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, then the entire edifice of liberal political theory, liberal journalism, liberal education, liberal foreign policy, and liberal institutional self-understanding rests on a fundamental mistake about what humans are. The mistake is not a minor technical error. It is categorical. It produces systematic failures across every domain where the mistake is institutionally operative.
Let me work through what follows if Mearsheimer’s claims are accepted as accurate.
What follows for reason. If reason is the least important of the three ways humans determine their preferences, then political theory that treats reasoned agreement as the foundation of legitimate political order is building on what is actually the weakest foundation humans have. Rawls’s overlapping consensus, Dworkin’s interpretive community of reasonable citizens, Habermas’s communicative rationality, all of these depend on reason doing work it is actually not capable of doing. Reason does not produce the commitments these theorists treat as its products. Reason elaborates and rationalizes commitments that socialization and innate sentiment have already produced.
This means reason’s role is different from what liberal theory assigns to it. Reason works within commitments rather than generating them. Reason can extend commitments to new cases, identify contradictions within existing commitments, produce sophisticated articulations of what socialization has already deposited. Reason cannot produce the foundational commitments from scratch through neutral analytical operations. Those commitments arrive through other channels.
What liberal theorists have been doing when they seem to produce political commitments through reason is actually something else. They are articulating commitments their socialization produced in them. The articulation feels like reasoning because they perform it using the vocabulary and procedures of reasoning. The feeling does not change what is actually happening. The commitments preceded the articulation. The articulation elaborates them. The articulation does not generate them.
This means that every liberal political philosopher who has built his system on the assumption that his reasoning could reach universal principles all reasonable people should accept has been doing something other than what he thought he was doing. He has been articulating his specific cultural formation in the vocabulary of neutral reason. His system’s apparent universality reflects the universality of the articulation vocabulary, not the universality of what is being articulated.
What follows for childhood. If humans have a long childhood in which they are exposed to intense socialization before they develop critical faculties, then the critical faculties that later emerge cannot be used to evaluate what the socialization deposited without circularity. The critical faculties themselves reflect the socialization that produced them. They cannot operate from outside the socialization to assess what the socialization did. They can only operate within the framework the socialization established.
This has substantial implications for what philosophy can accomplish. Philosophy has often been understood as the use of critical reflection to evaluate the commitments that ordinary life and culture have deposited in us. The Socratic examined life. The Cartesian methodical doubt. The Kantian critique of pure reason. Each of these presupposes that philosophical reflection can evaluate pre-philosophical commitments from a position that is not itself shaped by those commitments.
If Mearsheimer is right, this presupposition is false. Philosophical reflection cannot operate from outside the socialization that produced the capacities used in reflection. The capacities are themselves products of the formation being examined. Their apparent independence from the formation is illusory. They examine the formation using tools the formation provided. The examination cannot reach conclusions that transcend the formation because the examination operates within the formation’s framework.
This does not make philosophy useless. It means philosophy is something other than what its practitioners typically claim. Philosophy is the articulate working through of commitments from within the formation that produced the philosopher. The articulate working through can produce substantial intellectual work. It cannot produce assessment of the formation from outside the formation. No such outside position is available.
What follows for moral codes. If people have limited choice in formulating moral codes because so much of their thinking comes from inborn attitudes and socialization, then moral progress as liberal theory typically understands it is not what liberal theory describes. Liberal theory typically understands moral progress as the gradual recognition of universal principles through sustained rational reflection. The universal principles are discovered through the reflection. The discovery expands the circle of moral consideration, produces increasingly just institutions, brings human conduct into closer alignment with what reason requires.
If Mearsheimer is right, moral progress is not the discovery of universal principles through rational reflection. Moral progress, to the extent it occurs, is the gradual displacement of some culturally produced commitments by others. The displacement happens through specific social and political processes that include rational elaboration but are not primarily driven by it. The new commitments that displace the old ones are not more rational than the old ones. They are culturally sustained by different conditions that make them institutionally dominant.
This means moral progress is something other than what liberal theory claims. Societies can develop commitments that produce better outcomes on various measures than previous commitments produced. The development is not the discovery of universal truth. It is the cultural replacement of one set of culturally produced commitments with another. The replacement can be welcomed or resisted on various grounds. The grounds for welcoming or resisting are themselves culturally produced. There is no neutral ground from which to evaluate the change.
This is destabilizing for liberal self-understanding. Liberal self-understanding treats its moral commitments as the discoveries of reasoned reflection rather than as one cultural formation among others. If the treatment is incorrect, then liberal confidence in the superiority of liberal commitments over alternative commitments cannot be grounded in the way liberal self-understanding assumes. The superiority, to the extent it can be defended, must be defended on other grounds. The other grounds are themselves culturally produced and do not escape the general condition Mearsheimer identifies.
