A prosecutor stands in a Leeds courtroom in 1969 and asks an American professor to agree that he holds the most evil passage he has read. The passage describes a man’s encounter with a ten-year-old girl at Vauxhall Gardens. The book is My Secret Life, an anonymous Victorian memoir, reprinted for the first time in Britain and now charged under the Obscene Publications Act 1959. The professor is Steven Marcus (1928-2018), flown from New York to defend it.
Marcus declines the bait. He answers that the accounts of the Nazi camps, and the reports of thirteen-year-old chimney sweeps dying of cancer of the scrotum, strike him as more evil, and that no man proposes to suppress knowledge of those. The prosecutor changes his line. He suggests that a scholar who spends years among pornographic texts must take some private pleasure in the work.
Two men, one book, one room. Each treats candor as the highest service he can render. Each means a different thing by the word.
An immortality project, as Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued, is how a man lives. He needs to feel he counts in a scheme larger than his body, that some part of him will outlast his own death. Culture hands him the script. It names the hero and tells him what the hero must do to earn cosmic credit. A warrior earns it one way, a saint another, a father another. The hero system answers the terror of death with a promise: do this, and you will not have lived for nothing.
For Marcus the hero is the consciousness that can name what other men cannot bear to name. His immortality runs through articulate knowledge. To find the words for the buried thing, to drag the shameful and the unspeakable up into the daylight of clear language, redeems it, and the man who performs that act stands above the squalor he describes. He does not flinch and he does not look away. That refusal is his claim on permanence. Candor, in his system, is rescue.
The boy who became that man carries his lunch to school in a paper bag. His father loses his work for six years after the crash of 1929 and the family slides down into Highbridge, a lower-class corner of the Bronx near Yankee Stadium, among Irish and Italian and Jewish households. The boy reads. He wins full scholarships to Columbia and to Harvard and goes to Columbia because the family cannot pay for room and board anywhere else, and so he lives at home and studies under Lionel Trilling (1905-1975), the most serious man in the most serious department in the country. A grandson of emigrants from the countryside near Vilnius climbs into the Anglo-Protestant fortress of high literary culture and makes himself its heir. The climb is the first hero system. Trilling’s world runs on a single sacred word, seriousness, and Marcus earns his place by proving he can be more serious about more difficult things than the men born inside the gate.
He has a friend from the neighborhood, another Bronx boy his own age, named Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999). They stay close until Kubrick dies. Hold that fact for the end. Two boys from Highbridge, each building his life on the same refusal to look away, one through the word and one through the image.
The archive is where the hero system shows itself. Marcus goes into the locked materials, the private case, the cabinet of books a respectable man is not supposed to read, the indices Henry Spencer Ashbee kept and the records the Kinsey Institute preserved. He reads the Victorian physician William Acton (1813-1875), who denies the existence of childhood sexuality even while he writes at length about how to suppress it. He reads the panic over masturbation, the belief that semen ran out like a bank balance and that spending it through onanism or wet dreams led to enervation, madness, and death. He reads My Secret Life and treats the eleven volumes as a sexual biography touched by fantasy. He draws out the rape of the wife, the coerced servants and starving laborers, the shilling pieces, the standing fear of impotence and castration. And he coins the word that outlives all the others, pornotopia, the fantasy world where every man stays potent forever and every woman flows without end and no one ever tires or fails or dies.
Look at what pornotopia is. A man who never goes soft is a man who never decays. The dream of endless potency is the denial of the body that ages and rots and stops. Marcus, working his way through the locked cabinet, finds a pure Becker immortality fantasy lying at the bottom of the dirtiest books in England, the male body refusing its own death. And his own immortality runs by the opposite road. The pornographer escapes death by living inside the fantasy. Marcus escapes it by naming the fantasy, by standing outside the dream with a clear word for what the dreamer cannot say. Walter and Marcus run opposite bids on the same material. One man wants to feel infinite. The other wants to understand the man who wants to feel infinite, and to be remembered as the one who understood.
That is why the same candor reads as heroism to Marcus and as contagion to Acton. The physician’s hero system protects. To name childhood sexuality, in Acton’s world, spreads it, and the doctor earns his immortality by warning, by walling the knowledge off, by keeping the words locked away for the good of the young. Acton and Marcus stand on the same archive and reach opposite verdicts about candor, because each serves a different idea of what saves a man.
Sacred words travel badly. Candor means the heroic naming of the buried to Marcus. To a cloistered Carmelite, candor before God is silence, and to drag the flesh into speech profanes the one room where silence does the work of prayer. To a battlefield surgeon, candor is the flat clinical word that lets the hand cut while the patient screams, and warmth is the enemy of the cut. To a typist copying samizdat in a Moscow kitchen in 1974, candor is the crime the state breaks fingers for, the page that can cost ten years. To the prosecutor at Leeds, candor is a lever that moves a jury toward a verdict, and the truth of the book counts for nothing against the conviction the book can win. Same word. Five men. Five different immortalities, and each man would call the other four either cowards or criminals.
