistencies we see in the United States.

Individual differences and political alliances

One implication of Alliance Theory is that correlations between individual differences and political beliefs may not be as direct, causal, or wide-ranging as scholars have supposed. Instead, these correlations may be targeted to specific political beliefs and confounded with group allegiances. For example, allegiance to devout Christians may both increase support for traditional sexual morality (Weeden & Kurzban, 2013) and “need for certainty” in reference to one’s faith (Kossowska, & Sekerdej, 2015; Conway et al., 2016). Low socioeconomic status may both increase populist resentment of elites (Petersen, Osmundsen, & Bor, 2021) and sensitivity to threats (Kraus, Horberg, Goetz, & Keltner, 2011). Affiliation with urban, highly educated subcultures may both reduce populist resentment of elites (Petersen et al., 2021; Jacobs & Munis, 2022) and increase openness to experience (Smaldino, Lukaszewksi, von Rueden, & Gurven, 2019). Ideology itself may cause people to report having personality traits associated with their ideology—to signal similarity to their allies (Bakker, Lelkes, & Malka, 2021; Smaldino et al., 2019).
Another possibility is that group allegiances mediate the relationship between individual differences and political beliefs. For example, sexual restrictedness (i.e. discomfort with casual sex) may increase enmity toward stereotypically promiscuous groups (e.g., gay people, pro-choice people, recreational drug users), resulting in greater opposition to gay rights, abortion, and drug legalization (Kurzban, Dukes, & Weeden, 2010; Weeden & Kurzban 2014, chapter 4; Pinsof & Haselton, 2016). Male physical formidability may increase allegiance to the military and other dominant groups, thereby increasing support hawkish policy preferences (Sell et al., 2017). Greater conscientiousness might lead to greater career success (Duckworth, Weir, Tsukayama, & Kwok, 2012; Egan, Daly, Delaney, Boyce, & Wood, 2017), thereby reducing allegiance to poor or unemployed people—and decreasing support for redistribution (Koo, Piff, & Shariff, 2022). Regardless of whether group allegiances mediate or confound relationships between individual differences and political beliefs, Alliance Theory predicts that controlling for group allegiances will eliminate or substantially reduce these relationships.

Politics and morality

According to Alliance Theory, the contents of political belief systems derive primarily from group allegiances, with morality playing at best a secondary role. As we have seen, group allegiances determine apparent moral values more than the other way around (Goren, 2005), ethical philosophies are often confabulated to justify support for one’s allies (Uhlmann et al., 2009), and moral “principles” change flexibly depending on whether they benefit one’s allies or rivals (see table 1). But if abstract morality plays such a minor role in politics, then why do the most politically engaged partisans claim to be motivated by moral convictions (e.g., Skitka & Bauman, 2008) as opposed to group allegiances?
Such claims, we propose, serve the same function as the propagandistic biases discussed in previous sections, namely mobilizing support in conflicts. For example, creating common knowledge that one’s side of the conflict is moral—and the other side is immoral—may be an effective way to draw third parties to one’s side (DeScioli & Kurzban, 2013) and embolden allies to attack one’s rivals with impunity (Mooijman, Hoover, Lin, Ji, & Dehghani, 2018). Consistent with this functional account, partisans on both sides of the political spectrum claim to be motivated by moral virtues like altruism, impartiality, honesty, and love, while claiming that their political opponents are motivated by selfishness, intolerance, dishonesty, and hatred (Reeder, Pryor, Wohl, & Griswell, 2005; Steffens, Haslam, Jetten, & Mols, 2016; Waytz et al., 2014; Kennedy & Pronin, 2008; Cohen, 2003; Kalmoe & Mason, 2019; Chambers & Melnyk, 2006; Moore-Berg et al., 2020). Since these conflicting descriptions of each side’s motives cannot both be correct, then at least one of them must be incorrect. We propose that both accounts are equally distorted and function as propagandistic biases.
From the perspective of Alliance Theory, politics and morality are different domains, with the former often masquerading as the latter for strategic purposes. We do not deny that humans are fundamentally moral beings (Hamlin, 2013); rather, we claim that the widespread conflation of politics with morality hinders our understanding of both. Politics is about conflict and loyalty, whereas morality is about cooperation and impartiality (Baumard et al., 2013; DeScioli & Kurzban, 2013). Attending to these distinctions yields novel predictions, while ignoring them sows needless confusion. For instance, we predict that loyal partisans, compared to weaker or more moderate partisans, will be more willing to condone actions committed by their political allies that they would otherwise view as immoral (e.g., Solomon et al., 2019). Loyal partisans might also be relatively more likely to exhibit moral hypocrisy—that is, they may be more likely to flout their apparent moral principles when it serves the interests of their political allies (see table 1). However, these predictions make little sense if politics and morality are the same thing. Why would the most morally motivated individuals (i.e. loyal partisans) be the least morally principled? The predictions only make sense if we assume that politics is different from, and sometimes at odds with, morality.
The distinction between politics and morality also suggests that abstract, moral disagreement between partisans may be overstated. Rather than disagreeing about the general moral importance of tolerance, authority, or equality, partisans may merely disagree about who should be tolerated, whose authority is legitimate, and whose advantages are unfair. Rather than disagreeing about justice in the abstract, partisans may merely disagree about who deserves status (and how much), who deserves condemnation (and how much), and who deserves sympathy (and how much). Indeed, much of political discourse plays out against a backdrop of tacit moral agreement. Disputants compete to frame their opponents as immoral—e.g., unfair, selfish, disrespectful—while relying on shared assumptions of what counts as moral.
Many of us are familiar with the “politics” of everyday life—office politics, academic politics, etc. Yet the politics of everyday life may be no different from the politics of a democratic citizenry. Political alliances may be analogous to friendships; political parties may be analogous to cliques; and ideological belief systems may be analogous to the ‘two sides of a story’ the emerge from interpersonal disputes. If you do not trust your friends’ side of the story, they may not consider you a true friend; likewise, if you do not trust your fellow partisans’ side of the story, they may not consider you a true ally. When seen in this light, motivated reasoning is not so much of a cognitive shortcoming as it is an honest signal of loyalty. If Alliance Theory is correct, then ideological beliefs may be as fundamental to the human condition as friends, rivals, and social life itself.

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Mordecai Finley and the Hero System of the Soul

Posted on June 19, 2026 by Luke Ford

On a Friday afternoon in Herzliya the light off the Mediterranean goes flat and gold, and a man who once carried a rifle for the United States Marine Corps sits down in front of a camera and starts to teach. By the clock in Los Angeles it is still morning. The talk lands in homes across the city where people have listened to him for thirty years. Mordecai Finley (b. 1954) grew up in Southern California, served three years in the Corps, took his discharge as a sergeant in 1976, spent a year on a kibbutz, and came back to take degrees at the University of Southern California and a rabbinic ordination at Hebrew Union College. In 1993 he and his wife Meirav built a synagogue called Ohr HaTorah out of nothing and ran it for years from a book-lined office in a Valley Village strip mall. Newsweek once put him on a list of the country’s influential rabbis. He holds a black belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu. He took small parts in David Mamet films. He teaches now from Israel and calls the work a Center for Wisdom. The center of that work, the thing he comes back to week after week, is the soul.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gave us the tool for reading a life like this one. In The Denial of Death he argued that a man cannot bear the plain knowledge that he will die and rot, and so every culture hands him a hero system, a set of rules for earning the feeling that he counts in the scheme of things, that some part of him will outlast the body. Becker called the private version the causa sui project, a man trying to father himself, to be the cause of his own significance. He called the price of it the vital lie. A hero system tells a man what counts as winning and names the great threat he has to beat. It loads its key words with a charge that holds only inside its own walls. Say the soul inside Finley’s world and you have named the field where a man wins or loses everything. Carry the same word into another hero system and the charge shifts, or thins, or drops to nothing.