What follows for innate sentiments. If humans are born with innate sentiments that strongly influence how they think about the world, then the blank slate assumption that has structured substantial liberal theorizing is wrong. Humans are not infinitely plastic material that liberal institutions can shape in any direction through sustained training. Humans have genetically transmitted propensities that operate alongside and sometimes against what liberal institutions try to produce.
The propensities are substantial. Evolutionary psychology has documented many of them across varied research programs. In-group preference. Kin favoritism. Male competition for status. Female selectivity about mates. Sexual division of labor in response to differential reproductive costs. Disgust responses to potential contaminants. Group loyalty under threat. The list extends across most of what makes human social life distinctive.
Liberal theory has typically treated these propensities as obstacles to be overcome rather than as constitutive features of what humans are. The overcoming would happen through sustained cultural training that replaces the propensities with universalist commitments to individual dignity, equal respect, and rational cooperation regardless of biological heritage. The training has been attempted across substantial institutional apparatus for decades.
The results have been mixed. The propensities have proved more durable than the training’s ambitions assumed. They re-emerge whenever institutional pressure slackens. They operate through populations that have received substantial training in universalist commitments but revert to in-group preference under stress. They produce political movements that reassert tribal loyalty against the institutional cosmopolitanism liberal training aimed to produce. The reassertions are not temporary setbacks in a steady march toward universalism. They are persistent features of human populations operating through their actual biological constitution rather than through what liberal training tried to install.
If Mearsheimer is right about all of this, then contemporary American politics looks different from what liberal self-understanding assumes it to be. The political conflict is not between those who recognize universal principles and those who remain trapped in tribal commitments. The conflict is between different tribal commitments that have been institutionally packaged differently. Liberal institutional commitments are tribal commitments that have been trained to present themselves as universal. Populist commitments are tribal commitments that present themselves as tribal. The difference is in presentation, not in underlying structure.
This reframing changes what political conflict is about. It is not about whether to accept reason and universal principles. It is about which tribal commitments will be institutionally dominant. The institutional dominance of liberal commitments for several decades was a political achievement, not the triumph of reason over irrationality. The current resurgence of populist commitments is not the regression from reason to irrationality. It is the political reassertion of tribal commitments that liberal institutional dominance had suppressed but not eliminated.
The reframing does not automatically favor populist commitments over liberal ones. It removes the automatic favor liberal commitments have enjoyed through their self-presentation as universal rather than tribal. Both sets of commitments must be defended on grounds other than claims to universality. The grounds are whatever reasons people can offer for preferring one set of commitments over another. The reasons are themselves tribal in the sense that they operate from within specific cultural formations. There is no neutral ground from which to adjudicate. The adjudication happens through political processes that include rational argument but are not primarily determined by it.
If Mearsheimer is right that reason is the least important of the three ways humans determine their preferences, then Mearsheimer’s own argument is itself not primarily the product of reason. It is the articulation of commitments his socialization and innate sentiments produced. His realism in international relations theory reflects specific tribal and cultural commitments rather than neutral assessment of evidence. His critique of liberalism operates from a specific cultural formation that makes the critique possible rather than from trans-cultural assessment.
Mearsheimer would likely accept this. Realist international relations theory does not claim to be the view from nowhere. It claims to be accurate about human nature in ways that liberal theory is inaccurate. The accuracy claim can be evaluated on evidence without requiring that realism transcend cultural formation. The evaluation is itself culturally located. No neutral position is available. What can be asked is whether the evidence supports the realist claims better than it supports the liberal claims. The asking happens from within specific cultural formations that shape what evidence is admitted as relevant and how it is weighted.
If Mearsheimer is right, liberal political theory has been substantially mistaken about humans for the entire period of its institutional dominance. The mistake has produced specific pathologies across American institutional life. The pathologies include the specific failures of American foreign policy Mearsheimer’s book targets. They include the specific inadequacies of mainstream American media to cover political developments that operate outside liberal frameworks. They include the specific failures of American universities to engage substantial portions of the populations that fund them. They include the specific inability of American political theory to address contemporary political developments that do not fit its assumptions.
The pathologies cannot be corrected without acknowledging the mistake. The acknowledgment is resisted by the institutions that have been built on the mistake. The resistance is structural rather than accidental. Acknowledging the mistake would require reconstructing the institutions around different assumptions about what humans are. The reconstruction is difficult and expensive. The institutions have considerable inertia. They tend to persist through accumulating pathologies rather than through acknowledging and correcting the underlying mistake.
