John Stuart Mill and the Enlightenment

Posted on June 23, 2026 by Luke Ford

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.

The atomistic liberal of The Great Delusion picks his values off a menu by reason. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) held the reverse. The force behind On Liberty comes from his fear of custom, not from any faith that men reason their way to their beliefs. He calls it the despotism of custom. He points to China as the case of a people who perfected their customs and then stood still for centuries. Mill concedes John Mearsheimer’s (b. 1947) premise before Mearsheimer states it. Most men inherit their beliefs and then defend what they inherited.
Mill does not describe man as a lone reasoner. He laments that man is a herd creature and then asks what a society might do to protect the few who are not. The individualism in On Liberty works as a prescription built on top of the social man, not as a portrait of him. Mearsheimer reads liberal individualism as a claim about what men are. In Mill it operates as a claim about what a small number of men can become, and why the rest have a stake in shielding them.
Grant the socialization story and Mill’s politics still stands, because his politics answers that story. He wants room for the dissenter, the eccentric, the man who runs an experiment in living, against the pressure Mearsheimer describes. He does not justify that room by pretending everyone reasons. He justifies it by the gain that comes to a society when it leaves a channel open for the rare man who pushes against the inheritance and turns out to be right.
Mill needs reason to override socialization at least sometimes, in at least a few men, under good conditions. Mearsheimer ranks reason last among the three sources of our preferences and puts socialization and inborn sentiment above it. Push that ranking hard and Mill’s hope narrows to a thin band: the exceptional mind in whom criticism outruns the value infusion. Mill half believed this himself. He worried about mediocrity and the weight of mass opinion, and he wanted a learned class to hold the higher ground. Mearsheimer’s anthropology pushes Mill toward his own colder side, the side that doubts the many and rests its hopes on the few. The democratic Mill recedes. The aristocratic Mill comes forward.
Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) read Mill’s deepest commitment as self-creation rather than happiness, the man who makes his own life as a work and chooses his own path. Set that Mill against Mearsheimer and the conflict sharpens. If the self arrives all but finished, fabricated by family and society before the boy can weigh anything, then self-creation describes a late and partial edit, not an authorship. Mearsheimer does not deny that a man can revise himself. He denies that the revising self came from nowhere. Berlin’s Mill wants an author. Mearsheimer offers an editor working on a manuscript other hands already wrote.
Mill’s view of where moral feeling comes from takes a separate hit. Mill stood with the associationists against the intuitionist school of William Whewell (1794-1866). He held that our moral sentiments, however fixed they feel, come from education and association rather than from innate structure. His reform program depends on that plasticity. Remake the schooling and the institutions and you can remake the character, and so the society. Mearsheimer lists inborn sentiment as a force that shapes how a man thinks before he thinks. If that is right, character resists the reformer’s hand more than Mill allowed, and tribal feeling sits deeper than association can reach.
The sharpest defeat falls on Mill’s cosmopolitanism. In Utilitarianism he roots the sanction of morality in the social feelings of mankind, the wish to live in unity with one’s fellows, and he thought civilization widens that feeling. There lies the hope: the circle of sympathy grows until it reaches the species. Mearsheimer agrees that man is social and bonded and ready to sacrifice for his group. He denies the expansion. The bond holds at the level of the tribe and the nation and goes no further with any force. The quarrel is not whether man is social. Both men say he is. The quarrel is the ceiling. Mill bets the sympathy climbs to humanity. Mearsheimer bets it stops at the nation, and that when nationalism and liberalism collide, the nation wins. If Mearsheimer is right, the communitarian half of Mill survives and the cosmopolitan half fails.
Mearsheimer says liberal universalism breeds crusades, the urge to carry rights to every people for their own good. Mill is the case in point, not the exception. He worked for the East India Company for most of his career. On Liberty exempts the barbarians and the societies it calls backward from the liberty principle and grants that despotism suits them so long as it improves them. The missionary liberalism Mearsheimer describes runs straight through Mill’s imperial writing. A defender can answer that Mill’s universalism comes hedged. Mill does not think you can hand free institutions to any people at any stage. He ties good government to national character and to a people’s readiness, which reads closer to Mearsheimer’s realism than to the abstract creed Mearsheimer attacks. So Mill ends up more universalist and more particularist than the figure in the book, the imperialist by his paternalism and the realist by his developmentalism.
What comes through intact is the core argument of On Liberty about speech and harm. Those arguments never rested on atomism. Mill defends open debate because collision with error keeps truth alive and because the silenced opinion may hold the part of the truth the reigning view lacks. He defends the harm principle as a line drawn around the social pressure he saw everywhere. Grant Mearsheimer’s man, the social creature shaped by inherited value, and these arguments earn their keep, because they answer the very conformity Mearsheimer treats as our default. Mill becomes less a prophet of the sovereign individual and more a designer of guardrails against the herd.
Mearsheimer ranks reason last and then writes four hundred pages of reasoned argument meant to change how readers think, and he ranks the three sources for us as though we can weigh his ranking. The genre fights the thesis. Mill at least carries a theory for why argument earns its keep among the small class that reads and writes and decides what counts as knowledge. Mearsheimer leaves reason a junior place and then asks it to do the heavy lifting of his book. The tension does not sink his anthropology. It marks the seam where his account and Mill’s might still do business, in the narrow niche where reason does more work than it does in the run of men.

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The Nathan Cofnas Debates

Posted on June 23, 2026 by Luke Ford

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.

Grant Mearsheimer his three claims. Men are tribal before they are anything else. Reason ranks below socialization and inborn sentiment in setting what a man wants. Colorblind meritocracy is a local creed, not a law of nature. Run the Cofnas affair through that frame and the familiar story comes apart. The free-speech reading and the inclusion reading both assume a contest over evidence and rights. The realist reading sees a tribe defending the engine that reproduces its young.
Start with what Cofnas wants, because his own program carries the flaw he finds in his enemies. He argues that wokeness follows from the equality thesis, the premise that every group holds the same spread of cognitive traits. Accept that premise and any gap left over reads as proof of hidden racism. He wants the elite to trade the equality thesis for hereditarianism, genes playing a non-trivial part in average group differences, and he expects a colorblind meritocracy of individuals to settle out the far side. The fight then narrows to which premise the elite carries.
Mearsheimer’s man wrecks the payoff. A meritocracy of sorted individuals asks men to hold still while status flows to whoever scores highest, and to take their rank without forming a faction. No people does this. Tell a group it sits low on a prized trait and it does not scatter into lone strivers. It organizes. It mobilizes along the line Mearsheimer says runs deepest. Under his premises, hereditarian facts, once public and believed, arm tribal competition rather than dissolve it. Cofnas imagines the truth about genes yields peace and merit. The realist predicts it yields sharper coalitions and a harder scramble for power and resources. So Cofnas underrates tribe in his cure as the liberals underrate it in theirs. Two rationalist projects, one blind spot.
Look at the pair side by side and they rhyme. The woke elite holds that reason and reformed schooling erase the difference and widen sympathy toward all mankind. Cofnas holds that reason and accepted data sort men by talent and leave a creed of individual merit. Both trust the right facts to govern the man. Mearsheimer ranks reason last of the three and puts the value infusion above it. Both projects misread the creature in the same direction.
The crusade reading falls on Cofnas next. His hereditarian revolution is a missionary campaign. Convert the elite at the top universities, reform the society from above, carry the unwelcome truth into the fortress for the good of all. That is the universalist structure Mearsheimer attacks in liberalism, the urge to remake men by fixing the doctrine. Cofnas stands inside the pattern, not outside it. He is another missionary with a rival gospel, and the gospel travels by argument because he believes argument moves the men who run things.
That belief is the heart of the misread. He pins his hope on a vanguard of intelligent, rational leaders who change their preferences when shown the chart. Mearsheimer’s account of childhood value infusion says the elite mind is the most socialized mind in the country, formed inside the institution that selected it, trained it, and handed it its moral coordinates. Reason there is a lawyer for inherited preference, not a scientist chasing the taboo fact. Asking that elite to adopt race realism by philosophical argument asks the immune system to welcome the thing it formed to destroy.
The institution behaves the way the frame predicts. The university reproduces a value infusion and passes it to the next ruling class. The marketplace of ideas is a story the engine tells about itself. Its work is transmission, generation to generation, of a moral code, and the equality thesis sits at the center of that code as the sacred premise. Cofnas attacks the premise at the root. Function drives what follows. They did not disprove him. They removed him, the way a body clears what threatens its cohesion, and the removal needed no finding of fact.
Cofnas held no tenure. He was a Leverhulme early-career fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy and a College Research Associate at Emmanuel, a peripheral and unprotected affiliate. The college cut the affiliation. The faculty held the line. Realism expects the tribe to cull the exposed member first, at the lowest cost, and to send its signal through the cheapest available actor. A marginal post-doc is the easy target. The pattern then repeated at Ghent, where his own department moved against the appointment. One campus might be an accident. Two is a fault line.
So the protestors read the institution right and read themselves wrong. They see that the fortress lives by enforcing its code, that an affiliated insider who breaks the code threatens the cohesion of the whole, and that the safe move is expulsion. They are correct about all of it. Then they tell themselves the expulsion serves a borderless human liberation. Under Mearsheimer it serves their tribe and no one beyond it. Realists in the deed, universalists in the self-description: that is his portrait of the liberal, drawn from life.
The affair resolves into a hard diagnosis. No neutral seminar room. No resting point in colorblind merit, because the merit creed is one tribe’s myth and the egalitarian creed is another’s, and neither describes the man as he is. The university is an arena of great power competition, and the prize is the engine that infuses the next elite. Academic freedom and the Equality Act 2010 set the rules of the contest. They do not name the prize. The only live question is which tribe runs the engine, and on what terms it shapes the moral coordinates of the men who will govern.
Cofnas bets the truth about genes will free the West, and he addresses his guide to the most heavily socialized people in the country, on the faith that argument reaches them. The genre fights the thesis, the way the genre fights Mearsheimer’s own four hundred reasoned pages. If reason ranks last, the hereditarian revolution is a sermon preached to men whose tribe has already told them what to believe. The only readers it converts are the few in whom criticism outruns the infusion. That band is real, and it is too thin to turn an elite. It is also the one niche where Cofnas, and Mearsheimer, and the argument itself still do their work.

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The Amy Wax Debates

Posted on June 23, 2026 by Luke Ford

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.

Grant Mearsheimer his premises. Men are tribal first. Reason sits below socialization and inborn sentiment in setting what a man wants. Universalist, individualist talk is a shield, not a description. Run the Amy Wax affair through that frame and the academic-freedom story and the inclusion story both thin. Instead, we see a fight between two coalitions for the engine that forms the next elite.
Wax argues that all cultures are not equal and defends mid-century bourgeois culture, the Anglo-Protestant legal inheritance, and assimilation. Her enemies hear White supremacy. Her friends hear a brave defense of the West. The frame hears Wax defending a value infusion. She tells the society that its order rests on a code drilled into children, and that the code holds the state together. On Mearsheimer’s account she has this right. The childhood infusion does most of the work, more than reason, and a people that loses its infusion loses its cohesion.
Then she breaks her own insight. She treats the Anglo-Protestant matrix as an open system that any individual can enter by learning the script. That is the conservative-liberal hope folded inside her realism, assimilation as a merit on-ramp for the atomized newcomer. She names a real friction, the strain when millions arrive carrying other infusions, and then she prescribes a cure that assumes the tribe is a club a man joins by reading its handbook. Mearsheimer’s man does not join a tribe that way. The script he lives by went into him in childhood, before he could weigh it, and an adult does not swap one infusion for another the way he changes an opinion.
Wax’s case rests on culture, not blood. She says the bourgeois script can be taught and absorbed, which puts socialization above inborn sentiment, the order Mearsheimer sets. The hereditarian leans the other way, on genes.
Now the institution. Penn argued professional norms and equal learning opportunity. The Heterodox Academy and the free-speech camp answered with the Chicago Principles and the marketplace of ideas. The frame treats the marketplace as a story the engine tells. The elite university transmits a moral code to the class that will run things, generation after generation, and a managerial faction now holds the engine and runs a code built around diversity, equity, and inclusion. The sacred premise of that code is the equality of groups and the openness of the multicultural settlement. Wax attacks the sacred premise by name and in public.
The sanction follows from that function. Her offense, in the frame, is the breach of the sacred said out loud. A tribe punishes the spoken heresy harder than the private doubt, because the spoken heresy threatens the cohesion the code exists to hold.
Penn left her tenure standing. One year of suspension at half pay, the loss of her named chair and her summer pay in perpetuity, a public reprimand, and a standing order that she state at every appearance that she speaks for herself and not for the law school. The faction measured the cost. A tenured chair is an expensive target. Dismissal makes a martyr and hands the courts a clean claim. So the tribe drew the boundary, shamed the heretic, and contained her, all short of the rupture that firing brings. The disclaimer is the sharpest stroke and the most telling. It cuts her voice away from the tribe’s name. You may speak, it says, but never again in our name. Against a peripheral affiliate the tribe can expel outright. Against a tenured insider it calibrates. The cost of the target sets the maneuver.
Her legal strategy then walks into the frame. She files under Titles VI and VII and her tenure contract, appealing to colorblind, neutral principle. The court reframed the suit as breach of contract and set the speech claim aside. The district judge dismissed the case in August 2025. She stands now on appeal before the Third Circuit, with a separate contract suit filed in Pennsylvania state court in November 2025 waiting behind it. The realist reading says the neutral-rights vocabulary she reaches for belongs to the order the faction has already displaced, and that law serves the arrangement in power, so she pleads the old rules into a room that keeps new defaults.
If law were only an instrument of the dominant tribe, Wax would hold no case. She holds one. A contract claim has teeth a captured institution cannot wish away. Procedure binds even a faction that runs the engine. Belief and contract suits sometimes lose in the first round and win on appeal, as Forstater did in Britain. Pure realism overshoots here. The old liberal rules are not a fiction all the way down. They run weaker than Wax hopes and stronger than the frame allows, and the appeal is the place to watch which reading the law bears out.
Then the symmetry. Both sides reject the neutral university, and both dress their tribe in a universal creed. The new faction wields inclusion and harm reduction to purge dissent and enforce its code, and it tells itself it serves a borderless human equality. The traditionalist camp wields academic freedom and merit to hold ground for the old alignment, and it tells itself it serves universal reason and the open society. Each pairs a true tribal instinct with a false universal story.
The affair resolves where the Cofnas affair resolves. No neutral seminar room. No value-free university, because the university is always a site of socialization and never anything else. The only live question is which faction holds the engine and which code it pours into the students who pass through. Wax names the engine and defends one code for it. Her enemies hold the engine and defend another. The contest is great power competition over the right to form the next elite, and the rest, the principles and the statutes and the reprimands, is the vocabulary the two sides speak while they fight for the prize.
Wax defends the bourgeois infusion as the ground of a stable order, and then she asks colorblind law and open debate to rescue her, as though reasoned principle stood above the fight. The frame says reasoned principle ranks junior to the value infusion and serves whoever holds the engine. If she has it right that childhood socialization rules the man, then her appeal to neutral reason is the weakest card in her hand, and her strongest holding is the one her enemies hold too, a tribe that will fight for the engine. She asks the room to honor a creed the room no longer teaches its young.

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Benjamin Schreier: Literary Critic of Jewish Identity and Ethnic Studies

Posted on June 23, 2026 by Luke Ford

Benjamin Schreier (b. 1972) holds the Mitrani Family Professorship of Jewish Studies and a professorship in English and Jewish Studies at Penn State University, where he has directed the Jewish Studies Program and the graduate program in English. Since 2011 he edits Studies in American Jewish Literature, a journal published by Penn State University Press and one of the field’s central venues. His scholarship occupies the meeting point of literary theory, intellectual history, ethnic studies, and the sociology of academic knowledge, and across three monographs he presses a single sustained argument: that the categories scholars use to organize literature, above all the category of Jewish identity, are products of critical and institutional labor rather than reflections of a prior cultural essence.

Schreier earned his B.A. in English at Swarthmore College in 1994, graduating with High Honors, and completed his Ph.D. in English and American literature at Brandeis University in 2003. His training joined close textual reading to the theoretical currents that remade the humanities in the late twentieth century, among them post-structuralism, cultural studies, and the critical theory of identity and representation. That double inheritance marks all his work. He reads particular texts with care, and he reads the disciplines that read those texts with equal care.

His first book, The Power of Negative Thinking: Cynicism and the History of Modern American Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2009), takes cynicism as a category of literary and intellectual history. Schreier traces how skeptical and oppositional habits of thought shaped modern American writing, and the book already shows the concern that organizes his later career: the tension among identity, critique, and the cultural authority that lets some readings count and others fall away.

The book that established his reputation, The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History (NYU Press, 2015), turns that concern on his own field. Schreier rejects the premise that Jewish American literature expresses a coherent Jewish communal self waiting in the texts to be found. He argues instead that “Jewish American literature” is a critical and institutional construction, assembled by scholars, critics, editors, and teachers who decide which writers belong and what their belonging means. Through readings of figures across the canon, among them Abraham Cahan (1860-1951), the New York Intellectuals, and Philip Roth (1933-2018), he asks what identity-based literary study does when it puts identity to work, and he treats the answer as a question about the discipline rather than about the writers. The book reached debates well beyond Jewish studies, touching canon formation, ethnicity, and the politics of identity in the academy, and reviewers noted the paradox at its center, that a sustained critique of the field also enriches it.

The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) extends the argument into a cultural and intellectual history of Jewish American literary study as such. Schreier traces how the field formed across the twentieth century and which institutional and political conditions gave it shape. He holds that labels like “Jewish American literature” are not neutral descriptions but artifacts of particular historical circumstances, and he asks whether identity-based frameworks still serve the reading of literature in a more mixed and connected cultural world. Read together, The Impossible Jew and The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature form one argument against essentialist accounts of ethnicity and identity in literary scholarship, and they place Schreier among a cohort of critics who want to rebuild the foundations of minority and ethnic literary study rather than add to its accumulated readings.

His other publications widen the frame. He edited Studies in Irreversibility: Texts and Contexts (2007), and with Jonathan Eburne he edited The Year’s Work in Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons (2017), a project that carries his interests into the politics and self-conception of contemporary American intellectual life. As editor of Studies in American Jewish Literature he has pushed the journal toward ethnic studies, secularism studies, political theory, postcolonial scholarship, and the critical study of identity, positioning it as a site for interdisciplinary work that situates Jewish culture inside larger social and theoretical arguments.

At Penn State he teaches across American literature, Jewish American literature, ethnic literature, American comedy, modernism, post-Holocaust literature, Jewish American film, contemporary political fiction, and the intellectual history of the New York Intellectuals, at both undergraduate and graduate levels. His teaching turns on close reading, theoretical self-awareness, and reflection on the categories through which readers assign value to texts.

A constant runs through the scholarship, the editing, and the teaching: the relation between literary criticism and institutional power. Schreier holds that a critic must read the assumptions and structures that govern his own methods alongside the texts those methods address, and this reflexive demand separates his work from more conventional literary history. His current research carries the program into new material. He is at work on a study of Palestinian American literature within the development of Arab American studies, and on a second project concerning Zionism and the institutional and cultural politics of the Jewish Studies field, both of which keep his long-standing question in view: how cultural categories form, gain authority, and govern reading inside the academy and beyond it.

The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History

Schreier mounts a fierce polemic against the standard methods of Jewish American literary history. He argues that scholars in the field isolate themselves in a self-imposed ghetto. This isolation happens because they take Jewish identity for granted. They treat Jewish literature as a simple mirror of a biological or sociological population. Schreier calls this approach a form of historicist nationalism. It presumes that a critic can always recognize a stable Jewish subject behind the text.

Instead of this comfortable historicism, Schreier proposes what he calls a critical semitism. This perspective treats Jewishness not as a fixed biological fact but as an active cultural medium and an object of desire. Literature does not merely reflect a pre-existing identity. It tests, disrupts, and resists ready-made categories. Schreier looks at the ways texts build the vocabularies that allow people to think about identity. He investigates the limits of classification where identity grows uncertain and spectral.

The book moves chronologically through major touchstones of the canon to demonstrate this theory. Schreier reads Abraham Cahan’s early work not as a simple story of assimilation but as an illustration of how migration destabilizes the very terms of recognition. He challenges the standard history of the New York Intellectuals. Right-wing critics often claim these writers naturally evolved into neoconservatives due to their Jewish heritage. Schreier counters that this narrative relies on a false, biological concept of responsibility to a state polity. Turning to Philip Roth’s The Counterlife, he shows how the text stages the anxious search for an external referent and reveals that the discourse of the Jew requires a constant critical supplement. Finally, he positions Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as a text where identity depends on the reader’s desire to locate it.

A critique of Schreier’s project highlights both its theoretical strength and its material limitations. He succeeds in shaking the field out of its complacency. He forces critics to question the racialist assumptions that often lurk beneath talk of culture and heritage. By connecting Jewish studies to broader critical theory and ethnic studies, he breaks down institutional walls. His focus on active desire rather than passive reflection restores a sense of political and aesthetic stakes to reading.

Yet this postidentitarian move carries a significant cost. By turning Jewishness into an unstable specter or a product of interpretive will, Schreier risks vaporizing the material realities of history. Writers like Cahan and Roth reacted to concrete social conditions, institutional discrimination, and specific communal struggles. Reducing their historical environment to an effect of textual desire minimizes the real pressures that shaped their work. If identity becomes purely spectral, the category loses its utility as a tool to analyze historical experiences, leaving the critic with an elegant theory that struggles to speak to the lived realities of the authors he examines.

If John Mearsheimer’s anthropology is correct as per the below section, it undermines the entire foundation of Schreier’s The Impossible Jew.

Mearsheimer’s assertion that humans are fundamentally tribal, socially embedded, and shaped by an early “value infusion” opposes Schreier’s desire to dismantle stable ethnic categories.

Schreier advocates for a “postidentitarian” and “subjectless” approach to Jewish studies, drawing on critics who try to decouple ethnic fields from a concrete, identifiable human population. He argues that a text’s Jewishness should be viewed as a spectral product of interpretive desire rather than a reflection of real Jews. If Mearsheimer is right, Schreier’s theory is a textbook example of hyper-individualistic liberal delusion. In Mearsheimer’s view, humans do not operate as lone wolves or choose their identities from a menu of textual desires; they are born into social groups that shape their identities long before they can think for themselves. Schreier’s attempt to vaporize the biological and sociological reality of “the population” ignores the evolutionary and social fact that group survival depends on cooperation and shared, inherited tribal realities.

Schreier critiques the historicist mainstream of Jewish studies for its “anthropological expectation” that a body of literature represents a legible population. He calls this a complacent, nationalistic dead end. If Mearsheimer is right, this historicist “ghetto” is the only valid way to read literature. Literature should be evaluated through the lens of population, socialization, and shared tribal experience because authors are products of intense early childhood socialization within their specific group. You cannot separate a text from the collective survival engine of the society that produced the writer.

In Chapter 3, Schreier attacks right-wing critics like Ruth Wisse who argue that the Jewish New York Intellectuals had a cultural responsibility to a Jewish polity. Schreier prefers Lionel Trilling’s model of “self-conscious detachment from any position” and the preservation of individual imaginative freedom over collective affiliation. Mearsheimer’s framework suggests that Trilling’s detached, universalist individualism is a psychological impossibility. If humans are tribal at their core and reason is subordinate to socialization, then the New York Intellectuals could never strip away their early “value infusion.” Wisse’s argument that their identity naturally bound them to the fate of their group comports with Mearsheimer’s belief that individuals develop powerful, involuntary attachments to their group and are wired to cooperate for collective survival.

If Mearsheimer is right, Schreier’s book is an artifact of the post-Cold War liberal universalism it purports to critique. By trying to turn a concrete, historical group identity into an abstract aesthetic playground of “negation” and “unknowability,” Schreier is downplaying the social nature of human beings to the point of ignoring it. Mearsheimer would argue that no matter how much a literary critic twists textuality to make identity “impossible,” the tribal reality of human socialization will always dictate the boundaries of the group.

The Great Delusion

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.

The liberal error, for Mearsheimer, lies in treating the person as a free-standing chooser of his own moral code, when the code arrives mostly from birth and upbringing. If this anthropology holds, what happens to Schreier?
Schreier’s argument moves in the opposite direction. He treats Jewish identity as made rather than given, and he treats the communal self that the field claims to read as the field’s own product. The category gets assembled by critics and editors and teachers, and a man might dismantle it by showing the seams. That is a claim about contingency. The thing the field calls a Jewish communal essence has no fixed reality. It can be built, and what can be built can be taken apart, or built otherwise, or set aside.
Run the two men against each other. Mearsheimer does not say group identity is fixed in its content. He says attachment to the group is near-universal, deep, and prior to reason, planted by socialization before the man can weigh it. Schreier’s construction thesis and Mearsheimer’s social anthropology might seem to meet here, because both deny a timeless essence and both grant that identity gets formed rather than inherited from nature. The agreement breaks on what the formation produces. For Schreier the construction is light, a critical and institutional artifact a scholar might expose and loosen. For Mearsheimer the construction is heavy, a value infusion welded to the man in childhood, carried below the reach of argument, defended sometimes to the death. Schreier shows that the academic category was assembled. Mearsheimer answers that the assembly of a category and the durability of a bond are separate questions, and that the bond survives the demolition of the category.
Mearsheimer’s account turns on the weakness of reason against socialization, and Schreier’s project is a project of reason. It asks a man to see through his inherited sense of who he is, to recognize the communal self as a construction and hold it at the distance critique requires. Mearsheimer ranks that capacity last among the forces that move us. He might read the anti-essentialist program as a late and local product of one particular socialization, the training of the theory-formed humanities of the 1990s, a group with its own intense value infusion and its own sacred refusal of essence. The man who learned to distrust group belonging learned it from a group. His cosmopolitan suspicion of the tribe is the marker of his tribe. On Mearsheimer’s terms the academic who announces that identity is constructed performs the membership badge of the cosmopolitan intellectual class, and he mistakes a socialized preference for the verdict of free reason.
Samuel Moyn (b. 1970), whom Mearsheimer quotes on the rise of human rights, sits near this point. The elevation of the rights-bearing individual over the inherited group is, for Mearsheimer, the signature liberal move, and Schreier’s loosening of communal Jewish identity belongs to the same family. It frees the person from the weight of the collective self. Mearsheimer says the weight does not lift, that the liberal who proclaims the autonomous chooser describes a creature who never existed, and that the social animal goes on cooperating with his fellow members and sacrificing for them after the theorist has declared the bond a fiction.
What survives for Schreier, if Mearsheimer is right, is narrower than the full anti-essentialist claim but firmer for the narrowing. Schreier might be correct about the academic category and wrong about the attachment beneath it. Jewish American literature as a field, a canon, a journal, a set of chairs, got built by men making choices, and Schreier maps the building with care. The error, on this reading, comes when the construction thesis migrates from the category to the bond, when the demonstration that scholars assembled a label becomes a suggestion that the communal self is similarly optional. Mearsheimer holds that the self is not optional. The group precedes the man, shapes him before he can refuse, and holds him after he thinks he has reasoned his way out. The category is paper. The tribe is not.
There is a cost to Schreier in this collision, and a cost to Mearsheimer. The cost to Schreier is that his rationalism might overreach, treating critique as a solvent strong enough to dissolve what childhood welded, and underrating the durability of the attachment his own readers carry into the seminar room. The cost to Mearsheimer is that he can prove too much, since an anthropology that makes reason nearly powerless against socialization struggles to explain Schreier at all, the man who did, in fact, turn his critical faculties against the value infusion of his own people and his own field. If socialization wins as completely as Mearsheimer says, the heretic should not exist. He does exist. Either reason can do more than Mearsheimer grants, or Schreier’s heresy is the socialized loyalty of a rival group, and the tribe he serves is the one that taught him to doubt the tribe.

The Set

Picture the world Benjamin Schreier moves through. It has rooms, and the rooms have addresses. The Modern Language Association convention in winter, a vast hotel given over to job interviews and panels and the slow theater of who greets whom in the lobby. The annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies, where the Jewish studies people gather and the literature scholars form a wing of a larger hall that runs from Talmud to Holocaust history to Israeli politics. The seminar room at Penn State where the graduate students learn the trade. The pages of the journals, which are rooms too, with doors and gatekeepers. PMLA at the top of the literary hierarchy. American Literary History. American Literature. And the room Schreier himself keeps the keys to, Studies in American Jewish Literature, which he has edited since 2011, the field’s house organ, the place where a young scholar’s first essay on Roth or Ozick either appears or does not.

The people in these rooms share a formation. They came up through doctoral programs in English in the 1990s and after, when theory had won and the older philology had lost, and they carry the marks of that victory. They read Foucault in coursework. They learned to say that categories are produced rather than found, that the canon encodes power, that the critic’s job is to expose the operations a text conceals. Schreier’s own line runs Swarthmore to Brandeis to the chair at Penn State, and the line is typical of the set, the small liberal arts college and then the research university and then the tenure track at a flagship. The names around him in the field of Jewish American literary study form a recognizable company. Hana Wirth-Nesher, who wrote on language and the Jewish American text. Werner Sollors (b. 1943) at Harvard, whose work on ethnicity and consent and descent set terms the whole field still argues with. Michael P. Kramer, who debated with Wirth-Nesher over whether Jewish American literature even names a coherent object, a debate Schreier inherited and pushed further than either. Benjamin’s elders and contemporaries also include figures like Ruth Wisse (b. 1936), who holds the opposite pole from Schreier, the scholar for whom Jewish literature expresses a real and continuous national culture, and whose politics run to the defense of the Jewish people as a people. Set Schreier against Wisse and the field’s whole argument stands out in relief. She believes in the thing. He shows it was built.

What do they value? They value the unmasking. The highest praise in this set is that a piece of work is smart, and smart means it caught something the naive reader missed, found the seam, showed the construction, refused the obvious. A scholar earns standing by demonstrating that what looked natural was made, what looked innocent served power, what looked like a stable identity was a process held together by institutions. The set prizes theoretical sophistication, which means fluency in the vocabulary of construction and discourse and the critique of essence, and it holds in quiet contempt the work that takes its object at face value. To call a colleague’s book undertheorized is to wound him. To call it rigorous and self-aware is to bless him. Schreier sits near the center of what the set values, because his whole career performs the unmasking on the field’s own foundations, which is the unmasking the set admires most, the one that turns the tools on the home discipline.

Their hero system runs on the figure of the critic who sees through. The man who matters is the man who exposed an illusion others lived inside. The set tells its own history this way, as a sequence of demystifications, each generation pulling down what the last took for granted. The philologists believed in the text. Then theory showed the text was a site of power. The early ethnic critics believed in authentic ethnic experience. Then the next wave showed that authenticity was a construction. Schreier stands at the far end of this sequence, the man who turned the demystifying habit on the category of Jewish American literature and asked whether the field’s object had ever existed. To belong to this hero system is to want to be the one who saw furthest through, and the reward is a name that the next generation of scholars must cite, a place in the chain of those who advanced the critique. The body fails, but the citation persists, and the footnote is the set’s form of life after death.

The status games are mostly silent. Where you publish ranks you. A book with a university press, and the presses themselves are ranked, Harvard and Chicago and Princeton above the rest, NYU and Penn solidly respectable, and Schreier has published with Virginia, NYU, and Penn, a strong record that places him among the serious without placing him at the absolute summit. Who blurbs your book ranks you. Who writes the review and where ranks you. The invitation to the keynote rather than the parallel panel ranks you. The endowed chair ranks you, and Schreier holds the Mitrani Family Professorship, which marks him as a man the institution has chosen to honor. The directorship of a program ranks you, and he has run the Jewish Studies Program and the graduate program in English. The editorship of a journal ranks you highest of all in one specific way, because it makes you a gatekeeper, a man others must please, and Schreier’s long tenure at Studies in American Jewish Literature gives him that power over the field he critiques. The set plays these games while pretending not to, because open ambition reads as vulgar, and the proper pose is the disinterested pursuit of knowledge with the status accruing as a byproduct one never sought.

Their normative claims cluster around method. The set holds that a scholar ought to be reflexive, ought to examine the assumptions built into his own categories, ought to refuse the comfort of treating a constructed thing as natural. The cardinal sin is naivety, the unexamined belief, the scholar who writes about Jewish identity as though everyone knows what it is. The cardinal virtue is the critical self-awareness that turns the analytic eye on the analyst’s own tools. Schreier’s demand that the field face the made character of its object is a pure expression of the set’s normative order. He is not introducing a foreign standard. He is enforcing the set’s own ought with more nerve than most, applying to the field’s foundation the reflexivity the set preaches but often spends on safer targets.

Their essentialist claims are harder to find, because the set defines itself against essence, and a man trained in this room learns to flinch at any sentence that says a group is something. They will not say Jews are. They will not say literature expresses an authentic national soul. The flinch is so trained that it functions as the set’s deepest essentialism, the one thing they treat as given rather than constructed, the conviction that essences are always false and construction always the truth beneath them. They are essentialist about anti-essentialism. They hold, as a matter past argument, that the sophisticated position is the one that dissolves the stable category, and they do not turn the dissolving habit on that conviction. Schreier shares this. His work assumes, rather than argues, that showing a category was built settles something, that the constructed thing is thereby less real, less binding, less worthy of a scholar’s belief. The assumption is the set’s bedrock, and it sits under his project unexamined.