Finley’s hero is the man who wakes. He teaches the death of the ego and the resurrection of the authentic self. He works in mussar, the Jewish discipline of character that runs back to Yisrael Salanter (1810-83), and he splits the self into a lower part that grasps and lies and a higher part that sees. The task is to refine the soul the way a smith refines metal, to manage one’s own consciousness, to train. He took a word from the Israeli army, devekut l’misima, devotion to the mission, and he means by it a clarity that holds when the pressure comes. The soul in this world is real. It outlasts the body. A man cleans it or fouls it, and the cleaning is the work of a life. The immortality here is both plain and double: the soul that survives, and the line carried forward, three of his four children in Israel and two of them veterans of the army, and the students who take the practice and hand it down. Evil in this system is sleep. The enemy is the unexamined ego, the comfortable lie a man tells himself so he does not have to look.

Now move the word.

In a lab on a coast somewhere a cognitive scientist runs a subject through a scanner and watches the predictions light up. She is kind about it. When a visitor uses the word soul she gives a small smile and waits. For her the hero system is the slow advance of knowledge, the great enemy is the story people tell because it soothes them, and the only thing that outlasts her is the result that holds up when others try to break it. The soul is a folk tale the brain tells about the brain. “Show me where it sits on the scan,” she says, and she is not being cruel. She would refine the model, not the man.

In a forest in Thailand a monk in ochre robes sits in a hut the size of a closet. A novice asks him where the self goes at death. The old man does not answer the question he was asked. “Find the one who is asking,” he says. In his world there is no soul to refine. The hunt for one is the disease. The hero system is the end of craving, the threat is clinging, and the prize is the stopping of rebirth, which is the stopping of the very self Finley wants to polish. To this man the loving care of a personal soul is the trap with the best bait.

In a glass office above the Bay a founder in a gray T-shirt talks about his bloodwork and his cold plunge and the supplements he times to the hour. For him the soul is a pattern, the connectome, information that can be copied off failing hardware onto something that does not fail. The body is a device. The hero system is the defeat of death by engineering, the enemy is decay, and the immortality is plain and technical, a backup rather than a World of the Soul. “We are not going to die,” he tells the room. “We are going to debug.” He might find Finley’s soul charming and impossible to test.

In a hall hung with marigolds a teacher of Advaita speaks softly to a circle of seekers who flew in for the week. Atman is Brahman, he tells them. The single Self wears every face. Your particular soul is a mask, and to spend your life improving the mask is to sink deeper into the one error that holds you. “The one you are improving,” he says, “is the one you must see through.” His prize dissolves the man Finley trains.

In a Black Pentecostal church in Memphis, and later in a club down the street, the word means feel. Soul is the thing in a voice that cannot be faked, the body given over in sound, the depth under the performance. The hero system is the music. The enemy is the phony, the singer who hits the notes and moves nobody. The immortality is the record and the one night the room caught fire. This is the cousin closest to Finley, since both name a depth beneath the surface, yet the singer’s depth lives in the throat and the crowd, far from any ladder of higher and lower. “You can hit every note and still have no soul,” the bandleader says, and everybody in the band knows exactly what he means.

In a white clapboard church a Reformed pastor preaches that the soul is real and that it is corrupt past saving by any man’s effort. Grace alone. To him Finley’s refinement is the oldest mistake there is, salvation by works, a man scrubbing at what only God can wash. The hero system is election, the enemy is the pride that thinks it can save itself, and the immortality is given and never earned. “The heart is deceitful above all things,” he says, reading from Jeremiah. “You cannot counsel it clean.” Same word, soul, and the opposite order: stop polishing.

The other words crack the same way. Finley prizes clarity, the clarity the Corps gave him, devotion to the mission. To the monk clarity is an empty mirror. To the founder it is clean data. To the pastor it is the conviction of one’s own sin. To the singer it is the note landing true in the chest. Discipline splits along the same lines. The soul is the spine that holds Finley’s whole frame upright, and when you pull that word out and hand it to the others, the frame they build around it stands on different ground and points a different way.

Here is the turn Becker forces. He argued that the hero system is a needed lie, the vital lie of character, the way a man keeps the terror of death out of the room he lives in. Finley built a hero system whose content is the refusal of comforting lies. Wake up. Die to the ego. See what is in front of you. Asked once about his own spiritual struggles, he said, to be honest, that he carries no trouble and no conflict, and he traced that steadiness to the Marines. Read through Becker, the confident man who fights no inner war is not a man without a hero system. He is a man whose hero system works. The terror has been handled. The vital lie has done its job so well that it stopped feeling like a lie and started feeling like clarity.

Becker meant no contempt by that, and neither do I. He thought every man needs the thing, that the choice is never naked truth against illusion but a sturdy hero system against a broken one, or against collapse. The honest question a reader can put to Finley’s soul, or to the monk’s no-soul, or to the founder’s backup, is not which one feels best. It is which one is true, what it costs, and whether the man who lives by it can look at his own death without flinching and without lying. Finley says his can. That claim is the wager at the heart of his hero system, and it is the same wager, in other clothes, that every hero system asks a man to make.

The soul, in Finley’s world, is the field where a man wins or loses. Move the word and the field moves. For the monk there is no field, only the seeing through. For the founder the field is silicon. For the pastor the field belongs to God and the man stands as a spectator at his own rescue. For the singer the field is the room on a good night. Becker’s point holds across all of them. Each system hands its man a word, charges it with everything he has, and tells him that to lose there is to be erased. Finley spent a life teaching one of those words. He spells it soul, and he means it.

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Looking for Lost Jews

Posted on June 19, 2026 by Luke Ford

The campervan runs north on the Stuart Highway with a six-foot menorah strapped to the roof and two toddlers asleep in the back. Outside the window the plain goes red to the horizon. The man at the wheel wears a black coat and a black fedora in heat that drops tourists where they stand. He has driven fifty hours from Melbourne. He looks for a man he has never met, whose name he may have copied out of a country phone book because it sounded Jewish, a man who might not know what the word means when someone applies it to him.

This premise carries the 2017 documentary Outback Rabbis, by Danny Ben-Moshe, which follows two couples from Chabad of Rural and Regional Australia. Rabbi Yossi and Malki Rodal cover the center and the long emptiness between towns. Rabbi Ari and Mushkie Rubin work north Queensland out of Cairns, which Rubin calls the Miami of Australia, a thousand miles from Brisbane. The founder, a Melbourne businessman named Sauli Spigler, took a four-week, six-thousand-mile drive across the outback in the 1970s after the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), called on his followers to find Jews wherever they had scattered. Spigler came home and built an organization on a single sentence. No Jew gets left behind.

The whole enterprise hangs on one adjective applied to other people. Lost. The men and women in the van look for lost Jews. The Jews they find are, from the standpoint of the van, lost, whether or not they feel lost, whether or not they wish to be found. Hold that word. Everything in this essay turns on it.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives us the tool. In The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil he argues that man is the animal who knows he will die and cannot bear the knowledge. To make life livable, man enlists in a hero system, a scheme of cosmic value that tells him what counts as a life well spent and lets him feel that his small days add up to something death cannot cancel. The hero system hands a man a script for significance. Religion is the oldest and most complete of these scripts. It does not soften death so much as deny it, by folding the mortal self into an order that outlasts the body.

