A photograph from 2014 shows Daniel Aaron (1912-2016) in his Harvard office, pointing at a picture of himself as a boy. He is a hundred and two. The hand that points has signed petitions, edited seventeen million words of another man’s diary, and helped decide which American books stay in print forever. The boy in the frame knows none of this is coming. The boy has two living parents, a father with a Hollywood law practice, and an address on a Wilshire Boulevard that still runs partly to dirt. Within a few years both parents die and the boy goes back to Chicago to relatives. The old man pointing at him has outlived the parents by ninety years. He has outlived the relatives, the fraternity brothers, the department chairmen, and nearly every writer he ever interviewed, studied, or canonized.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) held that a man builds his life as a denial of death. The culture hands him a script for significance, a hero system, and inside that script he earns the feeling that he counts, that some part of him will outlast the body. Becker called the deepest form of the wish the causa sui project: the desire to be one’s own father, one’s own cause, the author of a self that no parent and no accident gave you. Most men get the script free, by birth. They inherit a faith, a people, a flag, and they spend their lives playing the part. Aaron’s case runs cleaner than most because the inherited script got taken from him at ten. The orphan keeps no tribe by default. He has to choose one, or build one, and then he has to earn his standing in it from a cold start.
What Aaron built was a country. Not by birthright, since the country already counted him a citizen, but by stewardship. He made himself the man who understood America better than the people who simply were American, and through that understanding he claimed a membership no one could revoke and no pogrom could chase him out of.
Watch the choosing happen. At the University of Michigan he lives in an all-Jewish fraternity, drifts off the premedical track, and reads Nietzsche and Baudelaire instead of chemistry. He takes a degree in English at the bottom of the Depression, a degree good for nothing, and carries it to Harvard. There a department chairman gives him the kind of advice that arranges a life. Jewish students in English, the chairman says, sometimes do better in German or chemistry or sociology, fields where a name and a face and an accent draw less notice. Aaron takes the hint and turns it sideways. He enrolls in the new program in the history of American civilization, founded the same year Harvard turns three hundred. In 1943 he becomes the first man to take a Harvard doctorate in it.
He had a word for what came next. Dehyphenation. The Jewish-American hyphen wears away, and he lets it. He converts to nothing. He joins no congregation and trades his grandfathers’ Russia for no new orthodoxy. Instead he attaches himself, his own verb, to parts of the American tradition he can use, and he goes looking for more parts to attach. An orphan with no father makes a father out of a nation and then spends seventy years proving himself the nation’s most attentive son.
The stance he chose for the work was the witness. He liked to call himself an observer, a reporter, a social historian who happened by. The self-description carried a half-step of distance built into it, and the distance was the point. During the war he works the asparagus fields of western Massachusetts beside Polish-American farmers. He pitches for a local softball nine called the Purseglove Pups. He interviews former Communists in their Mexican and London exiles. In each scene a reader feels two things at once, the closeness of the encounter and the gap the encounter never closes. Aaron sits with men who bet their lives on something. He takes notes. A critic of his memoir saw it plainly: the man who risks little sits across the table from the men who risked everything.
Those men gave him his best subject. In Writers on the Left he tells the story of the American writers who handed their whole hero system to the revolution. Mike Gold (1894-1967), who had written the world of Jewish poverty into Jews Without Money. Joseph Freeman (1897-1965). Max Eastman (1883-1969). They wagered their bid for permanence on History with a capital letter, on the future tribunal of the working class, on a verdict that would arrive and vindicate them. The verdict never came. History fired them. The thirties faith curdled into the forties and fifties disenchantment, and Aaron, who had bet nothing, studied the wreckage from his chair, outlived the wreckers by half a century, and put some of them back into authoritative editions on terms he set. The man who took no risk became the keeper of the men who took every risk. His scholarship even reached back and warmed them. It moved Freeman to write him long confessional letters. It sent Gold back to the world he had captured young.