The moral grammar follows. To be good in this world is to be smart and self-aware and on the right side, and the right side means the side that questions power, exposes construction, and refuses the consolations of identity. To be bad is to be naive, complicit, undertheorized, or worse, to be a defender of the essence, a Ruth Wisse who believes in the people and says so, which the set reads not as a rival intellectual position but as a moral failure, a refusal of the critical maturity the set requires. The grammar lets the set treat a disagreement about method as a disagreement about virtue. The scholar who believes Jewish American literature names a real thing is not merely wrong in this grammar. He is unserious, sentimental, behind the times, a man who has not done the hard work of facing how categories are made. Schreier’s standing in the set comes from speaking this grammar with unusual fluency and aiming it at the largest available target, the foundation of the field, which earns him the set’s highest regard, the regard reserved for the man who turned its own sharpest tool on its own ground and did not flinch.

There is a tension the set carries and rarely names. Schreier and his colleagues make their living from the very category they dissolve. The chair is a chair in Jewish studies. The journal is a journal of American Jewish literature. The graduate students come to study a thing the field’s leading critic says was constructed and may not cohere. The set needs the category to fund the critique of the category, and the men who show that Jewish American literature was built draw their salaries from departments and programs and endowments that exist because someone believes the thing is real. The donors who fund a chair in Jewish studies tend to believe in the Jewish people the way Wisse believes in them, not the way Schreier does. The set lives on this gap and mostly does not look at it, and the not-looking is part of the moral grammar, because to look too hard would be to ask whether the whole enterprise rests on a belief the enterprise officially denies.

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)

Pierre Bourdieu gives us a way to read a scholar’s career as a series of moves in a game, and the game has rules the players rarely state. A field, in his account, is a structured space of positions, and the men who occupy those positions struggle over a scarce resource. In the academy the resource is symbolic capital, the right to be recognized as a legitimate authority, and the deepest stake of all is the power to define what the field studies and how. Bourdieu calls that power the principle of legitimate vision and division, the nomos of the field, the buried agreement about what counts as a real object and a serious question. Most players accept the nomos without thinking. They inherit it as doxa, the unspoken sense of the game that feels like common sense rather than like a position. Schreier built a career by refusing the doxa of his field out loud.
The field here is Jewish American literary study, a subfield of Jewish studies and of American literature, with its own journal, its own canon, its own chairs and prizes and graduate seminars. Its founding agreement holds that Jewish American literature exists, that it forms a coherent body of writing expressing a Jewish communal self, and that the scholar’s task runs to reading that self in the texts. Schreier attacks the agreement at the root. He argues that the category is made rather than found, assembled by critics and editors and teachers who decide which writers belong, and that the communal essence the field claims to study is the field’s own product. The argument is heresy because it names the doxa as doxa, drags the buried agreement into the light, and denies that the field’s central object has the reality the field assigns it.
Bourdieu teaches that heresy is a position in the field, and a productive one. The space of positions always holds an orthodox center and a heterodox margin, and the law that governs intellectual life rewards the man who takes the open rival seat over the man who crowds into the consecrated middle. The orthodox accumulate capital by doing the field’s normal work well. The heretic accumulates a different capital by contesting the terms on which the work proceeds. Schreier occupies the heterodox slot with discipline. Across The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History (2015) and The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity (2020) he sustains a single heretical claim, and the claim gives him a position no orthodox reading of Roth or Cahan could supply. He is the man who says the object does not exist. That sentence is a brand, and in a crowded attention space a brand is worth a great deal.
Here the paradox opens. The heretic cannot leave the field. To overturn the nomos he must mobilize the players who live by it, publish in the venues they read, win the recognition they confer. His heresy depends on the orthodoxy it attacks for its sense and its charge. A man who denied that Jewish American literature exists from outside the field would be a crank. A man who denies it from the Mitrani Family Professorship of Jewish Studies, while editing Studies in American Jewish Literature, is an event. The NYU Press description of The Impossible Jew puts the logic in four words. He destroys to create. Bourdieu would read that formula as the signature of the heresiarch, who clears ground for a new vision of the field and installs himself as the authority over the cleared ground.
Consecration tells the rest of the story. The endowed chair, the journal editorship he has held since 2011, the directorships of the Jewish Studies Program and the graduate program in English, these are the field’s instruments for marking who holds legitimate authority, and the field has handed them to the man who questions its foundations. A field with enough autonomy can absorb its critics and convert their attacks into its own renewal, because the critique demonstrates that the field takes hard questions seriously, and the demonstration raises the value of the game. The heretic gets capital. The field gets proof of its vitality. The arrangement serves both.
Bourdieu uses the word habitus for the durable habits of perception a man acquires from his training and his trajectory, the feel for the game that shapes the moves he finds natural. Schreier’s formation joined close reading at Swarthmore and Brandeis to the theory that remade the humanities in the 1990s, post-structuralism and the critical study of identity, a training that teaches a man to distrust essences and to read categories as constructions. The anti-essentialist move comes to him as second nature, the way a different formation might make communal pride come as second nature. His weapon and his disposition match, and the match is no accident. The field rewarded the disposition with admission, and the disposition produced the weapon the field then rewarded again.
Schreier might be right that Jewish American literature is a construction. The claim can hold as scholarship and function as a position at the same time, and Bourdieu’s point is that the two run together. The denial of the object is also a bid for the authority to define the object, since the man who shows that the category was built claims the standing to say how it should be rebuilt, or whether it should stand at all. His recent turn toward Palestinian American literature and toward Zionism and the politics of the Jewish studies field reads, in this light, as the same move carried to fresh ground, the heretic extending the reach of his vision into the most contested material the field can offer.

The Sociology of Philosophies

Randall Collins (b. 1941) explains intellectual life as a sociology rather than a parade of free minds. Ideas come from people, people come in networks, and the networks run through master and pupil, rival and ally, across generations. Creativity is not the spark of a lone genius. It is the property of chains. A man does the work, but the chain hands him the tools, the problems, the rivals, and the charge of emotional energy that lets him think a new thought and believe it worth defending. Collins built the argument from a survey of the philosophical record across the world, and he distilled it into a law. He calls it the law of small numbers. The attention space of any field holds room for only three to six active positions at one time, no more, because the audience cannot track more than a handful of live arguments, and the rewards of recognition concentrate on the men who hold the open slots. The law governs who gets remembered and who vanishes, and it governs the moves a rising scholar makes if he wants a seat. Schreier reads as a man who found an open slot and took it.
The field of Jewish American literary study has an orthodox center. The center holds that Jewish American literature exists, that it expresses a Jewish communal self, and that the scholar reads the self in the texts. Collins predicts what happens around a strong center. The attention space fills, the consecrated positions crowd, and a man who joins the throng doing the normal work well competes against many others doing the same work, with thin rewards for each. The open slot lies elsewhere, in the position that negates the center. Schreier took the negating seat. He argues that the communal self is the field’s own construction, that critics and editors and teachers built the category, and that the object the field claims to study has no reality apart from the building. The position is contrarian, and Collins teaches that contrarian is where the energy is, because the rival seat sits empty while the orthodox seats are full.
The charge of the anti-essentialist position comes from the orthodoxy it denies. Collins makes this structural rather than psychological. A position carries intellectual energy in proportion to the strength of what it opposes, and an argument against a weak target generates little heat. Schreier opposes the founding agreement of his field, the deepest and most settled of its claims, and the opposition draws its force from the depth of what it attacks. A man who said Jewish American literature was a construction in a field that already believed so would say nothing. A man who says it where the belief in a communal essence runs strongest stakes out a real position, and the field’s attention turns toward him because the conflict is live. The orthodoxy supplies the energy. The heretic spends it. Without the strong center there is no charged margin, and Schreier’s position depends on the vigor of the view it rejects.
The network behind the man fits the frame. Collins holds that creative positions cluster where chains of intellectual contact concentrate, and that a scholar’s training network places him in the structure before he writes a word. Schreier formed at Swarthmore and then at Brandeis through the 1990s, inside the theory currents that remade the American humanities in those years, post-structuralism and the critical study of identity and the suspicion of essence. That network ran hot. It carried high emotional energy and a dense traffic of arguments about construction, representation, and the made character of categories once thought natural. A man trained in that network inherits the tools to dismantle an essence and the confidence that dismantling is the serious work. The anti-essentialist move toward Jewish American literature reads as the application of a network’s standard equipment to a field that had not yet felt its full force. Collins would say the position was waiting in the structure, and the structure produced a man fit to occupy it.
Emotional energy carries the argument from network to career. Collins uses the term for the charge a man draws from successful intellectual rituals, the focused encounters of seminar and conference and argument that leave a participant lifted and certain and ready to push his line. The contrarian who lands a position that the field must answer wins that charge, because the field’s response, even hostile response, confirms that his argument counts. Schreier’s heresy drew the field’s attention, and the attention fed the energy that let him sustain a single position across two books and a long editorship. The orthodox scholar grinding out competent readings in a crowded slot draws less of this charge, because his work provokes no answer and commands no center of attention. The contrarian provokes, and the provocation returns to him as the energy to provoke again.
The law of small numbers also sets a limit, and the limit shapes a career as much as the opening does. The attention space holds only so many seats, and the seat Schreier holds is the anti-essentialist seat in his subfield. Collins observes that men in adjacent positions compete for the same slot, and that the field will not seat two heretics making the identical move. Schreier’s move toward fresh ground, the recent turn to Palestinian American literature and to Zionism and the politics of the Jewish studies field, reads on this frame as the search for new attention space when the original slot has been worked. A position pays its highest returns when it is new. Once the field has absorbed the heresy, the heretic must extend the argument into contested material that the field has not yet metabolized, or watch the returns fall as the slot becomes familiar. The migration to harder ground is the contrarian protecting his charge.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

David Pinsof writes that intellectuals tell a flattering story about why the world goes wrong, and that the story pays them. The story says the trouble comes from misunderstanding. Polarization, bigotry, war, unhappiness, all of it traces to people getting the facts wrong, and the cure is better understanding, which lifts the men whose trade is understanding to the rank of the most important men alive. Pinsof throws the story out. He holds that people understand what they have an incentive to understand, that stupidity tends to be strategic, and that the engine under human conduct is not bad belief but motive, the drive to climb hierarchies, run down rivals, and dominate others behind a moral screen. Pinsof splits the stated motive from the real one, the mission statement from the deed, and reads the gap between them as the place the truth hides. Turn that move on Schreier.
Schreier’s stated motive is candor. He presents his work as the field cleaning its own house, the critic who refuses the comfortable belief that Jewish American literature names a real communal essence, the scholar willing to show that the category was built and to ask his colleagues to face what they have been doing. The NYU Press line catches the self-image. He destroys to create. Read through Pinsof, the self-image is the mission statement, and the mission statement asks to be checked against the deed.
Pinsof would start with the form of the claim. Schreier tells a field that it has misunderstood its own object. The essentialists think they study a Jewish self in the texts, and Schreier says they have it wrong, that the self is their construction and they failed to see the seams. This is the misunderstanding story in academic dress. The field erred, the critic understands, and the man who understands moves to the front of the room. Pinsof’s essay warns against the story because of what it does for the teller. A scholar who exposes a misunderstanding casts himself as the one who sees clearly while his colleagues sit in fog, and the casting is a status bid before it is anything else.
Pinsof holds that people are not confused about their interests. The field’s essentialists are not victims of a brain-fart. They have reasons to hold the category together, and the reasons are not secret. The category supports jobs, journals, endowed chairs, donor relationships, communal legitimacy, the apparatus that lets a man earn a living reading Jewish books as Jewish books. They believe in the communal self because believing in it pays, and they would keep believing it under any volume of critique, because the belief tracks their incentives rather than their information. Schreier’s demonstration that the category was constructed treats their conviction as an error to be corrected. Pinsof would say it is not an error. It is a position held by men who understand their incentives all too well, and the critique that calls it a misunderstanding misreads interest as confusion, which is the standard intellectual mistake.
Then Pinsof turns the same blade on Schreier. If the essentialists hold their belief because it pays, the anti-essentialist holds his because it pays him. The contrarian slot carries status the orthodox slot cannot, the charge of the man who saw through what everyone else swallowed. Schreier’s deed, on this read, is not the disinterested pursuit of a true account of his field. It is a successful campaign to climb the hierarchy of his field by running down the men who built it, conducted under the moral cover of rigor and self-critique. The cover is the part Pinsof watches closest. A man who said plainly, I attacked my field’s founding idea because the attack was the open path to a chair and a name, would forfeit the moral standing the attack requires. So the motive comes dressed as candor, as service to the discipline, as breaking down the walls of the academic ghetto, and the dress is the tell. Pinsof’s Starbucks line applies without strain. The mission statement speaks of nurturing the human spirit. The firm sells coffee for profit. The monograph speaks of freeing the field for honest self-examination. The career accumulates capital.
Coalition work fills out the picture, and the recent turn supplies the material. Schreier moves toward Palestinian American literature and toward a critique of Zionism and the politics of the Jewish studies field. Pinsof reads these as alliance signals before he reads them as arguments. In the contemporary humanities, the anti-Zionist and anti-essentialist positions confer elite standing, and they mark a man as a member of the cosmopolitan academic coalition rather than the communal Jewish one. Pinsof’s account of bigotry and partisan hatred runs on zero-sum competition over status and over the coercive apparatus of the state, and his account of antiracism notes that the position confers elite rank while letting its holders resent their nearest rivals in the hierarchy. Apply the shape. The Jewish scholar who loosens Jewish communal identity and questions Zionism takes a position that lifts him among one coalition by separating him from another, the communal establishment that sits closest to him in the social order and competes with him most directly for the right to speak for the tradition. The derogated rival is not far away. He is the nearest neighbor.
Pinsof’s law of self-deception keeps the read from collapsing into a charge of fraud, and the distinction matters for fairness. He does not say the intellectual lies. He says the intellectual believes his own mission statement, because the belief is a weapon, and a man who sincerely thinks himself a truth-teller signals candor better than a man performing the part. Schreier need not know any of this. The frame predicts that he would experience his work as honest inquiry and feel the status payoff as the natural reward of being right, and that the sincerity is part of the equipment rather than evidence against the read. The denial is a feature. Pinsof builds it into the model.
The hole at the end of Pinsof’s essay closes the application. He says the world does not want to be saved, that you can study the hole you are stuck in to the last molecule and remain stuck, because the trouble is not ignorance and so knowledge cannot cure it. Schreier studies how his field built its category. He maps the construction with care across two books and a long editorship. And the field goes on building the category, hands him a chair for the mapping, and changes nothing, because no one in it wanted the category dissolved. The essentialists keep their jobs. The journal keeps publishing. The critic keeps his standing as the man who sees through it all. Everyone’s incentives are met, and the critique that promised to expose a misunderstanding turns out to have exposed no misunderstanding at all, only a set of men doing what their interests told them to do, the critic included. On Pinsof’s terms the field has no problem. What looks like its problem, its naive belief in a communal essence, is the solution to a different problem, how to keep the apparatus funded and staffed and legitimate. Nothing is broken. That is the trouble.

Turner on Essentialism

Stephen P. Turner (b. 1951) spent a career hunting essences in social thought and pulling them out by the root. His target is the move that posits a shared collective thing, a substance held in common across many minds, and then treats that thing as the cause of what people do. Society, culture, the normative order, collective representations, shared frameworks, shared tacit knowledge, all of these name a supposed common possession, and Turner denies that the common possession exists. What exists is individuals. Each man acquires his habits through his own causal history, his own training, his own exposure, and there is no guarantee that what sits in one head matches what sits in another. The sameness gets assumed, not shown. When a scholar says a group shares a practice or a culture or an identity, he has helped himself to an essence, a hidden substance that does the explaining while escaping the demand to specify how it works or where it lives. Turner calls these explanatory fictions. They name the thing to be explained and dress the name as the explanation. Apply this to Benjamin Schreier, and the frame cuts toward him and against him at once.
The toward part comes first, because Schreier and Turner start as allies. Schreier denies that Jewish American literature expresses a Jewish communal self, a coherent essence sitting in the texts waiting to be read out. Turner makes the same denial about every collective essence, and he would welcome Schreier’s refusal of the communal self as a clean case of the general move he recommends. The field assumed a shared Jewishness, a substance common to Cahan and Roth and the rest, and built its readings on the assumption. Schreier shows the assumption was an assumption. So far the two men walk together. The Jewish essence is a fiction, and naming it as a fiction is the right first step.
The against part starts where Schreier stops walking. Turner’s argument does not halt at the natural essence. It turns on the substitutes, because the deepest finding of his work is that anti-essentialism keeps smuggling the essence back in under a new name. A man rejects the essence of the group and then explains the group’s products by appeal to culture, or discourse, or construction, or the field, and each of these is a fresh collective substance doing the old collective work. Schreier says Jewish American literature was constructed through the practices of critics, editors, publishers, and teachers. Turner would stop on the word practices and on the word field and ask what they name. A practice, in Schreier’s usage, is something shared across the men who carry it, a common way of building the category. That is the shared practice Turner spent The Social Theory of Practices (1994) showing cannot be a collective object. There is no thing the critics share. There are particular editors with particular habits, each acquired through a particular history, and the word practice papers a single substance over a distribution of separate dispositions that might or might not line up. Schreier traded the essence of Jewishness for the essence of the construction.
The trade runs through his key terms. Construction sounds like a process, a doing, a chain of causes a scholar might lay out step by step. In Turner’s reading it functions instead as a black box, an essence that explains without specifying. To say the category was constructed is to redescribe the category’s existence in the passive voice and present the redescription as a finding. The construction does no causal work that the word names. Who built what, in which year, through which act, with which effect on which reader, these are the questions a real account answers, and the collective noun lets a man skip them while sounding causal. The field is the worst offender. The field constructs, the field assumes, the field studies, the discipline maintains. Turner would say there is no field that constructs anything. There are men, and the field is the name we give to a rough overlap among their separate habits, an overlap we assume rather than measure. When Schreier makes the field the agent of construction, he installs a collective actor with intentions and effects, and the collective actor is an essence as surely as the communal Jewish self was an essence. He dissolved one and conjured another to do the dissolving.
Identity carries the same trouble, and the trouble runs to the center of his project. Schreier writes about identity and identification as his major theme, the made character of the self the field claims to find. Turner would press the question all the way down. If the Jewish self is not a shared substance, then neither is identity as such, and the word identity names no common thing that gets constructed or deconstructed. What a fuller account holds is particular men with particular self-understandings, formed by particular histories, no two alike, with the sameness across them assumed for convenience and never established. Schreier’s critique stops at the right place to indict the essentialists and the wrong place to spare himself, because the apparatus he uses to expose the Jewish essence, identity and construction and the field and institutional power, runs on essences of its own. He sees the substance in his opponents’ object and not the substance in his own tools.
The honest version of the project, on Turner’s terms, would read as biography and causal history rather than as the operation of forces. It would name a particular editor, trace where he learned his habits of selection, show whom he taught and what those students carried forward and how their habits diverged from his, and never assume that the men add up to a thing called the field with a will to construct. Schreier comes close in places. He names Cahan, names Roth, names the New York Intellectuals, names critics. The explanatory weight falls elsewhere. It falls on institutional power, on the discipline, on identity-based literary study, on the practices of the field, the collective nouns that carry the argument while the named individuals serve as illustration. Turner’s complaint is exact. The men are present as examples and absent as causes, and the causes are essences.
There is a reflexive sting, and Turner’s frame delivers it without the help of any other. Schreier built his standing as the scholar who refuses convenient essences and faces the constructed character of his field’s object. Turner shows that the refusal is partial, that the anti-essentialist retains a working set of essences he never turns the critique upon, and that the retention is what lets the critique proceed at all. A thoroughgoing application of Schreier’s own principle would corrode the ground he stands on, because construction and field and identity and practice would go the way of communal Jewishness, and the scholar would be left with particular men doing particular things for particular reasons, which is harder to write and impossible to brand. The half-measure is not a failure of nerve. It is the condition of having an argument to make. Pull the last essence and there is no thesis, only a long list of individuals.
The frame has its cost, and naming it keeps the application honest. Turner’s demand can dissolve every collective term, and a man cannot write history or sociology or literary study while refusing all collective shorthand. At some point a scholar says the field or the tradition or the practice, because the alternative is a catalog no reader can finish, and Turner grants the point. His test is not whether a writer uses a collective noun but whether the noun does causal work the writer can cash out, or hides the absence of such work behind a word that sounds like a cause. Schreier might survive the test in places, where his collective talk shortens a story he could tell in full if pressed. He fails it where the collective noun is the story, where construction and the field carry an explanatory load that no account of particular men ever arrives to support. The essence he exposed in his opponents is the essence he kept for himself, and Turner’s frame, applied to the end, leaves the anti-essentialist holding the substance he was sure he had abandoned.

Explaining the Normative

Stephen P. Turner aimed a second campaign at a target close to the first. Where his work on essences attacks the shared substance, his work on the normative attacks the shared ought. Normativism, as he names it in Explaining the Normative (2010), holds that a special domain of facts sits above the causal world, facts about what is correct, valid, required, binding, and that this domain explains how men agree, follow rules, mean the same things, and submit to standards. The normativist says people are bound by norms, answerable to reasons, governed by a shared sense of what counts as right. Turner denies the domain. What exists is habit, training, disposition, sanction, the ordinary causal traffic of men learning to do things and correcting each other. The normative is a layer the theorist adds on top, a posit invoked to fill a gap, and the gap it fills is the theorist’s sense that without an ought the agreement would be impossible. Turner calls the move a transcendental argument and treats it as a bluff. The bindingness is asserted, never cashed. It does no causal work the habits do not already do, and it launders contingency into necessity, converting what men happen to do into what they are required to do. Apply this to Schreier, and the question shifts from what he claims about his field to what he claims his field owes.
Schreier does more than describe. He charges. The essentialists have not merely built a category, they have failed to see that they built it, and the failure reads in his work as a fault, a deficiency, a lapse the field ought to repair. His signature demand is reflexive criticism. The scholar must examine the assumptions of his own method, must face the constructed character of his object, must refuse the convenient belief in a communal essence. Each must carries an ought. Turner’s frame asks where the ought comes from and what gives it force.
Start with the word wrong, because Schreier needs it. His critique holds that the essentialists got something wrong, that their readings mistake a construction for an essence, that they err. Wrong, mistake, error, these are normative terms, and they claim a standard against which the essentialist reading falls short. Turner presses the claim hard. Wrong relative to what, and what makes that standard binding on a man rather than one more trained habit competing with his? The essentialist learned his habits in his formation, acquired the disposition to read a Jewish self in the texts, and reproduces the disposition in his students. Schreier learned different habits in a different formation, the theory-formed humanities of the 1990s, and acquired the disposition to distrust essences and prize reflexivity. Two trained dispositions, two ways of reading, each reproducing itself through its own students and sanctions. To call one wrong and the other correct is to posit a normative fact that ranks them, and Turner says no such fact arrives. There is the standard Schreier prefers and the rhetoric that converts the preference into a verdict the essentialists stand convicted under.
The conversion is the part Turner watches. Normativism works by turning a habit into an obligation. Schreier values reflexivity, and his community rewards reflexivity, and out of the valuing and the rewarding comes a standard. Then the standard changes grammar. It stops being something Schreier favors and becomes something the field is bound to honor, a mark of serious scholarship the naive essentialist has failed to meet. Turner would identify the change of grammar as the trick. The reflexive demand presents itself as a requirement of good criticism as such, binding on anyone who would do the work properly, when it is the trained preference of a particular intellectual culture given the voice of necessity. Reflexivity is not superior by some normative fact. A community produces the disposition, rewards its display, and elevates it to a duty the outsiders are answerable to. The duty is the preference wearing a uniform.
The transcendental shape sits under the argument. Schreier’s case runs on a buried requirement. Good scholarship requires that the critic face his constructions, and without that facing the field falls into the error of essentialism. The requires does the work, and Turner asks for the receipt. Essentialist literary study runs fine on its own terms. Men do it, publish it, get hired for it, train others in it, and the practice reproduces itself across generations without collapse. In what sense, then, is it required to be otherwise? Only relative to the standard Schreier brings from his own formation. The necessity is an illusion produced by mistaking the failure to meet his standard for a failure to meet a standard the practice is bound by. The essentialists are not failing at the thing they do. They are doing a different thing, and Schreier’s requires names his wish that they would stop, dressed as a law they are breaking.
Turner’s long work on expertise sharpens the point, because Schreier is an expert claiming normative authority over a field. His books and his editorship and his chair give him standing, and from that standing he tells the field what it ought to recognize about its own object. Turner asks how such a claim gets cashed. The expert who says you ought to defer to my account of what is correct makes a bid for authority, and the normative clothing hides the bid. Schreier’s demand that the field face its constructions reads on this frame as a move to install his vantage as the one from which the field’s practice gets judged. The authority is real as power and unearned as a normative fact. He cannot show that the field is bound to accept his standard. He can show that he holds the position from which the standard issues, which is a different thing, and the normative talk runs the two together so that the power passes for correctness.
The reflexive turn arrives where it always arrives with Turner, and the normative version cuts a clean line. Schreier demands that the critic examine the assumptions of his method. He examines the essentialist’s assumption of a communal self. He does not examine his own assumption that reflexivity binds, that anti-essentialism is correct, that the field owes its categories a reckoning. Those oughts ride along unexamined, and they are the normativism, the residue of binding standards he never turns the reflexive question upon. A man who pressed Schreier’s own demand to the end would ask Schreier to face the constructed character of his sense that scholars ought to face the constructed character of their objects. The demand for reflexivity is a trained habit elevated to a duty, and the reflexive critic, so thorough about his colleagues’ assumptions, leaves his own deepest assumption, that there is a right way to do this and the others are failing it, standing untouched in the doorway.
A limit. Turner’s deflation of the normative threatens every evaluation, including the evaluations a critic cannot do without. A literary scholar has to say some readings are better than others, some careless and some careful, and if there are no normative facts then Schreier’s charge of error against the essentialists loses its ground, and so does any charge anyone might bring against Schreier, and so does Turner’s own complaint against normativism, which sounds like a claim about how theory ought to proceed. Turner has his replies. He is no flat relativist, and he holds that men can prefer and argue for their preferences without pretending the preferences are normative facts discovered in a higher domain. The reply tells where Schreier might survive and where he sinks. He survives where he frames his anti-essentialism as the more useful approach, the one he favors and recommends and will argue for, a habit he prefers and asks others to try. He sinks where he frames it as what the field is bound to see, what serious scholarship requires, what the essentialists stand in error against. The first is a preference a man can defend. The second is an IOU he writes against a domain Turner says is empty, and the note never clears.

Hero System

Two terrors sit under a life. The first is the body, the animal fact, the meat that fails and goes into the ground. The second cuts deeper in certain men. It is the suspicion that nothing about a life reaches past the flesh, that the name goes when the body goes, that the work was a way to fill the hours. Ernest Becker (1924-1974) built his picture of man on these two terrors and called the human answer a hero system. A hero system tells a man how to count. It hands him a path to significance inside a scheme that outlasts his body, and the scheme can be the nation, the faith, the bloodline, the cause, the book that stays on the shelf after the man who wrote it is gone. The hero system is a denial of death wearing the clothes of a purpose.
Schreier built his hero on a refusal. Where other men reach for an essence to belong to, a communal self that holds them and survives them, he made his name showing that the essence was never there. The field of Jewish American literary study believed it studied a Jewish communal soul living in the texts. Schreier showed the soul was built, assembled by editors and critics and teachers who decided who belonged. His heroism is the heroism of the man who will not be fooled. That posture has a long pedigree and a particular cost, and Becker gives us the tools to read both.
Every hero system rests on a story about something missing. The story names a lack, and the heroism repairs it or stares it down. Schreier’s story is the story of the absent essence. The field thought it possessed a thing, and the thing was gone, was never present, was only ever a construction men mistook for a substance. Take away the comforting essence, his work says, and the field will grow up. What remains when the illusion goes is the honest scholar, clear-eyed, facing the made character of his world without the crutch the others lean on. This is a subtraction story. It promises that you reach maturity by stripping away the consolations, and that the man left standing in the cleared field is the adult in the room.
Becker spent his life on the flaw in that promise. The cleared field is never empty. Strip one hero system and another moves into the space, and the man who subtracts the old consolation rarely notices that he has installed a new one. The demystifier has his own immortality project. It is demystification. He earns his significance by being the one who saw through what the others swallowed, and that role outlasts the body as surely as any creed. The believer wins his place in the scheme by belonging. The unbeliever wins his place by refusing to belong, and the refusal becomes a faith with its own saints and its own contempt for the unconverted. Schreier’s hero is the man who would not be consoled, and Becker’s question is whether that refusal is a consolation.
Hold the word at the center of the man. Call it honesty. Schreier’s honesty means facing the construction, refusing the essence, naming the seams in what looks seamless. He treats this as a near-universal good, the thing serious scholarship owes. The trouble is that honesty means a different thing in every hero system, and the differences run deep, and a man rarely sees that his honesty is the local honesty of his tribe rather than honesty as such.
Take a hospice chaplain at the bedside of a dying woman. Honesty for him does not mean stripping her of comfort. It means staying in the room when the prognosis is bad and not pretending it is good, holding her hand while telling her the truth she can bear, and the truth she can bear includes the promise that she is held by something larger than the disease. His honesty is presence under God, whose name he capitalizes and whose mercy he believes runs through the moment. To strip the dying woman of consolation would be to him a cruelty, not a candor. His hero system rewards the man who carries others toward the end without lying and without abandoning them to the void. Honesty here is fidelity.
Take a deep-sea welder, two hundred feet down, sealing a pipeline joint in the dark. Honesty for him means the weld that holds. He cannot fake it. The pressure tests the joint, and the joint passes or men die. His honesty is the refusal of the cosmetic, the surface that looks finished and fails under load. He earns his standing among the other divers by work that survives the test no rhetoric can talk past. His hero system has no place for the elegant argument. It has place for the thing that holds when the water presses in. Honesty here is the weld.
Take a woman who left a secular life and became observant, a baal teshuva keeping a kosher home she did not grow up in, learning the laws as an adult. Honesty for her means submission to a word she takes as given rather than made. She found her freedom in accepting that the obligations are not hers to construct, that the self is answerable to a law older than the self, and that the deepest honesty is the admission that she did not invent the good and cannot. Her hero system rewards the woman who bends her will to the revealed order and finds herself enlarged by the bending. Schreier’s honesty would call her essence a construction. Her honesty calls his construction a refusal to kneel. Each reads the other’s candor as evasion.
Take a quant at a trading desk who builds the model that prices the firm’s risk. Honesty for him means the number that does not flatter, the figure that tells the partners their favorite position will blow up. He earns his place by the unblinking estimate, the model that resists the wish. His honesty is the cold figure against the warm story everyone wants to believe. He and Schreier share a temper here, the suspicion of the comforting account, and they would still part on the question of where the comfort hides, because the quant trusts his number as a fact about the world and Schreier would ask who built the number and whose interests it serves.
Take a matador. The Spanish bullring has a word for it, the truth of the faena, the honest pass worked close to the horns rather than the safe pass faked at a distance. His honesty is the willingness to stand where the animal can reach him. He earns immortality, the only kind his hero system offers, by facing death in the afternoon and not flinching, and the crowd reads his courage in the inches between his body and the horn. Honesty for him is proximity to the thing that kills. Schreier faces no horn. His danger is the bad review, the unanswered argument, the slot that fills before he reaches it. The matador might find the scholar’s honesty bloodless, a courage with nothing at stake but reputation, and the scholar might find the matador’s honesty a vanity dressed as nerve. Both call their own version the real one.
Set Schreier’s honesty beside these and its shape comes clear. His honesty is demystification, the act of showing that what looked given was made. Inside his hero system this is the supreme virtue, the thing that separates the adult from the child, the critic from the dupe. He earns his significance by performing it across two books and a long editorship, and the performance grants him a name that will sit in the field’s footnotes after the body fails. The chaplain earns his place by fidelity, the welder by the weld, the baal teshuva by submission, the quant by the figure, the matador by the horns. Schreier earns his by seeing through. Each man calls his own coin honesty, and each spends it for the same wage, a stake in something that survives him.
How much of this does the man see? Schreier’s method is the demand for self-examination. He tells the field to face its assumptions, to turn the critical eye on its own categories, to refuse the convenient belief. He runs the demand on his colleagues with discipline. He does not appear to run it on his own hero. The reflexive critic, so sharp about the essentialist’s comfort, leaves his own comfort standing in the doorway, the comfort of being the man who exposes comfort. He sees that the communal self is an immortality project for the men who hold it. He does not seem to see that demystification is an immortality project for the man who performs it. The self-awareness is high in form and stops at the one place it might cost him. This is the common shape of the debunker. He audits every faith but the faith that he is above faith.
The shape of the hero, first. Schreier is the cosmic skeptic, the man who wins his place in the scheme by refusing every scheme but skepticism. He stands where the prophet once stood, calling the people off their idols, and the prophet’s old danger follows him, the danger of mistaking the smashing of idols for the absence of worship. He worships clarity. He serves it the way the chaplain serves God and the matador serves the bull, and his service buys him the same thing theirs buys them, a defense against the suspicion that the name dies with the body.
The unnamed rival, second. He defines himself against a man he rarely names, the consoled man, the scholar who reads the Jewish self in the texts and sleeps well, the believer in the essence. The rival is the figure who belongs without apology, who takes the communal soul as given and is warmed by it. Schreier’s hero needs that man to exist, because a demystifier with no one left to demystify has no role to play. He is bound to the essentialist the way the unbeliever is bound to the church he left, and the binding shows in how steadily he returns to the same target across a career.
The cost the ledger cannot price, last. The man who dissolves the communal self in others cannot keep it for himself. He showed the field that its belonging was built, and the showing left him outside the building he took apart. The chaplain has his God, the welder his crew, the baal teshuva her law and her table, the matador his crowd. Schreier has the clarity, and clarity is a cold thing to be held by at the end. He traded the warmth of the given self for the standing of the man who proved it was made, and the trade reads as a victory in every column the field can count. The column the field cannot count holds the thing he gave away, the home he might have lived in had he been willing to believe it was real.