This is where contemporary American politics currently stands. The institutions built on the mistake are under sustained pressure from populations whose actual human nature does not fit the institutions’ assumptions. The institutions respond to the pressure in ways that accumulate rather than resolve the pathologies. The responses deepen the divisions rather than healing them. The trajectory continues because no political coalition has both the will and the capacity to reconstruct the institutions around more accurate assumptions.
Democratic peace theory rests on Kantian foundations Doyle and Russett made canonical. Republican governments restrain war because citizens pay the costs and constrain leaders. Shared liberal norms produce mutual recognition between democracies. Both legs assume the individualism Mearsheimer rejects. Citizens identify with their nation before they identify with abstract liberal principles. The peace among Western democracies after 1945 rode on shared tribal alignment against the Soviet Union and on a thin civilizational kinship, not on the rational calculation of cost-bearing voters. India and Pakistan, both democratic at various points, fought along tribal lines that democratic norms could not dampen. Northern Ireland sat inside two democracies and produced thirty years of intercommunal violence. If Mearsheimer is right, the democratic peace rides on prior national alignment, not on liberal institutions or norms. It survives where tribal identities align and dissolves where they conflict.
Liberal institutionalism rests on similar premises. Keohane argued that institutions reduce transaction costs, supply information, and extend the shadow of the future, so cooperation becomes rational for self-interested states. Ikenberry extended the argument: the postwar American-led order binds even the leading power through rule-based commitments. If humans absorb national identity before reason can construct alternatives, institutions cannot transform interests at the deeper layer. They sit on top of national identity during periods when identities point the same direction. The European Union flourished while Western Europeans shared anti-Soviet alignment, postwar exhaustion, and a civilizational kinship none of them said out loud. It strains now: Brexit, the Hungarian and Polish challenges, the German-Greek split during the Eurozone crisis, the migration disputes that have run since 2015. The Trump-era assault on the liberal order looks less like institutional failure and more like American national identity reasserting against the technocratic-cosmopolitan layer riding on top of it.
Cosmopolitan ethics in the Beitz-Pogge-Held-Caney tradition rests on premises Mearsheimer’s view dismantles. These thinkers argue that humans owe moral duties to fellow humans regardless of borders, and that those duties can ground a universal political ethics. The argument requires a moral psychology Mearsheimer denies. Humans must be capable of recognizing distant strangers as moral equals through reason, and that recognition must stay stable enough to override tribal preference. Mearsheimer predicts something different. Cosmopolitan ethics describes the self-understanding of a credentialed Western elite whose tribal markers happen to be universalist talk, foreign travel, and elite education. The universalism is the in-group signal, not a transcendence of in-group thinking. Every refugee crisis, immigration debate, and border standoff shows publics reverting to tribal frames when stakes rise. Even within elite cosmopolitan circles, in-group sorting persists along ideological lines. The cosmopolitan project fails because socialization into a particular people happens long before reason can construct universal commitments, and the particular bonds stay stronger than any abstract ones reason can build later.
In the 2023 book, Making Democratic Theory Democratic: Democracy, Law, and Administration after Weber and Kelsen, George Mazur and Stephen Turner write:
In the decades after John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971) and especially over the past 20 years or so, many books have been published with the same aim: to vindicate and explicate something that is usually called social democracy on philosophical or social science grounds. After the intense ideological rivalries of the twentieth century, this political ideal has become the default position of virtually all academic thinkers in relevant areas. A century that began with the frank acceptance of the irreconcilability of political value choices, and proceeded with extraordinarily intense ideological warfare, ended with a surprisingly broad, though loose, consensus. One could list such works as Philip Pettit (1997), Amartya Sen (2009), and Alan Gewirth (1978) as examples. And in sociology, one could give Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu, 2008; Wacquant, 2005) and Jürgen Habermas (2001) as more or less full members of this consensus.
How did this happen?
The academic professions transformed demographically after World War II. The GI Bill expanded the universities. The 1960s and 1970s brought a wave of left-leaning entrants who became senior faculty by the 1990s. Hiring committees select for fit, and once a department tilts one way, the tilt reproduces. By the time Pettit, Sen, and Habermas wrote, the relevant departments in philosophy, political theory, and sociology had sorted ideologically. Conservatives and classical liberals had migrated to think tanks like AEI, Heritage, Hoover, and Cato, or to niches at a few institutions: Straussian programs, Catholic natural-law circles, the law-and-economics movement at a few law schools. The mainstream venues no longer had to argue against them.
Rawls did particular work here. A Theory of Justice gave welfare-state liberalism a philosophical apparatus that made it look like the conclusion of rigorous reasoning rather than a political preference. The veil of ignorance and the difference principle let academics derive redistributive conclusions through what looked like neutral procedure. Social democrats no longer had to say they preferred social democracy. They could say reason itself preferred it. Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) was the last libertarian work to get full engagement in mainstream philosophy. By the 1990s the field had moved on.
