{"id":195472,"date":"2026-06-25T08:09:29","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T16:09:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=195472"},"modified":"2026-06-25T09:44:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T17:44:10","slug":"mearsheimers-wager-on-human-nature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=195472","title":{"rendered":"Mearsheimer’s Wager on Human Nature"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities<\/em><\/a>, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:<\/p>\n

\nMy 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\u2014everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights\u2014and 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. \u201cHuman rights,\u201d Samuel Moyn notes, \u201chave come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities\u2014state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.\u201d
\n[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…\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

John J. Mearsheimer<\/a> builds The Great Delusion<\/em><\/a> on a claim about human nature. Liberalism’s foundation is the individual who carries inalienable rights and who would carry them even alone. Mearsheimer’s is the social animal who exists only inside a group. Two foundations, and the book turns on which one best describes the creature. One test runs through what follows: does this story make evolutionary sense?<\/p>\n

Carl Schmitt<\/a> (1888\u20131985) gave a test. “One could test all theories of state and political ideas according to their anthropology,” he wrote, “and thereby classify these as to whether they consciously or unconsciously presuppose man to be by nature evil or by nature good.” The line sorts the political world along one axis. The traditional, nationalist, and realist right tends to read man as flawed, dangerous, or fallen, a creature who needs restraint and hierarchy. The progressive left tends to read man as good or improvable, held back by bad arrangements that reason and reform can mend. Liberalism descends from the optimistic pole. The Enlightenment trusted that reason would settle the good life and that man was perfectible. Nicolas de Condorcet<\/a> (1743\u20131794) wrote that the perfectibility of man has no limit, and William Godwin<\/a> (1756\u20131836) that man is perfectible and one day would need no government. Liberalism inherits that confidence and builds rights on it. The optimism does the structural work. A man who is reasonable and good can stand on his own, so the thick, binding group becomes optional and the individual carries the weight of the theory. Place man at the fallen pole instead and he needs the group, the hierarchy, and the hard institutions to keep him in line. Mearsheimer sets out to deny the premise.<\/p>\n

Where does Mearsheimer land on the axis? Not where the realist tradition usually lands. He refuses the binary. He calls good and evil vague terms that no evidence can settle, and he plants man at neither pole, but his conclusions sit with the pessimists. Rational self-interested fear runs through his world, survival overrides, and conflict never ends. He keeps the tragic conclusion of the right and moves its source. He shifts the flaw off the heart and onto two other places: the head, where reason cannot settle what the good life is, and the situation, where no authority stands above the groups to keep the peace. Reinhold Niebuhr<\/a> (1892\u20131971) grounded the same pessimism in original sin. Mearsheimer grounds it in the limits of every situation. The trade keeps the realist’s hard conclusions and drops the theology. Original sin shuts the door on reform. A flaw made of genes, groups and anarchy leaves the door open, because a man can change a childhood and an order and possibly, one day, even genes. Mearsheimer’s own account hands the reform-minded liberals their opening.<\/p>\n

The social contract shows the foundation. The liberal story opens with men in a state of nature, free and equal, each holding his rights before any society forms, who then agree to build a government for their mutual good. John Locke<\/a> (1632\u20131704) put equality and rights in the state of nature and made the commonwealth a thing men consent to. Liberals know no man ever lived that way. They keep the story as a useful device for thinking about authority and obligation. Jean Hampton<\/a> (1954\u20131996) granted the concession and named its cost: the social nature of man, the part that explains how the world works, drops out of the account. The founding fiction locates the source of obligation in the consenting individual, and a theory built on that source reads society as an aggregate of choosers. Alexis de Tocqueville<\/a> (1805\u20131859) saw the break. The word individualism is modern, he wrote; his ancestors had no man who stood outside a group or thought himself alone. Aristotle<\/a> (384\u2013322 BC) and Aquinas<\/a> (1225\u20131274) assumed men social by nature. Liberalism broke with them and made the lone bearer of rights the unit of theory.<\/p>\n

Here the strongest objection to Mearsheimer arrives, and he answers it before it lands. Liberals acknowledge social ties. John Rawls<\/a> (1921\u20132002) writes that a man finds himself at birth in a particular place in a particular society, and that his place shapes his prospects. In The Law of Peoples Rawls turns to peoples, which is to say nations. The weight of liberalism still stays on the individual and his rights, as it does across A Theory of Justice. A theory based on individualism cannot at the same time make the group its ground, because the two pull against each other, and the strain shows up inside liberal theory. When Rawls takes peoples seriously, critics charge him with incoherence against his own individualist premises. Thomas Pogge<\/a> (b. 1953) and others note that the man-centered theory and the people-centered theory pull apart. That charge, raised by liberals against the most careful liberal, is the evidence for Mearsheimer’s claim. A theory can nod toward community in a clause and still rest on the individual in its frame. The nod leaves the frame in place.<\/p>\n