The Voice

Read Benjamin Schreier in his own pages and a voice comes up off the paper at once, unmistakable and worked. Start with the sentence, because the sentence is where he lives. He writes long, and he writes loaded. A characteristic sentence opens on a claim, then qualifies it, then qualifies the qualification, then turns on a colon or a dash and delivers the point it has been circling. He packs subordinate clauses inside subordinate clauses, and he trusts the reader to hold the whole structure in mind until the close. The prose moves the way a man thinks aloud when he distrusts every simple version of what he means. He will not say a thing plainly if a plain saying would let a false ease slip in.
The diction runs to the theoretical, and he wears it without apology. Hegemonic, historicist, epistemological, interpellated, ethnological, autocritique, representativity. These are the working tools of the theory-formed humanities, and Schreier reaches for them as a carpenter reaches for the plane, not to show the tool but to take the surface off. The vocabulary marks his tribe and does his labor at the same time. A reader outside the seminar feels the door close a little. A reader inside hears a man fluent in the house language, using it to say something the house does not want said.
Against that density he sets a second register, and the contrast is the signature. He coins blunt, almost rude tags for the things he attacks. He calls the field’s self-image the JCC conception of Jewish studies, and the joke lands because the Jewish Community Center is the warm suburban building where Jewishness means bagels and a gym membership, and he means the field has confused that comfort for thought. He calls the 1950s arrival of Bellow (1915-2005) and Malamud (1914-1986) and Roth and Grace Paley (1922-2007) the breakthrough, in scare quotes, and then names it the primal scene of the field, borrowing Freud to suggest the discipline keeps reenacting a founding it cannot look at. He writes that a Jew is a Jew is a Jew when it comes to keyword searches, turning Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) into a jab at the field’s unexamined faith that it knows a Jew when it sees one. The high theory and the low jab work the same seam. He uses the fancy word to dismantle and the rude word to deflate, and a paragraph will swing from one to the other inside a single breath.
He likes the diagnostic metaphor, and the diagnosis is always of sickness. The field’s habits contaminate its discourse. Its clubbiness metastasizes. Its insiderism is insidious. He reaches for the language of disease and of bad faith because he reads the field as a body protecting a comfort it should have outgrown, and the medical figure lets him sound less like a colleague with a disagreement and more like a man naming a pathology others have agreed not to see. The reviewers caught the temperature. They call him relentlessly intelligent, frequently polemical, bracing, a passionate wake-up call, and one of them, less charmed, notes the easy dismissals, the quick swipe at a rival critic in passing rather than the patient engagement.
The Yiddish and Hebrew matter, because of how he handles them. He drops sholom bayis, peace in the home, and sinas chinam, baseless hatred, into the argument in italics, and he uses them against the people who use them. The field, he says, treats hard criticism as a breach of the peace, as a kind of baseless hatred among Jews, and so it leaves its arguments at the door and calls the leaving virtue. He takes the community’s own pieties, the words a rabbi might use to keep peace at a fractious table, and shows them working as a gag. A man raised near those words knows their weight. He spends the weight to make his point, which is a move available only to an insider, and he is an insider attacking the privileges of being one.
His rhetoric runs on direct address and the staged question. He stops to ask why anyone should care how old the field is, answers fair question, and proceeds. He poses the objection a hostile reader would raise and takes it on the chin in the open. This is the manner of a man who wants the fight in public. He says so. He opens the essay on the field by praising expressed antagonism and calling the willingness to have it out a lost art, and he closes it by saying that not taking the field for granted means having fights, and asking how else scholarly work could carry any dignity. The pugnacity is the point and the brand. Where his colleagues prize sholom bayis, he prizes the argument conducted loudly enough that the room must turn and watch.
There is a tonal split between the books and the op-ed, and the split tells you something. In the monographs and the field essays the sentences thicken and the theory runs deepest, because the audience is the guild and the guild rewards the difficult surface. In the Chronicle, writing against the recommendation letter for a general academic reader, the prose shortens and hardens, and he calls the genre dishonest and useless for everyone in a subtitle a child could parse. The man can write plain when he wants the blow to land on a wide audience, and he writes dense when he wants standing inside the field. The choice is strategic, not a limit. He knows two registers and picks the one the room rewards.
Irony coats most of it. He rarely states contempt outright. He lets the adjective carry it, the much-ballyhooed breakthrough, the self-congratulatory emancipation, the field patting itself on the back, the scholar primping for his fellow insiders. He builds a sentence so that the sarcasm sits in a single chosen word and the rest stays level, which lets him deny heat while delivering it. The aside in parentheses does similar work, a quick concession or a muttered perish the thought that signals he sees the obvious objection and finds it beneath a full answer. The manner is donnish, quick, a little superior, the voice of a man who has thought about this longer than you have and wants you to feel the gap without his having to assert it.
What you do not find is warmth toward the object. He writes about Jewish American literature with great energy and almost no affection for the comfortable version of it. The feeling in the prose attaches to the act of seeing through, not to the books or the writers or the people. When he quotes Leslie Fiedler (1917-2003) admitting that his criticism was never disinterested, that he wrote as a Jew about the movement that carried Jews to the center, Schreier is not warmed by the confession. He uses it as evidence, the field caught in the act of mistaking autobiography for scholarship. Even his praise tends to be praise for candor about interest, for a man owning the bias Schreier wants to expose. He capitalizes on honesty wherever he finds it and reserves his own for the demolition.
The whole performance has a cost built into its surface, and a careful reader feels it. The density that proves seriousness to the guild also walls the work off from the community it concerns, the Jews who fund the chairs and fill the JCCs and would not finish a paragraph of the prose written about them. The pugnacity that he frames as the recovery of a lost honesty also reads, at moments, as a man enjoying the fight for its own sake. And the irony that protects him from sounding merely angry also keeps a certain coldness at the center, the sense that the writer is never quite in the room with the thing he describes, always a half step above it, narrating the autopsy. He writes, near the end of that field essay, that Jewishness should center a community of critique rather than a community of interest. The line is the man entire. He would trade the warm room full of people who belong for a colder room full of people who argue, and he writes in the prose of the second room, to the second room, against the first.

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Roger Pilon: Natural Rights, Judicial Engagement, and Constitutional Liberty

Posted on June 23, 2026 by Luke Ford

Roger Pilon (b. 1942) is an American political philosopher, constitutional theorist, and legal scholar whose work across more than four decades has shaped modern libertarian constitutionalism, and whose name now stands among the foremost American advocates of natural-rights theory, limited government, economic liberty, and constitutional originalism. Through his long association with the Cato Institute, where he founded the Center for Constitutional Studies in 1989 and served thereafter as vice president for legal affairs, Pilon became an architect of the libertarian legal movement, and his writings on natural rights, judicial review, property, federalism, and constitutional interpretation have reached scholars, judges, litigators, and policymakers who otherwise share little common ground.

His path to intellectual life departed from the conventional academic route in ways that mark the rest of his career. Born in Vermont and raised near the village of Galway in rural upstate New York, Pilon enrolled at Syracuse University as an engineering major, switched to music, and, finding neither discipline satisfying, left formal education for roughly seven years, a stretch he later described as an intellectual odyssey of various jobs, wide reading, and slow movement toward philosophy, political theory, economics, and law. He returned to higher education in 1968 with a clearer sense of purpose and took a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Columbia University in 1971.

Pilon continued at the University of Chicago, where he earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in philosophy. His dissertation, A Theory of Rights: Toward Limited Government (1979), examined the philosophical foundations of individual rights and the moral limits of political authority, and it carried the marks of three influences who supervised or surrounded the project: the philosophers Alan Gewirth (1912-2004) and Alan Donagan (1925-1991), who directed the work, and the economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006), whose presence at Chicago colored the broader intellectual setting. During these years Pilon also met the law-and-economics scholarship then forming at Chicago, a body of thought that would inform his later constitutional writing.

The defense of natural rights has supplied the central theme of his career. Drawing on John Locke (1632-1704), the American Founders, and the wider classical liberal inheritance, Pilon argues that individuals hold rights because of their nature as rational and purposive agents, that such rights do not originate in government, and that governments instead come into existence to secure rights already in place. On this account the legitimacy of any political institution turns on how well it protects life, liberty, and property while respecting the equal rights of others.

This starting point leads him to a sharp distinction between liberty rights and welfare rights. Liberty rights guard the individual against coercion and interference. Welfare rights, by contrast, require government to compel some men to furnish resources or services to others. Pilon argues that governments may choose to establish social programs, yet such programs ought not be mistaken for fundamental rights, a position that places him within the classical liberal tradition and that has shaped his criticism of expansive government programs and regulatory systems.

Property occupies a place near the center of his thought. He treats property not as an economic institution alone but as a condition of personal independence, holding that secure control over one’s labor and possessions guards the other liberties, which grow vulnerable without it. Much of his scholarship therefore criticizes the judicial doctrines and regulatory practices that weaken constitutional protection of private property, and he has pressed a long argument against eminent-domain abuse, against heavy regulation, and against doctrines that let governments load substantial burdens on owners without compensation.

His constitutional theory joins originalism to a broader commitment to the principles of the American Revolution as stated in the Declaration of Independence. Pilon argues that the Declaration of Independence supplies the moral ground of the American constitutional order and that the Constitution then builds the institutions meant to secure those principles, and for that reason he rejects procedural or majoritarian readings of constitutional government, holding that democratic majorities carry legitimate authority only within the boundaries set by individual rights.

A defining feature of his legal philosophy has been a long quarrel with judicial restraint. Across the late twentieth century many conservative legal thinkers, Robert Bork (1927-2012) foremost among them, argued that judges should defer to legislatures except where a constitutional violation appears explicit and unmistakable. Pilon refused that view. He held that courts carry an affirmative duty to protect liberty against governmental encroachment and should not presume the constitutionality of legislative acts, and decades before the term gained currency he argued for what later acquired the name judicial engagement, an approach under which courts enforce constitutional limits on government power and give substantive protection to individual rights.

His scholarship on the Fourteenth Amendment shows the same commitment. Pilon argues that the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was meant to protect substantive individual rights against the states, and he regards the Supreme Court’s decision in The Slaughter-House Cases as among the gravest constitutional errors in American history because it drained that clause of force. Restoring the clause to its original meaning, he contends, might strengthen constitutional protection for economic liberty, property, and other freedoms.

Though known mostly as a scholar, Pilon also gathered considerable government experience. Under the administration of Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) he held a series of senior policy posts at the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of State, and the Department of Justice. At the Justice Department he served as the first director of the Asylum Policy and Review Unit, where he worked on refugee and asylum questions during a period of large international migration and Cold War strain, and the experience deepened a skepticism toward bureaucratic expansion and confirmed his sense that administrative agencies often wield powers hard to square with constitutional principle.

One episode from these years carried a personal cost. A lengthy inquiry by the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility considered an alleged disclosure of classified information, and Pilon maintained his innocence throughout. After his clearance he brought suit under the Privacy Act, arguing that confidential information about the investigation had leaked. The litigation ended in his favor with a substantial settlement, an outcome that hardened his standing as a critic of governmental abuse and administrative misconduct.

Before his government service Pilon taught philosophy at California State University, Sonoma, and philosophy of law at Emory University School of Law, and he held a fellowship at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellowship at the Institute for Humane Studies. These posts tied him to a widening network of scholars devoted to free markets, constitutional government, and classical liberal ideas.

In 1989 Pilon joined the Cato Institute and founded what became an influential center for constitutional study. Under his direction the Center for Constitutional Studies advanced scholarship on limited government, federalism, economic liberty, and judicial review, and it grew into a venue for debate over constitutional interpretation and legal reform. Pilon organized conferences, sponsored research, testified before Congress, and built relationships among academics, judges, litigators, and policy experts drawn to the project of restoring constitutional limits on government power.

Among his lasting institutional achievements stands the Cato Supreme Court Review, which he created in 2001. Conceived as an annual study of the Court from a classical liberal vantage, the publication became a respected forum for legal analysis and constitutional argument. Pilon served as its founding publisher and later as publisher emeritus, and through the Review and the wider work of Cato’s constitutional program he carried libertarian legal arguments into the mainstream discussion of constitutional law.

He has written across a wide range of subjects, from free speech, federalism, and economic liberty to drug prohibition, judicial review, constitutional history, and international human rights, and he has edited volumes that include Flag-Burning, Discrimination, and the Right to Do Wrong, The Politics and Law of Term Limits, and The Rule of Law in the Wake of Clinton. His writing returns again and again to the danger of concentrated political power and to the place of constitutional constraint in the preservation of individual freedom.

Unlike many conservative constitutional theorists, Pilon grounds rights in reason rather than theology. He acknowledges the historical weight of Christianity on Western political development, yet he argues that natural rights admit of justification through philosophical reasoning open to all men whatever their religious belief, a rationalist orientation that reflects both his philosophical training and his continuing engagement with Enlightenment political thought.

His influence runs past libertarian circles. Scholars who work on judicial engagement, constitutional originalism, economic liberty, and limits on administrative power often take up arguments that Pilon helped form decades earlier, and while critics challenge his reliance on natural-rights reasoning and his skepticism toward the modern regulatory state, even opponents grant his standing as a consistent defender of classical liberal constitutionalism.

Pilon remains a senior fellow at Cato and continues to write and speak on constitutional questions, property, the Declaration of Independence, and the proper scope of government. His later writing circles back to the themes that have held him throughout: the moral foundations of liberty, the hazards of unconstrained political power, and the constitutional architecture built to protect individual rights.

He is married to Juliana Geran Pilon, a Romanian-born philosopher, author, and scholar of democracy and international affairs, and their shared formation in philosophy reflects a long intellectual partnership rooted in a common interest in political thought and the defense of free societies.

The significance of Roger Pilon rests not in his scholarship alone but in his work as a bridge among academic philosophy, constitutional law, and public policy. At a time when many legal scholars settled into either abstract theory or practical litigation, Pilon tied foundational questions about rights and human freedom to concrete constitutional disputes, and through that effort he became an architect of contemporary libertarian legal thought and a leading advocate of limited constitutional government in modern America.

The Sociology of Philosophies

Randall Collins (b. 1941) wrote The Sociology of Philosophies to press a hard claim about how ideas rise. Thinkers do not win on the strength of their arguments alone. They win on position in a network. The eminent cluster with the eminent, master to pupil and rival against rival, and the names that survive tend to sit at the dense crossings of these chains. Collins read two and a half millennia of philosophy this way and found one shape across cultures and centuries: a small set of linked figures holds the attention of each generation, the link comes first and the fame second, and the texts that endure carry the emotional charge of the gatherings that produced them. Set Pilon against this frame and the life hands the frame its data.

Begin with the chain that formed him. Collins holds that creative thinkers descend from creative thinkers, that cultural capital and emotional energy pass down master-pupil lines the way an inheritance passes down a family. Pilon took his doctorate at Chicago under Gewirth and Donagan, two philosophers already at work on the foundations of rights and moral agency, and he did so within reach of Friedman and the law-and-economics scholarship then gathering force at the same place. On Collins’s reading this matters more than any single book Pilon later wrote. He arrived at his own work charged by contact with men who held the attention of their fields, and he carried their problems forward as his own. Gewirth argued rights from the structure of rational agency. Pilon’s dissertation, A Theory of Rights: Toward Limited Government, took up that thread and ran it toward constitutional limits. The continuity reads less as borrowing than as descent.

Collins adds a second law, the one he calls the law of small numbers. The attention space of any field holds room for only a handful of active positions at a time, somewhere between three and six. Below three there is too little conflict to hold an audience. Above six the field splinters and no position commands notice. Rivals therefore define one another, and a thinker secures his slot by standing against the men who hold the neighboring slots. Place Pilon here and his quarrel with judicial restraint comes into focus. Across the late twentieth century the conservative legal field organized itself around restraint, and Bork held that position with authority. Pilon took the opposing slot and argued for what later acquired the name judicial engagement: courts that enforce constitutional limits rather than defer to legislatures. The two positions sharpen against each other. Engagement needs restraint to push against, and the energy of the argument comes from the opposition as much as from the substance. Collins would read the pairing as structural before it is philosophical.

The third element is the base. Collins insists that no intellectual position survives without an organizational base and a patron to fund it. Monasteries carried medieval philosophy. Universities and academies carried what came after. Shift the base and the field shifts with it. Most thinkers inherit a base, a chair in a department built by men who came before. Pilon built his own. He had taught at Sonoma and at Emory and had held fellowships at Hoover and the Institute for Humane Studies, the ordinary stations of an academic career, and then in 1989 he left that path and founded the Center for Constitutional Studies at Cato. The move reads, in Collins’s terms, as the creation of a base outside the university, funded by the patronage that sustains the libertarian network, and stocked deliberately with the carriers a position needs to spread: not other philosophers alone but judges, litigators, and policy experts who could move the argument from the page into the courts. A philosopher who recruits litigators has understood something Collins makes explicit. Ideas travel through their carriers.

The base needs its rituals, and here too the life cooperates. Collins draws his account of emotional energy from the study of interaction rituals, the focused gatherings that generate solidarity and recharge the confidence of the men inside them. Pilon ran conferences, testified before Congress, and built relationships across the field, and in 2001 he founded the Cato Supreme Court Review, an annual study of the Court from the libertarian vantage. An annual review is a ritual in Collins’s sense. It assembles the network on a fixed cycle, focuses its attention on a shared object, and sends its members back to their work charged with the sense that they belong to a project larger than any one of them. The Review did for Pilon’s circle what the seminar and the academy did for the chains Collins traced across history. It manufactured the solidarity that keeps a position alive between generations.

The judicial engagement idea rose, Collins’s account suggests, less because the argument compelled assent than because Pilon occupied a slot, built a base, ran the rituals, and recruited the carriers who could push the position into the institutions that decide cases. The merits of the natural-rights argument sit outside the frame. Collins brackets the question of whether a thinker is correct and asks instead how his position captured and held a share of the attention space. By that measure Pilon succeeded through the same route Collins found everywhere: descent from an eminent chain, a defining rivalry, a self-built base, a patron, and a ritual that renewed the arrangement on schedule.

Pilon presents himself as a man who reasons rights from human nature and follows the argument where it leads, and the natural-rights tradition trains its defenders to tell the story that way, as conviction against power. Collins relocates the story in the network. The conviction is real and the frame does not deny it. The frame holds that conviction alone never built an attention space, and that the rise of judicial engagement runs through Chicago, through Cato, through the Review, and through the litigators who carried it, more than through the force of any single proof.

What the frame leaves out is the content of the rights themselves and the question of whether the Privileges or Immunities argument or the reading of The Slaughter-House Cases states something true about the constitutional order. Collins does not arbitrate that. He maps the network that carried the claim into the room where it could be heard. Pilon’s life supplies what the theory asks for, and the theory returns a Pilon who looks less like a philosopher alone with a principle and more like a node that found its slot, built its base, and held its share of the attention space for forty years.

The Great Delusion

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.

Pilon grounds rights in man’s nature as a rational and purposive agent. Rights precede government. They reach all men through reason, whatever the creed or culture a man happens to inherit, and Pilon takes care to ground them in reason rather than theology so that the claim might hold for everyone and not for believers alone. The rights-bearing individual stands first, the group and the government after, and property guards the independence that lets the individual stand at all. The architecture rests on three loads: the individual is prior, reason is the faculty that finds his rights, and the rights so found hold for every man.

Mearsheimer pulls each load.

He pulls the faculty first. Pilon rests the structure on reason, and Mearsheimer ranks reason the weakest of the three sources and the last to arrive. The faculty Pilon makes foundational shows up after a man’s society has already stocked him with a code, which means the rights Pilon says any man can reason toward are, on Mearsheimer’s account, reached by almost no man through reason, because reason is not the place moral codes come from. Pilon’s foundation turns out to be the part of the human equipment that does the least work.

He pulls the unit next. Pilon’s individual holds rights before any government and, in the logic of the argument, before any group. Mearsheimer’s individual is born into a society that forms him before he can assert a self, and develops attachments to that society strong enough to die for. The atomistic rights-bearer, the self who owns himself prior to the social world, is the figure Mearsheimer says liberalism invents and then mistakes for something it found in nature. Liberty rights that guard the self against coercion and property that secures the self’s independence both presuppose a self standing apart from the group. Mearsheimer denies there is one.

He pulls the reach last, and this pull does the most damage to the thing Pilon cares about. Pilon left theology for reason to win the universal, rights for all men whatever they believe. Mearsheimer answers that moral codes come from socialization and inborn sentiment, both of them local, both varying from group to group, so the universal Pilon reaches for through reason collapses back into the particular code of one society. The flight from creed lands in another creed wearing different clothes.

What then for Pilon, if Mearsheimer is right?

His universalism reads as parochialism in disguise. The natural rights he calls human nature become the moral inheritance of a particular people, Lockean, Enlightenment, American, dressed up as the structure of all human nature and offered to the species. Mearsheimer ties this move to foreign policy, to the liberal state that goes abroad to spread rights it takes for universal. Pilon keeps his work at home, on the Constitution and the courts, yet the intellectual move underneath is the one Mearsheimer names: take the code of your own society, run it through reason, and present the output as a discovery about man as such.

Something of Pilon survives the demolition, though not the part he would defend hardest. Mearsheimer grants that liberalism works inside a nation-state, nested within a bounded group held together by the stronger force of nationalism. Pilon’s constitutional project can survive on those terms, re-described as the defense of one nation’s inherited settlement rather than the application of universal reason. The American order is a particular people’s achievement, and a man who guards it guards his tribe’s arrangement. That is the last name Pilon claims for what he does. Mearsheimer hands it to him anyway.

The stress test owes Pilon a fair limit, and here it is. Mearsheimer’s anthropology describes how men come to believe what they believe. Pilon’s claim is normative, that rights exist however a man arrives at the sight of them. A story about how a belief forms does not settle whether the belief is true. Mathematics also arrives after the value infusion, and its lateness says nothing about whether its theorems hold. Pilon can answer, then, that Mearsheimer has explained why few men reason their way to natural rights without showing that natural rights are not there to be reasoned toward. To explain the rarity of a belief is not to refute it.

The standoff costs Pilon more than it costs Mearsheimer. Mearsheimer dissolves the social plausibility of the universal claim and leaves Pilon a foundation that almost no man reaches through the faculty Pilon says delivers it, defended by a tradition that looks, from the outside, like one tribe’s code raised to the dignity of human nature. Pilon keeps the bare possibility that the rights are real and waiting. Whether a moral foundation that nearly no one reaches by reason can still serve as the foundation it claims to be is the question Mearsheimer forces and Pilon cannot walk around. The rationalist grounding that was supposed to open natural rights to every man becomes, if Mearsheimer is right, the narrowest beam in the house.

The Man Who Owes Nothing

He leaves Syracuse with nothing settled. Engineering first, then music, then neither, and then the long stretch of close to seven years, jobs and reading and no degree to hand a parent or a dean. A man can read his way out of one life and into another across years like those, and Pilon does. He comes back to school in 1968 already formed, already his own work, and earns the Columbia degree in 1971 and the Chicago doctorate after. The pattern holds for the rest of the life. He builds what he stands on. He founds his own center in 1989 rather than take a chair some other man built. He grounds rights in reason so that no priest need vouch for them. He owes the standing to no one, and that, more than any single argument, is the shape of the man.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) wrote The Denial of Death to explain what such standing is for. A man knows two things an animal does not. He knows he will die, and he knows, in the meantime, that he is an animal, a thing that eats and sweats and rots, a creature of no obvious account against the size of the universe. These two facts, mortality and creatureliness, press on him every waking hour, and he cannot live under the full weight of them. So every culture hands him a hero system, a set of roles and prizes by which he can feel that his life counts for something that will not die with his body. The hero system is the answer to the terror. It tells a man how to earn significance, how to be of lasting worth, how to purchase a piece of the eternal with the coin of a single life. Becker calls the deepest version of this project causa sui, the wish to be the cause of oneself, to be one’s own father, to owe one’s existence to no one and so to slip the leash of dependence and, behind dependence, of death.

Read Pilon through that lens and the wandering years stop looking like indecision. They look like the first move in a causa sui project carried out with rare consistency. The subtraction comes first. Pilon subtracts the inherited path, the degree taken on schedule. He subtracts theology from the ground of rights, grounding them in reason so the structure stands without God’s signature. He subtracts the borrowed institution and raises his own. What remains after the subtractions is a self that claims to rest on itself, a man who reasons his rights out of his own nature and bolts them to a Constitution built to outlast him. The eternal thing Pilon attaches himself to is not heaven and not the tribe. The eternal thing is rights, which on his account precede every government and survive it, and which therefore do not die.

Now the sacred words. Pilon keeps three close: liberty, property, rights. They serve one master word under them, and the master word is independence. Liberty is the absence of another man’s hand on you. Property is the wall that keeps the hand off. Rights are the title to the wall. Strip the technical layers and the thing being protected is a self that stands alone, owes nothing, asks nothing, and answers to no one but its own reason. For Pilon independence is the proof of dignity and the highest of the goods. A man who depends is a man diminished. A man who needs is a man exposed. The free man is the man who has arranged his life so that he need not need.

Hold that word up, independence, and carry it into other hero systems, because a sacred word means nothing until you know which terror it answers and which heaven it buys.

Carry it to a dying man in a hospice bed, three days from the end, who spent forty years building a life that required no one. He says it plainly to the chaplain who comes in the afternoon. “I never wanted to be a burden. I arranged everything so I would never have to ask.” His hands move on the blanket. “And now I need someone to lift the cup. I need someone to turn me. I wish I had practiced needing people. I wish I had not waited until I had no choice.” For this man independence is not the prize. Independence is the thing he must lay down to die well, the long habit that left him alone at the one hour belonging is the only comfort.

Carry it to a Maori elder on the bank of a river his people have named as an ancestor and a person in law. Ask him whether the river is his property, whether he holds independent title. He laughs, not unkindly. “You ask the wrong question. The river does not belong to me. I belong to the river, and so did my grandfather, and so will my granddaughter when I am bones.” For him the self that owns and stands alone is a category mistake, a knot that thinks it is the whole rope. Significance comes through the line that runs from the dead to the unborn, and a man’s worth is his place in that line, not his title to a parcel he can sell.

Carry it to a Trappist in a cloister who rose at three for vigils and will rise at three tomorrow. He took a vow of obedience and counts it the day he was set free. “I have no will of my own inside these walls,” he says, and his face when he says it holds no grief. “That is the freedom. The man outside spends his strength deciding. I gave the deciding to God and to the abbot, and what is left over I give to prayer.” For him independence wears the old name of pride, the first sin, the one that wanted to be its own cause and fell. The hero system here runs the other way from Pilon’s. A man earns the eternal by emptying the self, not by fortifying it.

Carry it to a sergeant who came back from a long deployment and buried two men from his squad. Say the word independence to him and watch his jaw set. “Out there the guy who wanted to do it his own way, who wanted to be the independent operator, that guy got people killed. You live because the man next to you carries your gear when you fall out. You owe him your life and he owes you his, and that debt is the only thing that holds when the rounds come in.” For him the free man who owes nothing is the dangerous man. Worth comes through the debt, through the unit, through the obligation Pilon’s free agent files under coercion.

Five men, one word. To Pilon it is the highest virtue. To the dying man it is the habit he regrets. To the elder it is a confusion. To the monk it is a sin. To the sergeant it is a hazard. The word does not float free with a fixed meaning a man can reason toward. The word lives inside a hero system and dies outside it, and each of these men reaches for the eternal by a route that makes Pilon’s route look not universal but particular, the chosen path of one tradition that prizes the standing-alone self above the held self, the bought wall above the inherited line.

How much of this does Pilon see. At the level of argument, a great deal. He knows he holds a position. He names his framework, defends it against rivals, grants that other men reason their way to other conclusions. He fought judicial restraint for decades and knew Bork held the opposite slot in good faith. His self-awareness as a thinker runs high. His self-awareness as a creature runs low, because the hero system is built to keep it low. A man cannot see his own death-denial as a death-denial and still draw comfort from it. Pilon experiences his love of independence as the recognition of a truth about human dignity. Becker says that is how it must feel from the inside. The vital lie does not announce itself. It presents itself as the plain sight of what is real.

Three coordinates close the reading.

The shape of the hero. Pilon is the self-caused man, the boy who walked away from the credential and spent seven years making himself, the scholar who grounded his rights in his own reason and his own institution, the figure who arranged a life and a philosophy so that he might owe his standing to no one and might fasten that standing to a thing, natural rights, that does not die. The denial of death takes, in him, the form of independence raised to a metaphysics.

The unnamed rival. Pilon names the state. The leviathan, the regulator, the eminent-domain officer, the agency that takes property without paying for it, these are the named enemies of the work. The rival he never names stands behind the state and wears it like a uniform. The rival is dependence, and behind dependence, death. The government that can coerce you, take your wall, end your independence is mortality in administrative dress, the one adversary a man cannot litigate against, displaced onto the one adversary he can. Pilon spent a career suing the stand-in.

The cost the ledger cannot price. Pilon built an accounting, liberty rights on one side, welfare rights on the other, the compelled transfer weighed against the protected sphere. The ledger is clean and the entries balance. What the ledger cannot price is the worth of being held. It has no column for the infant who owes everything and earns nothing and is loved past all desert, and no column for the old man who needs the cup lifted to his mouth, and these two, the cradle and the deathbed, are the pure cases of the human creature, the start and the finish Becker named. A life built to need no one arrives, at the end, needed by no one. That is the entry the man who owes nothing can never enter, because to enter it he would have to admit the debt, and the hero system stands on the refusal of the debt. He dies solvent and alone, the books square, the cup just out of reach.

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The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History

Posted on June 23, 2026 by Luke Ford

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

If John Mearsheimer’s thesis is correct, it directly undermines the entire foundation of Benjamin Schreier’s The Impossible Jew Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History. Mearsheimer’s assertion that humans are fundamentally tribal, socially embedded, and shaped by an early “value infusion” completely opposes Schreier’s desire to dismantle stable ethnic categories.

Schreier advocates for a “postidentitarian” and “subjectless” approach to Jewish studies, drawing on critics who try to decouple ethnic fields from a concrete, identifiable human population. He argues that a text’s Jewishness should be viewed as a spectral product of interpretive desire rather than a reflection of real Jews. If Mearsheimer is right, Schreier’s theory is a textbook example of hyper-individualistic liberal delusion. In Mearsheimer’s view, humans do not operate as lone wolves or choose their identities from a menu of textual desires; they are born into social groups that shape their identities long before they can think for themselves. Schreier’s attempt to vaporize the biological and sociological reality of “the population” ignores the evolutionary and social fact that group survival depends on cooperation and shared, inherited tribal realities.

Schreier fiercely critiques the historicist mainstream of Jewish studies for its “anthropological expectation” that a body of literature represents an actual, legible population. He calls this a complacent, nationalistic dead end. If Mearsheimer is right, this historicist “ghetto” is actually the only scientifically and sociologically valid way to read literature. Literature should be evaluated through the lens of population, socialization, and shared tribal experience because authors are products of intense early childhood socialization within their specific group. You cannot separate a text from the collective survival engine of the society that produced the writer.

In Chapter 3, Schreier attacks right-wing critics like Ruth Wisse who argue that the Jewish New York Intellectuals had a biological or cultural responsibility to a Jewish polity. Schreier prefers Lionel Trilling’s model of “self-conscious detachment from any position” and the preservation of individual imaginative freedom over collective affiliation. Mearsheimer’s framework suggests that Trilling’s detached, universalist individualism is a psychological impossibility. If humans are tribal at their core and reason is subordinate to socialization, then the New York Intellectuals could never truly strip away their early “value infusion.” Wisse’s argument that their identity naturally bound them to the fate of their group comports with Mearsheimer’s belief that individuals develop powerful, involuntary attachments to their group and are wired to cooperate for collective survival.

If Mearsheimer is right, Schreier’s book is an artifact of the post-Cold War liberal universalism it purports to critique. By trying to turn a concrete, historical group identity into an abstract aesthetic playground of “negation” and “unknowability,” Schreier is downplaying the social nature of human beings to the point of ignoring it. Mearsheimer would argue that no matter how much a literary critic twists textuality to make identity “impossible,” the tribal reality of human socialization will always dictate the boundaries of the group.