The collapse of the Soviet Union from 1989 to 1991 closed the revolutionary option. Marxists who had spent careers defending some version of the socialist project now had nowhere to go. Social democracy became the natural home for ex-Marxists and post-Marxists. Bourdieu came from that tradition. So did much of the Frankfurt School lineage Habermas inherited. The convergence of different starting traditions on roughly the same conclusions is the tell. Bourdieu, Habermas, Sen, Pettit, and Gewirth start from incompatible premises: French Marxism, Frankfurt critical theory, welfare economics, neo-republican theory, Kantian rationalism. They arrive at the same destination. Independent reason rarely produces that pattern. Coalition selection does.
Samuel Moyn’s argument about human rights fits here. Human rights discourse filled the vacuum socialism’s collapse left behind. It gave the consensus a universalist moral vocabulary that did not require defending command economies. Social democracy at home, human rights abroad. The package became the default elite position across the West.
Funding flowed in the same direction. Ford, Rockefeller, MacArthur, and later Open Society directed substantial resources toward research congenial to the consensus. Conservative funders existed but operated mostly outside the universities. Peer review, citation networks, tenure committees, and conference invitations rewarded work that fit the consensus and quietly punished work that did not. Dissenting books got reviewed in dissenting venues. The consensus rarely had to engage them.
Professionalization tightened the consensus. Earlier political theorists wrote for educated publics. By the 1990s, political theory had become a specialized academic subfield with its own internal markers of competence. Those markers included the Rawlsian apparatus, the Habermasian apparatus, and the language of recognition, deliberation, and capability that grew up around them. A young philosopher who wanted to publish in the leading journals had to speak that language. The language carried social-democratic premises with it.
The end of the Cold War removed the external pressure that had kept some academics defending market institutions against communism. Once communism collapsed, social democracy became the safe middle position. Defenders of markets looked extreme. Critics from the left looked nostalgic. The center moved.
What emerged was less a philosophical consensus than a coalition consensus. The members signal membership through shared vocabulary, shared citations, and shared conclusions. The premises differ. The conclusions converge. The twentieth century ended with one coalition winning the relevant academic institutions.
John J. Mearsheimer builds The Great Delusion on a claim about human nature. Liberalism’s foundation is the individual who carries inalienable rights and who would carry them even alone. Mearsheimer’s is the social animal who exists only inside a group. Two foundations, and the book turns on which one best describes the creature. One test runs through what follows: does this story make evolutionary sense?
Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) gave a test. “One could test all theories of state and political ideas according to their anthropology,” he wrote, “and thereby classify these as to whether they consciously or unconsciously presuppose man to be by nature evil or by nature good.” The line sorts the political world along one axis. The traditional, nationalist, and realist right tends to read man as flawed, dangerous, or fallen, a creature who needs restraint and hierarchy. The progressive left tends to read man as good or improvable, held back by bad arrangements that reason and reform can mend. Liberalism descends from the optimistic pole. The Enlightenment trusted that reason would settle the good life and that man was perfectible. Nicolas de Condorcet (1743–1794) wrote that the perfectibility of man has no limit, and William Godwin (1756–1836) that man is perfectible and one day would need no government. Liberalism inherits that confidence and builds rights on it. The optimism does the structural work. A man who is reasonable and good can stand on his own, so the thick, binding group becomes optional and the individual carries the weight of the theory. Place man at the fallen pole instead and he needs the group, the hierarchy, and the hard institutions to keep him in line. Mearsheimer sets out to deny the premise.
Where does Mearsheimer land on the axis? Not where the realist tradition usually lands. He refuses the binary. He calls good and evil vague terms that no evidence can settle, and he plants man at neither pole, but his conclusions sit with the pessimists. Rational self-interested fear runs through his world, survival overrides, and conflict never ends. He keeps the tragic conclusion of the right and moves its source. He shifts the flaw off the heart and onto two other places: the head, where reason cannot settle what the good life is, and the situation, where no authority stands above the groups to keep the peace. Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) grounded the same pessimism in original sin. Mearsheimer grounds it in the limits of every situation. The trade keeps the realist’s hard conclusions and drops the theology. Original sin shuts the door on reform. A flaw made of genes, groups and anarchy leaves the door open, because a man can change a childhood and an order and possibly, one day, even genes. Mearsheimer’s own account hands the reform-minded liberals their opening.
