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’s premises are right, the impact on Stephen Park Turner (b. 1951) is nuanced. His framework would receive both a powerful validation and a major structural challenge.
As a Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of South Florida, Turner has spent his career examining the philosophy of the social sciences, the nature of expertise, and the sociology of knowledge. The realist framework intersects with his life work in two ways.
One. The validation of his critique of shared culture. In The Social Theory of Practices, Turner argues against collective, supra-individual concepts like a uniform “culture” that group members simply download and share. Instead, he focuses on the actual, messy mechanics of transmission. He posits that what looks like a cohesive collective culture is a rough uniformity built through individual interactions, varied personal experiences, and feedback loops. If Mearsheimer is right about the total power of childhood value infusions, Turner’s emphasis on the transmission mechanism is completely validated. Culture is not an abstract cloud floating above individuals; it is a concrete, persistent series of behavioral habits and moral codes driven into the young to create group cohesion. However, the realist premise pushes Turner’s model further than his individualist focus on varied interactions implies because it suggests that these feedback mechanisms are not accidental or open-ended, but are heavily wired by an evolutionary necessity for tight in-group solidarity.
Two. Validates Turner’s analysis of epistemic inequality. In The Politics of Expertise and Liberal Democracy 3.0, Turner tracks the rising authority of technical and scientific experts in modern society. He points out that this reliance on experts introduces a profound “epistemic inequality” into liberal democracy, creating a fundamental tension between technocratic guidance and public governance. If the realist premise holds, Turner’s skepticism toward the neutral authority of experts is fully vindicated. Experts are not value-free information processors standing above the tribal fray. They are highly socialized members of a specific elite sub-tribe, trained in academic fortresses. The data and objective policy recommendations they issue are not neutral truths, but the protective ideology of their own institutional caste. Turner’s warning that expertise introduces a new axis of inequality matches the realist conclusion: “expert knowledge” functions as a highly effective weapon used by a managerial tribe to assert dominance over competing social groups.
While Turner is a sharp critic of how expertise distorts democratic processes, his work seeks to understand how civil society and liberal structures might adapt to or survive these epistemic tensions. If Mearsheimer is right, the very concept of a stable liberal democracy operating via open, reasonable feedback loops is an illusion. The tension Turner identifies cannot be managed or resolved through a better structural design of civil society. The rise of competing experts and the suppression of alternative views through “epistemic coercion” are not institutional malfunctions that can be corrected; they are the permanent, zero-sum dynamics of tribal factions fighting to control the narrative engine of the state.
Mearsheimer and Turner agree that epistemic coercion and epistemic dependence sit together because a man knows almost nothing on his own. He takes most of what he holds true on trust, from teachers, books, experts, and the people around him. John Hardwig gave this the name epistemic dependence in 1985, and it follows from the division of cognitive labor. No one checks the chemistry, the law, the history, and the medicine for himself. He relies on others who claim to know.
Once you grant that, coercion stops looking like a fault in the system and starts looking like a feature of the ground. Whoever controls the sources a man leans on holds power over what that man believes. The dependence is the opening. You cannot close the opening without removing the dependence, and you cannot remove the dependence, because no one thinks alone any more than he survives alone. That is the bridge to Mearsheimer. The social necessity he describes at the level of survival shows up again at the level of belief. We are embedded thinkers for the same reason we are embedded actors. By necessity.
Turner does not agree that these tensions are permanent, zero-sum, past repair by any design of civil society. Turner writes that structures can alter and mitigate. Mitigate is the word to watch. A man who held the contest zero-sum would not reach for it. Turner tells you the room for institutional work is real. Courts, universities, a free press, rival centers of expertise, these change how dependence spreads and how coercion travels. They do something.
Turner’s books, The Politics of Expertise and Liberal Democracy 3.0 among them, doubt that anyone can engineer the conditions of legitimate knowledge from above. The people who would design the mitigating structures depend on experts too. They face the same problem they mean to fix. And the effects of any reform run loose. You cannot model them in advance and collect the result you planned. So structures help, and the help comes without a guarantee and without a forecast.
There is slack between the anthropologies of Mearsheimer and Turner. The slack is small, and no one can promise where it leads, and inside that slack runs Turner’s project. He does not defend the liberal dream of open reasonable feedback. He denies that its failure leaves only tribal warfare with nothing left over. The slack is the partial, unreliable purchase that structures keep on a problem they can never solve.
The case for convenient belief by Turner here is strong. Take away the slack, seal the contest, call it zero-sum, and his books and articles lose their subject. A scholar of how liberal structures survive needs the structures to survive a little. The mitigation thesis keeps the enterprise running. He has spent his career on whether expertise and democracy can be reconciled, and a man cannot spend a career on a question he holds already closed. So the belief pays him. It pays his standing, his shelf, his reason to keep writing. The first beneficiary of the belief is Turner.
But convenience names the pull on a man who holds a belief. It says nothing about whether the belief tracks the world. A view can serve the one who holds it and still be true.
Now the part that complicates the easy verdict. Watch how little he kept. He concedes almost the entire hard claim by Mearsheimer. Rooted in necessity, yes. He keeps only “partially and unpredictably,” the smallest remainder a man could keep and still have work to do. A purely convenient belief runs the other way. It inflates. The comfortable version says structures work, reform succeeds, the dream sits within reach. That flatters the liberal and flatters the scholar’s craft. Turner refuses it. He also refuses the tribal answer that would please the realist. His hedge pleases no coalition.
Turner concedes the maximum, retains the minimum, and you have what an honest mind looks like under pressure. You also have what convenience looks like once an honest mind puts it on a short leash. The frame cannot pry those two apart from the outside. What you can say with confidence: if this is convenience, it runs lean. He bought himself the least belief that keeps the lights on, and he paid full price in concessions for it.
