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 is right, the consensus school of American history provides a flawed interpretation of the American past by mistaking an intense tribal socialization for a natural state of universal agreement. Writing in the 1950s, consensus historians like Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America and Richard Hofstadter argued that American history lacked the deep, violent ideological conflicts of Europe. They posited that Americans shared an underlying, almost unconscious agreement on individual rights, private property, and liberal capitalism.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology upends this thesis by redefining the nature of that agreement.
First, what the consensus school views as a rational, shared commitment to individual liberty is a highly potent tribal myth. Hartz argued that the absence of a feudal past allowed Americans to naturally adopt Lockean liberalism as a baseline identity. If Mearsheimer is right, this liberal consensus is not a testament to the primacy of individualism. It is the result of a rigorous value infusion drilled into generations of Americans during a long childhood. The shared belief in individual rights is the specific moral code of the American tribe, used to ensure internal cohesion and group survival. The consensus historians mistook a powerful local socialization for a society of atomistic individuals.
Second, the consensus framework fails to recognize how this liberal ideology drives conflict rather than harmony. Mearsheimer notes that the universalism inherent in liberal rights motivates states to pursue ambitious, interventionist foreign policies. The consensus school tended to treat the American liberal agreement as a peaceful domestic stabilizer. If Mearsheimer is right, this shared value system transforms the nation into a crusader. By believing that everyone on the planet desires and possesses the same inherent set of rights, the American tribe systematically projects its power outward, entering conflicts under the guise of human rights. The domestic consensus is the ideological engine of geopolitical expansion.
Third, the consensus school ignores the primary tribal divisions that exist beneath the surface of the liberal narrative. Historians of this school argued that even major American conflicts, like the Civil War, occurred within a broader liberal framework where both sides shared the same basic vocabulary. Mearsheimer’s view implies that when security is threatened, inborn sentiments and tribal attachments easily shatter any superficial ideological agreement. The consensus school overemphasized the power of liberal ideas because they wrote during a period of temporary postwar security and intense national cohesion. When resources grow scarce or distinct social groups within a nation feel their survival is at stake, the shared liberal code dissolves, and the primary, tribal nature of human conflict reasserts itself.
If Mearsheimer is right, the consensus school did not discover a unique American exceptionalism rooted in liberty. They merely documented a period where a highly successful tribe achieved total internal conformity through socialization, using the language of individualism to blind itself to its own tribal behavior.
If John J. Mearsheimer is right, Postcolonial and Subaltern Historiography is entirely accurate in its diagnosis of imperial power, but its core methodology and ultimate goals are based on a profound psychological illusion.
Subaltern studies, which originated with scholars like Ranajit Guha (1923–2023) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (b. 1942), aims to rescue the history of the peasant, the displaced, and the colonized from the dominant archives of elites and empires. The field uses critique to expose how colonial powers constructed histories that justified their dominance, and it seeks to recover the authentic voice and agency of the oppressed.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology impacts this historical school in three distinct ways:
First, it validates the subaltern claim that elite and imperial histories are instruments of power, not objective truth. Mearsheimer argues that universalist ideologies, like the Western concept of human rights, are constructed by powerful states to justify foreign intervention and dominance. Postcolonial historians who expose British or French colonial records as self-serving narratives designed to subjugate local populations are simply documenting this tribal logic in action. The empire’s history is the tribe’s mythic justification for survival and expansion.
Second, the field’s core ambition—recovering an unconditioned, authentic subaltern voice—is an impossibility. Subaltern historiography attempts to peel back layers of colonial discourse to find the true consciousness of the oppressed peasant. But if Mearsheimer is right, there is no such thing as an unconditioned human consciousness waiting to be liberated. The subaltern individual is just as thoroughly shaped by intense childhood socialization, local tribal values, and inborn sentiments as the imperial elite. If you strip away the social matrix that formed the subaltern’s identity, you do not find a pure, autonomous rational actor; you find nothing at all. The voice the historian recovers is not a universal human voice, but the voice of a different, localized tribe with its own rigid moral code.