The social contract shows the foundation. The liberal story opens with men in a state of nature, free and equal, each holding his rights before any society forms, who then agree to build a government for their mutual good. John Locke (1632–1704) put equality and rights in the state of nature and made the commonwealth a thing men consent to. Liberals know no man ever lived that way. They keep the story as a useful device for thinking about authority and obligation. Jean Hampton (1954–1996) granted the concession and named its cost: the social nature of man, the part that explains how the world works, drops out of the account. The founding fiction locates the source of obligation in the consenting individual, and a theory built on that source reads society as an aggregate of choosers. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) saw the break. The word individualism is modern, he wrote; his ancestors had no man who stood outside a group or thought himself alone. Aristotle (384–322 BC) and Aquinas (1225–1274) assumed men social by nature. Liberalism broke with them and made the lone bearer of rights the unit of theory.
Here the strongest objection to Mearsheimer arrives, and he answers it before it lands. Liberals acknowledge social ties. John Rawls (1921–2002) writes that a man finds himself at birth in a particular place in a particular society, and that his place shapes his prospects. In The Law of Peoples Rawls turns to peoples, which is to say nations. The weight of liberalism still stays on the individual and his rights, as it does across A Theory of Justice. A theory based on individualism cannot at the same time make the group its ground, because the two pull against each other, and the strain shows up inside liberal theory. When Rawls takes peoples seriously, critics charge him with incoherence against his own individualist premises. Thomas Pogge (b. 1953) and others note that the man-centered theory and the people-centered theory pull apart. That charge, raised by liberals against the most careful liberal, is the evidence for Mearsheimer’s claim. A theory can nod toward community in a clause and still rest on the individual in its frame. The nod leaves the frame in place.
Set the foundation aside and look at the creature. Does the social animal make evolutionary sense? Start with the child. The human infant arrives more helpless than the young of any other animal and stays dependent for at least ten years. That long childhood is the human adaptation. We are the cultural species. We survive by downloading what our group already learned about food, danger, tools, and each other, and the child who absorbs that store outlives the child who reasons from scratch. Joseph Henrich makes the case that our edge is cultural learning. So the order of acquisition runs as the design would have it: a man takes in language, the names of right and wrong, the bounds of his group, and the shape of God before his reasoning matures enough to weigh any of it. Mearsheimer’s phrase, the value infusion, names the sequence. By the time a man can ask whether his morals hold up, his morals already hold him. Even the man who flees to an island carries the town that raised him. Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) knew it about Crusoe.
The record of the species points the same way. No society on the books begins with solitary men who later contract into a group. Men live in bands, clans, congregations, and nations, everywhere we look, and the group is what lets a man survive. Hunger, predators, and rival groups punish the man who walks alone. The traits Mearsheimer names pay off in the terms selection counts. Care for kin spreads the genes they share, a point W. D. Hamilton (1936–2000) made exact. Help given to allies comes back, as Robert Trivers (b. 1943) showed for reciprocity. A reputation for loyalty draws partners and mates, so the man who sacrifices for the group advertises a value the group rewards. Charles Darwin (1809–1882) saw the group-level edge himself: a tribe rich in loyalty, courage, and sympathy beats a tribe of squabblers. Soldiers die for the regiment. Martyrs die for the faith. Parents starve so children eat. A theory that files these under departures from rational self-interest reads the creature backward. The group is a survival vehicle, and the man built for it feels exclusion as injury.
The harder claim ranks reason last among the three sources of a man’s preferences, below socialization and inborn sentiment. Read it as a claim about the average, not the individual. For a few men, at some moments, reason might be the strongest force they own; across people and across a life, it ranks last. Here too the evolutionary question helps. If reasoning evolved to track truth alone, its weakness would puzzle us. If it evolved to win arguments and justify a man’s side to his allies, the weakness is the design. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue that reason works best in the give-and-take of a group making its case, and works poorly as a lone road to truth. David Hume (1711–1776) saw the shape of it long before: reason serves the passions. Mearsheimer takes the support and steps back from its edge. Hume overstates the case, he writes. Reason can arbitrate when intuitions clash, it can correct first principles that lead a man to ruin, and a few hard cases examine their convictions and lead others to new ground. Some of us have some agency some of the time. That guardrail shapes what follows, because it keeps Mearsheimer off strict determinism. His claim stays narrow and hard to dislodge: on average, reason arrives late, works slowly, and rarely brings men to the shared truths liberalism needs.
From the foundation the rest follows. Because the unit is the individual and his rights inhere in him, the rights belong to everyone, everywhere, the same. Universalism falls out of that premise. The Declaration holds the rights self-evident and the men equal, and equal rights for all men is a claim about all men, not only Americans. The claim turns a state outward. If every man holds the same rights, a violation anywhere reads as a wrong the rights-bearing powers might answer, and the answer becomes a foreign policy of remaking other societies in the liberal image. Mearsheimer reads the cost of that policy in the record since the Cold War, the gap between the plan and the result. The plan had counted on interchangeable rights-bearers waiting for the right institutions. Men abroad turned out to be members of older groups with older loyalties. His anthropology predicts that. The liberal model missed it.