This explains the courtroom better than any argument about literary merit. The prosecutor is not stupid and he is not lying. He serves a hero system where the man of standing protects the public from filth, and where a scholar who reads filth for years has stained himself by the contact. When he asks Marcus whether the years of reading gave him pleasure, he asks the only question his system can ask, because in his world no clean man could spend that long in the cabinet and stay clean. Marcus answers from a system the prosecutor cannot enter, where the years in the cabinet are the proof of seriousness and the clean man is the one who stayed outside and stayed ignorant. They are not disagreeing about a book. They are two heroes from two faiths, each certain the other has it backward.
Marcus carries the same conviction into his work on Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). He argues that The Condition of the Working Class in England has been read wrong, that the squalor of Manchester beggared all description, and that Engels matters because he reckoned with a horror so large that words failed. The hero, again, is the consciousness that finds language for what language cannot hold. Marcus asks why the son of a German factory master would forsake his own class and answers that Engels authored himself, turned proletarian fury into thought, made himself the man he chose to be against the man his father made. That is Becker’s causa sui project, the self as its own father, and Marcus reaches for it because it is his own story. The Bronx boy who wrote himself into Trilling’s chair recognizes the factory heir who wrote himself out of his father’s house.
Then the world turns the word against him. By 1993 Marcus sits as dean of Columbia College, and a new generation has built a fresh cabinet of forbidden speech and called it justice. He writes an essay naming what he sees, a new puritanism he calls a soft totalitarianism, orthodoxies that muzzle dissent and breed fear in anyone whose thinking strays. He records the campus moment in its own idiom, an anthropologist denouncing the Mars Bar as a confectionery emblem of an American hunger to colonize everything up to and past the planets. The man who spent his youth breaking the Victorian silence about the body now watches a younger priesthood rebuild a silence about race and sex and power, and he stands where Acton once stood, on the wrong side of candor, recast as the thing that needs to be suppressed.
The campus answers in kind. The student paper reports that the dean will not meet with students, cannot use email, drags his feet on Asian American and Latin American studies. An editorial likens him to a giant severed phallus. Read that image through his own The Other Victorians and it lands as a sentence Walter might have feared in the dark, the male body cut, unmanned, finished. The critic who diagnosed castration anxiety in Victorian pornography reads his own castration in the campus paper, written by the children of the revolution he thought he had won. He resigns and gives his health as the reason.
The reversal is the truth of the hero system. Candor never sat still. Marcus thought he had freed the word once and for all, had broken the lock on the private case and let the daylight in. He had only moved the cabinet. The unspeakable shifted address, from the body to the tribe, from sex to power, and the men who guard the new silence are as sure of their service as Acton was of his. Marcus spent a life proving that civilization rests on what it forbids itself to say, and he lived long enough to feel the proof close over his own head.
He dies in April 2018 at eighty-nine. Tom Wolfe (1930-2018), who built his own immortality out of close looking and would have known a status detail like the paper-bag lunch for the gold it is, dies three weeks later.
Go back to the two Bronx boys. Kubrick spent his last years making a film about a masked orgy behind a locked door, the rich at their secret rite, the husband who must not see and cannot stop looking. He died before it opened. Two boys from Highbridge, one armed with the word and one with the camera, both certain that the heroic act is to walk into the room respectable men keep locked and to come back able to say what is in there. One named the private case. The other filmed it. Neither could leave it shut. That refusal was the whole of their faith, and each man wagered his share of forever on the proposition that to see clearly and to say plainly is the one service death cannot take back.
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 subverts the critical legacy of Steven Marcus.
Mearsheimer’s realism challenges Marcus’s psychoanalytic and social framework on three major fronts.
In The Other Victorians, Marcus analyzed nineteenth-century medical anxieties surrounding sexuality, contrasting them with the clandestine circulation of pornography. He treated pornography as a psychological escape hatch—an autistic fantasy space where individuals could temporarily break free from the hyper-repressive social engineering of the Victorian era.
If Mearsheimer is right, Marcus misinterprets the function of this subculture. Human beings are social animals whose moral frameworks and behavioral codes are sealed by intense childhood socialization long before their critical faculties mature. The official Victorian code was not a superficial layer of psychological repression that individuals could bypass via clandestine fantasy; it was the structural value infusion required to coordinate and preserve the British state during its drive for global hegemony. What Marcus analyzes as “pornotopia”, a boundaryless landscape of individual gratification, is an evolutionary impossibility. The individual mind cannot escape its socialization through secret text or fantasy, because the very categories of its thought remain manufactured by the tribe to serve group survival.