Most hero systems make a man the hero of his own immortality. The Chabad shaliach runs a stranger version of the script, and this is what a reader who has worked through ten of these essays has not yet seen. His significance runs through someone else. He earns his place in the eternal order by reaching another man’s soul. Chabad teaches that every Jew carries a pintele Yid, an indestructible spark, dormant in the man who keeps nothing and eats anything, and that one deed wakes it. One wrap of tefillin. One Shabbat candle. The shaliach does not need the lost Jew to believe. He needs him to do, once. That single act, in this account, lifts a world and draws the redemption of all things one step closer. So the hero borrows the stranger’s spark to light his own cosmic ledger. The fifty-hour drive buys him nothing he can keep for himself. It buys the chance that a man in Coober Pedy lights a candle he has never lit, and that the candle does work in worlds the driver will never see.

Set out the values that hold this man together, because each one reads as devotion from inside the van and as something else from every seat outside it.

The search comes first. The shaliach goes where he is sent and counts distance as nothing. Fifty hours on the highway with toddlers and an RV, natural creeks standing in for the ritual baths of Melbourne, kosher food ordered through an app from the middle of nowhere, a black wool coat in forty-degree heat. The discomfort is the offering. A comfortable errand would prove the search too small.

The single deed comes next, and it inverts the modern premise of sincerity. The surrounding culture asks a man what he believes and treats the answer as the core of him. The shaliach asks a man to act and trusts the act to carry its own freight. Belief can come later or never. The candle still rises.

Then comes blood over consent, the hardest value for the secular order around it to take. In the film a man tells the rabbi he wants to convert, and the rabbi waves him off. Being Jewish is hard, he says, and sends him to think again. The man who chooses gets discouraged. The man who never chose, who did not know, who carries the descent through a grandmother three towns and two generations back, gets chased across a continent. Modern Australia runs on choice. You are what you elect to be. This hero system runs on claim. You are what you descend from, and the descent holds whether you asked for it or not. The convert offers his will and the rabbi hesitates. The lost Jew offers nothing and the rabbi drives all night.

Joy is the method, not argument. The music, the warmth, the food, the readiness to look a little absurd with a menorah bungeed to the car. Self-erasure sits under all of it. The shaliach presents himself as an extension of the Rebbe’s will rather than an author of his own plan, and the small self he gives up returns to him as a part in a story that does not end.

Now run the word back through other hero systems and watch it refuse to hold still. Lost means a different thing in each, and the men who use it will never mean the same thing by it.

To the Arrernte man whose country the highway cuts, lost names the man with no country, no kin to fix him, no Dreaming to tie him to a stretch of ground that has held his line since before lines were counted. The van crosses his sacred text at a hundred kilometers an hour to reach a stranger of its own descent. He knows the shape of the errand, a people keeping faith with its own across hard distance. The content belongs to another world. To him the driver in the black coat, loyal to a bloodline carried over oceans and unmoored from any soil, looks like the lost one.

To the man who came to the center to vanish, the solo walker who sold the house and drove until the map ran out, lost is the achievement. He worked years to slip the rolls and the calls and the people who knew his business. Being found ends the thing he drove out here to find. The rabbi’s good news, that someone crossed a continent to locate him, lands as the small death he fled.

To the Theravada monk, lost names the grasping after a self that wants a name, a lineage, a fixed and lasting place in the order of things. Release the self and the question dissolves. The rabbi fastens a name and a descent onto a soul and calls that rescue. The monk loosens every name and calls that freedom. They sit on opposite banks of the same river and each sees the other drowning.

To the founder running on impact metrics, lost names the unoptimized life, the soul not yet entered in a ledger of measured good. He asks the cost per soul. Two weeks of a family’s labor and a tank of fuel for one candle that may never be lit again strikes him as poor math, charity that flatters the giver more than it moves the world. To the rabbi the math runs the other way. One soul holds a world, and a world has no price, so fifty hours buys a bargain past reckoning.

To the Calvinist, lost names the reprobate, the man outside an election no campervan reaches. Grace falls where God has already chosen, before the rabbi turned the key, before the lost Jew was born. The rabbi’s confidence that the deed itself shifts the account reads to him as men trying to purchase what only God gives, the old error in a new coat.

There are more seats than these. The census officer combs the same country phone book for the same uncommon surnames, and to him lost means off the rolls, untracked, a gap in the count. Same act, opposite spirit. A widow on a remote station might hear the knock and decide the lost ones are the people who need a stranger’s God to feel real. Each system manufactures its own lost and its own found, then hands the single word across the fence to men who will never load it the same way.

So the man in the bush is not lost to himself. He is lost only inside a scheme that has already settled what found will mean. Two men share a continent, a century, a surname, and stand inside accounts of a saved life that do not touch. One of them drove fifty hours to close the gap. The gap he means to close exists only on his map.

The film follows couples, and the hero system gives the wife a fixed place that does not trade with her husband’s. She lights the candles, carries the home in the van, teaches the children at a fold-down table between towns. From a hero system built on the interchangeable career self, the arrangement reads as confinement, a woman shut out of the work that counts. From inside, the rebbetzin holds the load-bearing center of the whole errand. The candle she lights on a Friday in a town of a hundred and ninety-four does the cosmic work the long drive exists to produce. The same arrangement, read from two systems, comes out as cage and as crown.

End where the work ends, with a candle. A man in Cairns wrote to Rabbi Rubin that one Friday he took his small daughter’s hand to light the Shabbat candles and help her say the blessing, and found she already knew it from the rabbi’s Hebrew school. He thanked the rabbi for not forgetting one more forgotten Jew. The father had not gone looking. The lineage ran through him to a child who learned the words before he thought to teach them. Becker reads the structure at a glance. A mortal man drives fifty hours into the heat so that a child he may never see again becomes, in the only account he trusts, eternal, and so that he himself, through her spark, joins the order that death does not close. The man folds his family back into the van. The menorah catches the last of the light. He turns the key for the next town, and the next name in the book.

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James Boyd White & the Legal Imagination

Posted on June 19, 2026 by Luke Ford

James Boyd White (b. 1938) was a founder of the law-and-literature movement and ranks among the leading defenders of a humanistic conception of law in the second half of the twentieth century. His scholarship rests on a single sustained claim, advanced across more than fifty years and a dozen books: that law is a cultural and linguistic practice through which communities define themselves, establish authority, and argue about justice, rather than a closed system of rules, commands, and procedures. From this premise he built a body of work that reshaped legal education, legal rhetoric, constitutional interpretation, and the standing of the humanities within professional training.

White received a classical education that governed his intellectual outlook for the rest of his career. He took a Bachelor of Arts in Classics from Amherst College in 1960, a Master of Arts in English Literature from Harvard University in 1961, and an LL.B. from Harvard Law School in 1964. A year in Europe as a Sheldon Fellow extended his exposure to classical and European traditions. He then practiced law for two years at the Boston firm Foley Hoag before concluding that scholarship and teaching suited him better than practice.

His teaching career began at the University of Colorado Law School in 1967 and continued there until 1974. He moved to the University of Chicago Law School in 1974, where he taught in the law school and in the College and took part in the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World until 1983. In that year he joined the University of Michigan Law School and remained for the rest of his career. Michigan recognized the range of his work through appointments across several departments, naming him L. Hart Wright Collegiate Professor of Law, Professor of English, and Adjunct Professor of Classics. These overlapping titles tracked a scholarship that crossed the lines separating law, literature, history, rhetoric, and philosophy.

White reached a national audience with The Legal Imagination: Studies in the Nature of Legal Thought and Expression in 1973. White treated the study of law as an exercise in reading, writing, interpretation, and imagination rather than the memorization of doctrine. He gathered judicial opinions, statutes, speeches, and works of literature into a single conversation and pressed students to see how legal language makes meaning and confers authority. The book unsettled the prevailing assumptions about legal training and serves as the founding text of the law-and-literature movement, a standing confirmed when a forty-fifth anniversary edition appeared in 2018.