He was no coward about it, and the record shows where he stood. At Smith he backed Newton Arvin (1900-1963) when the college pushed Arvin out over his homosexuality. He circulated a petition for Granville Hicks (1901-1982), a Communist whose teaching contract Harvard declined to renew. The petition earned Aaron a line in an FBI file, a file that reads, now that the Freedom of Information requests have pried it loose, as the dullest spy story in Cambridge. A faculty member suggested a petition. That is the whole crime. Even his brush with danger comes to us as a signature, a curatorial act, a name added to a document about a man the state found more interesting than him.
Then he built the apparatus. In 1979 he helped found the Library of America and served as its first president. Set the orphan’s biography beside the institution and the shape of the life stands clear. A man who lost his own lineage at ten spends his ninth and tenth decades conferring lineage on the nation’s dead. He runs the room where American writers stop being mortal and start being permanent, bound in uniform black, printed on paper that does not yellow, kept in print by charter. He could not keep his own parents. He kept Melville and Twain and Edmund Wilson (1895-1972). The boy who came first only because the roll call ran alphabetically grew into the man who decided whose names made the permanent roll.
So the sacred value at the center of Daniel Aaron is America, and to see what the word held for him you have to see what it could not have held. For Aaron, America names a tradition a stranger can study his way into, a democratic bastion worth understanding because it might be worth preserving, a family that takes you in if you learn its language better than its native speakers. The country is a text. You earn your place by reading it well. The whole hero system rests on a faith that close, fair, ungrudging attention buys belonging, and that belonging bought this way can never be taken back the way a hyphen or a homeland can.
That faith is legible only from inside the assimilated orphan’s project. Move to another hero system and the same five letters mean something a thousand miles off.
To a man on Pine Ridge whose grandmother walked to a boarding school that forbade her language, America names the thing that broke the world, and no amount of fair reading redeems it, because the text itself is the inventory of what was taken. To a Pentecostal mother homeschooling six children in exurban Texas, America names a covenant, a nation God set apart and might yet abandon, and her standing in it comes not from understanding it but from obeying its founding promises to its Founder. Aaron’s careful neutrality would strike her as the very faithlessness eating the country alive. To a Salvadoran roofer who crossed in 2004 and frames houses in the Dallas heat, America names the place that pays, indifferent, transactional, neither family nor text, a job site with better wages and worse winters, and the scholar’s loving custody of its literature belongs to a world he will never be invited into and does not want. To a Boston matron whose forebears sailed before the Revolution, America names a bloodline, a genealogy of pews and portraits, and Aaron is the clever newcomer who learned the catechism by rote, admirable, useful, and not quite one of us. To a Black organizer who came up through 1968, America names a promise written in a hand that never meant to honor it, and the canon Aaron guards is the document of his exclusion, the official memory that left his people, in Aaron’s own word for the Civil War’s writers, unfaced.
Five men and women, one word, five hero systems that share almost nothing. Each treats America as the stage on which a soul earns its weight, and each weighs it on a different scale. The dispossessed weigh it as theft. The covenant believer weighs it as a trust from Heaven. The laborer weighs it in dollars and distance. The descendant weighs it in blood. The organizer weighs it as a debt unpaid. Aaron weighs it as a library to be kept accurate and kept open. None of them is reading the same country, because none of them is denying death the same way.
His way had a tell, and the tell was the open door. For thirty-three years after he retired, Aaron held court in his English Department office at the Barker Center, the longest-running open seminar anyone could name. Friends a third his age came. Colleagues from a dozen countries came. He met them with curiosity and play and a self-deprecation that wanted no disciples and collected hundreds of devotees instead. He performed the membership daily, the host who could not be evicted from the house he had spent a life learning to keep. The boy in the photograph had no people. The old man pointing at him had a worldwide following and a wall of permanent books with his fingerprints on the spines.
He ended his memoir calling himself a citizen of two Americas, and the phrase concedes the whole game. A man secure in one country does not count them. The counting is the immortality project showing through. Aaron took the orphan’s wound, the lost tribe and the dead parents, and he answered it with a country he could read his way into and an archive he could make permanent, and he lived to a hundred and three inside that answer, longer than the radicals who bet on the revolution, longer than the believers who bet on the covenant, longer than the men whose contracts the state declined to renew. The question his long life leaves open is the one Becker would press. Did the man who took no risks finally win the thing the risk-takers died wanting, a name that outlasts the body, by the simple method of guarding everyone else’s? Or did he buy permanence at the only price permanence ever asks, which is to watch from the doorway while other men go inside and burn?
