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.
Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) gives Mearsheimer an even sharper test case than Reagan, because she said the anti-Mearsheimer thesis out loud. “There is no such thing as society,” she told Woman’s Own in 1987. “There are individual men and women and there are families.” That is liberal atomism stated as flatly as anyone has ever stated it. If Mearsheimer is right, her own career should refute her sentence. It does.
Begin with what made her. The grocer’s shop in Grantham, the Methodist discipline of her father Alfred Roberts (1892-1970), the thrift, the sermons, the civic duty of a provincial alderman’s home. Thatcher did not reason her way to her convictions any more than Reagan did. She received a value infusion in childhood and spent fifty years applying it. The woman who preached that individuals make themselves was herself the most thoroughly socialized politician of her generation, a walking product of one shop on one street in one Lincolnshire town.
Then look at what won her elections. Free-market doctrine never had mass appeal in Britain. The Falklands did. In April 1982 her government was the most unpopular on record, and the war transformed her into the embodiment of the nation. Crowds did not cheer monetarism. They cheered Britain humiliating an enemy and recovering its standing after Suez and the IMF crisis of 1976. Her project sold itself as national restoration: putting the Great back in Great Britain. The individualist economics rode on tribal feeling, which is Mearsheimer’s ranking of nationalism over liberalism in one package.
Her foreign policy splits the same way Reagan’s does. The rhetoric was liberal and Atlanticist, freedom against communism. The practice was balance-of-power realism. She spotted Gorbachev before Washington did and announced in December 1984 that she could do business with him. She opposed German reunification in 1989 and 1990 on naked power grounds, fearing a state that might dominate the continent, and she said so to anyone who listened. No liberal principle supports blocking forty million Germans from self-determination. Realism does.
Europe is the cleanest evidence. The European project is liberalism applied to nations: pool sovereignty, dissolve borders, let rules and markets replace tribal loyalties. Thatcher signed the Single European Act in 1986 for market reasons, then recoiled when she saw where the logic went. The Bruges speech of September 20, 1988 drew the line at the nation-state. When her liberalism and her nationalism collided, nationalism won, exactly as Mearsheimer predicts it must.
The domestic record carries a darker Mearsheimerian lesson. Her economics treated people as the atomistic actors of liberal theory, and where the theory met dense social groups it broke them. The miners’ strike of 1984-85 destroyed not just an industry but the villages built around it, and Mearsheimer’s frame predicts what followed: people stripped of one group attachment seek another. Scotland, hit by deindustrialization and then the poll tax, transferred its loyalty from Britain to Scottish nationalism, and the Tories were nearly extinct there within a decade. The long fuse of resentment her project lit in the deindustrialized north helped detonate Brexit, itself a tribal revolt against liberal integration. Her individualism produced nationalist reactions on every side, because the social nature she denied kept reasserting against her.
Her end completes the argument. The electorate never removed Thatcher. Her tribe did. In November 1990 the Conservative Party, the most ruthless group organism in British politics, judged her a liability over Europe and the poll tax and cut her down through its own internal rituals. The woman who said there were only individuals and families was destroyed by a collective she could not command, and she spent her remaining years wounded by exile from it. She needed the group more than the group needed her.
So Mearsheimer’s frame reads Thatcher as a nationalist who mistook herself for an individualist. The mistake cost her little while the two ran together, in the Falklands and the Cold War. It cost her everything when they diverged, over Europe and within her party. And it cost Britain a measure of social cohesion that her theory said did not exist and her policies proved did.
Thatcher is the buffered self elected to office. Taylor traces the buffered self to the Reformation’s long discipline: the war on magic and sacrament, the relocation of meaning from the world into the conscience, the sealed individual answerable to God and his own will. Methodism carried that discipline into the English provinces, and the grocer’s house in Grantham ran on it. Conscience, thrift, work, self-command, no mystery and no excuse. Thatcher did not merely hold the buffered anthropology. She was its finished product, three centuries of Reform compressed into one woman above a corner shop.
Her creed projected that self onto the whole country. There is no such thing as society means: there are no porous selves. There are sealed units of will and responsibility, each generating its own purposes from within, connected by contract and family and nothing else. Her economics assumed that man. Strip away subsidy and shelter, and the buffered individual stands forth, chooses, strives, and prospers. The Sermon on the Mound in May 1988 gave the theology version: salvation is individual choice, the Good Samaritan needed money before he could do good. The Church of England answered with Faith in the City, a porous Christianity of communities and bonds, and she regarded the bishops as fools. The two anthropologies could not hear each other.
In person she seemed sealed to a degree that astonished people. No doubt, no need for approval, four hours of sleep, no visible malaise. The lady’s not for turning is the buffered self’s motto: my meanings are inside, generated from within, and the weather of other minds does not cross my boundary. Ministers came to her with the mood of the party, the mood of the country, and the mood did not enter. She lacked the porous receptors. She could not feel a room, and toward the end she could not feel the nation turning on the poll tax, because feeling a nation requires a permeability she had trained out of herself or never had.
Yet her power over others was porous power. Cabinet ministers, grown men who had governed empires of paper, described being in her presence in the language of possession and fear. The handbagging, the blue gaze, François Mitterrand’s (1916-1996) line about the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe. Charisma is a presence crossing into other selves and acting there, an enchanted phenomenon with no place in her own theory of persons. She wielded on others a force she did not believe existed.
And her politics, when it mattered most, re-enchanted the world. The Falklands turned the nation back into a charged and sacred thing, a presence that claimed lives and demanded rejoicing, and the country answered as porous selves answer a summons. Her rhetoric peopled the cosmos with agents of menace: the enemy within, the Argentine junta, Brussels reimposing the frontiers of the state. Enemy within is demonology, the old enchanted grammar of possession and threat. She preached a disenchanted economy and ran an enchanted politics, and the second carried the first to three election victories.
The deepest collision came in the coalfields. Her theory saw inefficient industries staffed by individuals who could retrain and move, because buffered selves can move; their meanings travel with them, inside. The villages she broke were the last enchanted communities in industrial Britain: the pit, the chapel, the band, the gala, the union banner carried like a relic. The men were porous to those things. The pit was not their employer. It was in them, constitutive, the way the parish was in a medieval villager. When the pits closed, men grieved as for deaths, and then died early themselves in numbers, and her anthropology had no category for the wound. You cannot register the destruction of meanings you believe do not exist outside the head. Arthur Scargill (b. 1938) led an enchanted tribe against a woman who could not see one.
Her end ran the lesson in reverse, twice. First, the fall: the party’s mood gathered for months, porous men like Geoffrey Howe (1926-2015) absorbing the danger and signaling it, and she, sealed, perceived nothing until the votes were counted. The buffered self’s invulnerability had become deafness. Second, the aftermath: the woman whose theory said the self is complete in itself was hollowed out by exile from power, wandering, by every account, in grief for a presence that had left her. Denis, the red boxes, the purpose, the force that had filled her, gone. She turned out to be porous after all, open to one great power her whole life, and when it withdrew it took most of her with it.
So Taylor’s frame reads Thatcher as a woman who governed porous people with a buffered creed, broke their enchanted worlds in the name of a self they did not have, and was broken in turn by forces her philosophy could not admit through the boundary. The creed was wrong about Britain. Its last refutation was her.