The core of his thought holds that law is rhetorical. Legal actors do not apply rules to facts and stop there. They speak, write, persuade, interpret, and make meanings, and through those acts they build social relationships and shape the character of political communities. Legal language, on this account, does not only describe the world; it forms it. Constitutions, statutes, judicial opinions, and legal arguments supply the frameworks through which citizens understand themselves and one another, so that law operates as cultural expression as much as a means of governance.

From this thesis White drew his theory of constitutive rhetoric, an idea that carried his influence well past law into communication studies and cultural criticism. Where older theories of rhetoric concentrated on persuasion, White argued that rhetoric performs a deeper task: it creates identities, communities, and cultures. When a constitution speaks in the name of the people, or a court defines the rights and duties of citizens, language does more than carry information; it helps to constitute the community that the language names. White described rhetoric as the art of constituting character, community, and culture in language, and that formulation became a reference point for a generation of scholars.

His mature thought took shape across a sequence of books that together examine the bonds among language, authority, and justice. The most important include When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Character, and Community (1984), Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law (1985), Justice as Translation: An Essay in Cultural and Legal Criticism (1990), Acts of Hope: Creating Authority in Literature, Law, and Politics (1994), The Edge of Meaning (2001), Living Speech: Resisting the Empire of Force (2006), and Keep Law Alive (2019). Across these works he drew on classical literature, Shakespeare (1564-1616), constitutional law, political theory, and literary criticism to show how language creates and sustains moral communities.

One figure recurs at the center of his account of judgment: the translator. In Justice as Translation White compares the work of judges and lawyers to the work of literary translators. A translator keeps faith with an original text while rendering it intelligible within another language and culture, and a judge performs a parallel task, carrying the lived experience of litigants into the formal language of legal doctrine. The work asks for fidelity to legal tradition together with attention to the human realities before the court. Legal judgment, then, lies between mechanical rule application and unconstrained personal preference; it calls for imagination, humility, and ethical responsibility.

In When Words Lose Their Meaning White studies what happens when a society suffers a crisis of language and moral understanding. Reading Homer (fl. 8th century BC), Thucydides (c. 460-c. 400 BC), and Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), he traces how political and cultural breakdown erodes shared vocabularies and common understandings, and he carries those literary lessons into constitutional law. Judicial opinions, he argues, shape the moral character of legal communities; judges settle disputes, but through their language they also shape the values, assumptions, and habits of reasoning that order public life. White holds that legal education should train lawyers to read opinions with the attention a literary critic brings to poetry and prose.

White worked out many of his ideas against the dominant trends of late twentieth-century legal scholarship. As law and economics rose to prominence, associated above all with Richard Posner (b. 1939), legal academics increasingly explained legal outcomes through economic incentives, quantitative models, and the methods of social science. White did not reject interdisciplinary work, but he resisted the reduction of law to economics, sociology, or political science. Law, he argued, carries its own language, traditions, and forms of reasoning, which an external analytical apparatus cannot capture. He became the leading advocate for a humanistic understanding of law in an era that favored technocratic and scientific models.

A tension between force and persuasion runs through the whole of his work. Healthy legal and political institutions, White argues, depend on forms of discourse that invite participation, mutual recognition, and respectful disagreement, while institutions that lean on coercion, manipulation, and bureaucratic power weaken the cultural foundations of democratic life. The theme grew more urgent in his later books, among them Living Speech: Resisting the Empire of Force, where he warns against a politics that treats citizens as objects of administration rather than partners in a common conversation.

His interests reached well past law. He wrote on literature, classical texts, religion, and education, in books that include “This Book of Starres”: Learning to Read George Herbert (1994), the edited volume How Should We Talk About Religion? (2006), and Let in the Light: Learning to Read St. Augustine’s Confessions, a study of Augustine (354-430). George Herbert (1593-1633) and Augustine drew the same attention White gave to legal texts, and across these subjects he returned to the questions of language, interpretation, and moral understanding that animate his legal work.

Honors and fellowships have marked his standing in the academy. White belongs to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute. He served as a governor of the Chicago Council of Lawyers, chaired the Michigan Society of Fellows, and held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He served as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar in the 1997-1998 academic year. The Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities established the James Boyd White Award to honor originality and excellence in the fields he helped open.

His influence reaches past his own pages. Scholars in law, literature, rhetoric, constitutional theory, communication studies, and the humanities have built on his work, and his ideas continue to shape debate about legal interpretation, civic discourse, professional ethics, and the place of the humanities in public life. White holds a distinctive position in American intellectual history. In a period that sought scientific certainty and technical precision in the study of law, he argued that the deepest questions of law concern language, character, imagination, and community, and he pressed lawyers, judges, scholars, and citizens to see law as a human practice of meaning-making through which a society defines its values, builds its institutions, and sustains its common life.