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The Enlightenment Wasn’t Enlightened

Posted on June 23, 2026 by Luke Ford

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 here, John Locke, Voltaire and other Enlightenment thinkers were wrong.
If Mearsheimer is right, the Enlightenment is not the discovery of universal truths about human nature and society. It is a brilliant, localized cultural project that misunderstood its own foundations.
The mainstream Enlightenment, represented by figures like Denis Diderot (1713–1784), Voltaire (1694–1778), and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), rested on the belief that human reason could break free from the chains of tradition, superstition, and local prejudice.
Kant famously defined Enlightenment as man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity, urging individuals to have the courage to use their own understanding. The project assumed that reason is a universal tool, that human nature is uniform beneath cultural differences, and that society can be engineered rationally to maximize individual liberty.
Mearsheimer’s argument demolishes these pillars. If reason is the least important of the ways men determine their preferences, then the Enlightenment overestimation of human rationality is a profound error.
Enlightenment thinkers believed that independent reason could judge and reform culture. Mearsheimer reverses this relationship. Intense childhood socialization injects an individual with a specific value system long before his critical faculties develop. By the time a man begins to reason, the logic of his particular tribe has already captured his mind.
Reason does not operate as an objective, neutral judge. It operates as a lawyer, constructing justifications for preferences that socialization and innate sentiments have already established. The Enlightenment ideal of the independent thinker who strips away cultural bias to find universal truth is an impossibility.
The Enlightenment advanced a teleological view of history (a belief in moral and political progress). Thinkers argued that as superstition receded and reason spread, humanity would move away from tribal warfare toward universal peace, commerce, and shared cosmopolitan values.
If humans are tribal at their core and depend on group cohesion for survival, this progressive vision is a fantasy. Tribalism is not a primitive phase of development that education can erase. It is a permanent biological and social necessity. When Enlightenment liberalism attempts to dismantle traditional group identities in the name of universal human rights, it creates a vacuum. It underestimates the intense human need to belong to a specific group that defines itself against other groups.
The Enlightenment claimed that its principles of individualism, inalienable rights, and rule by reason apply to all people everywhere. Mearsheimer’s view reveals that this universalism is a delusion.
The values of the Enlightenment are the specific products of Western socialization. When liberal states use these values to guide their foreign policies, they mistake their own tribal code for a universal law of nature. Other societies do not reject Western liberalism because they lack reason; they reject it because their own intense socialization has given them different, deeply embedded moral codes.
If Mearsheimer is right, the Enlightenment did not discover a universal human nature. It merely produced a highly successful Western tribe with a unique ideology. The project’s insistence on its own universality makes it blind to the enduring power of nationalism and cultural difference, turning a philosophy of liberation into a recipe for endless foreign conflict.
If Mearsheimer is right, the core of John Locke’s political philosophy collapses because its starting assumptions about human nature, rights, and reason are incorrect.
Locke bases his political theory on the concept of the state of nature, a pre-political condition where individuals exist as autonomous, free, and equal agents. In this state, men use reason to discover the law of nature, which dictates that no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. For Locke, society and government are artificial constructs, created through a social contract when these autonomous individuals choose to join together to better secure their pre-existing, inalienable rights. Individualism is primary; social organization is secondary.
Mearsheimer flips this hierarchy. If humans are profoundly social beings from start to finish, the Lockean state of nature is a fiction. Men do not enter society as fully formed, rational adults who possess an inherent understanding of universal rights. Instead, they are born into specific social groups that shape their identities, languages, and moral codes long before their critical faculties develop. Survival requires tribal cooperation, not lone-wolf autonomy. If Mearsheimer is correct, Locke’s autonomous individual does not exist.
This undercuts Locke’s view of human reason. Locke famously compares the human mind at birth to a blank slate (tabula rasa), arguing that knowledge and moral understanding come through experience and reflection. He asserts that adult reason allows man to see past local prejudices to grasp universal moral truths. Mearsheimer argues that reason is weak compared to biological sentiment and intense childhood socialization. By the time a man can reason for himself, his community has already injected him with a specific, local value system. He has limited choice in formulating a moral code. Locke’s belief in a universal moral law discoverable by independent reason becomes an illusion.
Consequently, the concept of universal, inalienable rights loses its foundation. In Locke’s system, rights belong to the individual by virtue of his humanity, independent of government or culture. If Mearsheimer is right, rights are not inherent features of human existence; they are cultural products of a specific type of society. The belief that everyone on the planet possesses the same set of rights is a product of Western socialization rather than an objective truth.
When liberal states treat these rights as universal and attempt to spread them globally through ambitious foreign policies, they run into the reality of nationalism and tribalism. Other societies, shaped by their own intense socialization, do not see these rights as self-evident truths. They see them as foreign intrusions that threaten their own group identities.
If Mearsheimer’s description of human nature is accurate, Locke’s philosophy is not a universal blueprint for human governance. It is a highly localized ideology that downplays man’s tribal core. The social contract is not a historical or philosophical truth, but a myth that obscures the tribal solidarity and socialization required to maintain any state.
If Mearsheimer is right, Voltaire was a brilliant satirist who misdiagnosed the nature of the human condition.
Voltaire spent his life crusading against religious intolerance, superstition, and the abuses of the Catholic Church. His famous battle cry, Écrasez l’infâme! (Crush the infamous thing!), assumed that fanaticism and tribal bigotry were artificial distortions. He believed these evils were maintained by corrupt priests and kings to keep men in the dark. For Voltaire, if you removed the artificial weight of the Church and applied commerce, wit, and empirical reason, human beings would naturally default to a tolerant, cosmopolitan common sense.
Mearsheimer’s argument turns Voltaire’s entire crusade upside down.
Voltaire viewed religious intolerance as a disease of the mind that reason could cure. Mearsheimer argues that humans are tribal at their core and that survival requires deep embedding within a social group.
If Mearsheimer is right, the intense group loyalties and dogmas that Voltaire mocked in Candide and Treatise on Tolerance are not superficial errors invented by clever priests. They are the standard operating equipment of human survival. The fierce attachments to local religious or political groups are expressions of man’s evolutionary need for group cohesion. Voltaire was fighting against human nature itself, mistaking a permanent biological and social necessity for a temporary lack of education.
Voltaire believed in the power of the pen to change minds. He assumed that by exposing the absurdity of superstition through irony and clear argument, men would see the light and change their behavior.
Mearsheimer notes that reason is the least important way men determine their preferences. Long before Voltaire’s readers could develop their critical faculties, their families and societies had already injected them with an enormous value infusion. A witty pamphlet cannot undo years of childhood socialization and innate sentiments. Voltaire’s writing did not convert his enemies; it merely entertained a specific, highly socialized subset of European elites who already shared his tribal code.
Voltaire championed the idea of the cosmopolitan man—the rational individual who can look past his country’s prejudices to engage in commerce and conversation with men of all nations. He praised the Royal Exchange in London, where Royalists, Whigs, Catholics, and Jews traded peacefully for mutual benefit.
Mearsheimer’s view reveals that this cosmopolitanism is a mirage. Humans do not operate as lone-wolf traders who shedding their identities at the market door. They remain profoundly social beings whose identities are tied to their specific groups. While commerce might create temporary cooperation, the underlying tribal allegiances remain. When the pressure rises, the cosmopolitan veneer cracks, and men revert to their primary tribal defense structures: nationalism and the state.
If Mearsheimer is correct, Voltaire was not an objective observer liberating humanity from chains. He was the high priest of a new, secular Western tribe. His belief that his specific values of tolerance and skepticism were universally applicable was the ultimate delusion, blinding him to the reality that human beings prefer the security of the tribe to the cold autonomy of independent reason.

If Mearsheimer is right, several of the most contentious debates in contemporary politics, foreign policy, and culture would effectively resolve—not through a compromise, but because one side’s foundational assumptions would be proven completely wrong.
For decades, Western foreign policy has debated whether the United States should pursue liberal hegemony—exporting democracy, building international institutions, and intervening to protect human rights—or stick to a realist strategy of managing the balance of power.
If Mearsheimer is right, this debate is over. The idealist project of transforming foreign nations into liberal democracies is a structural impossibility. Interventions like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, or efforts to integrate nations like China and Russia into a rules-based liberal international order, are doomed from the outset. Because nationalism and tribal socialization always override abstract liberal values, foreign populations will inevitably view liberal intervention as imperial aggression. The debate resolves entirely in favor of a restrained, balance-of-power foreign policy.
Western democracies are locked in a fierce debate over immigration, border control, and national identity. One side argues for multiculturalism and open borders, believing that human beings are atomistic individuals who can easily integrate into any society by accepting abstract civic principles like the rule of law. The other side argues that integration is deeply difficult and that unchecked immigration destabilizes national cohesion.
Mearsheimer’s view resolves this in favor of the restrictionists. If human beings are intensely socialized from childhood and tribal at their core, you cannot simply drop millions of people from one culture into another and expect them to instantly become atomistic liberals. Their deeply embedded moral codes, shaped by their native societies, do not vanish upon crossing a border. Civic nationalism—the idea that a state can be held together purely by an allegiance to political ideas rather than a shared culture—reveals itself as an illusion.
Domestic political debates often center on whether society should be run by a technocratic, highly educated elite who claim to use objective, universal reason to solve social problems, or whether policy should reflect the instincts and traditions of the broader populist majority.
If reason is the weakest tool for determining human preferences, the technocratic ideal collapses. The globalist elite are not objective neutral actors; they are simply a distinct tribe socialized in elite universities, operating on their own insular value system. Their claims to scientific, value-free governance are a mask for group interest. Populism, rather than being an irrational pathology, is the natural reaction of a native population protecting its group identity against a managerial class that downplays the social nature of man.
The debate over identity politics splits those who view people primarily as individual citizens with universal rights from those who view people primarily through the lens of their demographic group (race, gender, class).
Mearsheimer’s logic suggests that the universalist liberals are wrong and the identity theorists are partially right about human mechanics, though wrong about their political goals. Humans do not operate as lone wolves; they are tribal from start to finish. The liberal dream of a colorblind society of pure individuals is a psychological impossibility. However, because group solidarity is an innate human defense structure, the identity politics attempt to fragment a nation into competing tribal grievance groups cannot lead to liberation. It can only lead to total social balkanization and majoritarian tribal backlash.
The modern debate over free speech usually pits free-speech absolutists, who rely on John Milton (1608-1674) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), against advocates for censorship and harm reduction. Mill argued that a completely open marketplace of ideas allows truth to eventually defeat error through public debate.
If Mearsheimer is right, the marketplace of ideas is a psychological impossibility. Because people are not atomistic individuals evaluating arguments with cold, objective reason, they do not change their minds when presented with superior logic. Instead, they view speech through a tribal lens. Information that threatens the group’s foundational myths is experienced as a physical threat to survival, while falsehoods that strengthen group cohesion are embraced as truth. The debate settles on a grim reality: speech is not a tool for discovering universal truth, but a weapon used in inter-group conflict. Free speech can exist only within a highly socialized, homogenous tribe that already shares the same underlying values.
For decades, international elites have argued that the world must move toward transnational governance. This view holds that global problems like climate change, financial crises, and pandemics require states to cede sovereignty to international bodies like the United Nations, the World Health Organization, or the World Trade Organization.
Mearsheimer’s logic ends this debate in favor of strict state sovereignty. If humans are tribal at their core and derive their identities from their specific national cultures, they will never transfer their ultimate loyalty to an abstract, global bureaucracy. Transnational institutions lack organic legitimacy because there is no such thing as a global tribe. When a crisis hits, individuals look to their nation-state for protection, and the state looks out for its own people first. Any attempt to enforce global governance will be resisted as a form of foreign imperial overreach.
Educational theorists debate the purpose of schooling. The classical liberal tradition aims to teach children how to think, turning them into independent, critical agents who can question their own societies. The opposing view, often associated with progressive or critical theories, sees education primarily as a tool for political and social engineering.
If Mearsheimer is right, the classical ideal of teaching a child to be a completely autonomous thinker is a delusion. During a long childhood, the human mind is intensely vulnerable to value infusions before its critical faculties can even form. Education is always and everywhere a process of socialization—it is the tribe reproducing its own moral code in the next generation. The only real question in education is which set of tribal values will be injected into the child, not whether the child can be kept free from indoctrination.
The debate over Universal Basic Income (UBI) features proponents who argue that giving individuals cash directly maximizes their personal freedom and autonomy, allowing them to exit bad jobs or bad relationships and construct their own lives. Critics argue it destroys the incentive to work and creates dependency.
Mearsheimer’s view shifts the ground beneath this debate entirely, cutting against the individualistic assumptions of UBI. If man is a profoundly social being whose identity and psychological health depend on being useful to and embedded in a concrete group, simply cutting him a check as an isolated consumer misses the core of human nature. Without the social structure, discipline, and communal recognition that come from shared work and local institutions, atomistic financial support cannot prevent social alienation. It accelerates the breakdown of the very social groups man needs to survive.

If Mearsheimer is right, the fierce intellectual civil wars that have fractured elite English departments since the 1970s would abruptly end.
For decades, these departments have been battlegrounds for competing literary theories: traditional humanism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, and various schools of identity-based cultural studies. If Mearsheimer’s description of human nature is accurate, the foundational justifications for almost all of these camps collapse, resolving the debate by exposing their shared misconceptions.
The traditional, conservative wing of English departments has long argued for a literary canon based on aesthetic excellence and universal human truths. Figures like Harold Bloom (1930–2019) argued that reading the “Great Books” allows an individual to transcend his specific time and place, cultivate a solitary, autonomous consciousness, and commune with the universal human spirit across centuries.
Mearsheimer’s logic destroys this humanist ideal. If humans are tribal from start to finish and deeply socialized from childhood, there is no autonomous individual consciousness to cultivate, nor is there a uniform, universal human spirit waiting to be discovered in a text. The Western literary canon is not a collection of transcendent, objective truths; it is the specific, sophisticated socialization mechanism of the European elite. The humanist belief that reading Shakespeare can liberate a man from his tribal instincts is an illusion. Literature does not transcend the tribe; it encodes it.
In the late twentieth century, elite departments were captured by post-structuralism and deconstruction, led by thinkers like Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). This camp argued that language is unstable, texts have no fixed meaning, and all stable identities or social truths are linguistic illusions that can be unraveled through clever reading. They believed that by deconstructing language, the critic could liberate himself from the dominant power structures of society.
If Mearsheimer is right, high theory is an intellectual dead end driven by the ultimate liberal delusion: that reason and language can exist independently of social survival. Humans do not live in a world of endless linguistic play; they live in concrete societies where survival depends on intense group cohesion. The moral codes and identities injected during childhood are not fragile linguistic constructs that vanish under a deconstructive critique; they are deeply embedded biological and social realities. High theory reveals itself as a luxury product of a highly secure, over-socialized academic tribe playing word games that bear no relation to how human beings function.
The dominant faction in contemporary elite English departments views literature almost exclusively through the lens of power, race, gender, and empire. This school argues that literature is either an instrument of imperial oppression or a tool for subverting dominant power structures to achieve universal liberation and global social justice.
Mearsheimer’s view suggests this camp is half-right in its diagnostics but completely wrong in its aims. They are right that literature is a tool of group power and socialization rather than a repository of disinterested beauty. Every text carries the value infusion of the tribe that produced it. However, their ultimate goal—using literature to dismantle all traditional identities and build a borderless, egalitarian, cosmopolitan world—is a psychological and political impossibility. By attempting to strip away national and tribal identities, they are fighting human biology. Furthermore, their own academic subculture is not a vanguard of universal liberation; it is just another tribe, socialized in elite institutions, using its own jargon-heavy moral code to compete for status and institutional power.
If Mearsheimer is right, the century-long debate over whether literature is about Beauty, Language, or Liberation resolves into a single, realist truth: Literature is an instrument of socialization.
The sole function of a culture’s stories, myths, and poems is to inject the tribe’s moral code into the next generation during their long, vulnerable childhood, ensuring group solidarity and survival. The elite English department would be forced to abandon its grand philosophical and political delusions. It would become a department of cultural anthropology, analyzing texts simply as the historical artifacts of various human tribes trying to hold themselves together in a competitive world.
If the history of English literature is fundamentally the history of Christian literature, and if Mearsheimer is right, then Christianity is not merely a set of theological propositions that individuals choose to believe through independent reason. It is the civilizational engine of Western socialization, the primary source of the value infusion that shaped the English-speaking mind for over a millennium.
Mearsheimer’s framework alters how we must view this Christian literary tradition, revealing that its power lies not in abstract dogma, but in its ability to solve the fundamental problem of human survival: creating intense group solidarity.
The earliest monuments of English literature, such as Beowulf, reveal the exact collision between man’s raw tribal nature and the Christian socialization process. The Anglo-Saxon world was fiercely tribal, built on blood feuds, kinship, and survival in a hostile environment.
If Mearsheimer is right, Christianity did not succeed by turning these warriors into atomistic individuals who loved their enemies. It succeeded because it was a more powerful system of group cohesion. Christian literature adapted the existing tribal code. In the Old English poem The Dream of the Rood, Christ is not a passive victim; He is described as a young warrior hero, girding Himself for battle on the cross. The Church understood that to survive, it had to capture the innate sentiments of the group and redirect their loyalty toward a universal king—the Christian God.
Mearsheimer places immense emphasis on the long human childhood, a period of vulnerability where families and society impose an enormous value infusion on individuals before their critical faculties develop. For centuries in England, that value infusion was entirely Christian, and literature was the primary instrument used to deliver it.
From the medieval miracle plays performed in the streets to John Bunyan’s (1628–1688) The Pilgrim’s Progress, the stories of English literature were designed to socialize the young and the unlettered. Long before an English child could reason for himself, his moral landscape was populated by the imagery of the King James Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and John Milton’s (1608–1674) Paradise Lost. His concepts of right, wrong, guilt, and redemption were deeply embedded by his community.
If Mearsheimer is right, the great works of Christian literature were not philosophical arguments to be debated by independent minds; they were deep psychological anchors that ensured the entire tribe operated on the same moral wavelengths.
The most profound implication of Mearsheimer’s view for Christian literature is that political liberalism itself—the very ideology Mearsheimer critiques—is a secularized heresy of Western Christian literature.
The emphasis on individual conscience, the inherent dignity of the soul, and universal human rights did not emerge from thin air through pure reason during the Enlightenment. These ideas were the product of centuries of Christian socialization. They are found in the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340–1400), where even the lowliest characters possess an immortal soul, and in the prose of the Puritans, who argued for equality before God.
When secular Enlightenment writers discarded the theology of Christianity, they kept its universalist moral assumptions. They took the Christian concept of the soul, stripped it of God, and renamed it the “autonomous individual” with “inalienable rights.”
If Mearsheimer is right, this was the ultimate mistake. Christian literature was effective because its universalist aspirations were backed by a powerful, concrete community—the Church—with intense rituals, social discipline, and a shared cosmic tribal identity. Liberalism kept the universalist rhetoric but destroyed the social structures that made it functional. It tried to create a global brotherhood of individuals without the shared socialization of a common faith.
By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, English literature became increasingly secular. Novelists like George Eliot (1819–1880) and Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) wrestled with the loss of faith, attempting to preserve Christian morality—charity, sympathy, and justice—without Christian dogma.
If Mearsheimer is right, this secular literary project was doomed from the start. You cannot maintain a specific moral code once you destroy the specific socialization mechanism that produced it. Without the shared religious framework to bind the group together, the common culture fractures.
The history of English literature shows that when Christianity was the dominant socialization engine, it created a massive, coherent civilization capable of immense collective action. As that Christian value infusion faded from literature and education, it was not replaced by universal reason. Instead, the English-speaking world began to fragment back into its primary state: competing, balkanized tribes, each trying to write its own moral code without a shared God to hold them together.

If John Mearsheimer’s thesis is right, the institutional prestige of high literary theory collapses. Literary studies since the late twentieth century has heavily rewarded critics who treat identity, nation, and gender as artificial, textual, or fluid.

If humans are fundamentally tribal, intensely socialized from early childhood, and bound to inherited group realities, then the dominant academic fashion of celebrating hyper-individualistic fluidity is wrong. Five elite English and comparative literature professors lose status under this framework:

Judith Butler

Why she loses status: Famous for pioneering the theory of gender performativity, Butler argues that identity is not an internal or biological essence but an artificial, stylized repetition of acts over time. If Mearsheimer is right, her view that individuals can subvert or re-perform identity downplays deep-seated socialization. Mearsheimer argues that innate sentiments and early childhood protection hardwire a human’s core preferences and values before critical reasoning even develops.

Homi K. Bhabha

Why he loses status: As a leading postcolonial theorist, Bhabha gained immense prestige for developing concepts like “hybridity,” “mimicry,” and “third space,” which argue that cultural identities are inherently split, unstable, and un-fixed by colonial histories. If Mearsheimer is right, this celebrated fluid hybridity is an academic fiction. Mearsheimer’s realism dictates that people form rigid, protective tribal attachments to distinct social groups to ensure survival, making Bhabha’s fluid, interstitial identities a luxury of liberal universalism.

Fredric Jameson

Why he loses status: The preeminent Marxist literary critic argued that the human subject under late capitalism is fragmented and decentralized, losing a coherent sense of history and place. Jameson viewed collective solidarity through a utopian political struggle against capital. Mearsheimer’s view undercuts this by showing that human solidarity is not an artificial or elusive political goal to be achieved by intellectual reason; it is an instinctual, survival-driven tribal reality rooted in the family and the immediate tribe.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Why she loses status: Celebrated for her work on deconstruction and postcolonialism, Spivak warns against “essentialism”—the idea that a group has a fixed, inherent nature. She advocates at most for “strategic essentialism,” where a group temporarily acts as if it has a shared identity for political purposes. If Mearsheimer is right, essentialism isn’t a strategy to be turned on and off by intellectuals; it is the fundamental, inescapable baseline of human existence. Group attachment is hardwired and involuntary, not a political posture.

Stephen Greenblatt

Why he loses status: As the founder of New Historicism, Greenblatt famously argued that human identity is a product of “self-fashioning,” where individuals navigate and manipulate the cultural scripts and power structures of their era. While he looks at history, his focus is on the individual’s micro-maneuvers within power. Mearsheimer counters that individuals have very limited choice in formulating their moral and social codes, because the overwhelming weight of early tribal socialization effectively seals a person’s identity long before they gain the critical faculties to fashion themselves.

If Mearsheimer is right, and English literature is fundamentally the history of Western Christian socialization, the position of Jews in elite English departments changes from one of assimilation and universal scholarship to one of profound structural tension.
For the last century, Jewish intellectuals entered English departments under the banner of the liberal Enlightenment. They assumed that literature could be treated as a universal humanist playground where anyone, regardless of background, could use independent reason to appreciate aesthetic excellence. If Mearsheimer’s framework is correct, this assumption was a historical anomaly—a beautiful illusion that masked a deeper conflict of tribal socialization.
In the mid-twentieth century, Jewish scholars broke into elite English departments—which had historically been bastions of Anglo-Saxon, patrician culture—by championing universalist, text-centered approaches. Scholars like Lionel Trilling (1905–1975) at Columbia became the ultimate arbiters of the Western literary tradition. They did this by practicing a form of cosmopolitan humanism, treating the texts of Matthew Arnold, John Keats, or William Wordsworth as expressions of a universal human condition rather than specific artifacts of Christian socialization.
Mearsheimer’s logic reveals this was an impossibility. You cannot fully separate a literary text from the intense childhood value infusion that produced it. When Trilling and his contemporaries analyzed the English canon, they were not engaging with a neutral, universal human spirit. They were immersing themselves in the sophisticated psychological machinery of a foreign tribe—the Western Christian world. To succeed, they had to master a moral code, an aesthetic sensibility, and a historical memory that was fundamentally distinct from their own inherited traditions.
It is no historical accident that by the late twentieth century, Jewish intellectuals in elite universities became the vanguard of deconstruction and post-structuralism. Figures like Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) and Harold Bloom (1930–2019) led the charge to dismantle the traditional, Christian-dominated literary canon.
If Mearsheimer is right, this shift was a predictable tribal reflex. Once Jews achieved institutional power within English departments, the deep friction between their own identity and the Christian socialization engine of the English canon became untenable. Deconstruction was a highly sophisticated intellectual tool used to neutralize the power of that canon. By arguing that language is unstable, texts have no fixed meaning, and the Author is dead, high theory stripped the traditional English texts of their authority. It allowed Jewish scholars to survive and dominate within an institution built on a Western Christian value system by declaring that the system’s foundational stories were merely linguistic illusions.
Bloom took a different path but arrived at a similar tribal defense mechanism. In The Western Canon, he championed the aesthetic, but he famously reframed the entire Western literary tradition as a series of aggressive, Freudian battles between writers and their predecessors—an interpretation deeply rooted in a secularized Jewish intellectual style rather than traditional Christian humility or Anglo-Saxon restraint.
Today, elite English departments are dominated by identity politics and post-colonial theory. This environment presents a distinct trap for Jewish scholars if Mearsheimer’s realism holds true.
Modern literary departments tend to divide the world into dominant Western oppressors and oppressed minorities. Under the old liberal framework, Jews could exist comfortably as individuals. But in a thoroughly balkanized, tribal academic environment, individual status is denied. Because Jews successfully mastered the traditional Western canon and achieved high status within elite institutions, the modern academic tribe classifies them as part of the dominant, white, Western establishment.
Yet, Mearsheimer’s logic shows they can never genuinely be part of that establishment because its core engine is Western Christian socialization, from which Jews are historically and culturally excluded. Jewish scholars in modern English departments find themselves stranded: rejected by the new identity-driven factions as representatives of Western power, yet fully aware that the traditional Western canon they studied is the artifact of a culture that is not their own.

The most sweeping analysis of this topic comes from Benjamin Schreier in his book The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History, published by New York University Press in 2015. Schreier argues that the field of English literature was built on a foundational Anglo-Saxon Christian narrative. He analyzes how Jewish critics had to navigate an institutional setup that treated Western Christian culture as the universal default. Schreier suggests that the subsequent turn toward post-structuralism and critical theory allowed Jewish academics to interrogate the givenness of that dominant cultural framework.
Mark Krupnick (1939-2003) wrote Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism, published by Northwestern University Press in 1986. Krupnick documents the intense friction Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) faced at Columbia University in the 1930s, where senior faculty members openly worried that a Jew could not properly appreciate or teach the English literary tradition. To survive and excel, Trilling adopted a posture of cosmopolitan humanism, framing the Christian-inflected literature of Matthew Arnold and the English Romantics as universal human expressions. Krupnick demonstrates that this universalism was a necessary strategy to neutralize the exclusionary tribal logic of the old Anglo-Saxon establishment.
Susanne Klingenstein provided the granular historical data for this transition in Jews in the American Academy, 1900-1940: The Dynamics of a Cultural Assimilation, published by Syracuse University Press in 1991. She tracks the first generation of Jewish scholars who entered English departments and details the psychological cost of their assimilation. These scholars had to master a foreign cultural lineage to achieve institutional authority.
From a different perspective, Ruth Wisse (b. 1936) critiqued the universalist strategy of Jewish intellectuals in The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Literature and Culture, published by the Free Press in 2000. Wisse argues that the desire of Jewish critics to blend into a borderless, humanist literary world often required them to downplay their own particularist traditions. She views the high theory boom of the late twentieth century as a symptom of a deeper alienation, where critics used abstract methodology to detach literature from its organic, national, and religious roots.
The entry of Jewish intellectuals into elite English departments was not a simple story of individuals joining a neutral discipline. It was a complex historical encounter where scholars first used the language of Enlightenment universalism to gain entry into an Anglo-Christian institution, and later used the tools of literary theory to reshape the power structure of the department.
If we strip away Mearsheimer’s name and look strictly at his specific premises—that human beings are driven entirely by in-group/out-group tribal survival, that Enlightenment universalism is a myth used by dominant groups to rationalize their own power, and that individualism is a fiction because childhood socialization completely captures the mind before reason can develop—nobody in polite society has published this analysis regarding Jews in English departments.
When elite historians and literary sociologists look at this historical transition, they write from a thoroughly liberal, mainstream viewpoint.
The most prominent authority on this academic shift is the historian David Hollinger. In his definitive work Science, Jews, and Secular Culture (Princeton University Press), Hollinger maps out exactly how Jewish intellectuals integrated into elite universities between 1930 and 1960. But Hollinger writes from a classic liberal perspective: he treats their entry as a triumph of cosmopolitanism over provincial Christian bias. He views “universalism” as a genuine, noble standard that both WASP and Jewish intellectuals successfully used to build a more open, meritocratic academy.
If you read the mainstream scholarship, the narrative is built on pillars that these premises reject:
It assumes reason and merit are real, neutral tools that allowed Jewish scholars to bypass traditional barriers.
It views the adoption of universalist humanism (like Lionel Trilling’s work) as a sincere intellectual breakthrough, not a protective tribal maneuver.
It views the subsequent rise of high theory and deconstruction as a progressive evolution of literary critique, rather than an aggressive defense structure designed to neutralize the authority of an Anglo-Christian canon.
The closest polite society gets to your premise is when critics charge that mid-century cosmopolitanism was “not multicultural enough,” or when conservative scholars like Ruth Wisse lament that Jewish intellectuals traded their distinct heritage for a bloodless universalism.
But the brutal, realist interpretation—that the entire historical arc was an arena of competing, self-interested tribes using universalist myths and linguistic deconstruction as weapons to secure institutional dominance and group survival—is absent from elite presses. In polite society, that level of raw realism violates the very liberal vocabulary the modern academy relies on to justify its own existence.
The absence of this stark, realist analysis from elite presses is a matter of institutional survival and ideological design. Elite university presses and top-tier academic journals are not neutral mirrors reflecting reality. They are components of the very socialization engine described in the premise.
For an elite press to publish a book framing the history of the academy as a series of raw, self-interested tribal maneuvers for dominance, it would have to violate the foundational myths that grant the modern university its authority.
The modern elite university derives its power, prestige, and funding from a specific Enlightenment claim: that it is a place of disinterested inquiry, objective merit, and universal human progress. The peer-review process is explicitly structured to project this image. A manuscript must argue within a framework that respects the legitimacy of the institution itself.
An analysis stating that Jewish intellectuals used universalist humanism merely as a tactical entry shield against an Anglo-Saxon tribe, and later used deconstruction as a structural weapon to neutralize the Christian canon, tears down that entire facade. It treats the temple of reason as a tribal fortress. If elite presses published that view, they would validate the argument that their own peer-review boards, funding networks, and status hierarchies are nothing more than the self-interested defense mechanisms of an academic sub-tribe.
To be published by Harvard, Yale, or Princeton University Press, a scholar must use the shared vocabulary of the modern academy. That vocabulary is thoroughly liberal and progressive. It assumes that terms like “inclusion,” “merit,” “marginalization,” and “liberation” describe real, universal moral ideals toward which history is moving.
The realist perspective rejects this vocabulary as a smokescreen. It suggests that what the academy calls “inclusion” is the displacement of one elite group by another, and what it calls “subversion” or “theory” is just a tool used in inter-group competition for cultural capital. Because elite presses are managed by people intensely socialized within this liberal framework, an argument stripped of these moral pieties looks crude, cynical, or unscholarly. It is rejected not because it lacks historical evidence, but because it lacks the required moral posture.
Polite society maintains strict boundaries regarding how ethnic and religious groups are discussed. Mainstream scholarship handles the integration of minority groups into the academy using two approved narratives:
The Whig Narrative: Individual merit and universal reason triumphed over old, irrational prejudices.
The Grievance Narrative: A dominant, oppressive group protected its privilege until forced to concede ground by the moral demands of social justice.
The realist analysis fits neither narrative. It describes the interaction between the Anglo-Saxon establishment and arriving Jewish intellectuals as a predictable, cold encounter between two distinct, highly sophisticated groups competing for institutional space. It grants agency and strategy to both sides based on self-interest and group cohesion rather than abstract virtue or victimhood. In elite academic publishing, discussing group dynamics with that degree of raw realism is a severe violation of social taboo.
The contemporary elite university is held together by an alliance of various identity-based factions, all operating under the umbrella of “global social justice.” This alliance relies on the myth that all historically marginalized groups share a common, universalist goal of total human liberation.
The realist analysis exposes the fragility of this setup. It notes that group solidarity is an innate human defense structure, and that breaking a culture down into competing identity groups cannot lead to universal harmony. It can only lead to total balkanization, majoritarian backlash, and shifting tribal alliances. Pointing out that Jewish intellectuals are now caught between an older Anglo-Christian canon they mastered and a new academic tribe that views them as part of the dominant Western establishment exposes a major fault line in the university’s current structure.
Elite presses exist to stabilize the ruling consensus of the academic tribe, not to publish the blueprints of its structural collapse.

To slip a raw, group-survival analysis past the gatekeepers of an elite press, a scholar cannot look like a cynical iconoclast trying to burn the temple down. He must dress his arguments in the formal vestments of institutional history, the sociology of knowledge, and field theory.
The strategy is to use the classic academic pivot: validate the conventional wisdom as a necessary but incomplete “first-generation” narrative, and then introduce the realist model as a deeper, more rigorous explanatory tool.
A successful proposal to a university press might look like this:

Book Proposal: The Pragmatics of Universalism: Literary Theory and Group Cohesion in the Mid-Century Academy

1. Abstract and Core Thesis

The Pragmatics of Universalism offers a structural and sociological re-examination of the demographic and intellectual transformation of elite American English departments between 1940 and 1990.

The conventional historiography—most notably articulated by David Hollinger—justly frames the entry of Jewish intellectuals into the patrician WASP academy as a triumph of cosmopolitan secularism and meritocratic liberalism. While this narrative captures the explicit ideals of the period, it leaves an explanatory vacuum regarding the specific intellectual mechanisms that accompanied this demographic shift. It does not explain why the initial embrace of universalist humanism (e.g., Lionel Trilling) was so rapidly succeeded by a fierce institutional commitment to high theory, deconstruction, and the systematic dismantling of the traditional canon (e.g., Jacques Derrida, Harold Bloom).