Third, the progressive, emancipatory narrative of subaltern studies is a delusion. The field is driven by a desire to dismantle oppressive power structures to achieve a more just, pluralistic global history. If Mearsheimer’s view of human nature is correct, human groups are locked in a permanent, anarchic competition for survival. When a subaltern group successfully resists or overthrows an elite structure, the logic of dominance does not disappear. The newly empowered group will immediately organize itself into a cohesive unit to ensure its own survival, which inevitably requires establishing its own internal hierarchies, enforcing its own value infusions, and competing with rival groups. The postcolonial history of internal ethnic and tribal conflicts confirms this reality.
If Mearsheimer is right, Postcolonial and Subaltern Historiography correctly identifies the mechanisms of imperial bias, but it misinterprets the nature of the people it seeks to liberate. History is not a story of progressive emancipation from power structures; it is a permanent cycle of tribal groups using culture, narrative, and force to survive in a hostile world.
If John J. Mearsheimer is right, Gender and Intersection Historiography provides a highly accurate map of how human societies organize themselves for internal solidarity, but its foundational theory of power and liberation is completely wrong.
Gender and intersectional historiography treats categories like masculinity, femininity, sexuality, and race as historical constructs that are constantly negotiated and enforced. The field uses these categories to analyze how societies distribute power and resources, arguing that hierarchies are maintained through systemic oppression. The underlying goal is emancipatory: by exposing these structures as unnatural and historically contingent, humanity can dismantle them and move toward a more egalitarian future.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology redefines this entire historical framework in three ways:
First, what gender historians call “systemic oppression” or “socially constructed roles” is actually the necessary machinery of tribal survival. Mearsheimer argues that humans are born into societies that protect and nurture them during a long childhood, exposing them to intense socialization to build group cohesion. In an anarchic world where groups must compete to survive, a tribe cannot leave its internal structure to chance. Roles governing reproduction, labor, defense, and lineage are enforced not out of arbitrary malice, but because a group must maximize its efficiency and internal stability to avoid destruction by its neighbors. The rigid gender roles documented by historians are the survival strategies of competing tribes.
Second, the intersectional model correctly identifies that individual identities are subordinate to group alignments, but it mistakes the nature of the primary group. Intersectional theory treats an individual as a combination of various oppressed or privileged identities (e.g., race, gender, class). Mearsheimer’s view implies that when existential security is threatened, these sub-tribal identities collapse into the primary survival unit: the state or the macro-tribe. A woman or a minority group member is socialized into the overarching values of their specific society long before they develop the critical faculties to analyze their intersectional position. In times of crisis, history shows that individuals almost always side with their national or cultural tribe against external threats, completely overriding internal intersectional solidarity.
Third, the progressive goal of dismantling these historical structures is a recipe for tribal collapse. Intersectional historians use critique to weaken the authority of traditional social hierarchies, viewing them as obstacles to individual and collective liberation. If Mearsheimer is right, a society that successfully deconstructs its internal roles and values saps its own social cohesion. It trades its intense, stabilizing value infusion for atomized individualism. In a competitive world, a tribe that deconstructs its own social fabric will inevitably be conquered, subordinated, or replaced by a more cohesive, traditional tribe that maintains strict internal socialization and clear group roles.
If Mearsheimer is right, Gender and Intersection Historiography is an excellent record of how tightly societies must manage their populations to ensure group survival. However, the field’s ultimate project is an illusion. It views the structural constraints of human society as temporary historical mistakes rather than the permanent, survival-driven logic of a tribal animal.
If John J. Mearsheimer is right, Global, Transnational, and Network History tracks the superficial plumbing of global civilization while completely misinterpreting the architectural foundation.
This school of history focuses on what flows across borders—ideas, commodities, microbes, and migrants. It attempts to bypass the nation-state, arguing that human history is better understood through borderless connections, oceanic worlds, and global circuits. It implies that the nation-state is a modern, artificial container that can be de-emphasized in historical analysis.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology redefines the findings of this approach in three ways:
First, networks do not replace bounded groups; they depend on them. Transnational historians trace the flow of global trade circuits or the spread of ideas across vast networks. If Mearsheimer is right, these networks can only exist because secure, powerful tribes create and maintain the stable conditions necessary for them to operate. A global trade network like the Silk Road or an oceanic world like the Atlantic basin is not a borderless space of pure flow. It is a space negotiated, policed, or dominated by powerful states seeking to maximize their wealth and security relative to rivals. The network is a byproduct of state power, not an independent force that transcends it.