Hero System

The seminar meets on the third floor of Hutchins Hall, in a room with high windows and a long table scarred by decades of legal pads. White comes in with a thin packet, no casebook, and sets it down. Two texts sit side by side on the page. The first is a passage from the Iliad. The second is a paragraph from a Supreme Court opinion. He lets the students read. Then he asks the question he has put to students for forty years. “Where does the authority come from here? Who gave this writer the right to speak this way, and why do you believe him?”
The students reach for the easy answers. The Court has authority because it is the Court. Homer has authority because he is Homer. White waits them past that. He wants them to see that the badge explains nothing, that an opinion can carry the seal of the United States and still fail to earn a single reader’s trust, and that a poem written by no one anyone can name still commands assent three thousand years on. Authority, in his account, is made in the writing and granted by the reader. It is not held in an office. This is the conviction under everything he has published, and it is also, though he does not use the word, the center of a hero system.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gave the study of culture a blunt premise. Men know they will die, and they cannot live with the knowledge, so every culture builds a scheme that lets a man earn the feeling that he counts past his span. Becker called these schemes hero systems. A hero system tells a man what a life well spent looks like, what earns him a place that death cannot cancel. The terms differ by tribe. The soldier earns it one way, the saint another, the merchant a third. Each system hands out significance on its own coin, and each promises, in that coin, that a man might outlast himself.
White’s hero system runs on the word. His immortality project is the conversation, the long exchange in which the dead keep speaking and the living answer. When his students read Augustine, Augustine is not gone. He is in the room, making a claim, waiting for a reply. The wager under the whole body of White’s work holds that a man lives on in the meanings he makes and passes on, and that the death he fears most is the death of language, the hour when words lose their meaning and a community can no longer say what it values or who it is.
Set the word authority at the center, because every hero system has to answer the question White puts to his students: who gets to speak with weight, and why do we yield to him. The answer is where a culture keeps its sacred value, and the answer is never the same twice.
For White, authority is made, not held. A judge does not carry it in his commission. He earns it, sentence by sentence, in whether he has listened to the loser as well as the winner, whether he has carried a human grievance into the language of doctrine without flattening the human being who brought it. Authority on this account is the trust a reader extends to a writer who has earned his attention. It cannot be commanded. The opinion that orders without persuading has power and no authority, and White spent his life on the difference.
Cross the country to Parris Island and the word changes its weight. A drill instructor stands over a recruit at three in the morning, campaign cover an inch from the recruit’s face. Authority here is the lawful order and the chain that carries it from the President down to the man shouting. “You do not have to like it,” he says. “You have to do it.” The recruit who learns to obey, and later to command, earns the only significance the system offers. He becomes a link in something that holds a line and outlasts him. The dead Marine lives on in the Corps, and authority is the structure that makes his death count. White’s question, where does the writing earn your trust, has no place on the parade deck. The order is valid because of who gave it and the office behind him, and the recruit’s job is not to be persuaded.
Move to a research lab where men train models, or a glass floor where they trade. Authority here is the number. A claim earns weight when it beats the benchmark, when the backtest holds, when the model predicts what the old hands could not. “I don’t care what the story is,” the head of research says. “Show me it generalizes.” Significance comes to the man whose method survives the test set, and the prize is a small immortality of citation and replication. Your result stands, others build on it, your name attaches to something that holds out of sample. The text means nothing here. Homer earns no trust. Authority belongs to whatever survives measurement, and a clean sentence that fails on new data is worth less than an ugly one that works.
A hospice in the late afternoon. A chaplain sits with a man who has days left, and she says little. Authority here is presence, the willingness to stay in the room with what no one can fix, and behind her sits a tradition that has kept watch over the dying for centuries. The dying man wants no argument and no benchmark. He wants someone who will not leave. Significance comes through accompaniment, and the system makes the oldest promise of all, that the soul outlasts the body and the watch kept at the bedside joins a communion death does not break. Her authority rests on the text she carries, but she carries it in her body, in her staying, not in her sentences.
A bandstand near midnight, and the word turns again. The leader counts off, and authority is the ear. He earns it by what he plays and by whom he is willing to follow when a younger man finds something better. “You hear that?” he says between sets. “Go with him there.” The system hands its significance to the player who swings, and the immortality on offer is the recording and the lineage, the phrase quoted for fifty years by men who never met you. This authority cannot be ordered or measured. Musicians who know confer it in real time, and they withdraw it the moment the playing stops being true.
There is a hero system older than any of these, and White meets it with unease. For the man who locates the sacred in blood and soil, authority comes down through the ancestors and the nation. It is the authority of the fathers, of the land, of the dead who fought for the ground a man stands on. Who are you to revise what they bled for, the challenge runs. Significance comes through service to the people and its survival, and the immortality is the people itself, the chain of generations that carries your name and your kind forward after you are gone. On these terms White’s faith in open talk looks thin, even dangerous, because a conversation that admits every voice can talk a people out of its own continuance. Authority here is inherited, not earned in a sentence, and the duty is to transmit it whole.
One figure stands closest to White and yet apart. In a courtroom a certified interpreter renders a witness’s Spanish into English for the record. Her whole discipline is fidelity. She may not improve the witness, may not soften him, may not explain. Authority for her is accuracy under oath, the trust that what the court hears is what the witness said. White built his theory of judgment on this same image, the judge as translator who carries one language faithfully into another. But her fidelity runs one way, toward the source, while White asks his judge to keep faith in two directions at once, with the tradition behind him and the living man in front of him. The interpreter serves the record. White asks his judge to serve a community he is also helping to make.
Here the essay can say what most accounts of White leave unsaid. His central claim, that rhetoric constitutes character, community, and culture, is a theory of how hero systems get built. Becker says a culture hands a man the terms on which he might feel significant. White says the handing happens in language, in the constitutions and opinions and stories through which a people tells itself what counts. He spent his career describing the process Becker named, and he did it from the inside, as a believer, which is why he writes as a partisan of one immortality project rather than an analyst of all of them.
His is one project among many. The Marine, the researcher, the chaplain, the bandleader, the man of blood and soil, the interpreter: each earns significance on terms that make the others look blind. The word authority sits at the center of all of them and means something different in each mouth, because each system needs a different kind of hero and rewards a different kind of death. White knows this better than most. His answer is to bet everything on the conversation, on the hope that men inside different systems might still speak to one another and be changed, that persuasion might hold where force fails.
The bet carries a cost he names himself. A community held together by talk can lose the talk. Words lose their meaning. The conversation can be drowned by the chain of command, by the benchmark, by the drum of the ancestors, or by simple noise. White stakes his own continuance on the most fragile of the systems, the one with the least force behind it, and he turns the dying man’s question around. The chaplain asks whether the soul survives the body. White asks whether the meaning survives the man. He hands out the packet, the Iliad beside the opinion, and waits to see whether anyone in the room will answer Homer. That is the whole of his faith. If they answer, Homer is not dead, and on White’s terms neither is he.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

White stakes everything on the force Mearsheimer ranks last. His seminar hands a man two texts and asks which one earns his trust. His judge earns authority sentence by sentence from a reader free to grant it or withhold it. His hope is that men inside different communities might speak to one another and be changed, that persuasion might hold where force fails. Every move assumes a reader open to the better argument, a mind that reasons its way toward assent. Mearsheimer says that mind arrives at the table already loaded. The value infusion happened in childhood, long before the seminar, and the critical faculties White trusts came online only after the code was set.
Mearsheimer’s quarrel is with the atomistic, rights-bearing individual and the universalism that follows from him. White is that quarrel’s pure case, a liberal of language rather than of markets or ballots. His unit is the single reader extending trust, the single judge carrying a grievance into doctrine. His universalism is the open conversation, the faith that the circle of those who might be persuaded has no fixed edge. On Mearsheimer’s account the reader is a tribesman first, his trust pre-committed by the group that raised him, and the circle of persuasion stops at the tribe’s edge, because survival, not truth, bound the group in the first place.
White’s central claim holds that rhetoric constitutes character, community, and culture, that a man does not invent his values but receives them through the languages he is born into before he can stand apart and reflect. This sits close to Mearsheimer’s value infusion. Both men deny the self-made individual. Both say the group writes itself into the child before the child can answer. They part on what the inheritance is made of and whether it can be revised. White says we are constituted in language, and language can be reworked by better language, by attention, by translation, so the constitution stays open. Mearsheimer says we are constituted by innate sentiment and the survival logic of the tribe, which run deeper than any sentence, so the constitution mostly holds. Reason can tug at the surface. It cannot move the floor.
Take the judge as translator, the image White built his theory of judgment on. Inside a settled community the picture survives Mearsheimer well enough. A judge carries one member’s grievance into the shared language of a people who already hold enough in common to hear it. But White wants more. He wants translation across the deeper divides, the conversation that binds strangers, the persuasion that reaches an enemy people and brings them in. Mearsheimer’s anthropology shuts that door. Translation runs on a floor of shared sentiment, and where the floor is missing no sentence builds it. Between tribes the medium is not the word. It is force, and the balance of it.
Take the line White returns to, that the opinion which orders without persuading has power and no authority. Mearsheimer’s man hears that distinction as a luxury. Where the group’s survival is in play, the order that holds the people together carries all the authority it needs, persuaded or not. Authority flows from the group and its need to cohere, not from the trust a free reader extends to a fine sentence. White treats the empire of force as the enemy of the human conversation. Mearsheimer reverses the order. Force is the conversation’s precondition. Persuasion happens inside a peace that force has already secured among people who share enough to talk.
Take White’s longest hope, the conversation with the dead, Augustine alive in the seminar room, the meaning surviving the man. Mearsheimer does not deny it. Socialization is transmission across generations; the dead do speak to the young. He recasts what the speaking is. It is the value infusion of a people into its children, ancestors imposing a code more than offering reasons. The free exchange of minds weighing the better case across the centuries is the smaller part. The communion of readers White prizes turns out to be the tribe extended through time, and the texts are how the tribe loads the next generation before that generation can think.
White has one answer left, and it lands on Mearsheimer’s own desk. The man wrote a book. The Great Delusion argues, marshals evidence, hopes to move readers who came in thinking otherwise. An anthropology that ranks reason last is advanced by reasoning, addressed to minds it expects to change. If socialization had closed the question, there is no point in the argument. So the act of writing concedes the residue White builds his life on, that men sometimes change by persuasion, that the conversation sometimes works.
Mearsheimer can hold his ground. Reason is the least of the three, he says, not the absent one. The book persuades at the margin, and chiefly those already socialized to prize a hard look at power. Argument moves men inside a tribe that shares enough to be moved; it does little across the divides where force decides. The residue is real and small. White stakes his whole project on it.
So the verdict, if Mearsheimer is right, divides. As description White holds. We are made before we choose, by an inheritance we did not pick, and White saw this as clearly as Mearsheimer, only he named the inheritance language where Mearsheimer names it tribe and sentiment. As hope White overreaches. His conversation is real but bounded, riding on a socialization it cannot itself produce, reaching only as far as a shared floor already extends. The persuasion he loves is the thinnest of the three forces that move men, and the rarest, and it works only where force and kinship have done the heavy work of making a people who can listen.
White might take the verdict and keep his post anyway. He stakes his life on the weakest force because it is the weakest, because the seminar and the careful opinion and the faithful translation are the small openings through which a settled people revises itself at the edges, and because a man who quits that work hands the whole field to force. Mearsheimer leaves him that much. Reason comes last. It still comes.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

