John J. Mearsheimer’s anthropology and Richard Posner’s legal pragmatism represent opposing views of human nature and political decision-making.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology argues that humans are “profoundly social beings” shaped by intense socialization, innate tribal sentiments, and strong attachments to their groups. He contends that we are born into societies that define our identities, making individualism secondary.
In contrast, Posner’s pragmatism—often linked to his “law and economics” background—views individuals largely as rational, utility-maximizing actors. Posner’s “everyday pragmatism” rejects “abstract” moral and political theory in favor of a “consequentialist” approach, where decision-makers look at the factual outcomes of a policy to see if it makes people “better off”.
A critique of Posner is his failure to account for law’s “expressive, value-shaping function”. Critics note that Posner treats people as having “fixed preferences” and views law merely as an instrument to create incentives for behavior modification. Mearsheimer’s anthropology would align with this critique, as he emphasizes that societies and their institutions actively shape the values and identities of individuals through socialization. To Mearsheimer, law is not just a tool for economic efficiency; it is part of the social fabric that constitutes who we are.
Posner dismisses “abstract” moral and political theory as “useless” or a “distraction,” arguing that judges should focus on practical consequences. Mearsheimer, however, argues that “reason” is the least important way we determine preferences, and that our moral codes are largely inherited from our family and society. From Mearsheimer’s perspective, Posner’s attempt to discard “abstract” theory is itself a socialized preference—a product of the specific “academic” tribe to which Posner belongs—rather than a neutral, objective way to view the world.
Posner’s pragmatism is often criticized for its lack of an “objective moral compass,” as he believes that when people disagree on fundamental moral questions, theory is unlikely to help. He relies on empirical evidence to guide decisions toward “beneficial” results. Mearsheimer’s anthropology would suggest that Posner’s definition of “beneficial” is inevitably tied to the specific social and cultural context he inhabits. Because Mearsheimer views humans as tribal and deeply attached to their specific groups, he would likely argue that a judge’s decision-making cannot be purely “consequentialist” in a vacuum; it is always filtered through the social values the judge has been socialized to hold.
If Mearsheimer’s anthropology is correct, Richard Posner’s pragmatic vision is built on a “delusion” — the liberal belief that we can function as atomistic, rational actors who discard our social and tribal baggage to make purely instrumental decisions based on “facts”. For Mearsheimer, Posner is an “Enlightenment” thinker who underestimates the power of the “social nature of human beings” and the way tribal loyalties and socialization — not just “costs and benefits” — drive the human experience.
Larissa MacFarquhar writes Dec. 3, 2001:
It is not apparent from his mild exterior that Posner is the most mercilessly seditious legal theorist of his generation. Nor is it obvious that, as a judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, he is one of the most powerful jurists in the country, second only to those on the Supreme Court. He is powerful, moreover, not just by merit of his position: he is powerful because he has decided to be. In hearing a case, he doesn’t first inquire into the constricting dictates of precedent; instead, he comes up with what strikes him as a sensible solution, then looks to see whether precedent excludes it. In 1991, he ruled that a group of deputy sheriffs who, without a warrant or probable cause, assisted with the seizure of a mobile home had not violated the Fourth Amendment because, rather than entering the house, they had removed it whole. (This finding was reversed unanimously by the Supreme Court, whose sarcastic opinion called it “creative.”) Posner finds the rituals of the courtroom vexing impediments to the real business of punishing criminals and freeing up markets. “I’m not fully socialized into the legal profession,” he says. “I’m like an imperfectly housebroken pet. I still have difficulty understanding—and this is something that most people get over in their first two weeks of law school—lawyers spouting things that they don’t believe. If someone is obviously guilty, why do you have to have all this rigmarole?”
Posner did not set out to seize power: he spotted it drifting and gleefully pocketed it, like a stray hundred-dollar bill. As one of the founders of the law-and-economics movement in the nineteen-seventies, he had promoted the idea that laws should be evaluated for their consequences—economic and otherwise—as much as for their fairness, and that judges should not deliberate over rights and duties in the abstract but figure out what kind of incentives their rulings were putting in place. Now that law and economics has become part of the legal establishment, it does not seem strange when Posner talks in his opinions about markets as well as precedent. More recently, he has taken up what, in the hands of gentler souls like the philosopher Richard Rorty, is the tolerant anti-doctrine of pragmatism, and made it the underpinning for his career as a flamboyantly candid judicial activist.