This book provides a necessary corrective by applying a structural-functionalist approach to academic discourse. It posits that intellectual frameworks—such as universalist humanism or post-structuralist deconstruction—do not function merely as abstract descriptions of aesthetic truth. Rather, they operate as highly sophisticated instruments of socialization and group preservation.

The book argues that the mid-century entry of Jewish scholars into departments historically built around an Anglo-Christian cultural lineage created an acute structural tension. To resolve this tension and secure institutional space, arriving scholars naturally deployed intellectual tools that served a dual function: first, a universalist framework to neutralize the exclusionary tribal logic of the old establishment, and second, a deconstructive framework to dilute the authority of a text-canon that acted as a foreign socialization engine. This study shifts the focus from idealized intentions to the pragmatic logic of group cohesion and institutional survival within an anarchic academic marketplace.

2. Theoretical Framework and Literature Review

The project positions itself at the intersection of Pierre Bourdieu’s (1930–2002) field theory and the sociology of knowledge. Bourdieu frames the academic field as a space of competitive struggles for cultural capital, where agents deploy specific strategies to maintain or alter the distribution of power.

The book directly engages with the standard literature but offers an analytical pivot:

The Liberal Consensus (Hollinger, Klingenstein): The project fully acknowledges the historical data compiled in David Hollinger’s Science, Jews, and Secular Culture and Susanne Klingenstein’s Jews in the American Academy. However, where Hollinger views “universalism” as a neutral baseline that emerged naturally from secularization, this book reinterprets universalism through a pragmatic lens. Universalism was the necessary rhetorical shield required to gain access to a closed institutional ecosystem.

The Particularist Critique (Wisse): Ruth Wisse’s The Modern Jewish Canon laments the loss of particularist identity in the pursuit of a bloodless universalism. This book provides the structural explanation for the phenomenon Wisse observes: the adoption of a universalist posture was not a failure of cultural loyalty, but a structural prerequisite for institutional survival. One cannot easily sit in a chair dedicated to an Anglo-Christian heritage while openly asserting a competing particularism; one must first frame the heritage as a universal human property.

3. Chapter Outline

Chapter 1: The Anglo-Christian Fortress and the Problem of Inheritance

This chapter establishes the baseline of the elite English department prior to World War II. Drawing on archival material from Columbia, Yale, and Harvard, it demonstrates that the traditional literary canon was explicitly understood as the socialization engine of the American patrician class. It explores the early institutional resistance to Jewish scholars, framing it not as random bigotry, but as a predictable group defense mechanism protecting the transmission of the tribe’s moral and cultural code.

Chapter 2: Lionel Trilling and the Tactics of the Universal Shield

A close reading of the institutional maneuvers and critical strategies of Lionel Trilling. The chapter analyzes how Trilling successfully decoupled the English Romantic poets and Matthew Arnold from their specific Anglo-Christian roots, reframing them as a “universal humanist tradition.” This chapter argues that this universalism functioned as a pragmatic entry mechanism, allowing the outsider to claim equal stewardship over the native tribe’s cultural artifacts.

Chapter 3: The Deconstructive Turn as a Structural Solvent

By the 1970s, the demographic shift was well underway, yet the traditional canon remained a potential site of cultural alienation. This chapter analyzes the rapid institutional adoption of post-structuralism and deconstruction. It argues that the assertion that language is inherently unstable and that texts have no fixed, authoritative meaning functioned as a highly effective structural solvent. By deconstructing the “Author,” the new academic coalition successfully neutralized the authority of the traditional socialization engine without needing to explicitly banish it.

Chapter 4: The Contemporary Equilibrium and the Balkanization Dilemma

The final chapter examines the current crisis in elite English departments, where the old universalist and deconstructive strategies have given way to a thoroughly fragmented landscape of identity politics. It maps out the contemporary trap facing Jewish scholars: having successfully mastered the old universalist framework and achieved high status, they now find themselves classified by a newer academic sub-tribe as part of the dominant Western establishment, even while remaining historically excluded from its foundational Christian core.

4. Conclusion and Contribution

By reframing this vital chapter of academic history through the lens of structural pragmatism and group cohesion, The Pragmatics of Universalism avoids the moralizing binaries of progress versus prejudice. It offers university presses a rigorous, objective, and deeply sociologically grounded methodology for understanding how intellectual paradigms shift in response to the permanent, structural demands of institutional survival.

If Mearsheimer is right, the intellectual battles that have split elite History departments since the 1960s resolve in favor of a stark historical realism.

For decades, historians have fought over the primary engine of human events, dividing themselves into hostile camps: traditional political historians, Marxist social historians, postmodern cultural historians, and globalists. If Mearsheimer’s assumptions about human nature are accurate, the foundational premises of several dominant historical schools collapse.

The most direct casualty is “Whig history”—the progressive interpretation of the past that views human history as a long, upward march toward greater individual liberty, rational governance, and universal human rights. This framework, which implicitly underpins much of Western historiography, treats the spread of democracy and the breakdown of traditional borders as the natural destination of human development.

If Mearsheimer is right, this teleological vision is an illusion born of a brief period of Western dominance. History has no built-in direction toward liberation. The expansion of liberal institutions was not the triumph of universal reason; it was simply the historical footprint of a dominant Western tribe imposing its order on the world. Because human beings are permanently tribal and driven by group survival, history is a cyclical, endless rerun of great power competition, nationalism, and shifting alliances. Progress in technology and wealth changes the weapons, but it does not change the tragic logic of human interaction.

Since the 1980s, elite history departments have been dominated by the “cultural turn” and post-structural history. Influenced by Michel Foucault (1926–1984), these historians argue that realities like national identity, gender, and the state are merely “social constructs” aka fragile linguistic discourses invented by elites to maintain power. They imply that by deconstructing these historical narratives, society can dissolve these categories and achieve a more fluid, liberated existence.

Mearsheimer’s framework forces a hard stop to this logic. While historical details vary, the underlying categories of the state, the tribe, and the in-group/out-group divide are not fragile linguistic inventions. They are hard biological and social defense structures rooted in the permanent human requirement for collective survival. A nation-state is not a text to be deconstructed; it is a concrete accumulation of power and socialization designed to protect a population from external threats. History departments would abandon the idea that societies can transcend these structures through clever discourse analysis.

Marxist and economic historians argue that class conflict and material conditions are the primary drivers of history. They view nationalism and religious tribalism as “false consciousness”—ideological smokescreens used by the ruling class to divide the international proletariat and prevent a universal worker revolution.

If Mearsheimer is right, the Marxist belief in a universal working-class solidarity that transcends national borders is a psychological fantasy. Man’s tribal nature and his need for group embedding are far deeper than his economic class. When the state faces an existential crisis, the factory worker aligns with the domestic factory owner against the foreign worker every single time. History proves this—most spectacularly in 1914, when the socialist parties of Europe abandoned international solidarity to vote for war credits for their respective nations. Mearsheimer’s realism notes that the primary actor in history is the tribe seeking security, not the economic class seeking wealth.

If Mearsheimer is right, the grand debate over whether history is driven by Ideas, Class, or Language resolves into a single, realist synthesis: History is the record of competitive group survival.

The elite historian’s task would simplify. History is the study of how human groups organize themselves into states, use intense socialization to maintain internal solidarity across generations, and navigate the permanent security dilemmas of a anarchic world. The ideological justifications societies give for their actions—whether Christian crusades, Enlightenment missions, or Marxist revolutions—are understood historically as the necessary myths used to steel the tribe for competition.

If Mearsheimer’s premises are right, the entry of Jewish scholars into elite History departments cannot be understood as a story of individual merit achieving a colorblind, universalist triumph over old biases. Instead, it must be viewed as an encounter between two distinct, cohesive groups navigating a shifting balance of institutional power.

Under this realist lens, the entire historical arc—from early exclusion to eventual dominance and the current factional tension—follows a predictable logic of group survival, socialization, and the pragmatic deployment of ideological narratives.

The WASP Field as a Tribal Socialization Engine
Before World War II, elite American History departments—dominated by White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) at institutions like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—did not view history as a neutral social science. History was the primary narrative tool used to socialize the elite, justify the existing political order, and maintain the cultural continuity of the ruling class. The focus was on diplomatic history, great men, constitutional development, and the transatlantic heritage.

If Mearsheimer is right, the intense exclusion of Jewish historians during this era was a logical protective response. The WASP establishment recognized that history is a powerful instrument of value infusion. Allowing outsiders into the department threatened the purity of the narrative engine that maintained their group solidarity across generations. It was not irrational bigotry; it was a group defending its primary cultural apparatus.

When Jewish historians finally broke through the barriers in the mid-twentieth century, they did so by embracing and promoting specific subfields that neutralized the traditional Anglo-Saxon narrative. They gravitated toward economic history, intellectual history, and social history.

By shifting the focus of history from national lineage and elite genealogy to economic data, abstract ideas, or structural forces, arriving scholars stripped the discipline of its Anglo-Saxon particularity.

Arriving scholars championed the idea of history as an objective, value-free science driven by rigorous archival research. This was the ultimate universalist shield. By asserting that history is governed by neutral rules of evidence rather than a shared bloodline, they made it impossible for the old establishment to deny them entry based on background.

The adoption of these neutral, scientific frameworks was not just a sincere belief in pure reason. It was the necessary rhetorical equipment required to dismantle the native tribe’s monopoly over the past.

Once a group achieves tenure and institutional status within an environment, its next structural requirement is to stabilize its own position and reproduce its values. By the 1960s and 1970s, the demographic transformation of History departments coincided with the total dominance of “history from below” and social history.

Instead of focusing on the continuity of the state, the discipline shifted to studying labor movements, immigrant struggles, urban history, and the histories of marginalized groups.

If Mearsheimer is right, this was the predictable phase of narrative capture. The old WASP socialization engine was not just neutralized; it was replaced by a new framework that aligned with the historical memory and identity of the arriving group. The past was re-written to celebrate the outsider, the immigrant, and the critic of the established order, thereby creating a new moral consensus that legitimized the new academic elite.

Today, the generation of scholars who engineered this transformation faces a severe structural trap. Elite History departments are increasingly dominated by an aggressive new sub-tribe focused on post-colonial theory, intersectionality, and a strict binary of global oppressors versus oppressed groups.

Under Mearsheimer’s realist logic, the current tension resolves into a classic security dilemma within the academy:

The mid-century Jewish scholars used universalist tools (the shield of objective science) and social history to displace the old WASP elite. They established a highly successful, stable academic meritocracy.

However, because group solidarity is a permanent human feature, this stable equilibrium could not last. A new, balkanized coalition of identity-based factions has emerged, using its own jargon and moral code to compete for status and institutional power.

Because Jewish scholars successfully integrated, achieved high status, and mastered the traditional institutions, this new academic faction classifies them as part of the dominant, white, Western establishment.

The tragic realist conclusion is that the university’s transition from a WASP monoculture to a diversified department was never a permanent moral victory for individual merit. It was simply a shift in the balance of power. The illusion of a neutral, colorblind history department has vanished, exposing the permanent reality of the discipline: a high-stakes arena where competing groups fight to control the historical narrative to guarantee their own survival, status, and power.

If John Mearsheimer is right, the institutional prestige of historians who prioritize transnational networks, human rights, and fluid cultural constructs over the raw reality of the nation-state collapses. Modern historical scholarship heavily rewards elites who treat nations as artificial inventions and individual rights as the ultimate metric of human progress. If human beings are fundamentally tribal and driven by survival-driven group socialization, the foundational premises of several prominent historians are wrong.

Lynn Hunt loses status because her influential work on the eighteenth century argues that human rights and individual empathy expanded naturally through cultural shifts like the rise of the novel. Hunt positions human rights as a profound awakening of individual moral consciousness. If Mearsheimer is right, universal human rights are a fragile ideological superstructure rather than an evolutionary baseline. Tribal boundaries and collective survival metrics dictate human behavior, meaning that individualistic empathy is a secondary luxury that quickly vanishes when a group faces an existential threat.

Yuval Noah Harari loses status because his sweeping histories treat nationalism, tribalism, and religious identities as mere imagined communities or flexible myths that humanity can eventually outgrow or engineer away. Harari argues that global cooperation and data-driven systems are the next logical step for human organization. Mearsheimer’s thesis undercuts this by showing that group loyalty and tribal attachments are hardwired biological necessities for survival, not optional fictions. Humans do not choose to cooperate globally based on reason; they cooperate locally within their tribe because childhood socialization molds their moral code before they can even think for themselves.

Timothy Snyder loses status because he frames modern European history around the moral imperative of liberal democracy and universal rights, treating tribalism and populism as dangerous deviations from the norm. Snyder argues that individuals must consciously defend universal values against the distorting pull of mass propaganda. Mearsheimer counters that reason is the least important way humans determine their preferences. Because family and tribal socialization impose an enormous value infusion on individuals during a long, vulnerable childhood, Snyder’s reliance on individual reason to resist tribal instincts misreads the primary engine of human organization.

Joan Wallach Scott loses status because her pioneering work historicizes identity and gender as fluid, politically manufactured concepts that are constantly contested and renegotiated by individuals. Scott views identity as an unstable site of power dynamics rather than an inherent truth. If Mearsheimer is right, early childhood socialization and innate sentiments impose a highly durable value system that seals a person’s core identity long before they develop the critical faculties to deconstruct it. Groups form rigid boundaries to protect themselves, making core social identities far more fixed and protective than Scott’s theories allow.

David Armitage loses status because his prominent global and transnational histories emphasize the international turn, tracking how ideas and legal frameworks effortlessly cross borders to shape a global intellectual community. Armitage downplays the insular nature of individual states in favor of a wider, interconnected world. Mearsheimer’s realism dictates that the bounded, protective state remains the primary actor in human history because humans are driven to secure their immediate group above all else. Transnational intellectual networks are a secondary consequence of elite interaction, not the driving force of human behavior.

If Mearsheimer’s premises are right, the intellectual warfare that has shaped elite Sociology departments since their inception would settle decisively.

Sociology is the study of society. If human beings are profoundly social, tribal at their core, and governed by intense childhood socialization rather than abstract reason, then the discipline’s deep ideological divisions resolve in favor of a tragic, structural realism.

For decades, a major faction within elite sociology championed Rational Choice Theory (often associated with scholars like James Samuel Coleman, 1926–1995). This school modeled society as a collection of utility-maximizing individuals who form social structures, networks, and markets based on calculated self-interest.

If Mearsheimer is right, this entire subfield is a psychological fiction. Humans do not act as atomistic, rational calculators who choose their social investments. They are embedded in social groups that dictate their preferences, moral codes, and identities long before their reasoning skills even develop. Reason is the weakest tool for determining human behavior. The debate resolves completely: society is not an aggregate of individual choices; individual choice is an artifact of group socialization.

Elite sociology is heavily dominated by the paradigm of Social Constructionism (pioneered by Peter L. Berger, 1929–2017, and Thomas Luckmann, 1927–2016). This school argues that institutions, gender roles, national identities, and social strata are entirely plastic, socially constructed realities that can be altered or dismantled if society changes its collective mind.

Mearsheimer’s logic suggests the constructionists are right about the mechanism but entirely wrong about the mutability. Yes, realities are socially constructed through intense childhood value infusions. However, these constructs are not fragile, arbitrary ideas that can be easily engineered away to achieve a liberated, cosmopolitan future. They are hard biological and social defense structures designed to ensure group survival in a competitive world. The in-group/out-group distinction, the necessity of hierarchy, and the enforcement of a shared moral code are permanent fixtures of human biology. Sociology would have to abandon the utopian delusion that deconstructing a social norm leads to absolute individual liberation; it only leads to the collapse of social cohesion or the rise of a new dominant tribe.

Marxist and critical sociologists argue that phenomena like nationalism, religious fervor, and ethnic solidarity are forms of “false consciousness”—ideological illusions manufactured by the ruling class to obscure the real structural driver of human history: class struggle.

If Mearsheimer is right, this perspective is functionally backwards. Man’s tribal nature and his need for group embedding are far deeper and more permanent than his economic class. When a society faces an existential crisis or an external threat, internal class lines dissolve into a unified tribal front. Group solidarity is an innate defense system, not an artificial trick played by capitalists. The debate settles on a realist baseline: the primary unit of social cohesion is the tribe (or the nation), and class conflict is merely an internal friction that is consistently overridden by the requirement for external survival.

If Mearsheimer is right, the grand debate over whether society is driven by Individual Choices, Economic Classes, or Plastic Constructs resolves into a single truth: Sociology is the study of tribal preservation.

The discipline would lose its progressive, engineering impulse. Elite sociologists would stop trying to design a borderless, perfectly egalitarian society of autonomous individuals. Instead, the field would return to a baseline of functional realism, analyzing how different human groups organize themselves into structures, inject values into their young, and maintain the internal solidarity necessary to survive.

Anthony Giddens loses status because his theory of reflexive modernization claims that modern individuals break free from traditional tribal constraints. Giddens views identity as a self-fashioned project of the self. Mearsheimer counters that humans possess limited choice in building their moral codes. Early group socialization fixes a human’s core preferences during a long, vulnerable childhood, exposing the fluid self as a liberal illusion.

Saskia Sassen loses status because her research on global cities highlights denationalization and transnational networks. Sassen tracks how mobile elites form identities that bypass nation-state borders. Mearsheimer’s realism dictates that humans remain deeply embedded in distinct societies for survival. Globalized fluidity ignores the protective, insular logic of the tribe, which reacts aggressively when resources grow scarce.

Jeffrey Alexander loses status because his cultural sociology relies on the civil sphere. Alexander frames this sphere as a zone of universal moral solidarity where reason expands human rights. Mearsheimer argues that reason ranks as the least important factor in human preference. Socialization and innate tribal sentiments dictate behavior, which prevents a universal civil code from conquering primal group attachments.

Michèle Lamont loses status because her work treats cultural boundaries as flexible properties that people constantly negotiate and redraw. Lamont views identity as a fluid process of boundary-making. Mearsheimer’s framework establishes that these boundaries remain rigid and protective. Groups enforce strict divisions to safeguard collective survival, rendering tribal separations an immutable reality rather than a flexible social construct.

John Meyer loses status because his world society theory argues that states and individuals adopt universal scripts of human rights and rationality from a global culture. Meyer views local institutional behavior as a product of global models. Mearsheimer rejects this universalism entirely. He shows that moral codes geopolitical realities derive from localized childhood socialization and survival-driven group loyalty, which exposes global models as a fragile ideological veneer.

If Mearsheimer is right, the foundational civil wars inside elite Psychology departments would settle.

For decades, psychology has been split between models that treat the human mind as an isolated, rational computer and models that treat it as a highly malleable blank slate. If Mearsheimer’s premises are correct—that reason is the weakest determinant of human preferences, that childhood socialization completely capture the mind, and that humans are innately tribal—then the major debates in the field resolve in favor of an unyielding, evolutionary social realism.

A dominant faction in modern psychology treats the mind as an individual, information-processing machine. This framework assumes that cognitive errors, biases, and prejudices are “dysfunctional” departures from a baseline of healthy, individual rationality. It implies that through education or cognitive behavioral adjustments, individuals can learn to evaluate evidence objectively and make independent, logical choices.

If Mearsheimer is right, this model is fundamentally wrong about the design of the human brain. The human mind did not evolve to be an isolated seeker of abstract, universal truth. It evolved to be a tool for group survival.

“Cognitive biases” like confirmation bias or in-group favoritism are not individual design flaws; they are critical functional assets that maintain tribal solidarity. Reason does not exist to discover objective reality; it exists to construct arguments that protect the group’s cohesion. The debate resolves on a stark truth: the baseline of human psychology is not individual rationality, but collective rationalization.

The opposing camp in many elite psychology departments—often influenced by radical social constructivism—argues that human nature is almost infinitely plastic. This school posits that traits like aggression, tribalism, gender roles, and competitive behavior are entirely learned products of an oppressive culture. They believe that by changing child-rearing practices and language, psychologists can engineering a cooperative, cosmopolitan human being free from group prejudice.

Mearsheimer’s premises dismantle this utopian vision. While he agrees that intense socialization is incredibly powerful, he emphasizes that this socialization operates on innate sentiments. Humans are born with an evolutionary blueprint that demands group embedding and cooperation for survival.

Tribalism is not a superficial cultural habit that education can erase; it is a permanent biological and social necessity. When psychologists try to strip away traditional group attachments, they do not create a liberated, independent individual. They create an anxious, alienated person who will inevitably seek out a new, surrogate tribe to satisfy his biological need for belonging.

The field of moral psychology has long debated whether morality is something children develop through independent cognitive reasoning about fairness and harm (as argued by the tradition of Lawrence Kohlberg [1927–1987]), or whether it is driven by gut instincts.

Mearsheimer’s argument settles this entirely on the side of structural socialization and innate sentiment. A child’s moral landscape is not a product of his independent reason discovering universal truths. During a long, vulnerable childhood, his family and community inject an enormous value infusion into his mind long before his critical faculties can even form. By the time an adult begins to reason about right and wrong, his native tribe has already captured his moral imagination. Abstract moral reasoning is simply the language the mind uses to defend the moral code it received through childhood socialization.

If Mearsheimer is right, elite psychology departments would have to abandon both the myth of the autonomous, rational individual and the myth of the infinitely malleable human being.

The discipline would resolve into a single, realist framework: Human psychology is the study of the tribal mind. The individual ego would no longer be treated as the primary unit of analysis. Instead, the field would recognize that the human brain can only be understood when viewed as a deeply socialized, biologically wired component of a larger collective organism designed entirely for group survival.

If Mearsheimer is right that reason is subordinate to innate sentiment and intense childhood socialization, and that the human mind functions fundamentally as an instrument of tribal survival rather than independent, rational processing, five elite active psychologists would experience a severe loss of status. Their life work relies on paradigms that this framework invalidates.

1. Steven Pinker (b. 1954)

The Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University is the most prominent defender of Enlightenment rationalism, classical liberalism, and cognitive-rationalist psychology. In books like Blank Slate, Better Angels of Our Nature, and Rationality, Pinker argues that human reason is a universal tool that can systematically override tribal instincts, diminish historical violence, and drive moral progress.

The Realist Verdict: Pinker loses status because his foundational model of human nature is proven wrong. Under the realist premise, Pinker’s celebration of global progress and objective rationality is not a neutral scientific discovery; it is merely the sophisticated ideology of his own over-socialized, elite academic sub-tribe. His belief that education and reason can permanently dismantle tribal frameworks is revealed as a psychological impossibility.

2. Richard Nisbett (b. 1941)

The Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Michigan is a titan in social psychology, famous for his work on how people think and learn. In Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking, Nisbett argues that individuals can be trained in statistical logic, cost-benefit analysis, and cognitive strategies to become truly independent, rational decision-makers who bypass cultural biases.

The Realist Verdict: Nisbett’s entire pedagogical framework collapses. If reason is the weakest lever of human preference and is captured by childhood value infusions long before critical thinking develops, Nisbett’s “tools for smart thinking” are superficial decorations. They do not create autonomous, rational agents; they simply teach individuals how to build more complex, sophisticated justifications for the tribal prejudices they already hold.

3. Howard Gardner (b. 1943)

The John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education is world-renowned for his theory of multiple intelligences. A major pillar of his work, detailed in books like Changing Minds, focuses on how leaders and educators can use reason, evidence, and logical appeals to systematically alter deeply held beliefs and change human behavior.

The Realist Verdict: Gardner’s theories on cognitive change lose their explanatory value. If deep-seated moral codes and group preferences are anchored in biology and intense childhood socialization, they are fundamentally insulated from abstract persuasion or logical re-education. Gardner’s belief that minds can be re-engineered through rational shifts ignores the protective, survival-driven logic of the tribal mind.

4. Carol Dweck (b. 1946)

The Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University achieved global status for her pioneering work on “growth mindset” in Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Dweck’s model treats the human mind as an autonomous, highly malleable agent capable of transforming its capabilities, preferences, and identity through individual conscious choice and personal cognitive effort.

The Realist Verdict: Dweck’s individualistic paradigm loses its foundational authority. If human identity and moral codes are structurally dictated by the social groups into which an individual is born, the concept of a self-authored, perfectly fluid individual mindset is a liberal fiction. The mind is not an isolated project of personal growth; it is an instrument of collective preservation.

5. Martin Seligman (b. 1942)

The Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania is the founder of positive psychology. In works like Authentic Happiness and Flourish, Seligman argues that individuals can achieve well-being and moral virtue through conscious self-cultivation, rational reflection, and the independent maximization of personal character strengths, independent of strict traditional constraints.

The Realist Verdict: Seligman’s model of human flourishing falls apart. If man is a profoundly social organism whose psychological health depends strictly on being embedded in and useful to a concrete, disciplined group with a shared moral code, Seligman’s focus on the autonomous pursuit of happiness is an illusion. It is a recipe for alienation rather than flourishing, because it downplays the primary social and tribal structures necessary for human stability.

If Mearsheimer is right, elite Anthropology departments would face an abrupt resolution of the theoretical wars that have divided the field for over a century.

Anthropology has been torn between biological determinism and radical cultural constructionism, and more recently, between Western scientific objectivity and postmodern reflexivity. If human beings are innately tribal, governed by a drive for group survival, and captured by intense childhood socialization before reason can develop, these long-running debates settle in favor of a tragic, functional realism.

For decades, elite departments have been battlegrounds over the relationship between biology and culture. One camp, rooted in evolutionary anthropology and sociobiology, has sought universal biological imperatives for human behavior. The opposing camp, rooted in the cultural determinism of Franz Boas (1858–1942) and Margaret Mead (1901–1978), argued that human nature is an incredibly plastic construct shaped almost entirely by culture, viewing universal biological claims with skepticism.

The realist premise resolves this by merging the two positions into a single, functional architecture. The debate over whether humans are biological or cultural is settled: they are biologically wired to be cultural. Tribalism and the requirement for in-group solidarity are innate, evolutionary defense systems necessary for survival in a competitive world. Culture is the specific, localized method the tribe uses to achieve that solidarity. Biology provides the tribal blueprint; childhood socialization writes the local software.

Since the publication of Writing Culture in 1986, elite anthropology has been consumed by a crisis of representation. Postmodern anthropologists argued that objective ethnography is an illusion, that any description of an outside culture is merely a text constructed to maintain Western imperial dominance, and that the discipline must focus on self-reflexive critique to dismantle these power structures.

If the premise is right, this entire reflexive turn is a luxury product of an over-socialized, secure academic sub-tribe. The idea that a culture can deconstruct its own categories to achieve a borderless, power-free cosmopolitan existence is a psychological impossibility. Anthropologists cannot step outside of their own socialization. The postmodern attempt to dissolve stable identities and national boundaries through literary critique is a failure because it treats hard, survival-driven social defense structures as fragile linguistic habits.

A major focus of contemporary anthropology is globalism and transnationalism. Many elite theorists argue that global migration, digital networks, and consumer capitalism are eroding the nation-state and traditional tribal boundaries, creating a new, hybrid global consciousness.

Realism finishes this debate in favor of the permanent particular. Globalism does not erase man’s tribal core; it merely shifts the fault lines. When resources shrink or security dilemmas intensify, the thin veneer of cosmopolitan global citizenship fractures immediately. Individuals look to their primary, highly socialized in-group for protection, and groups look out for their own survival first. The anthropological dream of a borderless global village is revealed as a delusion that ignores the permanent human requirement for concrete, localized group cohesion against outsiders.

If these premises hold, the debate over whether anthropology is a science of universal human progress or a tool for absolute cultural relativism resolves into a single, realist model: Anthropology is the study of how human groups hold themselves together to survive.

Elite anthropology departments would abandon the utopian hope of engineering a world free from ethnocentrism, prejudice, and group conflict. The field would become an empirical catalog of the various rituals, myths, and kinship systems that different human tribes use to perform the exact same biological task: injecting a specific moral code into their young during a long childhood to ensure absolute internal solidarity and external defense.

If the realist framework is correct, five elite, anthropologists would see their foundational theories invalidated and lose significant intellectual status.

1. Agustín Fuentes (b. 1966)

The Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University is an influential public intellectual who argues against the idea that human beings have an innate, biological drive for warfare, aggression, or tribal division. In works like The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional and Why We Believe, Fuentes posits that the defining evolutionary trait of humanity is a capacity for fluid, creative cooperation that can transcend historical boundaries.

The Realist Verdict: Fuentes loses status because his model of human exceptionalism mistakes a secondary capacity for the primary logic of survival. Under the realist premise, human cooperation is not an open-ended, borderless creative spark; it is a highly localized tool used exclusively to strengthen the in-group against an out-group. His optimistic belief that humans can construct beliefs entirely free from biological tribal constraints is revealed as a luxury myth of the modern academy.

2. Akhil Gupta (b. 1957)

The Professor of Anthropology at UCLA is a leading theorist on transnationalism, post-coloniality, and globalization. In seminal works like Anthropology by Comparison and Culture, Power, Place, Gupta argues that modern global networks, migration, and digital spaces are actively de-territorializing culture, dismantling traditional national borders, and giving rise to fluid, hybrid global identities that challenge the old, fixed categories of the state.

The Realist Verdict: Gupta’s entire framework on global hybridity collapses into irrelevance. If humans are profoundly social and dependent on concrete, bounded group cohesion for physical and psychological survival, “de-territorialization” is a superficial and temporary phenomenon. When a systemic crisis or resource shortage occurs, the thin veneer of a borderless global citizenship shatters, and individuals instantly retreat to their primary, highly socialized national and tribal defense structures.

3. Arturo Escobar (b. 1951)

The Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (still highly active in writing and international forums), is a pioneer of post-development theory. In books like Encountering Development and Designs for the Pluriverse, Escobar argues that local, marginalized communities can use radical self-reflection and political activism to entirely dismantle dominant Western capitalist structures, creating a fluid, egalitarian “pluriverse” where many distinct, peaceful worlds coexist without hierarchy or dominance.

The Realist Verdict: Escobar’s utopian pluriverse is exposed as a psychological impossibility. The premise dictates that human groups do not seek abstract, peaceful co-existence in a borderless matrix; they seek the preservation and dominance of their own specific group within an anarchic, competitive environment. The very tools Escobar champions for liberation would simply be captured by local elites to perform the eternal task of group socialization, hierarchy enforcement, and defense against outsiders.

4. Tim Ingold (b. 1948)

The Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen remains a towering, highly active figure in ecological and psychological anthropology. In works like The Perception of the Environment and Being Alive, Ingold advances an organism-environment model that rejects fixed human nature and static cultural boundaries. He views human life as an open-ended, fluid process of continuous self-creation and development through movement, arguing that human identity is constantly generated along “lines of flow” rather than anchored by rigid, inherited tribal structures.

The Realist Verdict: Ingold’s philosophy of fluid self-creation fails the test of structural socialization. If an enormous, definitive value infusion is imposed on a child by his family and immediate society long before his critical faculties can develop, human identity is not an open-ended line of flow. It is heavily anchored, locked, and pre-determined by the native group’s survival logic. Ingold’s model treats the human mind as far more autonomous and unencumbered than the reality of childhood socialization allows.

5. Faye Ginsburg (b. 1952)

The David B. Kriser Professor of Anthropology at New York University is an elite figure in visual media anthropology and social activism. In her extensive work on indigenous media, cultural activism, and global networks, Ginsburg argues that media technologies and shared digital stories can be used to bypass traditional political boundaries, build transnational solidarity, and foster a cosmopolitan human empathy that liberates individuals from localized, nationalist prejudices.

The Realist Verdict: Ginsburg’s model of media-driven universal empathy is revealed as a fundamental misreading of human mechanics. The realist premise notes that language, imagery, and stories do not function to liberate individuals from their local groups or build a global village. Instead, stories are the precise instruments used by a specific tribe to inject its own moral code into its young and maintain internal discipline. Transnational media networks do not create a universal human bond; they merely create a larger digital arena where competing groups weaponize narratives to secure their own power and survival.

If Mearsheimer’s premises are right, the foundational intellectual battles that have split elite Economics departments for generations would settle decisively in favor of a tragic, nationalist realism.

Modern economics is built primarily on individualist and universalist assumptions. If human beings are profoundly social, tribal at their core, and governed by intense childhood socialization rather than cold rationality, then the discipline’s major models collapse.

The dominant paradigm in elite economics departments relies on Homo economicus, the model of human beings as atomistic, self-interested, rational actors who maximize personal utility through calculated economic choices. This model assumes that preferences are individual, stable, and evaluated via independent reason.

If Mearsheimer is right, this foundational figure is a complete fiction. Humans do not act as lone-wolf utility calculators. Their preferences, moral codes, and identities are structurally dictated by the social groups into which they are born long before their critical faculties can even form. Reason is the weakest lever of human preference. The debate resolves on a stark truth: economic behavior is not the aggregate of individual rational choices; individual choice is an artifact of tribal socialization.

For decades, elite economists at institutions like Harvard, Chicago, and the World Bank have championed neoliberal globalism. This view argues that free trade, open borders, capital mobility, and global supply chains create a universal, borderless market where everyone wins through comparative advantage. It assumes that wealth maximization is the ultimate goal of human societies and that global commerce will eventually make national borders obsolete.