David Pinsof calls it the misunderstanding myth: the conviction, dear to intellectuals, that the world’s troubles come from people getting things wrong, and that the cure is to get them right. The myth flatters its tellers, because the men whose trade is understanding turn out to be the most important men alive. Set James Boyd White inside this frame and his life’s work reads as the myth in its most refined dress, the version a man of letters builds when he wants the cure to be reading well.
White’s account of social decay runs through language. Communities come apart when words lose their meaning, when the shared vocabulary that let a people say what it values thins out and fails. The remedy follows from the diagnosis. Read with care. Write with attention. Carry the grievance of the litigant into the language of doctrine without losing the man. Keep the conversation alive against the noise. White names the disease as a failure of understanding and prescribes more and better understanding, supplied by the careful reader, the humane judge, the literary critic turned lawyer. Pinsof’s question lands here first. What if the trouble was never that people misunderstood each other?
Pinsof’s sharpest tool is the gap between stated motives and actual motives, the distance between the mission statement and the business. White works almost entirely on the side of the stated. When a court writes in the name of the people, he hears a community constituting itself in language. When a constitution speaks, he hears a people telling itself what it values. He reads the document as the document presents itself, as an act of meaning. Pinsof reads the same document as Starbucks’ mission statement, the noble words a coalition prints over the thing it is doing, which is fighting for control of the apparatus that puts men in prison at gunpoint. The opinion that speaks for the people is written by the winners. The losers were not persuaded. They were beaten.
This cuts straight at the line White returns to, that the opinion which orders without persuading has power and no authority. Inside the misunderstanding myth the distinction holds, because authority is the trust earned by a sentence that has done its work on a free mind. Inside Pinsof’s account the distinction dissolves. Men go along because of incentives, because of where their coalition stands, because the cost of resistance runs high. The trust White prizes is itself a move. A reader who extends it is backing a side. White treats force as the enemy of the conversation. Pinsof treats persuasion as force conducted by other means, a way to recruit allies, shame rivals, and take the state. The empire of force is not what breaks in when the conversation fails. It is what the conversation was the whole time.
White is right that rhetoric constitutes communities. Pinsof grants the constituting and changes its purpose. Language builds coalitions and ranks men within them. It is the chief weapon in the competition for status and for the state, and a people fluent in a shared tongue is a people organized to fight as one. White hears this building as the making of moral community and calls it the highest work of language. Pinsof hears coalition assembly and status sorting wearing the robes of meaning. Same act. Different account of what the act is for.
The myth’s tell, for Pinsof, is that it crowns the man who tells it. Look at who White is and where he stood. He held chairs in law, English, and classics, and he built a movement that told lawyers to read judicial opinions the way critics read poems. He raised this banner across the years when law and economics was taking the high ground in the legal academy, armed with numbers, models, and the claim to a science with policy in its hands. White answered that the deepest questions of law are questions of language, character, and imagination, the questions a man trained in Homer and Augustine is fit to answer and a man trained in regression is not. The misunderstanding myth, in his hands, sets the worth of legal thought on the ground he commands. The humanist becomes the keeper of the republic, and the quant becomes a technician who has missed the point. Pinsof does not ask whether White believed this. He asks what the belief did for the man who held it. It put him at the center.
White’s bearing carries the same charge. The patient attention to the other, the humility before the text, the refusal of force in favor of listening, all of it reads as the high decency Pinsof says we perform because cynicism is icky and sweetness sells. The man who counsels careful reading and faithful translation gets to be the good man in the room, and the good man collects the status the room hands out. None of this requires that White schemed it. The myth runs on its own, rewarding the men who carry it, selecting for the ones who carry it best.
And the people White hopes to save understand their position. The politician who debases the public language is winning votes by debasing it. The partisan who refuses the better argument has no incentive to accept it and strong incentive to parrot his side. The press that floods the conversation with noise is selling the noise. White looks at this and sees words losing their meaning, a community forgetting how to speak, a sickness a humanist might treat. Pinsof looks at the same scene and sees savvy animals getting what they want. There is no meaning to restore, because the degradation is the strategy working. White studies the hole. He maps its language to the last molecule, and the hole holds him as it holds everyone, because nothing in it is broken.

The Set

The reception runs late in a paneled room with a portrait of a dead dean above the mantel. The wine is decent, not good. A young scholar with a joint appointment in law and comparative literature holds a plastic cup and listens to a senior man explain why the empirical paper from that afternoon, the one with the regression tables and the policy recommendation at the end, has missed the only thing worth knowing. “They can tell you what the rule does,” the senior man says. “They cannot read the opinion.” The young scholar nods. He has read the opinion. He has also read the Oresteia, and he wants the older man to know it.

This is White’s world, the law-and-literature movement and the wider company of legal humanists who came up around it. Beside him at the founding stand Robert Cover (1943-1986) at Yale, who held that law lives inside narrative worlds and then, in his last work, that the judge deals in pain and death and the word stands backed by violence, and Richard Weisberg at Cardozo, who coined the term poethics and read Melville and the collaborationist judges of Vichy for what literature teaches a legal conscience, in The Failure of the Word. White himself sits at Michigan with The Legal Imagination behind him.

The interpretive turn fed the set and complicated it. Ronald Dworkin (1931-2013) cast the judge as an author writing the next chapter of a chain novel, keeping faith with the story so far. Stanley Fish (b. 1938), the Milton scholar turned needler, told all of them that no text stands apart from the community that reads it, and took pleasure in puncturing the earnest. Owen Fiss (b. 1938) at Yale fought the nihilist reading and held that interpretation can be disciplined and right. Sanford Levinson (b. 1941) in Texas read the Constitution as a sacred text and asked what keeping faith with it requires.

The literary wing carried the warmth. Martha Nussbaum (b. 1947) made the novel a school for the public emotions and the literary imagination a faculty the judge needs, in Poetic Justice. Peter Brooks (b. 1938), the literary critic who crossed into law, edited Law’s Stories with Paul Gewirtz at Yale and pressed the place of narrative and confession in the courtroom. Robin West wrote on narrative, authority, and the inner lives the law steps over. Behind them stand Wayne Booth (1921-2005), White’s kindred at Chicago, whose The Company We Keep treated reading as the keeping of moral company, and Stanley Cavell (1926-2018) at Harvard, who read Shakespeare and ordinary speech for the moral schooling in them.

A wing of lament runs alongside. Anthony Kronman (b. 1945), the Yale dean, mourned the lawyer-statesman in The Lost Lawyer, the man of practical wisdom pushed aside by the specialist and the rainmaker. Mary Ann Glendon (b. 1938) at Harvard charged in Rights Talk that an absolutist rights vocabulary had thinned American public speech. Grant Gilmore (1910-1982) wrote the elegies, The Death of Contract and The Ages of American Law. The ancestors they claim are the craftsmen and the prudent: Lon Fuller (1902-1978) with the inner morality of law, Karl Llewellyn (1893-1962) with situation sense and the craft of the common law, Edward Levi (1911-2000) with reasoning by example, Alexander Bickel (1924-1974) with the passive virtues. These are the men the humanists read as proof that law was once an art of judgment and might be again. Around them move fellow travelers and a younger line: Thomas Grey, who read Wallace Stevens the insurance lawyer for the poet inside the prose; Milner Ball, who gave law a theological and narrative cast; Kenji Yoshino, who later set Shakespeare beside questions of justice.