Marcus spent much of his career using Freudian psychoanalysis to explore how the individual ego negotiates its impulses against the demands of civilization. He operated on the liberal, psychological assumption that through rigorous self-reflection, a man could uncover his deep, hidden repressions and gain greater individual autonomy.
Mearsheimer’s hierarchy of human preferences destroys this Freudian optimism. Reason and individual self-reflection arrive late and rank last, far behind socialization and inborn sentiment. A man does not navigate the world by unpacking his private neuroses; he navigates it by obeying the collective imperatives of his survival group. The deep, non-rational value infusions given in childhood are not psychological wounds that a patient can heal through psychoanalysis; they are the necessary programming that keeps the human animal embedded in the group. Marcus’s faith in psychoanalysis as a tool for individual enlightenment overestimates the power of independent reason.
In Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class, Marcus examined how Friedrich Engels used literary and sociological techniques to map the horrific conditions of the industrial proletariat in the 1840s. Marcus viewed this history as a tragic demonstration of how economic arrangements fracture human consciousness and alienate the individual.
Mearsheimer’s worldview flips the causal arrow. The horrific industrial scaling of Manchester was not an ideological or economic accident that damaged human nature; it was the brutal reality of state optimization under conditions of international anarchy. Wealthy, industrializing states build factories, railways, and dense urban centers to maximize their material power relative to foreign rivals. The working-class solidarity Engels documented was not a new stage of class-conscious human evolution breaking free from old myths; it was the predictable formation of a new domestic coalition designed to compete for status and resources against the industrial bourgeoisie.
If Mearsheimer is right, Marcus’s scholarly effort to merge literature, psychoanalysis, and social critique captures only the surface ripples of intellectual anxiety. The human mind is not a complex, Freudian theater searching for individual liberation from social repression; it is a structural mechanism designed to lock onto the nearest protective tribe and maintain its boundaries at all costs.
If David Pinsof is right, Marcus’s reliance on psychoanalysis and social critique was not a breakthrough in human understanding. It was a sophisticated operation to claim ultimate authority over human motives.
Marcus used Sigmund Freud’s concepts to explain history. He argued that the Victorians suffered from massive collective repression. In The Other Victorians, he treated their public prudery and their private obsession with smut as a deep psychological neurosis—a failure to integrate the conscious mind with subconscious desires.
Pinsof’s logic flips this entirely. The Victorians did not have a collective brain-fart, nor did they misunderstand their own sexuality. They were acting as highly rational primates. Publicly spouting rigid moral purity allowed them to signal elite status, enforce social control, and police the behavior of lower classes. Privately indulging their impulses was a direct pursuit of pleasure.
There was no subconscious glitch. The behavior was perfectly strategic. Marcus invented the narrative of “repression” because it required a psychoanalytic critic to decode it. By framing human behavior as a puzzle of hidden drives, the intellectual positions himself as the only person who truly knows why you do what you do.
Marcus coined the term Pornotopia to describe the fantasy world of pornography, where time stops, resources are infinite, and mechanical pleasure is endless. He treated this as a tragic, utopian delusion that distracted people from real human connection and social reality.
From Pinsof’s perspective, this critique is an intellectual turf war over what matters. The consumer of pornography is seeking direct, low-cost gratification. By pathologizing this pursuit as a “utopian delusion,” Marcus attempts to lower its social value. He implies that the person who enjoys raw, popular filth is stuck in a primitive mental trap, whereas the refined academic who analyzes the filth occupies a higher moral plane. It turns a basic human impulse into a symptom that requires academic curation.
In Doing Good: The Limits of Benevolence (1978), Marcus and his co-authors examined how social interventions and charity often end up controlling and degrading the people they are supposed to help. Marcus framed this as a tragic irony of modern social planning—a well-intentioned mistake where the desire to do good outruns practical understanding.
Pinsof’s essay shows that this “limit of benevolence” is not an accident or a misunderstanding. The social worker, the progressive reformer, and the policy expert do not end up controlling the poor by mistake. They do it because controlling people under a moralistic pretext is the actual goal.
The elite class uses the language of care and “doing good” to justify its right to nudge, manage, and govern the lives of lower-status citizens. Marcus correctly identified the paternalistic harm, but by treating it as a conceptual failure—a limit of understanding—he protected his own class. He implied that we just need a more sophisticated, self-aware group of intellectuals to run the interventions, keeping the academic monopoly on state guidance secure.
This recording from his memorial service includes testimonies from colleagues detailing how Marcus built his academic career around the integration of psychoanalytic theory and literary criticism.