Mearsheimer’s logic ends this debate in favor of strict economic nationalism (mercantilism). If humans are tribal at their core and derive their security from the nation-state, they will never prioritize abstract global efficiency over group survival. The international arena is anarchic and competitive. When a crisis hits, or when wealth accumulation threatens a state’s security relative to a rival, the thin veneer of global market cooperation cracks.

Elite economics departments would have to concede that the “wealth of nations” is secondary to the “security of nations.” Wealth is not an end in itself; it is merely a tool used by the tribe to secure power against external threats. The dream of a borderless global economy is revealed as a Western illusion that completely ignored the permanent security dilemma.

Behavioral economics—pioneered by figures like Daniel Kahneman (1934–2024) and Richard Thaler (b. 1945)—gained elite status by proving that humans consistently depart from rational choices due to cognitive biases, heuristics, and emotional shortcuts. However, behavioral economists still view these “irrationalities” as individual psychological bugs or design flaws to be corrected via clever “nudges.”

The realist framework resolves this by reframing these biases not as individual bugs, but as critical systemic features. The human brain did not evolve to calculate personal financial optimizations in a vacuum; it evolved to maintain group cohesion and ensure tribal survival. In-group favoritism, conformity, and herd behavior are highly functional assets for collective defense. Behavioral economics is right that pure rationality is a myth, but wrong in thinking that humans can be nudged into becoming atomistic, cosmopolitan rationalists.

If these premises hold, elite economics departments would lose their status as pure, value-free mathematical sciences. The grand debate over whether the market should be entirely free or state-managed resolves into a single, realist synthesis: Economics is an instrument of tribal competition.

The discipline would return to its historical roots as Political Economy. Economists would abandon the utopian pursuit of an optimized global market of individual consumers. Instead, the field would focus on how states handle resources, industrial policy, and financial networks to perform the exact same biological and political task: maintaining the internal material solidarity of the group and securing the state against foreign adversaries.

If the realist premises of structural tribalism, intense childhood socialization, and the weakness of human reason are correct, these five elite economists would experience a severe loss of intellectual authority. Their global status rests on modeling the world as an aggregate of individual choices, borderless efficiencies, or universal rational incentives.

1. Daron Acemoglu (b. 1967)

The Institute Professor of Economics at MIT is one of the most cited living economists and co-author of Why Nations Fail. Acemoglu’s framework argues that a society’s long-term prosperity is determined by its political and economic institutions. He posits that any society can achieve growth and stability if it transitions from “extractive” tribal and authoritarian setups to “inclusive” liberal institutions that protect property rights, individual incentives, and democratic governance.

The Realist Verdict: Acemoglu loses status because his institutional teleology is exposed as a Western cultural product rather than a universal law of development. Under the realist premise, “inclusive institutions” are not neutral frameworks that any population can adopt through rational choice. They are highly localized products of specific Western socialization. Other societies do not fail because they have bad institutional blueprints; they operate on different, deeply embedded tribal and national survival logics that resist the atomizing effects of liberal structural engineering.

2. Jeffrey Sachs (b. 1954)

The University Professor at Columbia University is a global architect of international development and sustainable global planning. Sachs achieved immense prominence by advising post-Soviet Eastern Europe on transitioning to free-market capitalism and by designing sweeping United Nations frameworks like the Millennium Development Goals. His work assumes that poverty and conflict are structural technical problems that can be solved through global economic integration, international aid, and universal managerial expertise.

The Realist Verdict: Sachs’s technocratic globalism collapses into a structural impossibility. If human beings are innately tribal and look to their primary group for physical and psychological survival, the ideal of a borderless, globally integrated world managed by transnational experts is a delusion. When resources shrink or geopolitical competition sharpens, the thin veneer of international cooperation shatters. Sachs’s belief that global financial planning can override the permanent security dilemma of competing nations is revealed as a luxury myth of the Western elite.

3. Paul Krugman (b. 1953)The Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Nobel laureate is a premier defender of globalized trade theory and international integration. While Krugman acknowledges certain domestic dislocations from trade, his core work on New Trade Theory demonstrates that globalized markets, integrated supply chains, and international specialization maximize aggregate efficiency and wealth for all participating nations.

The Realist Verdict: Krugman’s focus on absolute market efficiency loses its foundational relevance. The realist premise notes that the “wealth of nations” is secondary to the “security of nations.” In an anarchic world, states do not seek abstract, global consumer efficiency; they seek relative gains to ensure survival against rivals. Krugman’s model assumes that states will comfortably outsource critical industrial and supply capabilities to foreign actors for the sake of cheaper goods, ignoring the tragic reality that interdependence creates vulnerability, which the tribal state must eventually resist.

4. Richard Thaler (b. 1945)

The Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business is a Nobel laureate celebrated for pioneering behavioral economics. In Nudge, Thaler demonstrates that humans depart from pure neoclassical rationality due to cognitive biases. However, his entire framework treats these departures as individual psychological bugs to be subtly corrected by enlightened technocrats through choice architecture, steering people toward optimal, independent, rational decisions.

The Realist Verdict: Thaler’s individualistic paradigm is fundamentally misaligned with human biology. If human cognitive biases such as in-group favoritism, conformity, and herd behavior are critical evolutionary defense mechanisms designed to maintain tribal solidarity and collective survival, they are not individual flaws to be “nudged” away by an academic elite. Thaler’s belief that humans can be subtly engineered into becoming atomistic, cosmopolitan rationalists ignores the primary social architecture of the mind.

5. Andrei Shleifer (b. 1961)

The Professor of Economics at Harvard University consistently ranks as one of the top economists in the world according to research citations. Shleifer is a pioneer of the “Legal Origins Theory,” which argues that the historical origin of a country’s legal system (such as English common law versus French civil law) dictates its modern economic performance by establishing clear, universal rules for individual investor protection and market freedom.

The Realist Verdict: Shleifer’s structural formalism loses its explanatory power. If a child is intensely socialized with an enormous value infusion long before his critical faculties form, a society’s economic behavior is driven by its deeply embedded moral code and tribal culture, not by the abstract mechanics of its legal text. Shleifer’s theory treats law as a neutral, universal machine that regulates individual actors, whereas a realist framework reveals that formal law is merely a secondary instrument used by a specific dominant group to preserve its internal solidarity and project its domestic authority.

If the foundational premises of structural realism and intense childhood socialization are correct, the landscape of higher education would undergo an absolute redistribution of intellectual authority.

Departments that assume human beings are independent, rational utility-maximizers or infinitely plastic, self-authoring entities would collapse in prestige. Conversely, departments that study the concrete levers of group survival, material power, and the historical transmission of tribal identity would gain total ascendancy.

Here is how academic departments and the university ecosystem as a whole would be affected.

The Departments That Lose Status

1. Economics (Particularly Neoclassical and Neoliberal)

The discipline would lose its crown as the premier “scientific” advisory body to governments. Because its foundational models depend on Homo economicus—the atomistic, rational agent acting independently of tribal cohesion—its economic forecasts and policy recommendations regarding borderless global markets would be exposed as recurring failures.

2. Cognitive Psychology and behavioral Sciences

Psychology departments would see their prestige diminish as they move away from treating the individual mind as an independent, objective processor. The belief that cognitive biases are individual defects to be cured or “nudged” by technocrats would be discarded.

3. Modern Philosophy

Mainstream political philosophy—built on the legacy of John Locke, John Rawls, and universalist ethics—would be downgraded to a branch of Western ideological history. Its attempts to construct a rational, borderless, value-neutral framework for global governance would be viewed as a psychological impossibility.

4. Global Studies and Transnational Relations

Departments built around the concept of a “global village,” transnational citizenship, and the peaceful erosion of the nation-state via international institutions would lose virtually all intellectual credibility. They would be viewed as factories for the exact liberal delusions that cause foreign policy catastrophes.

The Departments That Gain Status

1. Political Science (Specifically Realism and Strategic Studies)

International Relations and strategic studies programs would become the undisputed intellectual centers of the social sciences. The study of the balance of power, the security dilemma, and the structural behavior of states in an anarchic world would be recognized as the truest descriptions of human macro-behavior.

2. Evolutionary and Functionalist Anthropology

Anthropology would gain status by reclaiming its role as an empirical, structural science. By abandoning the postmodern reflexive turn, the department would become the premier field for studying the exact mechanisms of human group survival, analyzing how different tribes enforce internal solidarity and social discipline to protect themselves from external threats.

3. Institutional and National History

History departments would shed their progressive, teleological assumptions and rise in status. History would be re-centered as the essential ledger of competitive group survival, industrial development, and state formation. It would provide the necessary case studies for how great powers rise, fall, and socialize their populations across centuries.

4. Evolutionary Biology and Behavioral Genetics

Hard sciences that explore the deep, innate biological imperatives undergirding human cooperation, in-group favoritism, and reproductive survival strategies would gain immense authority. They would provide the biological blueprint that explains why cultural socialization is so fiercely effective.

The Fate of Universities

If these premises are right, universities would suffer a massive loss of status and cultural authority.

The modern elite university is structurally and ideologically dependent on the exact individualistic, universalist Enlightenment myths that the realist premise dismantles. The university justifies its immense wealth, social power, and role as a gatekeeper by claiming that it is an engine of disinterested reason, objective merit, and universal human progress. It claims to take young minds and liberate them from their local, provincial prejudices to turn them into cosmopolitan, rational citizens of the world.

If the premise holds, this entire justification is an illusion. The university is not a sanctuary of objective, universal truth; it is simply the specialized socialization engine of a specific, managerial sub-tribe. Its unique jargon, peer-review standards, and moral dictums are not universal discoveries; they are the values injected into its members to maintain internal elite solidarity and protect its institutional power against competing domestic groups.

Once the public and the political establishment realize that elite universities are merely tribal strongholds producing highly socialized, self-interested ideological cadres rather than objective truth, the institutional legitimacy of higher education collapses. The state and the broader population would treat universities with deep skepticism, viewing them not as sacred temples of learning to be funded and revered, but as powerful, insular factions whose ideological output must be contained to preserve national cohesion and state survival.

If Mearsheimer’s premises are right, the entire discipline of academic Ethics would face a brutal, leveling reduction.

For centuries, ethical philosophy has been dominated by a search for the definitive, universal foundation of right and wrong. Ethicists have split into major warring camps, each claiming to have discovered the objective logic of human morality. If human beings are profoundly social, tribal at their core, and captured by intense childhood value infusions before their critical faculties can even form, these grand philosophical debates resolve entirely in favor of an unyielding moral realism.

The most prestigious camp in academic ethics is Deontology, rooted in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kantian ethics rests on the absolute premise that morality is a product of pure, universal reason. Kant argued for the Categorical Imperative: you must act only according to maxims that you can rationally will to become a universal law for all rational beings, independent of your specific culture, desires, or group loyalties.

If the realist premise is right, Kantian ethics is a psychological and structural impossibility. Reason is the weakest lever of human preference. The idea that a man can strip away his childhood socialization to operate as a bloodless, universal rational agent is an illusion. Humans do not owe their primary moral allegiance to an abstract “kingdom of ends” or to humanity as a whole; they owe it to the specific tribe that protected them during a long, vulnerable childhood. The debate settles decisively: the Categorical Imperative is not an objective law of reason, but a highly sophisticated secularized myth produced by the Western academic tribe.

The primary rival to Kantianism is Utilitarianism, pioneered by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873). Modern utilitarian ethicists, like Peter Singer (b. 1946), argue that morality requires the rational maximization of well-being for all sentient creatures. Singer famously argues for the “expanding circle,” asserting that independent reason allows us to see past our family, tribe, and nation to grant equal moral weight to a stranger on the other side of the planet.

Mearsheimer’s logic dismantles this expanding circle. If human beings are biologically wired to be tribal for group survival, the moral distance between the in-group and the out-group is a permanent necessity, not a primitive error that education can fix. A society that genuinely treats the interests of foreigners as equal to the interests of its own members will fail the test of survival and be displaced by a more cohesive, self-interested rival. Utilitarian cosmopolitanism is revealed as a luxury delusion available only to secure, affluent elites who have forgotten that their very security depends on a heavily defended national border.

Ethicists have long debated Moral Realism—the question of whether moral facts (like “cruelty is wrong”) exist as objective, mind-independent truths in the universe, or whether morality is entirely relative and subjective.

The premise resolves this debate through a functionalist lens. Moral truths do not exist as abstract, independent facts floating in the cosmos, nor are they flimsy, arbitrary preferences. Moral codes are hard, functional instruments of collective defense. The intense value infusion a child receives from his family and community is designed to do one thing: ensure absolute internal solidarity and external defense. A tribe’s moral code—its definitions of honor, duty, right, and wrong—is an evolutionary defense mechanism. Morality is “real” only in the sense that it is a hard biological and social prerequisite for group survival in a highly competitive, anarchic world.

If Mearsheimer is right, the century-long debate over whether morality is rooted in Universal Reason (Kant), Universal Consequences (Singer), or Universal Rights (Locke) resolves into a single, realist truth: All morality is particularist and tribal.

The discipline of Ethics would be stripped of its universalist, crusading mission. It would no longer function as a tool for engineering a global human rights regime or a borderless cosmopolitan brotherhood. Instead, the field would become a branch of descriptive sociology and evolutionary biology, analyzing the specific, localized moral frameworks that different human groups use to hold themselves together and survive against competing tribes.

If the realist framework is correct, these five elite active ethicists would see their foundational systems invalidated and experience a significant loss of status.

1. Peter Singer (b. 1946)

The Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics Emeritus at Princeton University (who remains highly active in global forums and public debate) is the world’s most prominent champion of utilitarian cosmopolitanism and effective altruism. In The Expanding Circle and One World Now, Singer uses rationalist utilitarian calculations to argue that borders are morally arbitrary and that an individual possesses an equal moral obligation to relieve the suffering of a stranger on another continent as he does his own neighbor or family member.

The Realist Verdict: Singer’s expanding circle collapses into a psychological and structural impossibility. If humans are biologically wired to be tribal for group survival, the distinction between the in-group and the out-group is a permanent protective structure, not a primitive error to be engineered away through logical argument. Singer’s cosmopolitan calculus treats the human mind as an unencumbered utility-computer, completely ignoring the reality that abstract universal altruism weakens the exact internal solidarity a group requires to survive in an anarchic world.

2. Onora O’Neill (b. 1941)

Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve is a towering figure in contemporary Kantian ethics, a member of the House of Lords, and past president of the British Academy. In works like Faces of Hunger: An Essay on Poverty, Justice, and Development and Bounds of Justice, O’Neill applies a strict Kantian deontological framework to global politics, arguing that reason demands all human institutions and states respect the autonomy and rights of every individual globally, transcending national sovereignty and cultural borders.

The Realist Verdict: O’Neill’s universalist ethics are exposed as a highly localized cultural product rather than a dictation of pure reason. Under the realist premise, human beings are completely captured by specific childhood socialization and value infusions long before they can exercise independent critical faculties. O’Neill’s belief that states can or should base their behavior on a borderless obligation to universal individual autonomy ignores the fundamental reality that states exist to protect the specific tribe that formed them, not an abstract global kingdom of rational agents.

3. Thomas Pogge (b. 1953)

The Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University is an elite political philosopher who studied under John Rawls. In World Poverty and Human Rights, Pogge argues that citizens of wealthy Western nations have a direct, universal negative moral duty to restructure the global economic order because current international institutions systematically violate the human rights of the global poor.

The Realist Verdict: Pogge’s global justice model loses its foundational authority. If human moral codes are instruments of group survival and internal cohesion rather than abstract, universal laws discoverable by independent reason, his claim that Western citizens owe a primary moral obligation to alter their own systems for the benefit of distant out-groups is a fantasy. Pogge mistakes the highly specific, secure socialization of elite Western academies for a universal moral imperative, failing to see that international institutions are arenas of great power competition rather than a neutral global social contract.

4. Kwame Anthony Appiah (b. 1954)

The Professor of Philosophy and Law at NYU is one of the most prominent public ethicists in the West, famous for his defense of modern cosmopolitanism. In books like Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers and The Honor Code, Appiah argues that individuals can and should cultivate a global citizenship that balances a respect for local differences with a primary, rational allegiance to a universal human community.

The Realist Verdict: Appiah’s elegant cosmopolitanism is revealed as a luxury product of a secure, over-socialized academic sub-tribe. The premise notes that because human survival depends on being embedded in a concrete society that defines itself against other groups, there is no such thing as an organic, universal human tribe. When geopolitical crises or resource scarcities occur, the thin veneer of global conversation cracks immediately. Appiah’s model treats human identity as far more fluid and self-authored than the hard reality of childhood tribal value infusion allows.

5. Martha Nussbaum (b. 1947)

The Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago is a titan of contemporary ethical and political philosophy. In Frontiers of Justice and Creating Capabilities, Nussbaum champions the “Capabilities Approach,” arguing that there is a universal baseline of core human capabilities that every government on earth is morally obligated to guarantee to every single citizen, independent of local traditions, cultural preferences, or national sovereignty.

The Realist Verdict: Nussbaum’s universalist blueprint is exposed as a form of Western ideological projection. If humans are tribal at their core and derive their moral codes from the intense socialization of their specific societies, what Nussbaum defines as a “universal human capability” is the highly specific moral code of modern Western liberalism. Other societies do not reject these standards due to a lack of ethical development, but because their own survival mechanisms prioritize group continuity and traditional structures over the atomistic rights of the individual.

If Mearsheimer’s premises are right, the intellectual landscape of elite philosophy departments would face a catastrophic leveling.

Modern academic philosophy is built largely on the assumption that human reason is an independent, sovereign tool capable of discovering objective truths about reality, morality, and justice. If human beings are profoundly social, tribal at their core, and governed by intense childhood value infusions before their critical faculties can even form, then philosophy is not a path to universal truth. It is a highly sophisticated, localized method of rationalizing tribal preferences.

Several of the most contentious debates within elite departments would settle.

1. Political Philosophy: Rawlsian Liberalism vs. Communitarian Realism

For more than half a century, elite political philosophy has been dominated by the legacy of John Rawls (1921–2002) and his followers. Rawls argued that the principles of a just society can be discovered by imagining individuals behind a “veil of ignorance”—a thought experiment where rational actors choose political structures without knowing their own race, class, talents, or conceptions of the good life. This individualistic, universalist framework assumes that justice can be engineered independently of concrete cultural identities.

If Mearsheimer is right, the entire Rawlsian project collapses into a psychological and structural impossibility. The “unencumbered self” behind the veil of ignorance is a fiction. Humans are situated from start to finish within specific social groups that dictate their moral codes and identities long before they can think for themselves. Reason is the weakest lever of human preference. The debate over the abstract structure of a universal liberal society resolves on a stark truth: the veil of ignorance is a fantasy because you cannot strip away an individual’s socialization without destroying the very apparatus he uses to reason. Communitarian realism wins completely.

2. Metaethics: Moral Realism vs. Evolutionary Expressivism

Analytic philosophy departments are locked in a sophisticated debate over Moral Realism—the question of whether moral properties exist as objective, mind-independent facts in the universe, or whether morality is merely subjective. Rationalist realists argue that human reason can look past cultural biases to grasp universal, objective moral truths, much like discovering mathematical laws.

The realist framework reduces this debate to a branch of evolutionary biology and sociology. Objective, mind-independent moral facts do not exist floating in the cosmos. However, moral codes are not flimsy, arbitrary preferences either. They are hard, functional instruments of collective defense. The intense value infusion a child receives during his long childhood is designed to do one thing: ensure absolute internal solidarity and external defense for the tribe. A society’s moral code—its definitions of duty, honor, right, and wrong—is an evolutionary defense mechanism. Morality is “real” only in the sense that it is a hard biological prerequisite for group survival in a highly competitive, anarchic world.

3. Epistemology: The Market of Ideas vs. Tribal Pragmatism

In epistemology, particularly social epistemology, philosophers debate how groups acquire knowledge and whether an open, rational marketplace of ideas allows truth to eventually defeat error. This framework assumes that human minds, when presented with superior logical arguments and empirical evidence, will update their beliefs toward objective reality.

If Mearsheimer is right, this model is a profound misreading of human cognitive design. The human brain did not evolve to be an isolated, disinterested seeker of abstract truth; it evolved to ensure tribal survival. What philosophers call “cognitive biases” or “irrationality” are critical functional assets that maintain group cohesion. Reason does not operate as an objective judge evaluating evidence; it operates as a lawyer constructing justifications for preferences that childhood socialization and innate sentiments have already established. The debate resolves into a grim, pragmatic realism: language and arguments are not neutral tools for discovering universal truth, but weapons used in inter-group competition.

4. The Philosophy of Mind and Action: The Myth of the Autonomous Agent

A vast amount of work in the philosophy of action assumes the existence of an autonomous individual agent who weighs reasons, forms intentions, and acts freely based on independent rational reflection. This individualistic model is the baseline for how modern philosophy conceptualizes human responsibility, ethics, and legal theory.

Mearsheimer’s premises dismantle this autonomous agent. If an individual is born into a social group that completely shapes his identity and infuses him with an enormous value system during a long childhood before his critical faculties even form, his choices are heavily pre-determined. Humans have very limited choice in formulating a moral code or determining their deepest preferences. The debate over free will and autonomous agency settles in favor of a strict social determinism: the self-authored, independent individual is a liberal myth.

If Mearsheimer is right, elite philosophy departments would lose their grand, civilizational authority. The discipline would be stripped of its universalist, crusading mission to discover timeless truths or engineer a borderless, cosmopolitan global order.

Instead, philosophy would be recognized as a branch of cultural genealogy and anthropology. The great systems of Western philosophy—from John Locke’s rights to Immanuel Kant’s duties—would no longer be taught as objective discoveries of human reason. They would be understood historically as the sophisticated, highly specialized myths produced by a specific Western sub-tribe to maintain its own internal solidarity, justify its institutional power, and steel itself for competition against the rest of the world.

If John Mearsheimer’s precepts are correct—that reason is the weakest determinant of human preferences, that intense childhood socialization completely captures the mind before critical faculties develop, and that humans are innately tribal actors driven by group survival rather than atomistic individuals—five active, high-status philosophers would experience a severe loss of standing. Their life work relies on paradigms that these precepts invalidate.

1. Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929)

The world’s most prominent living social and political philosopher has dedicated his career to the theory of communicative rationality. Habermas argues that human beings can transcend tribal prejudices, state coercion, and ideological distortions through “ideal speech situations”—spaces where individuals engage in open, rational discourse to reach a genuine, universal consensus.The Realist Verdict: Habermas loses his foundational standing. If reason is subordinate to innate sentiment and intense childhood value infusions, the “ideal speech situation” is a psychological myth. Language and arguments do not function to liberate individuals into a borderless, rational consensus; they are the highly specific tools a tribe uses to enforce internal solidarity and compete against outsiders.

2. Christine Korsgaard (b. 1952)

The Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy Emerita at Harvard University is a titan of contemporary neo-Kantian ethics. In works like The Sources of Normativity and Self-Constitution, Korsgaard argues that morality is an inescapable requirement of rational agency. She posits that by practicing reflective endorsement, an individual can step back from his desires and cultural socialization to author his own moral identity based on universal human worth.

The Realist Verdict: Korsgaard’s model of self-constitution collapses. If an individual is born into a social group that completely shapes his identity and infuses him with a moral code during a long childhood before his critical faculties form, he has very limited choice in formulating a moral outlook. The independent rational agent who steps back from his culture to endorse universal duties is a liberal fiction.

3. Philip Pettit (b. 1945)The Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University is the leading contemporary theorist of neo-republican political philosophy. In Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government and Just Freedom, Pettit argues that a just society can be engineered around the principle of “freedom as non-domination.” This individualistic, universalist framework assumes that institutions can be rationally designed to ensure no individual is subject to the arbitrary will of another, independent of deep cultural or tribal hierarchies.

The Realist Verdict: Pettit’s institutional engineering is revealed as a Western cultural luxury. Under the realist premise, human groups do not seek a state of neutral non-domination; they seek the preservation and dominance of their own specific group to guarantee survival in a competitive, anarchic world. The abstract rules Pettit designs to protect atomistic individuals would simply be captured by the dominant domestic tribe to enforce internal discipline and external defense.

4. Thomas Scanlon (b. 1940)The Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity Emeritus at Harvard University is one of the most influential ethicists in the analytic tradition. In his landmark book What We Owe to Each Other, Scanlon champions contractualism, arguing that an act is wrong if its performance could only be justified by principles that other rational persons could reasonably reject. This system treats morality as a universal, reason-driven negotiation among equal, unencumbered individual agents.

The Realist Verdict: Scanlon’s contractualism loses its foundational relevance. If human moral codes are hard biological and social defense structures designed exclusively to ensure internal group cohesion against an out-group, what we owe to “each other” depends entirely on who is inside the perimeter of the tribe. A universal negotiation based on abstract reasonableness ignores the tragic reality that morality is a weapon used in inter-group competition, not a value-neutral seminar.

5. David Enoch (b. 1971)The Professor of Legal Philosophy at the University of Oxford is a leading defender of robust moral realism in analytic metaethics. In Taking Morality Seriously, Enoch argues that there are objective, mind-independent moral facts that human reason can discover, and that these facts are universally binding on all rational agents regardless of their personal desires, upbringing, or cultural background.

The Realist Verdict: Enoch’s robust realism is reduced to a branch of evolutionary functionalism. Objective, mind-independent moral truths do not exist floating in the cosmos. A society’s moral code—its definition of right, wrong, duty, and honor—is an evolutionary defense mechanism designed to perform a concrete task: injecting solidarity into the young to hold the collective together. Enoch mistakes the highly specific, secure socialization of modern elite academies for the discovery of universal moral laws.

If Mearsheimer’s premises are right, the field of religious studies within elite universities would face a rapid, leveling reorientation.

Modern academic religion departments are largely dominated by two frameworks: a liberal, ecumenical Protestant heritage that seeks a universal, pluralistic core behind all faiths, and a post-colonial, critical framework that views religion almost entirely as a fluid, modern European invention used for colonial control.

If human beings are innately tribal, governed by intense childhood value infusions before critical faculties form, and driven by a need for group survival, these long-running debates settle in favor of a stark, functional realism.

1. The Death of the Pluralist “Universal Mystic Core” Debate

For decades, a major debate has persisted between pluralists—influenced by figures like John Hick (1922–2012)—who argue that all world religions are simply different cultural expressions of a single, universal ultimate reality, and particularists who argue that religions are distinct. The pluralist model assumes that beneath dogmatic differences lies a shared human spirituality that can usher in a global, cosmopolitan brotherhood.

If Mearsheimer is right, this universalist model is a psychological fiction. Religions do not exist to connect individuals to an abstract, borderless cosmic truth. Religion is the ultimate group preservation device.

The theological dogmas, rituals, and boundary lines of a faith are explicitly designed to perform a concrete evolutionary task: creating an absolute distinction between the in-group (the saved) and the out-group (the damned). This boundary ensures the internal solidarity and sacrifice required for a group to survive against competing tribes. The pluralist dream of stripping away these particularist boundaries to find a peaceful, universal core would destroy the very social logic that makes religion a permanent feature of human history.

2. The Reframing of the “Religion as a Modern Invention” Debate

Following the path of scholars like Jonathan Z. Smith (1938–2017), elite religion departments heavily emphasize that “religion” is a fabricated academic category. This school argues that pre-modern peoples did not have a distinct thing called “religion”—they just had culture—and that European colonizers invented the rigid category of “world religions” to classify, manage, and subjugate foreign populations.

The realist framework agrees with the mechanism but entirely reverses the conclusion. Yes, separating “religion” from the rest of a tribe’s daily survival apparatus is artificial. Pre-modern peoples did not view faith as an individual, private weekend hobby; it was completely interwoven with law, warfare, and tribal identity.

However, the critical theorists are wrong to think that this means tribal religious boundaries are flimsy, historical accidents that can be deconstructed to achieve individual liberation. The fusion of sacred myth with group identity is a permanent social and biological necessity. The debate settles on a realist baseline: “religion” is simply the name given to the most intense, binding value infusions a tribe uses to ensure its young are completely socialized to defend the collective perimeter.

3. The Collapse of Secularization Theory

A foundational debate in the sociology of religion centers on Secularization Theory—the prediction that as societies advance scientifically, educationally, and economically, the cognitive hold of religion will permanently decline, giving way to a secular, rational, and cosmopolitan public square.

Mearsheimer’s premises dismantle this teleology. While a society might abandon traditional supernatural dogmas, it cannot escape man’s innate tribal nature or the requirement for childhood value infusions. When a traditional religion recedes, the human mind does not become an objective, individualist computer. It immediately seeks out surrogate, secular faiths to satisfy its biological need for group embedding and moral certainty.

The fierce, dogmatic, and exclusionary ideologies that capture modern secular academic and political circles (such as rigid nationalism or intense identity-politics movements) are recognized under this lens as functional replacements for religion. Secularization does not eliminate religious dynamics; it merely changes the vocabulary of the tribe’s sacred code.

4. The Resolution: Religious Studies as Evolutionary Political Theology

If these premises hold, elite religion departments would lose their status as arenas for universalist moral lecturing or postmodern textual deconstruction.

The discipline would resolve into a single, realist framework: The study of religion is the study of high-stakes group cohesion. The field would become an empirical catalog of the specific rituals, taboos, and sacred myths that human groups deploy to steel their members for the permanent, zero-sum competition of an anarchic world.

If John Mearsheimer’s realism rules, five high-status scholars of religion would lose significant standing. Their influential frameworks rely on individualist choice, global cosmopolitan pluralism, or the idea that religious boundaries are merely plastic linguistic constructs rather than rigid, survival-driven defense systems.

1. Diana L. Eck (b. 1945)

The Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies at Harvard University and founder of The Pluralism Project is a leading voice on religious diversity. Eck’s life work models “pluralism” not just as the existence of diversity, but as an energetic, empathetic engagement where distinct religious groups cross tribal lines to build a shared, harmonious civic space through ongoing dialogue.

The Realist Verdict: Eck loses status because her model of dialogic harmony ignores the structural logic of group cohesion. If humans are innately tribal, religious identities are not open-ended commitments that can be held loosely in a global conversation. They are boundary markers designed to protect the in-group from external threats. Eck’s pluralism is revealed as a luxury product of a highly secure, elite academic ecosystem that mistakes civilized academic dialogue for a permanent transformation of human nature.

2. Reza Aslan (b. 1972)

A prominent writer, public intellectual, and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, Aslan holds a doctorate in the sociology of religions. In works like No god but God and God: A Human History, Aslan champions a progressive, universalist reading of faith, arguing that individual religious expressions are simply different historical pathways toward a shared human spiritual baseline. He regularly asserts that personal spiritual evolution can dismantle traditional institutional dogmas and border-enforcing prejudices.

The Realist Verdict: Aslan’s individualistic, evolutionary paradigm collapses. Under the realist premise, a person’s moral and religious worldview is heavily captured during a long childhood by intense group value infusions before independent reason even develops. Religion does not function to liberate individual egos into a borderless human family; it binds them to a specific tribe for collective preservation. Aslan’s celebration of an unencumbered, personalized spirituality is exposed as a modern liberal fiction.

3. Karen Armstrong (b. 1944)A globally renowned scholar, former nun, and author of A History of God and The Case for God, Armstrong is the architect of the Charter for Compassion. Her sweeping historical work argues that the true core of all major world religions is the “Golden Rule” and the cultivation of universal, borderless empathy. She posits that the dogmatic, aggressive, and tribal elements of religion are historical corruptions that can be stripped away through rational education and a return to compassionate practices.

The Realist Verdict: Armstrong’s core thesis is turned completely on its head. If Mearsheimer is right, the aggressive in-group/out-group distinctions she views as corruptions are the primary functional features of religion. Universal empathy is a recipe for group dissolution in a competitive, anarchic world. Religions survive across generations precisely because they use sacred myths to enforce intense internal solidarity and an unyielding defense against the out-group, rendering Armstrong’s universalist compassion a psychological impossibility on a macro scale.

4. Mark Juergensmeyer (b. 1940)The Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is a leading authority on religious violence and global religion. In works like Terror in the Mind of God, Juergensmeyer frames religious nationalism and fundamentalist violence as localized, reactive distortions—”global rebellions” against the secular, cosmopolitan global order, driven by ideological choices and strategic calculations.

The Realist Verdict: Juergensmeyer’s framework loses its explanatory primacy. Realism dictates that tribal nationalism and the defense of the in-group are the baseline conditions of human existence, not reactive distortions. The “secular global order” he treats as a baseline is the aggressive ideological projection of a specific, managerial Western elite. Religious groups do not revolt because they are confused by modernity; they mobilize along sacred lines because group survival demands a rejection of any universalist system that seeks to dissolve their unique cultural borders.

5. David Morgan (b. 1957)

The Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University is a pioneer in the study of material religion and visual culture, famous for The Sacred Gaze and The Forge of Vision. Morgan focuses heavily on how religious images, media, and consumer objects allow individuals to construct personal, fluid networks of feeling and attachment, treating religious visual culture as an open-ended, transactional space where meanings are continuously made and altered.

The Realist Verdict: Morgan’s emphasis on fluid, individualistic aesthetic construction fails the test of structural socialization. While he correctly notes that religion is material and behavioral rather than purely intellectual, his framework treats the “sacred gaze” as far more plastic and self-authored than the reality of childhood value infusion allows. A group’s sacred symbols are not open-ended consumer choices for personal emotional management; they are the heavily policed, non-negotiable instruments used by the collective to hammer its specific moral code into the young, ensuring total internal conformity and generational survival.