The rival sits across the hall. Richard Posner did not ignore the movement. He wrote Law and Literature to deflate it, holding that the great books teach little about statutes and contracts and that the analogy flatters the literary man at the legal man’s expense. He is the set’s foil and its dark mirror, the figure with the same wide learning who turned it toward efficiency and output and left the humanists holding the canon. Their signals of belonging are clear: to publish in the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, founded at the end of the 1980s, to be read in Critical Inquiry out of Chicago, to win the prize the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities chose to name the James Boyd White Award.

What binds them is a creed about what law is and what a lawyer should be. Law is reading and writing before it is anything else. The opinion is a made thing, a composition, and you judge it as you judge any composition, by the quality of its attention and the truth of its voice. The lawyer should be a cultivated man, wide in his reading, formed by the great texts, fit to sit in judgment because he has the range to take in a whole human situation and the prose to do it justice. Craft is sacred. Sensibility is the cardinal gift. The seminar, the close reading, the well-made sentence, the cultivated conscience: these are the goods.

Their hero system follows from the creed. The hero is the cultivated humanist on the bench or in the chair, the man who carries Homer and Augustine and the canonical opinions in his head, who writes to persuade rather than to command, who hears the loser as well as the winner, who treats the person before the court as a man and not a unit. He is the lawyer-statesman Kronman mourns, the faithful author Dworkin draws, the reader of good company Booth describes. Heroism is depth, range, and the quality of attention, and the prize is a place in the conversation that runs across the centuries, a name set among the writers who keep meaning alive. The villains are fixed. The technician who knows the rule and cannot read the opinion. The economist with his models, who has shrunk the person to incentives. The bureaucrat who orders without persuading. The careerist who games the citation count. The skeptic who says the text means nothing and leaves only power.

The set holds an odd station. Rich in the prestige of learning, poor in institutional power. They keep the moral high ground and watch the economists take the dean’s office, the grant money, and the ear of the courts. So the status games run on the goods they control. Who has read more deeply. Whose prose carries. Who holds the joint appointment, the law degree beside the doctorate in classics or English. Who founded the journal, gave the named lecture, drew the festschrift. Who can quote Aeschylus at the reception and leave the empiricist feeling like a tradesman. Range is the coin, and refinement, and the show of a conscience too fine for the crude work down the hall. The deepest contempt goes to the merely clever and the merely useful. The highest praise is humane, capacious, subtle, deeply read, wise. A man rises here by seeming the most cultivated and the most serious about the human, and the seeming and the being are hard to pull apart, which suits everyone.

Under the creed sit claims about the nature of things. Law is by nature a humanistic and interpretive practice, not a science and not a market. Man is by nature a meaning-making creature, constituted by language and story before he can stand apart from them. There is a human nature, and literature shows it where the social sciences flatten it. Reading the great books forms character, a claim about the essence of literature and the essence of the self it shapes. The lawyer holds a calling, not a job, and the calling has a fixed shape: to judge well, to keep faith with the tradition, to do justice to the person. These ride as truths about the world rather than preferences about it.

From the essence comes the ought, and with it a moral grammar. You ought to read closely and write with care. You ought to attend to the loser. You ought to write opinions that persuade. You ought to treat the litigant as a whole human being. You ought to resist force with conversation, recover the lost dignity of the profession, hold the line for the humanities against the technocrats. The grammar runs on a small set of sacred words: voice, listening, attention, recognition, dignity, community, conversation, fidelity, character, imagination, the human, the made, the shared. The cardinal sin is reduction, the shrinking of a person to a unit, a law to a power play, a meaning to a number. Force is sin. The cynical and the merely instrumental are sin. To damn a colleague’s work you call it reductive, thin, mechanical, technocratic, merely clever. To bless it you call it humane and wise. The whole order turns on the line between persuasion and force, the human and the mechanical, depth and surface, the cultivated and the crude.

The young scholar at the reception learns the order before anyone states it. He has read the opinion and the Oresteia, and he keeps the second fact ready, because in this room the second fact places him. The senior man finishes his wine and looks toward the door, where the economist who gave the afternoon paper is leaving early and alone, a laptop bag on his shoulder and a flight to catch, off to advise a court that has never heard of the James Boyd White Award. The humanists keep the high ground. They lose the building. They have made a hero of the man who reads well inside a profession that pays the man who counts, and they know it, and the knowing gives their gatherings the warmth and the grievance of a faith sure that it is right and slow to win.

The Voice

White writes essays. Even his books move as linked essays rather than as treatises with a thesis marched to a conclusion. He starts from a particular text, a passage of Homer, an opinion, a poem by Herbert, and reads it closely in front of you, and the general claim rises out of the reading rather than ruling over it. The shape of his thought is inductive. He distrusts the system and the syllogism, and the prose shows the distrust.
The first thing you notice is the first person. He writes “I,” and he reports his own experience of reading, what a passage does to him, how it asks to be taken. Legal scholarship mostly hides the writer behind an impersonal authority. White steps out from behind it on purpose. Beside the “I” runs a “we,” and the “we” does work. It invites the reader into a shared act and tries to make, on the page, the community of readers his theory describes. The pronoun enacts the argument. He asks questions and leaves many of them open. He prefers to model inquiry and lets the questions stand.
The diction is plain at the level of the word and patient at the level of the sentence. He reaches for ordinary words and for the old vocabulary of literature and ethics: meaning, voice, attention, character, community, fidelity, translation, force. He keeps a short list of these and returns to them across the books until they carry a personal weight, almost a private music. He refuses jargon, the law-review apparatus, the social-science term of art. The refusal is itself a position.
The sentences run long and loop. They gather clauses, qualify, double back, add a second thought inside a comma or a parenthesis, and reach the point by accretion. He is not aphoristic. He builds. The prose performs the slow attention he recommends, so that reading him is supposed to train you in the thing he is describing. When it works, the form teaches. When it does not, it spreads thin.
His rhetoric persuades by enactment, not by proof. He does not stack premises and close with a QED. He shows you a reading and asks you to see it as he sees it, and his authority is the authority he theorizes, earned in the quality of the attention and not claimed from the chair. He writes the anti-brief. Against the memo, the model, the regression, he sets the essay, and he makes the case for a way of writing by writing that way.
There is a tone, and it divides readers. Earnest, humane, morally serious, at moments homiletic. He cares about the texts and about the reader and shows the caring. To admirers this is depth and a rare seriousness about the human stakes of law. To critics, Posner chief among them, it reads as vague and gestural, shy of definition and evidence, high-minded to the edge of self-regard, and the inviting “we” can feel like a hand on the shoulder that assumes an agreement you have not given. The style asks you to share his values before he argues for them, and a reader who does not share them finds little to grip.
As a teacher his manner matched the prose. The seminar over the lecture, the question over the lesson. He hands out a packet and asks where the authority in the writing comes from, then he listens, and the listening is the teaching. He draws a student into reading rather than telling him the rule. The same patience, the same trust that close attention to one text opens onto the largest questions.
The classical schooling shows in the cadence. Amherst classics, Harvard English, a year in Europe on a fellowship, the King James rhythms and the Latin periodic sentence somewhere underneath. The voice is formal without stiffness, a little old-fashioned, closer to the nineteenth-century man of letters than to the modern law professor. Montaigne (1533-1592) stands behind the form, the essay as a man thinking on the page and testing himself, and so does the homiletic tradition White knows from the religious texts he loves to read.

The Four Questions

1. What coalition do they depend on for status and income.
2. Who do they risk angering if they speak plainly.
3. Who benefits if their framing wins.
4. What truths would cost them their position.