One objection. If men are tribal, what of the cosmopolitan who claims the species as his people, or the universal faith that preached one God for all men long before liberalism arrived? David Pinsof (b. 1987), working from what he calls Alliance Theory, gives the answer Mearsheimer’s logic implies. Beliefs are built to form coalitions, manage reputations, and signal group loyalty. Moralizing recruits allies and coordinates them against a shared enemy. Read in that light, liberal universalism is an elite coalition strategy. A creed that takes all mankind as its concern hands the holder supreme moral authority and lets him recast a local rival as an enemy of mankind. It flatters the men who carry it, marks their side, and shames the holdout who fails the test. So take a group’s account of its own virtue as a move in its game rather than a finding about the world. The cosmopolitan has not escaped the tribe. He has joined a new one and flies the language of universal rights in his group interest. He favors his own, the educated and mobile who share the creed, and polices the ones who break ranks. Christianity and Islam carried universal claims and built particular empires, churches, and armies to carry them. The universalist speaks for humanity and fights for his coalition. Far from refuting the tribal thesis, he confirms it.
That is the strong case, and it makes evolutionary sense at each step. The weak points sit less in the picture of the creature than in the joints where Mearsheimer turns the picture into a verdict on liberalism, on rights, and on truth.
If every man who claims a universal loyalty is a tribesman in disguise, and every man who reasons against his side is the rare exception, then no case could ever count against the thesis. A claim that forbids nothing explains nothing. The same trap hides in the bet that the nation always wins: name whichever coalition prevails the real tribe, and the bet cannot lose on paper, while the world stays more contingent than that, holding universal creeds and wide identities that have governed and lasted. The tribal account earns its keep when it makes a risky prediction and the prediction holds. It loses its keep when it can absorb any outcome after the fact.
Mearsheimer grants that innate sentiment is hard to measure and that we know little about how the brain works. Ranking reason as a weak influence on humanity feels right to many readers. Feeling right falls short of evidence, and some of the psychology behind it is contested.
Here is the full context of Mearsheimer’s paragraphs, from the beginning of chapter two:
BELIEFS ABOUT HUMAN NATURE ARE the building blocks of theoretical arguments in politics, and liberalism is no exception. Its core claims are based on a set of assumptions about human nature, meaning those attributes that are common to all people, as opposed to those that vary among individuals. Thus, to assess liberalism, we must first describe what it says about human nature and determine whether those claims square with what we know about the human condition.
The conservative French thinker Joseph de Maistre maintained that “there is no such thing as man in the world. In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he exists, he is unknown to me.”1 Of course, there are important differences among peoples as well as people, and those differences are central to the arguments in this book. Yet certain features are permanent and distinctive in almost every person, and these can provide the microfoundations for a simple theory of politics that can then be employed to evaluate liberalism and its relationship to nationalism and realism. My main aim in this chapter is to present my own thinking about human nature and politics.
I begin with two simple assumptions, the first of which concerns our critical faculties. There is no question humans have an impressive capacity to reason. Still, this capacity has significant limits, especially when it comes to answering essential questions about what constitutes the good life.
Almost everyone agrees that survival is the most important individual goal, because without it you cannot pursue any other goal. But beyond that, there is often intractable disagreement about the answers to the important ethical, moral, and political questions that all societies confront, and which have profound implications for daily life. Those differences over first principles sometimes become so passionate that they create the potential for deadly conflict. That lurking possibility of violence, which leads individuals to fear each other and worry about their survival, applies to relations among societies as well as among individuals.
My second assumption is that humans are profoundly social beings. They 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. This is not to deny that individuals sometimes have good reasons to act selfishly and take advantage of other group members. On balance, however, cooperation trumps selfish behavior. Social groups are survival vehicles.2
One might wonder how it is possible to have a functioning society when it is so difficult for individuals to agree about fundamental beliefs. There is unquestionably a tension between my two core assumptions, which is why social groups sometimes break apart and also why there never has been and probably never will be a unified global society. Nevertheless, people are obviously capable of living together in social groups for sustained periods, as the planet has been populated with them since human beings first appeared.
For a society to hold together, there must be substantial overlap in how its members think about the good life, and they must respect each other when, inevitably, serious disagreements arise. These differences notwithstanding, it is possible within a social group to have considerable agreement about first principles, mainly because the members share a common culture, which includes a variety of beliefs about ultimate values. Most people have been socialized since birth to venerate their culture, which means being socialized to respect certain core principles. Culture is a kind of glue that helps hold individuals together inside a society.
