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 atomistic liberal of The Great Delusion picks his values off a menu by reason. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) held the reverse. The force behind On Liberty comes from his fear of custom, not from any faith that men reason their way to their beliefs. He calls it the despotism of custom. He points to China as the case of a people who perfected their customs and then stood still for centuries. Mill concedes John Mearsheimer’s (b. 1947) premise before Mearsheimer states it. Most men inherit their beliefs and then defend what they inherited.
Mill does not describe man as a lone reasoner. He laments that man is a herd creature and then asks what a society might do to protect the few who are not. The individualism in On Liberty works as a prescription built on top of the social man, not as a portrait of him. Mearsheimer reads liberal individualism as a claim about what men are. In Mill it operates as a claim about what a small number of men can become, and why the rest have a stake in shielding them.
Grant the whole socialization story and Mill’s politics still stands, because his politics answers that story. He wants room for the dissenter, the eccentric, the man who runs an experiment in living, against the pressure Mearsheimer describes. He does not justify that room by pretending everyone reasons. He justifies it by the gain that comes to a society when it leaves a channel open for the rare man who pushes against the inheritance and turns out to be right.
Mill needs reason to override socialization at least sometimes, in at least a few men, under good conditions. Mearsheimer ranks reason last among the three sources of our preferences and puts socialization and inborn sentiment above it. Push that ranking hard and Mill’s hope narrows to a thin band: the exceptional mind in whom criticism outruns the value infusion. Mill half believed this himself. He worried about mediocrity and the weight of mass opinion, and he wanted a learned class to hold the higher ground. Mearsheimer’s anthropology pushes Mill toward his own colder side, the side that doubts the many and rests its hopes on the few. The democratic Mill recedes. The aristocratic Mill comes forward.
Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) read Mill’s deepest commitment as self-creation rather than happiness, the man who makes his own life as a work and chooses his own path. Set that Mill against Mearsheimer and the conflict sharpens. If the self arrives all but finished, fabricated by family and society before the boy can weigh anything, then self-creation describes a late and partial edit, not an authorship. Mearsheimer does not deny that a man can revise himself. He denies that the revising self came from nowhere. Berlin’s Mill wants an author. Mearsheimer offers an editor working on a manuscript other hands already wrote.
Mill’s view of where moral feeling comes from takes a separate hit. Mill stood with the associationists against the intuitionist school of William Whewell (1794-1866). He held that our moral sentiments, however fixed they feel, come from education and association rather than from innate structure. His reform program depends on that plasticity. Remake the schooling and the institutions and you can remake the character, and so the society. Mearsheimer lists inborn sentiment as a force that shapes how a man thinks before he thinks. If that is right, character resists the reformer’s hand more than Mill allowed, and tribal feeling sits deeper than association can reach.
The sharpest defeat falls on Mill’s cosmopolitanism. In Utilitarianism he roots the sanction of morality in the social feelings of mankind, the wish to live in unity with one’s fellows, and he thought civilization widens that feeling. There lies the hope: the circle of sympathy grows until it reaches the species. Mearsheimer agrees that man is social and bonded and ready to sacrifice for his group. He denies the expansion. The bond holds at the level of the tribe and the nation and goes no further with any force. The quarrel is not whether man is social. Both men say he is. The quarrel is the ceiling. Mill bets the sympathy climbs to humanity. Mearsheimer bets it stops at the nation, and that when nationalism and liberalism collide, the nation wins. If Mearsheimer is right, the communitarian half of Mill survives and the cosmopolitan half fails.
Mearsheimer says liberal universalism breeds crusades, the urge to carry rights to every people for their own good. Mill is the case in point, not the exception. He worked for the East India Company for most of his career. On Liberty exempts the barbarians and the societies it calls backward from the liberty principle and grants that despotism suits them so long as it improves them. The missionary liberalism Mearsheimer describes runs straight through Mill’s imperial writing. A defender can answer that Mill’s universalism comes hedged. Mill does not think you can hand free institutions to any people at any stage. He ties good government to national character and to a people’s readiness, which reads closer to Mearsheimer’s realism than to the abstract creed Mearsheimer attacks. So Mill ends up more universalist and more particularist than the figure in the book, the imperialist by his paternalism and the realist by his developmentalism.
What comes through intact is the core argument of On Liberty about speech and harm. Those arguments never rested on atomism. Mill defends open debate because collision with error keeps truth alive and because the silenced opinion may hold the part of the truth the reigning view lacks. He defends the harm principle as a line drawn around the social pressure he saw everywhere. Grant Mearsheimer’s man, the social creature shaped by inherited value, and these arguments earn their keep, because they answer the very conformity Mearsheimer treats as our default. Mill becomes less a prophet of the sovereign individual and more a designer of guardrails against the herd.
Mearsheimer ranks reason last and then writes four hundred pages of reasoned argument meant to change how readers think, and he ranks the three sources for us as though we can weigh his ranking. The genre fights the thesis. Mill at least carries a theory for why argument earns its keep among the small class that reads and writes and decides what counts as knowledge. Mearsheimer leaves reason a junior place and then asks it to do the heavy lifting of his book. The tension does not sink his anthropology. It marks the seam where his account and Mill’s might still do business, in the narrow niche where reason does more work than it does in the run of men.