White draws his income and his standing from the elite legal academy and the cluster of fields around it. The salary and the chair come from the law schools, Colorado, then Chicago, then Michigan, and from the deans and faculties who grant tenure and name professorships. The status comes from a wider set. The law-and-humanities subfield he helped found supplies the citations, the invitations, the festschrift, the prize that carries his name, and that subfield has to exist and prize its founders for his founder’s standing to hold. The literary and classical departments that gave him joint appointments lend their esteem. Above them sits the honor-granting liberal establishment, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Law Institute, the Guggenheim and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which certify a man as serious. His readers complete the coalition, a liberal educated class that believes the great books make better citizens and wants law to feel humane. He needs all of them, and all of them reward the same posture.
Speaking plainly cuts three ways against him, which is part of why he rarely does it. The law-and-economics camp holds the institutional power, the deans, the money, the ear of the courts, and a blunt charge that the quants have debased legal thought angers the colleagues who control hiring and resources. His own coalition is the second hazard. Plain words about the movement’s weaknesses, that it changes no outcomes, that the analogy between reading a poem and deciding a case runs thin, that much of it performs sensibility for status, anger the friends and disciples whose loyalty rests on the movement’s dignity. The third is the dominant faction of the humanities. White prizes the Western canon as the school of character and quietly distrusts the politicized turn in literary study. Said straight, that he reveres Homer and Augustine as formation and doubts the critical and identity-based scholarship that reads the canon as exclusion and law as nothing but power, it sets him against the people who now run his broader field. His sympathy for religious and classical sources carries the same risk in a secular academy that permits religion as a text and not as a claim.
If his framing wins, the beneficiaries are easy to name. The humanists take the keys to legal truth from the economists, and the subfield’s budget, hires, and prestige rise with the doctrine that law is rhetoric and literature. The literary lawyer and the cultivated judge gain a charter, their formation, the canon in the head and the fine sentence on the page, becoming the qualification that counts over statistics an outsider can learn. Judges gain most of all. A theory that casts them as wise translators and faithful authors dignifies their discretion as humane craft and spares them the harder description, that they exercise power. The liberal establishment that holds power and wants it to look gentle benefits from a vocabulary that renders coercion as conversation and force as persuasion. And the already-cultivated keep the high ground, because the framing rewards inherited formation over acquired technique, the man raised on Homer over the man who learned regression.
The truths that might cost him his standing are the ones the prose is built to avoid. That the law-and-literature movement has moved almost no cases and sits marginal and losing, high in prestige and low in power, so the founder presides over a refuge rather than a force. That he leaves his key terms undefined because defining them risks exposing their thinness, the charge Posner pressed and White never met head-on. That his humanism dignifies judicial power as craft and so helps unaccountable judges launder discretion as wisdom, that the persuasion he honors is often force in good clothes, and that the conversation rides on a coercion it dresses up, which makes the announced resister of the empire of force one of its quieter servants. That the canon he calls human is a particular tradition serving particular men, the educated Western liberal raised to the rank of universal man, and that prizing this formation rewards the people who already hold it. That reading great books does not reliably make better or more just men, that cultivated judges served Vichy, a thing his ally Weisberg documented, so culture and virtue come apart and the moral warrant of the whole enterprise weakens. And that the project is partly a status move in an academic war he is losing, its grammar of sin and force a weapon in that war as much as a finding about the world. To say any of these plainly is to spend the standing the coalition pays him to keep.

RightTalkism

James Boyd White built a body of work on one belief, that a community lives or dies by its language. Law, for him, is rhetoric and translation. A people holds together while it can say what it values, and it falls apart when its words lose their meaning. The cure follows the diagnosis. Read with care, write with attention, carry the conversation forward, keep the law alive. Set this beside an idea that Robin Hanson named and David Pinsof carries, RightTalkism, the belief that bettering the world means changing how people talk, that you get people to say the right things and the problems get solved. White’s whole project shows the frame. He is the purest RightTalkist in the academy, and the most learned.
The crude RightTalkist works in slogans. Change the word and you change the world. Say the approved thing, ban the forbidden thing, and the trouble lifts. White has nothing but distaste for that. His version is slow and demanding. He wants the seminar where the crude man wants the slogan, the well-made opinion where the crude man wants the right pronoun. He asks for years of reading, for attention trained on the particular text, for the patience to hear the loser as well as the winner. Strip the refinement and the engine is the same. Get the talk right and the world comes right behind it.
A belief like this rewards the men who hold it. RightTalkism hands the repair of the world to the people whose trade is talk, and White’s version hands it to the legal humanist. Talk is his instrument. A doctrine that makes talk the lever of history sets him at the lever and puts the economist, the man who counts incentives, up in the gallery. White did not choose the belief because it flatters him. The charge is sharper. The belief survives and spreads among men like him because it flatters them, and the ones who carry it best rise.
Hanson’s objection cuts at the cause. Talk tracks incentives. It is the surface, not the spring. Men say what their position requires, and a position is set by interest, coalition, and force long before it reaches speech. Change the words and the interests stay put, and the new words bend back toward the old power until they say what power needs them to say. White reads the order of cause backward. The thin and angry public language he mourns is a readout of the contest beneath it, not the contest’s cause. Sand the readout smooth and the contest runs on unchanged.
This turns his central image inside out. White names force the enemy of the human conversation and hopes the conversation can hold force in check. RightTalkism answers that the conversation is force in its Sunday clothes. Power moves first. Speech arrives to give the movement its reasons. Consider the work White most admires, the constitution that speaks in the name of the people. He hears a people calling itself into being through language. The harder account is that the people was made by arms and money and the long pressure of interest, and the language came after to consecrate what the fighting had settled. Lincoln (1809-1865) gave the war its words at Gettysburg, and the words are great, but the Union held because its armies held, and the address followed the cannon. The sentence ratifies the victory. It does not win it.
Take the case a humanist loves to teach, Brown v. Board of Education. White’s tradition treats the opinion as a moral act in language, a court teaching a nation what equality means. Earl Warren (1891-1974) wrote it. The decision moved the country because the forces had shifted, the migration north, the war, the Cold War contest for the loyalty of a watching world, the black vote settling into a ruling coalition. The words sealed a change the forces had prepared. A finer opinion changes nothing about that. A people set on keeping the old order reads the same sentences and feels only insult.
The crude RightTalkist, who thinks the right phrase saves the world, falls at a touch. White’s claim is deep, that long reading forms character and that formed character makes a better polity, and the depth does not save it. The depth hides it and lifts its standing. The cultivation is still talk. The promise that cultivated talk reworks the world still needs incentives it cannot supply. The seminar shapes a handful of readers. It does not reach the courts, the legislatures, or the markets, because those answer to incentives no seminar can touch. A judge raised on Homer and Augustine still rules the way his appointment and his ambition and his coalition push him, and he writes a finer opinion while he does it. The reading improved the man. It left the world to its forces.
One exit stays open. White says he offers no program, only a way to live, a counsel of fidelity to the text and to the person rather than a plan to fix anything. Read that way, the charge slides off, because RightTalkism strikes the causal promise and not the private discipline. A man may love close reading the way he loves music, for itself, and claim nothing for the world. But White claims more, and he claims it across the books. Better language sustains moral community. Honest reading resists tyranny. Keeping the conversation alive keeps the law alive. The payoff sits there every time, the better world set just downstream of the better talk. The causal promise is the thing RightTalkism names, and the causal promise is the thing he cannot make good.
White’s whole structure rests on the claim that talk sits upstream of the world. Pull the beam and the building does not fall. It floats, fine and weightless, a practice that improves the reader and leaves the world to its incentives. He spent a life calling that practice the keeping of law alive. The harder name for it is talk about talk, carried on with great care, while the world goes on as before, deciding by force what it will afterward describe in his beautiful sentences.

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