Second, the circulation of ideas across borders does not create a universal human identity. Transnational history often highlights how political concepts or cultural trends jump from one society to another, implying a growing global interconnectedness. Mearsheimer notes that because of intense early childhood socialization within specific groups, an individual’s moral code and primary identity are fixed locally long before his critical faculties develop. When a foreign idea enters a new tribe, it is not received by neutral, cosmopolitan actors. It is aggressively filtered, adapted, or weaponized to serve the internal cohesion and survival needs of that local tribe. Ideas cross borders, but primary loyalties do not.
Third, the nation-state is not an arbitrary historical container that humanity can outgrow; it is the ultimate expression of the tribal survival imperative. Transnational historians treat the nation-state as a historically contingent nineteenth-century invention. If Mearsheimer is right, the state exists because humans are profoundly social beings who require an overarching political structure to protect them from external threats in an anarchic world. The scale of the group may change over centuries—from clans to city-states to empires to nation-states—but the underlying logic of a bounded, defensive social group remains constant.
If Mearsheimer is right, Global, Transnational, and Network History provides a valuable description of the interactions between human societies. However, the field fails because it mistakes increased interaction for the dissolution of the boundary. Man remains a tribal animal, and no matter how fast commodities, diseases, or ideas move through a global network, the primary unit of human survival remains the bounded, social group.
If John J. Mearsheimer is right, Environmental History provides an exceptionally accurate account of the material constraints that drive human conflict, but the field’s prescriptive lessons are fundamentally at odds with human nature.
Environmental history treats nature as an active agent. It demonstrates how changes in the physical world—droughts, plagues, crop failures, and resource depletion—destroy regimes, force migrations, and trigger wars.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology fits this framework precisely, transforming environmental history into a record of tribal survival strategies under ecological pressure.
First, environmental history confirms that human groups are locked in a permanent, material struggle for security. When historians document how a climate shift or a soil crisis caused a state collapse, they are showing what happens when a tribe can no longer protect and nurture its members. In Mearsheimer’s world, an anarchic environment forces groups to maximize their power relative to others. Power requires energy and resources. Therefore, the historical record of human societies aggressively extracting resources and clearing land is not a cultural mistake or a lack of awareness; it is the logical consequence of competing tribes doing whatever it takes to survive.
Second, the field exposes the illusion of universal reason when resource scarcity strikes. Environmental historians often study resource frontiers—the places where societies expand to secure timber, coal, or water. If Mearsheimer is right that reason is the least important way humans determine their preferences, a society facing an ecological crisis will not calmly reason its way into a global sharing agreement with its neighbors. Instead, its deep-seated survival instincts and innate sentiments will reassert themselves. The group will prioritize its own members, weaponize its narratives, and use force to secure what it needs from rival groups. History shows that ecological stress intensifies tribal boundaries rather than dissolving them.
Third, the field’s underlying hope—that understanding historical ecological collapses will convince modern humanity to cooperate globally—is a delusion. Many environmental historians write with a moral urgency, hoping that by exposing the material limits of the planet, they can inspire a cross-border, unified effort to avert climate disaster.
If Mearsheimer is right, this global cooperation is impossible. Because individuals are intensely socialized within specific societies during childhood, their moral attachments are bound to the local tribe. A man will make sacrifices for his group, but he cannot form the same sacrificial attachment to an abstract global ecosystem. If saving the biosphere requires a tribe to unilaterally cut its resource use and weaken its position relative to a rising rival, the tribe will choose survival over sustainability every time.
If Mearsheimer is right, Environmental History is a brilliant, tragic map of human history. It correctly identifies that nature dictates the terms of human existence, but it fails to see that the tribal structure of human psychology guarantees that humanity will fight each other for the remaining pieces of the planet rather than unite to save it.
If John J. Mearsheimer is right, Material Culture and Science and Technology Studies (STS) provides an exceptionally accurate map of how human groups construct reality to survive, but the field’s underlying impulse to demystify power is an intellectual dead end.