As much as for his contentious opinions, Posner is famous for his freakish productivity. He publishes a book every half hour. Now sixty-two, he has written thirty-one books, more than three hundred articles, and nearly nineteen hundred judicial opinions. He has written books about aids, law and literature, and the Clinton impeachment trial, and articles about pornography, Hegel, and medieval Iceland. This year alone, while working full time as a judge and teaching at the University of Chicago Law School, he published “Breaking the Deadlock,” a book about the Bush-Gore election; a second, updated edition of his 1976 book, “Antitrust Law”; and two collections of essays. He also wrote “Public Intellectuals,” a four-hundred-page diatribe against the species, and “Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy,” in which, among other things, he derides democracy’s anti-élitist pretensions and the animal-rights movement. He is, by a wide margin, the jurist most often cited in scholarly articles—cited almost as much as the next two, Ronald Dworkin and Oliver Wendell Holmes, added together. As Milton Friedman, the legendary Chicago economist, puts it, “He’s a very brilliant fella and he’s written on everything under God’s green sun. What else do you want?”
If Posner is aggressively unconventional in his judging, he is ten times as much so in his books. To paraphrase an author he admires, André Gide, Posner writes not to defend himself but to be accused. This is, of course, one of the primary reasons for his fame. He began propounding the conservative economics of the Chicago School in the late nineteen-sixties, when the legal academy was almost entirely left of center; for this reason, he became the object of furious criticism even before he published his more outré theories. He relishes facts, the more obscure and counterintuitive the better, but as rhetorical weapons rather than as data. His accounts of the world are sometimes so eccentric as to be almost Martian. He has argued, for instance, that a higher proportion of black women than white women are fat because the supply of eligible black men is limited; thus, black women find the likelihood of profit from an elegant figure too small to compensate for the costs of dieting. As John Donohue, a law professor at Stanford, delicately puts it, “A little bit of empirical support goes a long way for him.”
Applying David Pinsof’s “A Big Misunderstanding” to Richard Posner provides an illustration of the “intellectual as savior” archetype, albeit one that is paradoxically honest about its own cynical underpinnings.
Pinsof posits that intellectuals construct the “misunderstanding” myth to sell themselves as the architects of a broken world. Posner, however, is a fascinating variant: he admits the world is a Darwinian, zero-sum struggle, yet he still uses his intellectual output to create a hierarchy where he is the preeminent “clarifier” of that struggle.
Pinsof argues that intellectuals blame social problems on bad beliefs. Posner reframes this as a battle between “clear thinking” (the economic/pragmatic approach) and “mushy moralizing” (the legal/academic tradition). By dismissing the traditional legal focus on fairness as “boilerplate” or “pious rubbish,” Posner positions himself as the only one brave enough to look at the “real world.” This is exactly the status-seeking move Pinsof describes—he is “dunking on the masses” (or in this case, his colleagues) by labeling their adherence to precedent as an intellectual error.
Pinsof suggests that moral vocabularies are “coalition technologies” used to signal in-group status. For Posner, “law and economics” is this technology. By turning law into a mathematical equation of “costs and benefits,” Posner provides a vocabulary that allows his coalition (conservative judges, market-oriented elites) to justify their decisions in a way that sounds objective and “scientific.” It is a powerful way to organize a tribe, even if the “science” (as critics note) often relies on “rhetorical weapons” rather than empirical rigor.
Posner is a thoroughgoing Darwinian. Pinsof argues that intellectuals often trap themselves by “studying the hole” of human nature. Posner’s reliance on sociobiology—his attempt to explain everything from rape to altruism as an evolutionary imperative—is him staring into the “hole” of our primate origins. He isn’t trying to “fix” the primate, he is trying to rationalize it. He uses his writing to explain that the world is cold, selfish, and hierarchical, which confirms his own status as the man who is “unblinking” enough to see it.
Posner claims his motive is to make the law more “efficient” and “sensible.” Pinsof’s essay prompts us to ask: cui bono? What does Posner gain? He gains immense status as the most cited jurist of his generation. He gains the ability to “pocket power” as it drifts by. His “pragmatism” isn’t a neutral tool; it is a way to ensure that he remains the central figure in the intellectual marketplace, constantly producing new work that forces everyone else to respond to him.
Posner’s self-identification with his cat—”cold, furtive, callous, snobbish, selfish”—is the ultimate status signal. He rejects the “sentimental deference” of ordinary humans to adopt the persona of the detached, rational predator. This is the intellectual’s version of the “cynic as meanie.” By admitting to being a “mean” thinker, he creates a barrier that only those “sophisticated” enough to appreciate his coldness can cross.
In the Pinsof frame, Posner’s work is not a quest for judicial truth, but a sophisticated, high-status game. He isn’t correcting a “misunderstanding” about the law; he is replacing an old moral grammar with a new, market-centric one that allows him and his allies to maintain their position as the arbiters of social reality.