But culture alone is not enough. To stay intact, a society also must have political institutions that govern behavior within the group. It needs rules that stipulate how the group’s members are expected to live together, as well as the means to enforce those rules. This commonly takes the form of a juridical system based on what has become known as “the rule of law.” Social groups also need political institutions to help them survive in the face of threats from other groups. These institutions must control the means of violence both to enforce the rules within the society and to protect it from external threats.
With political institutions comes politics, which is crucial to daily life in any society. Politics is essentially about who gets to write the rules that govern the group. This responsibility matters greatly because the members of any society are certain to have some conflicting interests, as they will never completely agree about first principles. Given that basic fact of life, whichever faction writes and interprets the rules can do so in ways that serve its interests rather than its rivals’, or reflect its vision of society rather than its rivals’. Of course, power matters greatly in determining which faction wins this competition. The more resources an individual or faction possesses, the more likely it is to control the governing institutions. In short, in a world where reason takes you only so far, the balance of power usually decides who gets to write and enforce the rules.
Given the absolute necessity of politics for the functioning of social groups, when I say that humans are naturally social beings, I am in effect saying they are also political beings. This obviously includes hunter-gatherers, who are sometimes wrongly portrayed as operating alone in a Hobbesian world. In fact, they lived together in small groups in which power, rules, and factions—that is, politics—were unavoidable. The political and social dimensions of the human condition go hand in hand. Questions about what constitutes the good life are axiomatically about political as well as social matters. Although I frequently use the term social group in this book, it is shorthand for what is effectively a sociopolitical group.
Politics is vitally important in the relations between self-governing social groups. There are no higher political institutions, however, that can write and reliably enforce rules that might govern their behavior toward each other. The power to write rules, which matters so much inside a society, thus matters much less at the intergroup level. Still, power itself matters greatly in dealings among groups, because possessing superior power allows a group to get its way when it is at odds with another group. Above all else, it allows a group to fend off threats to its survival from other groups. Independent social groups thus compete with each other for power. Politics among groups is all about gaining relative power.
Social groups have a propensity to expand, because greater size usually augments their power relative to rival groups and thus enhances their prospects for survival. Groups can also be bent on expansion for other reasons. They might believe, for example, that they have found the true religion or political ideology, and go on a crusade to export their prized blueprint to other societies. Groups mainly expand by conquering other groups, although occasionally groups with common interests join together voluntarily. Conquerors usually try either to dominate the vanquished group and rob it of its autonomy or else absorb it into its own society. Sometimes they try to wipe out the defeated group. There are limits as to how far any group can expand because the potential victims almost always have powerful incentives to resist and ensure their own survival.
In sum, I begin with two simple assumptions about human nature: there are significant limits on our ability to reason about first principles, and we are social animals at our core. Taken together, these assumptions tell us three important facts about the world. First, it is populated with a great number of social groups, each with its own distinctive culture. There is no reason to think that situation will change in the near or distant future. In effect, the crucial universal traits of humankind lead us to a world distinguished by its particularism.
Second, social groups have no choice but to build political institutions, which means politics and power are at the center of life within societies as well as among them. Third, survival is of overriding importance for individuals as well as social groups. It runs like a red skein through human history…
An individual’s thinking about the good life is largely shaped by three factors. First and foremost is socialization. Starting at birth, our parents and the broader society bombard us with messages about right and wrong. The principles we are taught largely reflect our society’s cultural norms. But because all societies have evolved in different circumstances, they have distinct cultures. The same is also true of families. This means that individuals vary markedly in their thinking about the good life, depending on the circumstances in which they are raised. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt concludes, “Children somehow end up with a morality that is unique to their culture or group.”
The second factor that influences our moral thinking is the set of innate sentiments hardwired into each of us at birth. We are born with a discrete bundle of attitudes or passions that are driven by feelings that are largely independent of the software package that society programs into us over our lifetimes. We are not born as blank slates. All humans, in other words, have different inclinations toward life’s big questions even before their families and societies begin shaping how they think.
These innate feelings are hard to measure: we have limited knowledge about how the human brain works. Nevertheless, we see evidence all around us of individuals who were raised in the same family and socialized in similar ways, yet have different personalities and widely dissimilar views about what constitutes the good life. This is not to deny the power of socialization, but if it were the sole driving force, there would be more homogeneity of thought inside families and societies.