This historical school rejects the idea that technology and science develop along a linear path of objective, neutral progress. Instead, STS treats scientific knowledge and physical artifacts as systems deeply embedded in specific political and social frameworks. They argue that what a society labels as objective truth or a neutral tool is actually a social construction shaped by those in power.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology redefines the insights of this school in three ways:
First, it validates the core STS claim that knowledge and technology are socially constructed instruments of power. Mearsheimer argues that humans are socialized into a specific tribe’s value system long before their critical faculties develop. Science, medicine, and engineering do not develop in a vacuum of pure reason; they are organized by the state or the tribe to maximize its security, wealth, and competitive advantage in an anarchic world. When an STS historian demonstrates that the development of the steam engine, the laboratory, or algorithmic data systems was driven by state priorities and military-industrial needs rather than pure curiosity, he is confirming Mearsheimer’s realism. Technology is the physical muscle of the tribe.
Second, material culture is the physical manifestation of the intense value infusion Mearsheimer describes. Historians of material culture analyze everyday objects to decode social status, identity, and consumption. If humans are tribal down to their core sentiments, objects are not merely utilitarian tools or empty displays of wealth. They are the instruments used during a long childhood to condition and socialize individuals into the group’s moral code. A flag, a uniform, a architectural style, or even everyday consumer goods serve to reinforce the boundary between the internal community and the external world. Material culture is the physical anchor of tribal cohesion.
Third, the STS project of unmasking scientific objectivity is politically destabilizing for the society that practices it. Many STS scholars operate with an emancipatory motive, believing that by exposing the social biases behind scientific consensus or technological systems, they can democratize knowledge and reduce institutional control.
If Mearsheimer is right, a tribe requires a shared, stable narrative—including a shared belief in its own operational truths—to maintain internal solidarity and survive. A historical critique that systematically hollows out a society’s trust in its own scientific institutions, technical systems, and foundational knowledge structures does not liberate its citizens. It fractures their collective reality. While one society engages in the luxury of deconstructing its own technological and scientific authority, rival tribes maintaining strict, uncritical state alignment will continue to maximize their hard power, engineering capabilities, and strategic coherence.
If Mearsheimer is right, Material Culture and STS correctly observes that science and objects are extensions of social logic rather than detached, objective progress. However, the field fails to see that this social construction is a biological and political necessity. A group cannot survive on critique alone; it requires functional tools and shared certainties to withstand the permanent pressure of an anarchic world.
If John J. Mearsheimer is right, Memory Studies and Public History is the most anthro-politically accurate discipline in the entire academy. It maps the precise engineering by which human groups survive.
This field focuses on how societies actively construct a collective memory through monuments, museums, holidays, and myths to build internal solidarity and navigate trauma. It acknowledges that public history is rarely about an objective recording of the past; it is about the living social needs of the present.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology fully validates and explains the mechanics of this field in three specific ways:
First, collective memory is the primary vehicle for the intense value infusion Mearsheimer describes. He argues that during a long childhood, before critical faculties develop, individuals are exposed to intense socialization by their families and society. Public history—the statues a child walks past, the national holidays he celebrates, the stories he is told in school—is the deliberate structure built to achieve this value infusion. It implants a shared moral code and identity into the individual’s mind when he is most impressionable. Collective memory is not an intellectual hobby; it is the socialization engine of the tribe.
Second, the field correctly identifies that societies prioritize solidarity over objective truth. Scholars of memory studies frequently document how nations manipulate, clean, or completely rewrite historical events to maintain a coherent national narrative. If Mearsheimer is right that humans are tribal at their core and depend on the group for survival, this narrative manipulation is a biological necessity. A tribe cannot afford a fragmented, hyper-critical memory that saps internal loyalty. To face an anarchic, dangerous world, a group must have strong attachments and a willingness to make great sacrifices for fellow members. Public history constructs the myths that justify those sacrifices.
Third, the modern academic effort to deconstruct national myths is a form of political sabotage. Many contemporary public historians and memory scholars operate with an iconoclastic motive. They seek to dismantle national myths, tear down traditional monuments, and expose the dark underbellies of state commemorations to force a society to confront its historical sins.
If Mearsheimer’s framework holds, a society that successfully hollows out its own collective memory does not achieve a higher, more enlightened state of being. It destroys its own internal cohesion. By replacing a unifying national myth with a narrative of permanent internal guilt and division, the group fractures its own socialization process. In a world of permanent tribal competition, a society that deconstructs its public history systematically dismantles the psychological defenses required for its own survival, leaving it vulnerable to more cohesive, single-minded rivals.
If Mearsheimer is right, Memory Studies and Public History accurately captures the exact logic of human society. It shows that man does not live by bare, objective facts, but by the shared, sacred memories that bind him to his tribe.