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Morality from Within: The Philosophy of Alan Gewirth

Posted on June 22, 2026 by Luke Ford

Alan Gewirth (1912-2004) ranks among the American moral philosophers who pressed hardest against the skepticism of his century. For roughly four decades he pursued a single ambition: to show that morality, and with it human rights, follows from reason alone. He worked at a time when relativism, emotivism, and logical positivism had made the idea of objective moral truth seem naive, and he treated that intellectual climate as both a philosophical error and a social danger. His central claim, that every man who acts for a purpose has already committed himself to a universal moral principle, remains contested. Few philosophers, even among his critics, have attempted a defense of moral objectivity as systematic as his.

He was born Isidore Gewirtz on November 28, 1912, in Union City, New Jersey, and grew up in West New York and other towns along the Hudson. His parents, Hyman and Rose Lees Gewirtz, were Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire who had fled antisemitic persecution. Hyman hung wallpaper for a living and longed to play the violin in concert halls. Music filled the home, and the boy took up the violin young. He rose to concertmaster of the Columbia University Orchestra and taught the instrument to younger students.

Two changes of name marked his early sense of himself as a man set apart. At eleven, weary of the taunt “Dizzy Izzy,” he took the name Alan after Alan Breck Stewart, the bold Highlander of Robert Louis Stevenson‘s (1850-1894) Kidnapped. In 1942, against a backdrop of open antisemitism in American life, he anglicized the family surname from Gewirtz to Gewirth. The experience of exclusion came early, and it shaped a lifelong concern with dignity, rights, and the standing of persons.

Gewirth excelled as a student. He finished as valedictorian of Memorial High School in January 1930 and entered Columbia University, where he studied under Richard McKeon (100-1985), a scholar of wide learning who pushed him toward philosophical inquiry and influenced his early work. He took his bachelor’s degree from Columbia in 1934, spent time at Cornell University, and served as McKeon’s research assistant at the University of Chicago. The Second World War cut into these plans. He served in the United States Army from 1942 to 1946 and rose from private to captain. He returned to Columbia under the GI Bill and completed his doctorate in 1948.

His dissertation took up the fourteenth-century political thinker Marsilius of Padua (c. 1275-c. 1342), whose effort to pry political authority loose from church power anticipated modern constitutional thought. Gewirth went on to publish studies of medieval political philosophy and to translate parts of Marsilius’s Defensor Pacis, and he earned a reputation as a careful historian of ideas. He joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1947 and stayed there for the rest of his working life. He became a full professor in 1960 and the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in 1975. He served as president of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association and of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected him a Fellow. He retired in 1992 and kept teaching and writing into his nineties.

The first half of his career centered on the history of political thought. The second turned to a larger question: can morality be justified by reason? By mid-century many philosophers had given up on the idea. The logical positivists treated moral statements as expressions of feeling. Relativists treated morality as a product of culture. The existentialists stressed individual choice over universal duty. Gewirth read these positions as both mistaken and corrosive. If morality had no rational ground, he held, then human rights rested on nothing sturdier than preference and custom, and what convention grants, convention can take away.

His answer came in Reason and Morality (1978), the book that made his name. There he set out the Principle of Generic Consistency, which scholars call the PGC. The principle reads: “Act in accord with the generic rights of your recipients as well as of yourself.” Gewirth argued that this principle follows by logical necessity from the standpoint of anyone who acts for a purpose.

His method set him apart. He began neither from religious doctrine nor from intuition, social contract, or any thick account of human nature. He began inside the perspective of an acting man. He called the approach dialectical because it drew out commitments that an agent already holds whenever he pursues a goal. The argument moves in stages. Every agent acts on purpose for ends he counts as good. Every agent must therefore value the conditions he needs to act at all, and those conditions are freedom and well-being. Without freedom a man cannot choose or pursue anything. Without well-being he lacks the capacity to act. So every agent must prize freedom and well-being as goods he cannot do without.

The hard step comes next. Because an agent must value freedom and well-being, Gewirth argued, he must claim rights to them. To deny himself such rights would mean accepting interference with the very conditions his action requires. The final step turns the claim outward. The ground of a man’s claim to these rights lies in nothing more than that he is a purposive agent. Every other person is a purposive agent too. Consistency then forces him to grant the same rights to everyone else. A universal moral principle emerges from the structure of agency.

Gewirth named this reasoning “dialectical necessity.” He believed he had found a route to morality that owed nothing to premises outside the agent. Morality, on his view, is not laid on a man from without. It sits inside the logic of his own action.

The concept of generic rights stands at the heart of the theory. These are the rights every agent holds simply as an agent, and they fall into two classes: freedom and well-being. Freedom names control over one’s own conduct and choices. Well-being names the conditions of successful action, and Gewirth ranked it in three tiers. Basic well-being covers life, bodily integrity, and mental competence, without which agency collapses. Nonsubtractive well-being covers protection against coercion, deception, and exploitation that strip a man of his power to act. Additive well-being covers the goods that widen his reach, among them education, wealth, self-respect, and opportunity. The ranking gave him a way to weigh competing claims. Basic rights outrank additive ones. The right to life outweighs the right to gain more wealth. He offered the scheme as a working tool for legal and political judgment, not as an abstraction sealed off from practice.

He saw himself as an heir to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and a corrector of him. He admired the attempt to anchor morality in reason but found the categorical imperative too formal, too thin in content. Kant had shown that moral rules must hold for everyone. He had not, in Gewirth’s reading, supplied the substance such rules require. Freedom and well-being supply it. By tying morality to the real conditions of action, Gewirth hoped to keep Kant’s universalism while giving it teeth.

His later books drew out what the principle implied. Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications worked through the moral ground of rights. The Community of Rights examined how individual liberty meets the claims of social institutions, and here Gewirth parted from the libertarians. Rights, he argued, generate not only duties of noninterference but, in some cases, positive duties of aid. A society carries obligations to protect the basic conditions of agency for all its members. His last major book, Self-Fulfillment, studied the link between morality and human flourishing and held that a man’s pursuit of fulfillment must run inside a framework of universal rights.

His reach extended past philosophy departments into legal theory and human-rights scholarship. His student Roger Pilon bent parts of the PGC toward libertarian ends. The legal philosopher Deryck Beyleveld became the system’s leading defender and reconstructed it in detail in The Dialectical Necessity of Morality. Legal scholars found in Gewirth something rare: a defense of human rights that leaned on neither religion, tradition, national identity, nor political consensus. If rights follow from agency, they stand on firmer ground than any agreement men happen to reach.

The theory drew sustained fire. The sharpest objections target the move from agency to rights. Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025) held that rights are social concepts with a history, not truths of logic. Others asked whether an agent must claim rights at all, rather than simply register practical needs, and whether one can pass from facts about action to conclusions about obligation. The egoist objection pressed the case in its starkest form. Why can a man not say, with consistency, that he values his own freedom and well-being because they serve his purposes while owing nothing to anyone else’s? Gewirth replied that the stance contradicts itself, since the ground of a man’s own claim is his agency and not any trait unique to him, and agency is something he shares with all others. His critics have not been satisfied, and the argument runs on.

Other philosophers attacked his defense of positive rights and welfare duties. Jan Narveson (b. 1936) and fellow libertarians held that rights guard a man against interference rather than oblige others to help him. Bernard Williams (1929-2003) and other skeptics doubted that any moral system might be wrung from universal requirements of reason at all. Nearly every step of the PGC has generated its own body of commentary.

For all the dispute, Gewirth holds a major place in twentieth-century moral philosophy. Even his opponents grant the rigor and ambition of the project. Few thinkers have tried to derive a whole account of ethics, politics, and human rights from the logic of action. Read as a proof or read as a brilliant failure, his work stands among the last great attempts to ground morality in objective truth during an age that had lost its taste for such truths.

Gewirth died in Chicago on May 9, 2004, at ninety-one. He left a body of work that still presses philosophers, legal theorists, and political thinkers, and a question that has not lost its force: if men hold rights, what justifies them? His answer gave no quarter. The justification lies not in religion, tradition, law, or sentiment, but in the plain fact that men act, choose, and pursue ends. Reason itself, he held, requires morality.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

David Pinsof says intellectuals believe the world’s troubles come from misunderstanding, and that this belief flatters the people whose trade is understanding. A philosopher who can show that morality follows from reason has done something better than flatter himself. He has made himself the man who holds the proof. If rights rest on logic rather than custom, then the logician sits above the quarrel as its judge. Gewirth’s career runs on the claim that the trouble with his age was an error, a failure to see what reason already contains. Relativists had misunderstood. Emotivists had misunderstood. The positivists had misunderstood. And the cure lay with the one man rigorous enough to walk the argument from agency to rights without a slip. The misunderstanding myth gives the intellectual a heroic part. Gewirth wrote himself the largest part on offer: the man who saves morality itself.
Read his stated motive at face value and you get a thinker who fears for human dignity in a skeptical century and labors to put rights on solid ground. Pinsof’s frame asks what the work does rather than what it says it does. Watch the deeds, not the mission statement. Gewirth’s deeds built a system in which trained philosophers adjudicate every claim of right, rank every conflict, and certify which interests count as basic and which as additive. He handed the keys to his own guild. The PGC reads as a contribution to knowledge. It functions as a charter of authority for the people who can wield it.
Gewirth’s hardest critic was the egoist, the man who says, “I value my freedom and well-being because they serve my purposes, and I owe nothing to yours.” Gewirth called that position incoherent. The ground of your own claim, he argued, is your agency, and your rival has agency too, so consistency forces you to grant him the same rights. Pinsof’s frame is the egoist objection restored to health and given a Darwinian pedigree. The savvy animal values his own freedom and well-being because natural selection built him to value them. He extends the courtesy to others when alliance pays and withholds it when it does not. There is no inconsistency in this, only fitness. Gewirth’s proof requires that an agent’s reason for valuing his own goods generalize into a reason for valuing everyone’s. The frame says the agent’s reason does not generalize at all. It serves him. It was never meant to travel.
So the famous “dialectical necessity” looks, in this light, like a piece of motivated reasoning dressed as logic. The argument has to reach universal rights because Gewirth wants universal rights, and he wants them because a universal moral law gives the moral philosopher a jurisdiction without borders. Confirmation runs the proof forward. Each step that an outsider finds doubtful, Gewirth found necessary, and he found it necessary in proportion to how much the conclusion needed it.
The positive-rights turn fits the same reading. In The Community of Rights Gewirth broke with the libertarians and held that rights generate duties of aid, that society owes its members the basic conditions of agency. Treat this as moral discovery and it is generous. Treat it through the frame and it is a bid in a status contest. A doctrine of welfare obligation aligns the philosopher with the redistributive coalition, the side that confers elite standing on those who speak for the dispossessed, and it does so under a moralistic cover that makes the alignment look like the conclusion of a syllogism rather than a choice of allies. The libertarians made the opposite bid and dressed it in the opposite proof. Narveson’s rights guard the man against interference and oblige no one to help. Both men found in pure reason exactly the politics they brought to it.
Gewirth feared relativism as a social danger. He was right that what convention grants, convention can revoke. He drew the wrong lesson. The danger he sensed was the danger to his guild’s authority, because a world that treats morality as convention has no special need of moral philosophers to certify the truth. So he built a fortress, a proof that no shift in custom could touch, and he staffed it with people like himself. The frame reads the fortress as a status play, not a discovery. The intensity of his alarm tracks the size of the threat to his standing, not the size of the threat to anyone’s rights.
What does the frame leave standing? Not much of the proof. It grants Gewirth his rigor and reads the rigor as a weapon, the finest available, swung in a fight he denied was a fight. It grants him his sincerity and counts sincerity as cheap, since the surest way to win a moral argument is to believe your own case. And it answers his central question without ceremony. If men hold rights, what justifies them? Gewirth said reason. The frame says nothing justifies them in his sense, that rights are tools coalitions forge and defend because the tools pay, and that the search for a deeper ground is the hole the moral philosopher studies while sitting in it. The only misunderstanding, on this telling, is Gewirth’s faith that there was a proof to find. He spent forty years examining the dirt.

The Great Delusion

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 here, he hands Gewirth a clean defeat at the level Gewirth cared about most: the order in which a man arrives at his morality.
Gewirth built everything on the acting individual reasoning his way out, alone, from the bare fact of his own agency to a universal law. Strip away religion, tradition, nation, sentiment, and what remains is a mind following an argument it cannot consistently refuse. Mearsheimer says that picture inverts the real sequence. The infusion comes first. A man is born into a group that shapes him through a long childhood, before his reasoning faculties exist, and by the time he can reason he is already loaded with inherited sentiment and the values his people pressed on him. Reason arrives late and arrives last, the weakest of the three sources of preference, well behind socialization and innate disposition. So the agent Gewirth places at the start of the argument is a fiction. There is no man who reasons toward his commitments from a standing start. There is only a man who was furnished with his commitments and later learned to give reasons for them.
If that is right, dialectical necessity collapses into rationalization. Gewirth thought he was excavating commitments every agent already holds by the logic of action. Mearsheimer would say he was excavating commitments every agent already holds by the accident of where he was raised, and the logic is a story told afterward. The PGC does not lie beneath socialization. It sits on top of it. A liberal Jewish American philosopher at the University of Chicago in 1978 reasoned his way to individual inalienable rights because individual inalienable rights were the air he breathed, the value his society had infused in him long before he opened Kant. A man infused with different values, raised in a clan or a confessional order or a nation that ranks the group above the person, reasons his way somewhere else and feels the same necessity Gewirth felt. The sense of being driven by logic is real. It is also what socialization feels like from the inside.
The universalism takes the hardest hit, because that is where Mearsheimer aimed the book. Gewirth’s claim that every man on earth holds the same rights, derived the same way, is the exact doctrine Mearsheimer names as liberalism’s central conceit and its central danger. The universalism rests on the priority of the individual, the atomistic actor who is a man before he is a member of anything. Mearsheimer says we are social from start to finish, members before we are individuals, and that the individual Gewirth abstracts is a being who never existed. Pull the atomistic individual out from under the PGC and the universal scope goes with him. What is left is a moral code that is local in origin, parochial in content, and universal only in the ambition of the men who hold it. Gewirth thought he had found the ground common to all agents. He had found the ground common to liberals.
This cuts deeper than the egoist objection Gewirth fought all his life. The egoist accepted the rules of the game and tried to show the move from self to others did not follow. Mearsheimer refuses the game. He does not argue that the agent should not generalize his reason. He argues the agent did not reason his way to the starting point and cannot, because no one reasons from nothing. You cannot derive a value-free morality from agency when the agent comes pre-loaded. The premises Gewirth treats as the bare structure of action, the necessary valuing of freedom and well-being, are themselves products of a particular value infusion. A man socialized to prize honor over freedom, or the standing of his lineage over his own well-being, does not recognize Gewirth’s necessary goods as necessary. He recognizes them as foreign.
Gewirth published Reason and Morality in 1978, at the front edge of the human-rights ascendancy Moyn dates to that decade, the moment human rights became the highest language of aspiration across the world. Gewirth read his proof as the discovery of a timeless foundation. Mearsheimer reads the human-rights wave as a contingent ideological project that armed liberal states to remake other societies in their image and ran aground on the social and national loyalties it had dismissed. On that reading Gewirth was not standing outside history with a proof. He was riding the crest of a particular history and supplying its philosophy. The proof and the foreign policy share a root, and the root is the same false anthropology: man as individual first, reasoner first, bearer of universal rights first, member of his people a distant last.
What survives? Gewirth might answer that Mearsheimer describes how men come to their morals and says nothing about whether those morals are justified. The genetic point does not touch the validity of the argument. A proof reached by a socialized creature can still be a proof. That defense holds against the weaker reading of Mearsheimer. It does not hold against the stronger one, because Mearsheimer does not merely note the origin. He denies the premise. He denies that there is a generic agent whose generic structure yields generic rights, and he grounds the denial in the claim that the social precedes and constitutes the individual rather than the reverse. If man is a member before he is an agent, then agency is not the bedrock Gewirth needs. Something stands beneath it. The group is there first, and it put the agent together.
So if Mearsheimer is right, Gewirth’s monument reads as the most rigorous expression of a delusion. The rigor is real. He worked the argument harder than anyone. But he worked it from a foundation that was poured by his own society, mistook the pouring for bedrock, and called the result reason. The man who tried to escape tradition, nation, and sentiment built his system out of the one tradition, the one nation’s faith, that told him such escape was possible.

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Adrian Vermeule and the Common Good

Posted on June 22, 2026 by Luke Ford

Cornelius Adrian Comstock Vermeule (born May 2, 1968) is an American legal scholar and constitutional theorist who holds the Ralph S. Tyler, Jr. Professorship of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. He came to wide notice as a scholar of administrative law, statutory interpretation, and the design of legal institutions, and he became, after his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 2016, the figure most closely identified with common-good constitutionalism, a theory that draws on the classical legal tradition and on Catholic political thought and that defines itself against both originalism and living constitutionalism. His defenders regard him as a rigorous critic of liberal jurisprudence; his critics regard his program as a justification for illiberal government. By either reading he stands among the more influential and contested legal academics of his generation.

Vermeule was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, into a family of established academic standing. His father, Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule III (1925-2008), served for decades as curator of classical and ancient art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and ranked among the leading American classical archaeologists of his day. His mother, Emily Vermeule (1928-2001), was a professor of classical philology and archaeology at Harvard and a figure of comparable distinction in her field. His sister, Blakey Vermeule, became a literary scholar and a professor of English at Stanford University. He was raised in the Episcopal tradition, drifted from organized religion during his college years, returned for a time to Anglicanism, and converted to Roman Catholicism in 2016, a passage that would reorganize his public thought.

He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1990 with a degree in East Asian languages and civilizations, an education in textual reading and tradition that has left visible marks on the cast of his later legal work. He then entered Harvard Law School, where he earned the Juris Doctor magna cum laude in 1993. After law school he clerked for Judge David Sentelle (b. 1943) of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1993 to 1994, and then for Justice Antonin Scalia (1936-2016) of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1994 to 1995. The clerkship with Scalia carries a particular irony, since Scalia was the most prominent judicial advocate of originalism in his era and Vermeule became, in time, among the most searching critics of the originalist project.

After a period in practice and early teaching, Vermeule joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School in 1998, where he established a reputation as a scholar of constitutional structure and institutional design and held the Bernard D. Meltzer Professorship. He returned to Harvard Law School as a professor in 2006, was named the John H. Watson Professor of Law in 2008, and was appointed the Ralph S. Tyler, Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law in 2016. His standing within the profession was confirmed by his election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012, at the age of forty-three, and in 2020 he was appointed to the Administrative Conference of the United States. He has authored or co-authored nine books and a substantial body of articles across constitutional law, administrative law, legislation, and national security law.

The early scholarship took as its premise that legal institutions should be judged by their real capacities and their real limits rather than by the idealized portraits common in constitutional theory. Vermeule argued that courts, legislatures, and agencies each operate under conditions of uncertainty and bounded competence, and that the proper allocation of interpretive authority follows from a candid comparison of those competences rather than from a presumption in favor of judicial supremacy. This institutional orientation set him apart from theorists who organized their accounts around rights or around judicial doctrine, and it supplied the through-line of his first books, among them Judging Under Uncertainty (2006), Law and the Limits of Reason (2009), and The System of the Constitution (2011). In place of the familiar celebration of courts as singular guardians of liberty, these works pressed the inevitability of error, the value of restraint where judges lack comparative advantage, and the practical constraints that shape adjudication in a complex society.

A connected theme, the defense of executive and administrative authority, runs through the middle period of his career. In The Executive Unbound (2010), written with Eric Posner (b. 1965), Vermeule argued that modern emergencies enlarge executive power as a matter of practical necessity and that formal constitutional limits restrain presidents less than do elections, public opinion, and political competition. The book unsettled the conventional account of the separation of powers by relocating the real checks on the executive from legal doctrine to politics. His defense of the administrative state grew more explicit in Law’s Abnegation (2016), where he argued that the courts had ceded authority to agencies not through constitutional failure but through a reasoned recognition of administrative expertise and institutional competence. Where many conservatives treated the bureaucracy as a standing threat to liberty, Vermeule treated administrative governance as a durable and legitimate feature of the modern state, capable of serving public purposes when rightly directed. That position placed him at a distance from much of the conservative legal movement, and in particular from the wing of the Federalist Society that sought to revive judicially enforced limits on agency power. His collaboration with Cass Sunstein (b. 1954) in Law and Leviathan (2020) extended the argument by showing that administrative governance remains bound by longstanding principles of legality and reasoned decision.

His conversion to Roman Catholicism in 2016 marks the decisive reorientation of his intellectual life. Reading Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821), and above all John Henry Newman (1801-1890), Vermeule came to hold that liberal political theory cannot furnish a stable moral foundation for law and government. Newman proved the most important of these influences, shaping his understanding of the development of doctrine, the standing of authority, and the continuity of a living tradition. He summarized the shift in a remark made soon after his conversion, in which he disclaimed any deep faith in law as such and described it as a tool that serves good or bad ends and that will, over time, prove no better than the culture and the polity that hold it.

From this position Vermeule emerged as a leading advocate of Catholic integralism, the tradition holding that political authority should be ordered toward the common good, including the spiritual ends of the human person, rather than remaining neutral among competing accounts of the good life. He distinguished his approach from any program of sudden institutional rupture and described instead a strategy of ralliement, a patient working within existing institutions to turn them toward substantive moral ends.

His most widely debated contribution to legal theory is common-good constitutionalism. He introduced it to a general audience in the 2020 essay “Beyond Originalism,” published in The Atlantic, and developed it at length in Common Good Constitutionalism (2022). The theory rejects both conservative originalism and progressive living constitutionalism and asks that constitutional interpretation draw on the classical legal tradition, on the ius commune, and on principles of natural law rather than on original public meaning or on evolving social values alone. Interpretation, on this account, should advance substantive goods such as justice, peace, public morality, prosperity, solidarity, and human flourishing, and it should treat authority, hierarchy, subsidiarity, and the educative office of law as legitimate parts of a sound political order. Vermeule sets the promotion of these conditions above the modern elevation of individual autonomy to the highest constitutional value. A distinctive feature of the theory places interpretive responsibility not on judges alone but also on legislators, administrators, and executive officials, who are to apply the law with a conscious view to the common good. His supporters read the program as a recovery of the classical tradition that governed Western law before the rise of modern liberalism; his critics read it as a grant of wide discretion to officials and as a theory open to authoritarian use.

Much of the controversy that surrounds Vermeule has gathered around his engagement with the German jurist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985). He rejects a great deal of what Schmitt concluded, yet he has found Schmitt’s treatment of sovereignty, emergency, and political authority useful for describing the actual operation of modern government. His critics take the borrowing as evidence of an authoritarian cast of mind; he answers that classical legal principle and natural law supply the moral framing that holds such power within bounds. His public rhetoric has at times sharpened the conflict and drawn rebuke, as when a remark of his in early 2020 was read as a comparison between attendees of a conservative gathering and the first inmates of the Nazi camps, a reading that brought criticism from colleagues and alumni. Episodes of this kind have shaped his reception as much as the scholarship has.

The portrait of his career as a clean ideological break understates the continuity in his development. Long before he described himself as a Catholic integralist, Vermeule placed institutions above individual rights, administrative expertise above judicial supremacy, and the practical conditions of governance above abstract constitutional theory. The later work reads less as a repudiation of the earlier than as a theological and philosophical reinterpretation of commitments that had organized his thought for two decades. The skeptic of judicial ambition and the theorist of the directed state share a single underlying preference for ordered authority exercised by competent officials.

Vermeule remains an active figure in public argument. He serves as a contributing editor at Compact, co-founded the book-review journal The New Rambler in 2015, and writes a Substack newsletter, The New Digest. He continues to publish on constitutional theory, administrative law, executive power, and postliberal political thought, and his commentary on decisions such as Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and his replies to critics of common-good constitutionalism keep him engaged with the moving edge of doctrine.

His personal life met a grave loss in 2024, when his son, Spencer Vermeule (2003-2024), a sophomore at the University of Notre Dame and a member of the university’s fencing team, died on March 2 in a single-car accident in Elkhart County, Indiana, at the age of twenty. A memorial Mass was held for him at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on the Notre Dame campus, and friends, family, and members of the academic and Catholic communities gathered to mourn him.

Vermeule holds a singular place in American legal thought. Few scholars of his generation have done as much to undermine the assumptions of liberal constitutionalism and of movement conservatism at the same time. Read as a critic of liberal jurisprudence, a defender of the administrative state, a Catholic political theorist, or the author of common-good constitutionalism, he has obliged lawyers, scholars, and officials to confront direct questions about the purposes of law, the standing of authority, and the moral foundations of political order.

Auctoritas

The fire captain owns the building while it burns. He stands on the lawn in the white helmet, and the men climb to the roof to cut a hole because he said so and for no other reason. For twenty minutes his word is the only law on the street. Then the fire dies, the pumps wind down, and his command runs off into the gutter with the hose water. He drives home a man like the rest. He never takes the helmet for his face.
Three states north a monk wakes at three for vigils. In his house authority lives in the Rule and the bell, and the abbot who keeps it must wash the feet of guests and call the youngest brother to counsel first, because the Lord may speak through the young. The abbot commands. The Rule commands the abbot. The arrangement points past every man in the chapel toward One who does not sleep.
In a glass office on Sand Hill Road a founder of twenty-nine tells a room what authority means to him. “Nobody gave me permission,” he says. “You don’t ask. You ship, the users come, and the numbers are the only boss.” Authority for him is traction. The market signs off or it does not, and a man who waits for a blessing has already lost.
One word. Three worlds. The fireman’s authority dies when the fire dies. The monk’s authority is a loan from God. The founder’s authority is whatever the market ratifies this quarter. Set the three men at one table and they agree on the syllables and on nothing else, because each carries the word home to a different cosmos, and the cosmos gives the word its weight.
Behind all three stands the same pair of fears. A man knows he will die. A man fears that when he does, the books will show he came to nothing. Ernest Becker says the human animal alone foresees its own rot, and to bear the knowledge it builds a scheme by which it counts, a hero system, a way of earning a place in something that outlasts the body. The fireman earns it in the company of men who run toward what others flee. The monk earns it in an Order that has sung the same psalms for fifteen centuries. The founder earns it in a market he trusts to remember the thing he built. Each scheme answers the second terror by tying the small life to a large and lasting thing. Each keeps the first terror, death, at the edge of the eye.
Adrian Vermeule carries the word the farthest. The Cambridge boy, the summa, the two clerkships, the chair with a dead benefactor’s name on it, the Latin he reads for pleasure, the Substack where he posts under a handle drawn from a cardinal. He converted in 2016, and a convert holds the new thing harder than the cradle believer, because he chose it against the run of his own life.
In his cosmos law is not a tool. He said the tool sentence once and meant it as a demotion, law set beneath the culture that holds it. In the order he built after, law rises again, no longer a human instrument but a low rung on a ladder that climbs past the human. Eternal law in the mind of God, natural law in the reason He gave men, the ius commune the lawyers of Christendom worked out across centuries, and at the bottom the statutes and the cases. To read a constitution toward the common good is to set the bottom rung in line with the top. Auctoritas is the thing that runs down the ladder from God to the magistrate, and the magistrate who wields it does the work of Heaven when he turns the coercive power of the state toward justice, peace, and the flourishing of men.
See why his word will not die with him. The fireman’s command ends with the fire. The founder’s traction ends when the market turns. Vermeule ties the word to the one thing that cannot end, because God does not end. His hero system reaches past the company and the Order and the market to the source the monk only borrows from, and claims it for the law. It is the most ambitious answer to the second terror a lawyer can give. If he is right, his work does not merely outlast him. It joins a thing that was never going to die.
Every such scheme buys its comfort, and the price is a subtraction. To make the cosmos hold, something has to be left out of the frame. The thing Vermeule’s order leaves out is the accident. An order that runs from God down to the traffic court keeps no room for the car that leaves the road for no cause any ledger can name. Providence will say the cause is hidden, not absent. The scheme requires that nothing is brute, that every loss serves a good seen or unseen. That requirement is the subtraction. It takes the raw contingency of the world, the part that answers to nothing, and files it under a heading that promises it makes sense.
Walk his second word the same way and watch it come apart in the same hands. The common good. The hospice nurse says the good is the death her patient wants, the morphine titrated so the man goes out without pain and with his daughter holding the hand that still works. Her good is small, particular, and over by morning. The shop steward on the Oakland docks says the good is the local, the seniority list honored, the pension fund whole, the brother with twenty years not bumped by a kid with six months. His good stops at the union hall door. The Sicilian widow in black says the good is the family and the name, the debt of honor paid, the grandson at the table on Sunday, and a stranger’s flourishing is a stranger’s affair. Vermeule says the good is the soul rightly ordered to its end, and that the state may bend a man toward that end with its full weight, because to leave him to choose his own ruin is no kindness. Four goods. The nurse’s ends at dawn. The steward’s ends at the door. The widow’s ends at the blood. Vermeule’s reaches the soul and the next world and binds the police power to the reach. His good holds together only in his cosmos, where man has a true end and an authority stands licensed to enforce it. Carry the word into the nurse’s room and it dissolves. She is not ordering a soul. She is easing a death.
Grant him what he owns. Vermeule sees his own war and says so. He names the strategy, ralliement, the slow turning of institutions from inside. He hides behind no neutrality the way his opponents hide behind procedure. He says the state should form men, that authority and hierarchy are goods, that he wants his side to hold the power and use it. An academy that buries every preference under a method finds him reckless for stating his. That is a clear kind of self-knowledge, the strategist’s.
The other kind he does not show. Becker’s question is whether a man can see his cosmos as a thing he built against the dark, the work of a frightened creature, and hold it off at arm’s length while still living inside it. The convert cannot do this and stay a convert. He does not feel the order as a scheme that answers his terror. He feels it as the truth that stood before him and will stand after, and his certainty is the measure of how well the scheme performs. A man who could see his immortality project as a project would feel the cold the project keeps out. Vermeule keeps the cold out. That is the scheme working as designed, and it is the one place the frame cannot credit him with sight, since sight there would unmake the thing seen.
Then in March of 2024 the cold came through. His son Spencer died on a county road in Indiana on a Saturday afternoon, twenty years old, the car off the pavement and into a tree, the season half run. No order accounts for it. The ius commune holds no rung for it. The common good keeps a ledger of goods to be weighed and advanced, and a dead boy of twenty enters no ledger, balances against nothing, serves no end a man can name and keep his reason. Providence will say the cause is hidden. The father at the Mass in the Basilica heard what every mourner hears and knows the size of the silence under it.
Three things to carry off.
The hero. Not the conqueror and not the founder. The restorer. Vermeule casts himself as the heir who comes back to the great shut house of the classical tradition, throws the bolts, and opens the rooms the moderns boarded over. His heroism is recovery, not invention. He wins by handing back what was taken, and the prize is to be the man through whom an old and rightful order returns.
The unnamed rival. He names enemies without end, the liberal, the originalist, the proceduralist, the autonomous self. He never names the real one, because to name it is to lose. The rival is contingency. The car on the county road. The world that runs without consulting the ledger and takes a son on a Saturday for no cause that any order can enter in its books. Every line he writes about the good and the form and the end is aimed, under the named enemies, at that one. He builds the cosmos to outvote the accident. The accident does not stand for election.
The cost the ledger cannot price. The common good is a system of accounts. Goods go in, get weighed, get advanced by the wise magistrate. The scheme is made to price things, to say this serves the flourishing of men and that does not. Spencer Vermeule enters no column. The father knows it, whatever the theorist holds. There is the cost the accounting cannot hold, the boy who served no end, balanced nothing, and is gone, and the order that was built to make all things answer stands at the grave with nothing to enter and nothing to say.

The Great Delusion

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.

