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.
If Mearsheimer (b. 1947) is right, the Declaration of Independence rests on a flawed picture of man, and its most famous sentence claims more than it can deliver.
Start with “self-evident.” Jefferson (1743-1826) calls the equality of men and their unalienable rights truths that any mind can see. Mearsheimer ranks reason last among the three sources of our preferences, behind innate sentiment and socialization. The truths feel self-evident because Jefferson and his readers share a Lockean, Protestant, Anglo inheritance. Reason has little to do with it. A Confucian scholar or a Bedouin chief would not find them obvious. “Self-evident” shrinks to “self-evident to men raised as we were raised.”
Then the universalism. All men created equal, each carrying the same inherent rights. Mearsheimer says we are tribal from birth, formed by a group before we can assert ourselves, ready to sacrifice for our own and to draw hard lines against outsiders. The Declaration’s universal claim describes an aspiration, not how men behave. The case sat in the room. The men who wrote that all men are equal held slaves and counted most of mankind outside the circle. The tribe showed through the creed at once.
Next the rights themselves. The Declaration treats the individual as primary, the bearer of rights before and against the state. Mearsheimer reverses the order. The group comes first. The individual arrives into a society that already exists and that made him. On that view rights are not natural facts lodged in lone men. A society grants them, recognizes them, enforces them. Strip away the society and the inalienable right has no one to honor it.
The Creator language complicates this, and in Mearsheimer’s favor. Jefferson does not say reason finds these rights. He says the Creator endows them. He hedges against pure rationalism by grounding rights in God. The appeal to the Creator is its own product of a particular religious formation. The theology does not escape the problem. It moves it.
Consent of the governed runs into the same wall. The Declaration pictures free men constituting a government by agreement. Mearsheimer’s anthropology says societies do not begin when atomistic individuals contract. The founders were already one people: English speakers, common-law heirs, Protestants, colonists with a thick shared past. The consent was the act of a people already made, not of bare men meeting to invent a nation.
Two limits.
First, the Declaration works as a political act, not only as a report on human nature. Even granting the false anthropology, the document does its job. The universal language bound thirteen quarrelsome colonies and claimed standing before the world. Lincoln (1809-1865) later read the equality clause as a proposition, a standard to move toward rather than a finished fact. That reading survives Mearsheimer whole. Mearsheimer himself thinks nationalism is the strongest force in politics, and the Declaration became a nationalist scripture. The American creed turned into a tribal badge. The particular nation did the work while the universal rights supplied the story that legitimized it.
Second, Mearsheimer’s argument lands on how we know, more than on what is. He explains how preferences form: innate sentiment, socialization, weak reason. That account undercuts the Declaration’s epistemology, its claim that the truths stand self-evident to universal reason. It does less to the metaphysics. A defender in the natural-law line, Locke (1632-1704) or Aquinas (1225-1274), can grant every word about socialization and still hold that the rights are real, that we reach real moral truths through a particular tradition the way we reach mathematical truths through a particular schooling. Mearsheimer shows the parochial road by which men arrive at rights talk. That does not show there is nothing at the end of the road.
A founding myth that unifies a people at home turns dangerous when a state reads it as a mandate to remake the world. The line runs from 1776 to liberal hegemony. All men hold the same rights, so every nation deserves liberal democracy, so we will help install it. Other peoples are tribal too. They resist the gift. The universalism that steadies the republic at home becomes the delusion that wrecks its statecraft abroad. If Mearsheimer is right about man, the Declaration is safest as Americans’ own creed and most ruinous as a blueprint for mankind.