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 John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology challenges the intellectual historical framework of Daniel Aaron, a pioneer of American Studies and author of landmark works like Men of Good Hope and Writers on the Left.
Aaron approached American intellectual and literary history through a progressive lens, chronicling how individual writers and thinkers interacted with utopian dreams, radical politics, and democratic ideals. He viewed the shift of American intellectuals toward communism in the 1930s not as a simple case of subversion, but as an honest, critical engagement with human suffering and an attempt to expand the boundaries of the American democratic tradition.
Mearsheimer’s realism upends Aaron’s historical narrative in many ways.
In Writers on the Left, Aaron treats the attraction of American intellectuals—such as Max Eastman, John Reed, and Langston Hughes—to communism as a moral and philosophical struggle. He focuses on their literary and ideological navigation of a crisis.
If Mearsheimer is right, Aaron misinterprets this movement by focusing on the surface rhetoric of ideas. Human reason ranks last among the ways preferences are formed, falling far behind socialization and innate sentiments. The radicalization of the 1930s intelligentsia was not an act of individual critical reasoning breaking free from bourgeois culture. It was a classic process of tribal realignment. Faced with the crisis of the Great Depression, these writers did not independently think their way into Marxism; they sought the protection and solidarity of a new, cohesive intellectual coalition that provided clear moral boundaries and a shared weapon against status rivals.
In Men of Good Hope, Aaron sought to rehabilitate a native American progressive tradition, tracing a line of reformist thought from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Thorstein Veblen. Aaron believed this tradition was fueled by a distinct “faith in the possibilities of democracy”—a shared ethical framework that could guide social reform through reason and pragmatic gradualism.
Mearsheimer’s worldview implies that this progressive faith is built on an incorrect view of the creature. Liberalism and its progressive offshoots mistakenly treat society as an aggregate of individual choosers who can be united by abstract universal principles. The American progressive tradition Aaron champions is not a neutral discovery of discoverable utopias; it is a parochial ideology belonging to a specific, educated Western coalition. The belief that human societies can be permanently improved or unified around abstract democratic ideals ignores the hard reality of human tribalism and structural anarchy.
Aaron characterized the eventual disillusionment and departure of American writers from the Communist Party in the 1940s as a tragic, internal reckoning with a failed utopian dream.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology, paired with David Pinsof’s alliance theory, offers a simpler, structural explanation that strips away the literary romance. Ideas and universalist creeds serve to bind alliances and signal loyalty to a group. When the Soviet state under Stalin acted to ensure its own survival and hegemony through ruthless power politics (such as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), the universalist language of literary communism could no longer protect the reputations of American writers within their local social groups. They abandoned the coalition not because their critical faculties suddenly matured, but because the cost of remaining in that specific tribe became dangerous to their survival and status in the American nation-state.
In The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (1973), Aaron examines how American writers dealt with the trauma of the Civil War. He notes with disappointment that the war failed to produce a singular literary masterpiece, and he attributes this dearth to the psychological and emotional resistance of writers who were “blinded by bias” and unable to comprehend the full moral and historical meaning of the conflict.
Mearsheimer’s realism shows that Aaron misinterprets what a national crisis does to the human mind. Under the pressure of existential conflict, men do not become detached, universal moral observers who process national tragedy through objective reason. Humans are tribal at their core; when an anarchic system fractures into war, early socialization and survival instincts tighten. Writers like Walt Whitman or Herman Melville did not fail a moral test of comprehension; they reacted precisely as Mearsheimer’s anthropology predicts, using their work to stabilize, defend, and process the survival of their respective social groups. Aaron’s expectation that a writer should rise above the tribal fray to produce a balanced, universal masterpiece asks human nature to violate its own design.
Aaron focuses on the “invisibility of Black Americans” in nineteenth-century Civil War literature, treating the blocking out of race by White writers as a profound failure of the American democratic imagination. Mearsheimer’s anthropology, supplemented by alliance theory, offers a structural explanation that strips away Aaron’s moralism. Socialization during a long, vulnerable childhood infuses individuals with the specific boundaries and prejudices of their immediate group to ensure survival.