Reason is the final factor influencing an individual’s core principles. It involves a mental process different from that of sentiment and socialization, both of which rely on intuition. With intuition, individuals make decisions without consciously working through the matter at hand. The person thinks she instinctively knows the correct position to take. Sometimes this position comes quickly, as a visceral response to seeing or hearing about a situation; other times it is a matter of slowly realizing how one feels about an issue, perhaps after repeated exposure to it. Often this realization comes with a sense of having always felt this way but only now coming to acknowledge it consciously. Whether fast or slow, however, sentiment and socialization naturally push individuals to believe they are well equipped to offer insights on a host of issues. Reason, however, operates fundamentally differently.
Reasoning is a process by which humans make a concentrated effort to put aside their intuitions and employ facts and logic to analyze problems and make decisions. An individual employing reason tries to address problems in a systematic and disciplined way without letting his biases or emotions interfere with his thought process. Reasoning is a time-consuming mental activity because it rejects spontaneous responses and instead requires careful construction and evaluation of arguments.30 Of course, an individual can engage in deliberation, which is where he and others collectively employ their critical faculties to analyze a difficult issue. Reason is a more disciplined form of inference than intuition, and it often provides a more transparent way of answering questions than either sentiment or socialization.
The effort to exclude emotions is often not successful. As Antonio Damasio makes clear, it is impossible to completely separate your critical faculties from your biases and emotions, which, he argues, actually help individuals make well-reasoned decisions.
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.
Some social psychologists argue that reason has very little to do with the formation of an individual’s views about the good life. What reason does best, they claim, is provide a rationale for opinions largely formed by our intuitions.33 This perspective is stated in its starkest form by the famous British philosopher David Hume, who maintained that “the rules of morality . . . are not conclusions of our reason.” For him, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”34 There is a place for reasoning in Hume’s story, but it comes after the moral code has been established, and its main job is to find clever ways to justify it. This is what instrumental rationality is all about. There is obviously little substantive rationality in Hume’s account.
In the footnotes, Mearsheimer adds:
* The phrase—“Reason Rules the World”—is from Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1988), p. 12. For an example of a scholar who believes that people everywhere can agree on a body of first principles, see Derek Parfit, On What Matters, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Also consider Louise Antony’s comment in the introduction to a book of essays by “twenty leading philosophers from Great Britain and the United States, all of whom abjure traditional religious faith.” Noting that atheists are routinely said to have “no moral values,” she notes, “The essays in this volume should serve to roundly refute this. Every writer in this volume adamantly affirms the objectivity of right and wrong.” Louise M. Antony, ed., Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. x, xii. This optimistic perspective on objective truth is also clearly reflected in J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (London: Penguin Books, 1990), although Mackie himself argues against it.
* Liberals and others who emphasize individualism and downplay the importance of society or community usually concede that humans could never have been atomistic individuals in the state of nature, and that everyone had to be raised by others in a society. Nevertheless, they believe this invented story is a useful theoretical device for thinking about the human condition. While this approach has its virtues, its great flaw is that the social nature of humans, which is so important for understanding how the world works, gets left on the cutting room floor. Jean Hampton, “Contract and Consent,” in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, ed. Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 379–82.
* Rule of law is a concept that is sometimes associated with liberal democracies. All societies, however, require a system of rules to function effectively. Even Nazi Germany had a wellestablished
body of rules, which is not to say those rules were just. See Alan E. Steinweis and Robert D. Rachlin, eds., The Law in Nazi Germany: Ideology, Opportunism, and the Perversion of Justice (New York: Berghahn, 2013); Michael Stolleis and Thomas Dunlap, eds., The Law under the Swastika: Studies on Legal History under Nazi Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)
* Most liberal theorists acknowledge that individuals have important social ties. John Rawls, for example, writes: “Each person finds himself placed at birth in some particular position in some particular society, and the nature of his position materially affects his life prospects.” John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 13. Moreover, in The Law of Peoples: With “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), Rawls focuses directly on peoples, which is a synonym for nations. Still, much of the analysis in The Law of Peoples focuses on the individual, which is certainly the focus of attention in his other two seminal book, A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, expanded ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). Nevertheless, a theory based on individualism cannot at the same time emphasize that people are profoundly social, because the two perspectives are at odds with each other. In fact, Rawls has been criticized on this point. For example, see Andrew Kuper, “Rawlsian Global Justice: Beyond the Law of Peoples to a Cosmopolitan Law of Persons,” Political Theory 28, no. 5 (October 2000): 640–74; Thomas W. Pogge, “The Incoherence between Rawls’s Theories of Justice,” Fordham Law Review 72, no. 5 (April 2004): 1739–59. For an overview of the debate between Rawls’s critics and defenders, see Gillian Brock, Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), chap. 2
* Schmitt writes: “One could test all theories of state and political ideas according to their anthropology and thereby classify these as to whether they consciously or unconsciously presuppose man to be by nature evil or by nature good.” Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1976), p. 58.