The social account underwrites Vermeule’s positive program better than it underwrites the liberal’s. If a man is socialized before he can reason, raised through a long childhood under heavy value infusion, then the law that forms and teaches him is no intrusion on a free chooser. It is how the creature gets made. Vermeule prizes the educative office of law, authority, hierarchy, subsidiarity, solidarity. Mearsheimer’s picture of human nature hands him each one. The neutral state that declines to form its citizens is the fiction, since something always forms them, and Vermeule’s reply is that the state should know what it forms them toward. So far the realist is the integralist’s ally, and a strong one. Mearsheimer’s anthropology is Vermeule’s foundation.
The premise that lays the foundation cracks the roof. Mearsheimer ranks the three sources of our preferences. Innate sentiment, then socialization, then reason, with reason last and weakest. By the time a man’s reasoning runs sharp, his family and society have already laid down their value infusion and his inborn sentiments have already tilted him. Reason arrives late and mostly serves what came first. Set Vermeule’s project beside that ranking. Common good constitutionalism rests on natural law and the classical tradition, the ius commune, treated as a universal moral order that reason reaches and that binds all men everywhere. The architecture is a claim staked on reason, that a trained mind apprehends the true human good and points law toward it. Mearsheimer ranks that faculty last.
So the integralist universalism stands exposed as a second universalism, the mirror of the one it fights. Mearsheimer’s quarry in The Great Delusion is liberal universalism, the doctrine that every person on the planet carries the same inalienable rights, the doctrine that drives liberal states to remake the world. He calls it a delusion because it overrates reason and ignores the particular, tribal nature of men. Natural law makes the same shape of claim. Everyone, everywhere, one moral order, reachable by reason, binding without regard to belonging. If Mearsheimer has the ranking right, the integralist universal falls to the same blade as the liberal universal. Vermeule has not climbed out of the delusion. He has swapped its content and kept its form. Rights gave way to the common good; the universal reach and the trust in reason stayed.
Vermeule half-concedes the point in his own voice. He says he puts little faith in law, calls it a tool fit for good or bad ends, and says it will prove no better than the culture and the polity that hold it. That is a Mearsheimerian sentence. Culture over formal reason, formation over parchment. The man who wrote it has granted that the value infusion runs deeper than the legal argument laid on top. Then he stops the knife short of his own natural law. He lets socialization dissolve the liberal’s rights and exempts his own universal good from the solvent. Mearsheimer might refuse the exemption.
A Vermeule consistent with this frame drops the universal claim and keeps the particular community formed toward its own good. That Vermeule is a nationalist of the soul, a man who says this people, with this inheritance, formed by these authorities toward the ends this tradition carries, and who makes no pretense that the ends bind the Chinese or the Turk. Mearsheimer could sign that. It is his own pluralism, each society with its infusion and no universal court of reason seated above them. It is not the Vermeule who exists. The living Vermeule insists the classical tradition is true for all and not merely ours, and reaches past the American community to an order that predates and outranks it. Strip the universal and a defensible integralism remains that is also a parochialism. Keep the universal and the frame returns the liberal’s error in clerical dress.
Mearsheimer fears the universalist state because universalism joined to power breeds the crusade. The liberal hegemon, sure it knows the rights of all men, sends its armies to install them and names the wreckage liberation. Vermeule wants a state with a substantive mission, sure it knows the good of all men, holding the coercive power and using it to form them. The same logic points home. A regime convinced it has found the universal good and granted the means to enforce it presses toward the good as it sees it and reads resistance as error to correct. Mearsheimer’s book is a long warning against that confidence. The warning does not stop at the water’s edge.
Apply the ranking to the man. Vermeule is a creature of reason if anyone is, summa cum laude, the two clerkships, the endowed chair, the lawyer’s apparatus run across nine books. Mearsheimer says reason comes last and mostly dresses the sentiment and the socialization that came before. Read that way, the natural-law scaffolding is the late arrival. What came first was the Cambridge boyhood, the academic home, the drift, the return, the conversion in 2016, the new belonging among the postliberals. The belonging landed, and the reasoning followed to dignify it. This carries no charge of bad faith. The claim holds for every man, the liberal included, whose rights-talk is the late servant of a prior formation, and it holds for Mearsheimer too. The order is it. For Vermeule the order means the common good he reaches by argument is the good he was already formed to want, and the argument came after.
Mearsheimer ranks reason last; he does not abolish it. If reason never reached past socialization, no man could judge his own tribe’s infusion false, and reformers, converts, and dissenters would be impossible creatures. Vermeule is himself a convert, a man who turned against the formation of his youth, which is some evidence that reason and conscience pull against the value infusion as well as serve it. The frame explains the pull toward the common good as sentiment and socialization, and on its own terms it cannot rule out that the pull also runs toward something true. Mearsheimer is an anthropologist of belief, not a judge of its truth. He can show that Vermeule’s universalism wears the same form and rests on the same weak footing as the liberalism it opposes. He cannot show that the natural law is false. He can show only that the confidence in reaching it outruns what reason, ranked last, can carry.
If Mearsheimer is right, Vermeule keeps his anti-liberal anthropology and loses his warrant for the universal. He is left with a people to form and a tradition to carry, and no view from above to prove the tradition true for anyone outside it. Whether that reads as a loss or as a homecoming turns on whether he can surrender the claim that made his name.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

Vermeule asks officials to read the constitution toward substantive goods, justice, peace, public morality, solidarity, and flourishing, drawn from a classical tradition, the ius commune, and the natural law, sources he treats as available to reason and held in common. The frame puts the question the program cannot answer on its own terms. Whose good, by whose lights, named by whom? No common good hangs in the air apart from the men who name it. When an official directs law toward the common good, he directs it toward the good as he and his allies see it. The phrase does not pick out a thing in the world. It picks out a coalition’s conception of the good, raised to the dignity of the universal.
This is the Starbucks move. The mission statement says it nurtures the human spirit one cup at a time. The goal is profit. Vermeule’s mission statement says it orders law toward justice, peace, and flourishing. Read through this frame, the goal is the capture and direction of the coercive apparatus of the state by a particular coalition, postliberal, integralist, traditionalist, Catholic, national-conservative, against its rivals. The rivals are the liberals who hold autonomy as the highest value and the originalists who want to freeze the contest at the founding. Common good constitutionalism is what the bid for power sounds like when a learned man makes it.
Watch the candor. He claims no neutrality. He says authority is legitimate, hierarchy is legitimate, the law teaches and forms, the state may pursue substantive ends. He names his strategy, ralliement, working inside the institutions to turn them toward those ends. Pinsof’s targets bury the bid for power under proceduralism and the promise that reason will decide. Vermeule states the bid. He wants his side to hold the apparatus and use it. The frame credits the honesty and then declines the gloss.
Why the noble language at all, if the aim is power? Because the naked sentence repels. To say my coalition should rule you and bend you toward our conception of the good drives men off. To say law should serve the common good and human flourishing draws them in. The content is the same. The reception is not. The classical framing does double work. It dignifies the bid as the recovery of a lost inheritance, and it recruits a lineage of allies, Aquinas, Newman, the ius commune, whose authority transfers to the man citing them. A faction with Aquinas in it looks less like a faction and more like the truth.
Turn it on the critics. The liberal scholars who call him an authoritarian and panic over his reading of Schmitt are not clearing up a misunderstanding either. They are a coalition defending a long hold on the courts and the academy, coding a rival as outside the bounds of decent argument. Their alarm is real and it is also a weapon. His interest in Schmitt on sovereignty and emergency is the recognition that politics turns on friend and enemy and on who decides, which is the recognition the frame starts from. The two sides understand each other well. Each calls its own bid for the state the universal good and calls the rival’s bid a threat to it. This is no seminar. It is a contest of coalitions conducted in the language of principle.
The conclusion the frame forces is bracing. There is no misunderstanding to resolve at Harvard Law School. Vermeule and his opponents do not talk past each other; they grasp each other’s ends and reject them. Better arguments will not settle the question, because the question is not an argument. It is who controls the coercive apparatus of the state and toward what ends he points it. The debate over common good constitutionalism stands in for that question. The world he wants to order does not want to be ordered by him, and he knows it, which is why he reaches for authority over persuasion. The originalists he left behind do not misread the constitution. They want a different master. He wants his.

The Political Object Governs

Adrian Vermeule is the rare subject who knows he is at war and says so. He names his method, ralliement, the patient turning of institutions from within rather than their overthrow. He has read Carl Schmitt for strategic realism, for the recognition that politics runs on friend and enemy and on who decides. A man who theorizes his own campaign invites the theorist of campaigns. Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) wrote that war is the continuation of policy by other means, that the political object governs, and that a commander who loses sight of the object will win battles that serve no war. Read Vermeule through On War and the question is no longer whether his cause is right. The question is whether the strategist serves his own object or spends himself in engagements that flatter him and cost him ground.

Begin with the object, since Clausewitz insists everything follows from it. Vermeule’s political object is a polity formed toward substantive ends, a state that holds the coercive power and points it at the common good as he and his allies conceive it. That is the war. The doctrine of common good constitutionalism, the campaign against originalism, the placement of allies, the journals and the Substack, these are the means. Clausewitz warns that the means must stay subordinate to the object and scaled to it. A move that wins applause but does not advance the formed polity is a battle mistaken for the war. The test of any tactical choice is not whether it lands. The test is whether it carries the army closer to the object.

He has chosen a campaign over a battle, and chosen well. Ralliement is the long war of position. Vermeule rejects the sudden rupture, the seizure, the single decisive stroke, and elects instead the slow capture of institutions men already trust. Clausewitz respected the difference. A battle is an event; a war is a sequence governed by a purpose that outlasts any one engagement. The patient form fits a small force that cannot win by mass. It works by attrition of the enemy’s legitimacy and by accretion of one’s own. The danger native to the patient form is the same one Clausewitz marked in every commander, the temptation to seek the brilliant engagement, to fight for the sake of fighting, to take the viral hour for territory held. A tweet that routs an opponent in an afternoon takes no ground. It may lose some.

Which brings the frame to friction, the concept Clausewitz prized above the diagrams of the military writers he scorned. War on paper runs smooth. War in the field drags, because the medium resists, because small failures accumulate, because the plan meets weather and fatigue and the enemy’s will. The integralist advance generates its own friction, and some of it the commander makes himself. The remark in early 2020 read as a comparison between a conservative gathering and the first inmates of the camps was friction of the self-inflicted kind. It cost him moral standing, handed the enemy a position, and mobilized the very coalition he means to dissolve. Clausewitz wrote that the commander’s temperament is a force in the field, that boldness untethered from judgment wastes armies. A strategist who provokes the defender into unity has advanced the enemy’s cause with his own hand.

The deepest warning the frame carries is the culminating point. Clausewitz observed that an attack does not strengthen as it advances. It weakens. The attacker outruns his supply, the defender falls back onto his depth and gathers force, and there comes a point past which a further push no longer takes ground but loses it. The wise commander halts at the culminating point of victory and consolidates. Apply this to the integralist advance and the structure of its peril stands out. Each step toward plainness, each open borrowing from Schmitt, each frank statement that the state should form men toward a substantive good, gains a measure of clarity and conviction among the committed. Past some point the same plainness arms the enemy. It converts a diffuse liberal establishment, slow and complacent, into an alarmed and reunited coalition that names him the danger and closes ranks against him. The advance that produces the backlash that reconstitutes the enemy has crossed its culminating point. The candor that recruits the young postliberal is the candor that wakes the sleeping hegemon. A commander who cannot feel where that point lies will press until the defender’s gathered strength rolls him back.

Clausewitz held that the defensive is the stronger form of war, though it carries the negative object of mere preservation. Note who stands on which side. Vermeule’s enemies hold the courts, the academy, the settled account of what counts as serious legal argument. They are the defenders, and the defensive is the stronger form. Vermeule is the attacker with the positive object, the man who must move, take ground, change the order, and the attacker pays the cost of motion while the defender draws on his depth. This is the structural reason ralliement is the right method and impatience the wrong one. The attacker who cannot win by a single blow must husband his force, choose his ground, and decline the engagements that bleed him for no gain. He must above all find the center of gravity and strike there rather than skirmish on the periphery.

The center of gravity, Clausewitz’s Schwerpunkt, is the hub on which the enemy’s power turns, and the art of war is to find it and concentrate against it rather than dispersing into a hundred small fights. For Vermeule the enemy’s center of gravity is not any single doctrine. It is the legal academy’s grip on legitimacy, its power to set the bounds of respectable argument, joined to the courts that ratify those bounds. A movement that wins on Twitter and loses the law schools has struck the periphery and left the hub intact. Common good constitutionalism aims correctly at the source, at the question of what makes a legal argument count, since to change that is to change everything downstream. The discipline the frame demands is to keep the fire on that hub and to treat the daily provocations as the dispersions they are.

Clausewitz ranked the moral forces above the material, and here Vermeule’s position looks better than the count of his battalions. His army is small and high in conviction, converts and the formed young, men who believe they recover a lost inheritance. The opposing host is large and, on this reading, low in conviction, holding its ground by inertia and procedure rather than by faith in a thing it loves. Moral force offsets mass, to a point. It is the asset of the attacker who cannot match numbers, and it is the asset that self-inflicted friction squanders fastest. The commander who keeps his men’s conviction and provokes his enemy’s lethargy into passion has traded his one advantage for the enemy’s.

The frame credits Vermeule’s strategic self-knowledge and then turns it into the standard by which to judge him. He sees the war. He names the campaign. He grasps that politics is a contest of wills over who decides, which is the Schmittian core and the Clausewitzian core at once. The open question is discipline. A strategist who understands the political object, the patience of the war of position, the danger of friction, and the culminating point of the attack will subordinate every engagement to the object and decline the satisfying battles. A strategist who knows all this and fights anyway, who reaches for the sharp line and the open provocation because they feel like victory, will cross his culminating point and watch the defender reunite. The theory is in his hands. The temperament is the variable.

A limit since a universal solvent dissolves too much. Clausewitz describes war between organized forces directed by a will toward a single object. Intellectual and legal life is not that, and to read it as that is to import the friend-enemy picture Vermeule borrowed from Schmitt and to mistake every disagreement for a campaign. Some men change their minds by argument. A frame that sees only war cannot see persuasion, conversion, or the slow work of a true idea making its own way, and Vermeule’s own conversion in 2016 is evidence that minds turn for reasons that are not maneuvers. The frame assumes a commander directing an army, and Vermeule commands no army. He writes. A movement has no single will, and the analogy strains where it treats a scattered tendency as a force under one hand. The frame illuminates his strategic self-understanding and the structural risks that attend his chosen form. It cannot tell us whether the natural law he fights for is true, because war decides outcomes and not truth. A campaign can be lost by a just cause and won by an unjust one, and Clausewitz, who studied how wars are won, never pretended otherwise.

The Tradition Cannot Be Transmitted

The program rests on an instruction. Read the constitution by drawing on the classical legal tradition, the ius commune, the natural law that reason apprehends. The magistrate who would serve the common good consults this inheritance and applies it. The instruction assumes a thing to draw on, a body of content held in common by the trained, present in the jurist the way water is present in a well. Stephen Turner has spent a career asking after that thing. Where does it live. How does it pass from one head to another. Is it shared at all, or only assumed to be shared because men who were formed apart turn out to perform alike. Put Turner’s question to Vermeule and the foundation he treats as solid ground turns to a claim about transmission that no one has shown can be true.
Turner’s argument runs against a family of ideas that includes Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) on tacit knowledge and Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990) on tradition. The family shares a move. Confronted with men who coordinate, who agree without stating their grounds, who recognize a competent performance when they see one, the theorist posits a hidden shared something beneath the agreement. A common stock of tacit knowledge. A tradition carried in the bone. A set of presuppositions held in common and passed down. The hidden thing explains the visible agreement, and because it is hidden, it cannot be examined, only invoked. Turner’s reply is patient and fatal. For a shared content to explain agreement, the same content has to sit in many heads. For the same content to sit in many heads, it has to get there. And there is no route by which a hidden mental content copies itself from one mind into another. You cannot pour a presupposition. What passes between men is public, performances and corrections and texts, and what each man builds inside from that public traffic is his own, assembled by his own history of exposure and feedback. The insides are never shown to match. They are assumed to match because the outsides roughly do.
So the sameness the theory needs is the sameness the theory never demonstrates. Two jurists schooled in the classical tradition do not carry the same tradition in them. Each carries his own deposit, laid down by his own reading, his own teachers, his own corrected mistakes, calibrated against the performances of others until it runs close enough to pass. Close enough to pass is not identity. It is rough functional alignment, held in place by ongoing public correction, and it holds only where the corrections are frequent and the cases easy. Take away the public traffic and the alignment drifts. Push into hard cases where the performances diverge, and the alignment was never there to begin with.
The classical tradition is exactly the shared hidden thing Turner says cannot be shared in the way the argument requires. Vermeule writes as though the ius commune were a fund a judge might draw against, a content the tradition supplies and the trained mind receives. Turner asks for the route. How does the content of a thousand years of canonists and civilians get into the head of a sitting judge such that he and his brother judge, drawing on the same fund, reach the same result. The honest answer is that it does not. Each judge has his own reading, thin or thick, and the tradition does not arbitrate between their readings, because the tradition is not a thing in the room with them. It is a library, and a library settles nothing. Men settle things, and men formed apart settle them apart.
Watch the prediction the frame makes and then watch it come true in the standard objection to natural law adjudication. The objection holds that the natural law underdetermines outcomes, that judges invoking it reach opposed conclusions and call each on the same source. Vermeule treats this as a failure of nerve or training, a defect in the judge rather than in the theory. Turner locates it in the theory. The convergence Vermeule needs, that competent application of the shared inheritance yields determinate answers, is the convergence the tacit can never deliver, because the sharedness was posited and not produced. The good faith Thomist and the good faith integralist and the good faith liberal natural lawyer divide on the hard cases and each cites the law written on the heart. They divide because there is no common content adjudicating between them. There are three men with three deposits, each calling his deposit the tradition.
The appeal protects itself, and Turner named the way it does. When the shared thing is hidden, the man who invokes it holds a move against every challenger. You do not see it because you lack the formation. You read the sources wrong because you were never trained to read them right. The critic who cannot find the answer in the tradition is told the answer is there and his failure to find it is the proof of his unfitness to look. This insulates the position from the only test that could break it. It converts a claim about the world into a claim about the qualifications of the doubter. Vermeule’s exchanges with his critics run aground here as often as anywhere. He can always say they stand outside the tradition and so cannot judge it, and the tacit appeal makes the saying unanswerable, which is to say it makes it empty. A claim no observation can dent is a claim that has stopped describing anything.
The educative office of law takes the same wound. Vermeule holds that law forms citizens, that it teaches and infuses, that it bends the soul toward its end. The picture requires a content to pass from the law into the formed citizen, a shared something deposited in the population by the statutes and the rulings and the public habits law shapes. Turner’s whole case is that deposit of a shared something is the thing that does not happen. What happens is that each citizen, under the public traffic of rule and sanction and example, builds his own habits, and the habits run roughly parallel where the traffic is dense and the cases plain, and diverge everywhere else. The formed people Vermeule wants is a people he imagines as carrying a common infusion. The route by which one infusion reaches the many is the route Turner says does not exist. A regime can produce rough behavioral alignment by constant correction. It cannot pour a shared inner content into the citizenry, and the difference is the difference between a people that mostly stops at red lights and a people that holds in common a substantive conception of the human good.
Note that his own deflationary sentence half-admits the point and then forgets it. He says law will be no better than the culture and the polity that hold it. Set law beneath culture, fine. But culture is doing the same illicit work the tradition does, a shared formative substance invoked to explain why a polity hangs together, and the substance has the same problem under the same questioning. There is no common culture men carry inside in the strong sense the sentence needs. There is a mass of individually held habits, aligned by public feedback into rough parallel and called a culture by those who see the parallel and infer a cause beneath it. Vermeule reaches past law to culture as a firmer ground, and the ground is made of the same fog.
Vermeule’s own competence is not in doubt. The summa, the clerkships, the chair, the reading of the civilians in their own Latin, these built in him a deposit that is hard-won and rare. Turner does not deny expertise. He relocates it. The expert is the man whose individually acquired habits have been calibrated against a vast body of performances until they run reliably. Vermeule has that. What he does not have, and what no one has, is a tradition object he can hand to the federal judiciary by telling it to consult the classical sources. The expertise is his, formed slowly in him, and it does not transfer by instruction, because there is nothing to transfer except the long private labor that made it, and most judges will not undergo the labor, and the judges who do will come out aligned on the easy cases and split on the constitutional ones, which are the cases the theory exists to decide.
A limit. Turner deflates a causal and metaphysical claim about shared hidden content. He does not abolish texts, and the texts of the ius commune exist on the shelf whatever lives or fails to live in anyone’s head. A patient Vermeule might retreat to firmer ground. I need no shared inner substance, he might say. I need the corpus of sources, which exists, and a community of readers whose habits public correction keeps in rough alignment, which also exists, and that suffices to ground an interpretive practice. Turner can press the retreat hard. Rough alignment delivers agreement on the plain cases and silence on the contested ones, and constitutional adjudication lives among the contested ones. The corpus underdetermines, the readers diverge, and the common good content the theory promised dissolves at the exact point it was needed. But Turner cannot follow the knife all the way to the conclusion that the natural law is false. He is an analyst of how shared belief is and is not produced, not a judge of what is true. He can show that the inheritance cannot be transmitted in the manner the argument assumes, that the convergence is asserted and not earned, that the appeal insulates itself against the only test that could falsify it. He cannot show that there is no law written on the heart. He can show only that if there is, no man has yet found the route by which two readers of it could be made to read it the same.
Vermeule asks the magistrate to draw on the tradition. The frame asks Vermeule to say where the tradition is, how it reaches the magistrate, and why two magistrates who draw on it should ever agree. Until those questions have answers, the instruction names no deposit and licenses no convergence. It licenses each official to call his own deposit the common inheritance and to enforce it with the power of the state, while telling the official who reads the inheritance otherwise that he was never formed well enough to read it at all.

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Loïc Wacquant: The Boxer, the Ghetto, and the Penal State

Posted on June 22, 2026 by Luke Ford

Loïc Wacquant (b. August 26, 1960) is a French sociologist whose work on urban poverty, race, punishment, embodiment, and the state has made him an influential social theorist of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He holds a professorship in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and for decades he worked alongside Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002). Wacquant joins ethnographic immersion to broad social theory, and he uses the pairing to explain how advanced societies manage poverty, inequality, and marginality. His studies of boxing gyms, urban ghettos, prisons, and welfare offices have reshaped debates about race, class, punishment, and neoliberalism.

Wacquant was born in Nîmes and grew up near Montpellier in southern France. His father worked as a botanist and his mother taught school. Before he entered academic life he held a range of manual jobs, among them construction, industrial painting, farm labor, and automobile repair. That early work shaped a lasting interest in the tie between social structure and lived experience. He studied economics and sociology at HEC Paris, the Université Paris Nanterre, Washington State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Chicago, where he earned his doctorate in sociology in 1994.

Between 1983 and 1985 Wacquant performed his military service in New Caledonia as a functionary of the French colonial research office known as ORSTOM. He has since described the territory, with its tight knot of race, class, and space, as a laboratory that prepared him to read the segregated landscapes he later met in the United States.

A decisive turn came when Wacquant met Bourdieu in Paris in 1980. He became one of Bourdieu’s close students and later a principal interpreter of Bourdieu’s work for English-speaking readers. Their collaboration produced An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (1992), a volume that introduced a generation of students to habitus, field, symbolic power, and reflexivity. Bourdieu’s demand that sociology expose how power and inequality reproduce themselves stayed at the center of Wacquant’s work.

While in Chicago, Wacquant worked with the urban sociologist William Julius Wilson (b. 1935). The city showed him forms of racial segregation and concentrated poverty far removed from those in France, and that contrast became the seed of his comparative research on American ghettos and European urban marginality.

Wacquant first drew wide attention through an ethnographic experiment. Rather than observe life in a Chicago boxing gym from the side, he trained as a boxer and fought in the city’s Golden Gloves tournament. The resulting book, Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (2004), became a classic of the genre. From it he built what he calls carnal sociology, an approach that treats embodied participation as a route to social knowledge. Observation alone cannot capture social life, he argues, because much of what people know sits in bodily habit, feeling, and practical skill.

His work on urban poverty carried further. In Urban Outcasts (2008) he set the American ghetto beside the marginalized housing estates of France. These spaces amount to more than poor neighborhoods, he argues. Economic restructuring, state policy, and symbolic exclusion turn them into territorially stigmatized zones. His concept of advanced marginality names the concentration of poverty and insecurity in the postindustrial city. Modern urban inequality runs deeper than economic deprivation on his account. It also marks places and populations as socially undesirable.

His most influential theoretical claim concerns the modern state under neoliberalism. He rejects the view that neoliberalism yields a weak state. Neoliberalism reorganizes state power, he argues. He calls the contemporary state a centaur state: liberal and permissive toward corporations, investors, and the affluent, and paternalistic and punitive toward the poor. Deregulation at the top travels with tighter regulation at the bottom.

That argument anchors his book Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (2009). Welfare reform, workfare programs, aggressive policing, and prison expansion form a single system for the management of social insecurity, he contends. Prisons do more than control crime on this reading. They govern marginalized populations cast off by economic restructuring.

A key part of the analysis turns on his distinction between mass incarceration and hyperincarceration. Imprisonment in the United States falls unevenly, he argues, and concentrates among certain groups, above all poor Black men from segregated urban neighborhoods. He prefers hyperincarceration for the way it foregrounds the targeted character of penal growth. The prison, in his account, becomes an instrument for the management of economic exclusion.

Wacquant ties this to a shift from welfare to workfare and prisonfare. Welfare offices discipline recipients into low-wage labor. Penal institutions absorb those who fall outside that labor. The prison becomes a surrogate for the ghetto, he argues, and helps regulate populations treated as redundant in a postindustrial economy.

His most ambitious historical account of race and punishment appears in his theory of the four peculiar institutions that have structured Black subordination in the United States. The first was slavery. The second was Jim Crow segregation. The third was the urban ghetto that formed in northern cities across the twentieth century. The fourth is the present pairing of hyperghetto and prison. These institutions differ in form, he argues, yet they perform related work as they organize, contain, and regulate African American populations across changing political and economic conditions.

Wacquant has also fought what he sees as loose method in the social sciences. In essays such as “Scrutinizing the Street” he challenged influential urban ethnographies by scholars including Elijah Anderson (b. 1943) and Mitchell Duneier (b. 1961). Some ethnographic accounts lean too hard on narrative and moral storytelling, he argues, and fail to link daily encounters to larger structures of power, inequality, and state action. He carried this critique into his recent book The Poverty of the Ethnography of Poverty ([2023] 2025), where he sets out a rationalist approach he calls thick construction, a scientific construction of an ordinary folk construction anchored in the concept of social space.

Beyond race and punishment, Wacquant has written on the sociology of the body, social theory, urban policy, and the legacy of Bourdieu. His work appears in dozens of languages and has shaped sociology, criminology, political science, anthropology, urban studies, and law. He has lectured across Europe, North America, and Latin America and has advised governments and public institutions on poverty, policing, and social policy in France, Argentina, Brazil, Norway, and Sweden, and at the OECD.

His books include An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (with Bourdieu), Body and Soul, Urban Outcasts, Punishing the Poor, Deadly Symbiosis, The Invention of the “Underclass” (2022), Bourdieu in the City (2023), Racial Domination (2024), Jim Crow: Le terrorisme de caste en Amérique (2024), The Poverty of the Ethnography of Poverty ([2023] 2025), and Rethinking the Penal State (2026), the last drawn from his 2024 Adorno Lectures. His honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, an Alphonse Fletcher Fellowship, election to the Harvard Society of Fellows, and the Lewis A. Coser Award of the American Sociological Association.

Wacquant sits at the crossing of French social theory, American urban sociology, and ethnographic fieldwork. From Bourdieu he took an emphasis on symbolic power and reflexivity. From Wilson he took a concern with race and class in the modern city. From his own fieldwork he took a feel for embodied experience and institutional detail. The result is a body of work that traces how inequality settles into places, institutions, and bodies, and how modern states govern populations through a blend of welfare, punishment, and symbolic classification. Few sociologists have done more to hold the boxing ring, the ghetto, the prison, and the state inside one theoretical frame.

Loïc Wacquant and the Misunderstanding Myth

Pinsof says intellectuals run on one story. The world’s troubles come from misunderstanding, and the people whose work is understanding can therefore save the world. Wacquant tells a harder version of that story. The masses misread the ghetto, the prison, and the poor, and so do most sociologists, and only a correct science, his science, cuts through the folk picture to the structure beneath. He calls the method thick construction, a scientific construction laid over an ordinary one. The ordinary construction is the misunderstanding. The scientist comes to fix it.
Wacquant looks like a poor target for this frame, because he is already half a cynic. He throws out the standard misunderstanding stories about the state. Neoliberalism does not produce a weak state by accident, he argues. The centaur state works as built, liberal at the top and punitive at the bottom. Prisons do not fail to control crime. They govern the populations a postindustrial economy has cast off, and they do this job well. The cruelty is no whoopsie. On these points Wacquant sounds like Pinsof. The system runs as designed, and the people who run it understand what they are doing.
Then the cynicism stops. It stops at the edge of his own coalition, and it never turns around to face him.
Take his stated motive. He wants to expose how power reproduces inequality and to stand with the marginal. Read his conduct in the academic field instead, by the standard he uses on everyone else, and a second account appears. The most cited move of his career is a costly signal. He trained as a boxer, fought in the Golden Gloves, and wrote the book. The training proves commitment, the honest signal of a man who finishes what he starts. The fight proves an authenticity no deskbound rival can buy. Carnal sociology then turns that personal credential into a rule of method: knowledge sits in the trained body, so only those who paid the bodily price may speak. The claim reads as epistemology. It works as a fence around the field, and it keeps the competition out.
Look at how he treats the competition. He went after Elijah Anderson and Mitchell Duneier for soft method and moral storytelling. Pinsof would call this what high-stakes competitors do. They demonize their rivals, deny that they are doing it, and embellish the rivals’ faults. The takedown wears the costume of rigor. Underneath sits the older work of marking territory and lowering a neighbor’s standing to raise your own.
His standing reply to critics carries the misunderstanding myth in its purest form. You have not read Bourdieu. Disagreement becomes the rival’s failure to understand, which converts a contest into a diagnosis and seals the position against any test. The man who cannot be wrong, only misunderstood, has built himself an unfalsifiable claim to authority. This is the move he says the masses make about the world, run now in his own defense.
His politics fit a coalition, and his science feeds it. The centaur state names the enemies the academic left already names: corporations, investors, the affluent, the penal right. The story sets a polluted villain against a pure victim and supplies the footnotes. Pinsof reads partisan hatred as competition over the coercive apparatus of the state, the thing that puts people in cages at gunpoint, and Wacquant writes about that apparatus more than almost anyone alive. He treats his own side as the party of understanding and the other side as the party of greed and false consciousness. The frame asks the obvious question. Why would a contest over the prison and the welfare office spare the sociologist who has staked his career on which side wins it?
The split shows most clearly over stigma. Wacquant says territorial stigmatization is symbolic violence, a misrecognition that good science can correct. The poor and their neighborhoods get marked as undesirable through a false classification, and the sociologist’s job is to undo the error. Pinsof reads stigma the other way. Stigma is strategic, a move in a status contest by people who have incentives, not a confusion they would drop if someone explained their mistake. The classifiers are not misinformed. They are competing. Wacquant needs them to be misinformed, because the misinformed need a corrector, and the corrector is him. Grant that the stigmatizers understand their own interests and the sociologist loses his reason to exist.
So consider the hole. Wacquant has mapped his hole, the ghetto and the penal state, down to the last molecule, across decades of fieldwork, dozens of languages, a dozen books. Pinsof says you can study the hole forever and stay in it. Wacquant half admits this, because his own theory tells him the penal state is functional rather than mistaken. If it is functional, no quantity of correct understanding dislodges it, since no one with power misunderstands it in the first place. The understanding moves nothing on the ground. It moves his standing. The world does not want to be saved, and the centaur state, by his own account, has no wish to reform.
Wacquant also keeps signaling that he is not a meanie. The body on the line, the solidarity with the dispossessed, the moral heat of the prose, all of it reads as the sweetie signal that covers the status game underneath. Even the combat style pays. Each public fight charges him with standing. He spends the standing on the next fight.
Reflexive sociology demands that the scholar objectify his own position in the field, his capital, his interests, his stakes in the game he claims to study from outside. Carry that demand out without mercy and you get this essay. He sharpened the knife and told everyone to use it. The frame only takes him at his word.

The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities

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.

Wacquant’s morality is universalist. He wants to dissolve ethnoracial domination. He reads race as denegated ethnicity, a classification that a clear science can dismantle. He calls territorial stigmatization a symbolic violence, a misrecognition that good sociology corrects. On Mearsheimer’s account the sorting that makes the stigma is no error. It is the tribal floor at work. Wacquant himself noticed that the low-status white draws the hardest line against the Black urban poor. Read through this frame, that line is coalitional competition over rank among close rivals, the survival behavior of a social animal, not a confusion that fades once someone explains it. The stigmatizer is not misinformed. He is defending his place.
Then the prison and the ghetto. Wacquant reads the penal turn as class management under neoliberalism, capital warehousing the labor it no longer needs. The frame keeps that reading and sets a deeper floor beneath it. The state is the tribe’s survival vehicle. The in-group uses it to hold and manage a population it has coded as a rival or a danger. Hyperincarceration of poor Black men then looks like the oldest behavior there is, the coalition turning the coercive apparatus on the out-group. This sharpens Wacquant on the targeting and demotes his cause. The penal state runs older than neoliberalism because tribalism runs older than capitalism. The centaur was here before the market.
Then the reformist horizon, where the frame cuts deepest. Wacquant advises governments, writes advocacy, trusts that a corrected sociology can undo the misrecognition. Mearsheimer wrote an entire book against the hope that you can reengineer deep human attachment through enlightenment. That hope is the delusion in his title. The man who maps the hole down to the last molecule then believes that understanding fills it. On the tragic reading the marginal keep getting stigmatized because coalitions always do this to their rivals and to the populations they treat as surplus, and no quantity of correct understanding dissolves the floor. The world Wacquant describes does not want the reform Wacquant prescribes.
Now turn his own concept on him. If reason ranks last, and the value infusion arrives before critical thought, then Wacquant’s egalitarian cosmopolitan morality is a habitus too. The French academic left raised it. Bourdieu’s seminar instilled it. The Chicago and Berkeley sociology of race confirmed it. Wacquant treats the stigmatizer’s morality as socialized, contingent, and open to correction, and treats his own as the clear view that science delivers from outside the game. By his theory he cannot. His solidarity with the dispossessed is a value infusion from his own tribe, the cosmopolitan clerisy, whose path to status runs on universalist signals. He is not standing above the contest. He plays his coalition’s hand and calls the hand truth.

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