White Northern and Southern writers ignored or distorted the reality of Black Americans not because their democratic machinery suffered a temporary malfunction, but because their primary evolutionary obligation was to the cohesion of their own coalition. A group’s narrative operates to protect its internal solidarity and defend its status against immediate rivals. The “blindness” Aaron documents is the standard operation of the tribal mind insulating itself from inputs that threaten the unity of the group.
As the founding president of the Library of America, Aaron dedicated decades to preserving a definitive, standardized canon of American literature. His goal was deeply progressive and liberal: to collect the diverse voices of the American past into a unified, accessible heritage that could inform and cultivate a shared civic consciousness.
Mearsheimer’s hierarchy of preferences reveals why this canonical project is a fragile superstructure. Reason and text-based reflection arrive too late to forge the primal bonds that hold human societies together. A collection of books cannot overwrite the deep, non-rational value infusions that individuals receive from their immediate communities. Aaron’s secular, literary patriotism assumes that a nation can find its coherence in shared ideas and democratic principles. Mearsheimer’s realism predicts that when real scarcity, anarchy, or conflict hits, a shared literary canon provides no protection. The sophisticated, universal text is quickly abandoned, and individuals fall back on the primal, unreflective identities that actually preserve life.
If Mearsheimer is right, Aaron’s lifelong effort to document the American literary mind captures the surface waves while missing the deep ocean currents. Writers do not navigate history as independent moral agents exploring ideas; they remain social animals whose writing serves to defend, justify, and advance the survival vehicles of their respective tribes.
Daniel Aaron pioneered the field of American Studies and helped found the Library of America. His most influential book, Writers on the Left, examined the American writers who responded to the Great Depression by aligning with Communism. Aaron framed this history as a story of good intentions, crushed hopes, and moral idealism. He argued that these intellectuals were motivated by a desire for social justice, but were disillusioned when they discovered the harsh realities of Soviet authoritarianism.
If David Pinsof is right, Aaron misread the entire phenomenon. The attraction to radical politics was not a noble experiment gone wrong. It was a strategic bid for dominance.
Aaron spent much of his career institutionalizing American literature, ensuring it was preserved and taught as a coherent civic tradition. As the founding president of the Library of America, he helped create a uniform, authoritative canon. To a traditional scholar, this looks like a public service that preserves a shared national heritage.
Pinsof’s logic shows that the project serves a more practical function. By determining which writers constitute the “authentic” American voice, the academic elite builds a cultural monopoly. The Library of America functions as an exclusive club where professors serve as the door-keepers. They decide who is remembered and who is forgotten, transforming raw creative work into academic capital that confirms their own high status.
In Writers on the Left, Aaron treated the intellectual embrace of Communism as a tragic misunderstanding. He wrote that these writers were romantic idealists who simply failed to see the totalizing nature of the ideology they endorsed. They had a “good hope” for humanity that blinded them to political reality.
From Pinsof’s perspective, this explanation covers up the true motive. The writers who flocked to Communism did not do so out of a naive misunderstanding. They did so because the ideology promised them ultimate authority over the coercive apparatus of the state. In a fully realized Marxist system, the intellectual class stops being a group of low-influence writers and becomes the vanguard that directs society. Stupidity is strategic here: the writers ignored the warning signs of tyranny because the system offered them a path to absolute power.
Aaron’s work often focused on bridging divides, examining how marginal or radical voices eventually fit into the broader American tapestry. He believed that studying our literary past creates a more empathetic, unified culture.
Pinsof would argue that this emphasis on unity and empathy is the typical story intellectuals use to signal their own benevolence. Literary history is not a tool for building empathy; it is a tool for forging elite alliances. By mastering the canon and defining its boundaries, figures like Aaron create a shared language that allows the educated class to identify its members, exclude its rivals, and justify its right to guide public consciousness. Aaron looked at the American literary tradition and saw a grand search for national meaning. Pinsof’s view suggests he was documenting the steady consolidation of authority by a professional class that hides its pursuit of status behind a screen of cultural preservation.