Set the foundation aside and look at the creature. Does the social animal make evolutionary sense? Start with the child. The human infant arrives more helpless than the young of any other animal and stays dependent for at least ten years. That long childhood is the human adaptation. We are the cultural species. We survive by downloading what our group already learned about food, danger, tools, and each other, and the child who absorbs that store outlives the child who reasons from scratch. Joseph Henrich<\/a> makes the case that our edge is cultural learning. So the order of acquisition runs as the design would have it: a man takes in language, the names of right and wrong, the bounds of his group, and the shape of God before his reasoning matures enough to weigh any of it. Mearsheimer’s phrase, the value infusion, names the sequence. By the time a man can ask whether his morals hold up, his morals already hold him. Even the man who flees to an island carries the town that raised him. Daniel Defoe<\/a> (1660\u20131731) knew it about Crusoe.<\/p>\n

The record of the species points the same way. No society on the books begins with solitary men who later contract into a group. Men live in bands, clans, congregations, and nations, everywhere we look, and the group is what lets a man survive. Hunger, predators, and rival groups punish the man who walks alone. The traits Mearsheimer names pay off in the terms selection counts. Care for kin spreads the genes they share, a point W. D. Hamilton<\/a> (1936\u20132000) made exact. Help given to allies comes back, as Robert Trivers<\/a> (b. 1943) showed for reciprocity. A reputation for loyalty draws partners and mates, so the man who sacrifices for the group advertises a value the group rewards. Charles Darwin<\/a> (1809\u20131882) saw the group-level edge himself: a tribe rich in loyalty, courage, and sympathy beats a tribe of squabblers. Soldiers die for the regiment. Martyrs die for the faith. Parents starve so children eat. A theory that files these under departures from rational self-interest reads the creature backward. The group is a survival vehicle, and the man built for it feels exclusion as injury.<\/p>\n

The harder claim ranks reason last among the three sources of a man’s preferences, below socialization and inborn sentiment. Read it as a claim about the average, not the individual. For a few men, at some moments, reason might be the strongest force they own; across people and across a life, it ranks last. Here too the evolutionary question helps. If reasoning evolved to track truth alone, its weakness would puzzle us. If it evolved to win arguments and justify a man’s side to his allies, the weakness is the design. Hugo Mercier<\/a> and Dan Sperber<\/a> argue that reason works best in the give-and-take of a group making its case, and works poorly as a lone road to truth. David Hume<\/a> (1711\u20131776) saw the shape of it long before: reason serves the passions. Mearsheimer takes the support and steps back from its edge. Hume overstates the case, he writes. Reason can arbitrate when intuitions clash, it can correct first principles that lead a man to ruin, and a few hard cases examine their convictions and lead others to new ground. Some of us have some agency some of the time. That guardrail shapes what follows, because it keeps Mearsheimer off strict determinism. His claim stays narrow and hard to dislodge: on average, reason arrives late, works slowly, and rarely brings men to the shared truths liberalism needs.<\/p>\n

From the foundation the rest follows. Because the unit is the individual and his rights inhere in him, the rights belong to everyone, everywhere, the same. Universalism falls out of that premise. The Declaration holds the rights self-evident and the men equal, and equal rights for all men is a claim about all men, not only Americans. The claim turns a state outward. If every man holds the same rights, a violation anywhere reads as a wrong the rights-bearing powers might answer, and the answer becomes a foreign policy of remaking other societies in the liberal image. Mearsheimer reads the cost of that policy in the record since the Cold War, the gap between the plan and the result. The plan had counted on interchangeable rights-bearers waiting for the right institutions. Men abroad turned out to be members of older groups with older loyalties. His anthropology predicts that. The liberal model missed it.<\/p>\n

One objection. If men are tribal, what of the cosmopolitan who claims the species as his people, or the universal faith that preached one God for all men long before liberalism arrived? David Pinsof (b. 1987), working from what he calls Alliance Theory, gives the answer Mearsheimer’s logic implies. Beliefs are built to form coalitions, manage reputations, and signal group loyalty. Moralizing recruits allies and coordinates them against a shared enemy. Read in that light, liberal universalism is an elite coalition strategy. A creed that takes all mankind as its concern hands the holder supreme moral authority and lets him recast a local rival as an enemy of mankind. It flatters the men who carry it, marks their side, and shames the holdout who fails the test. So take a group’s account of its own virtue as a move in its game rather than a finding about the world. The cosmopolitan has not escaped the tribe. He has joined a new one and flies the language of universal rights in his group interest. He favors his own, the educated and mobile who share the creed, and polices the ones who break ranks. Christianity and Islam carried universal claims and built particular empires, churches, and armies to carry them. The universalist speaks for humanity and fights for his coalition. Far from refuting the tribal thesis, he confirms it.<\/p>\n

That is the strong case, and it makes evolutionary sense at each step. The weak points sit less in the picture of the creature than in the joints where Mearsheimer turns the picture into a verdict on liberalism, on rights, and on truth.<\/p>\n

If every man who claims a universal loyalty is a tribesman in disguise, and every man who reasons against his side is the rare exception, then no case could ever count against the thesis. A claim that forbids nothing explains nothing. The same trap hides in the bet that the nation always wins: name whichever coalition prevails the real tribe, and the bet cannot lose on paper, while the world stays more contingent than that, holding universal creeds and wide identities that have governed and lasted. The tribal account earns its keep when it makes a risky prediction and the prediction holds. It loses its keep when it can absorb any outcome after the fact.<\/p>\n

Mearsheimer grants that innate sentiment is hard to measure and that we know little about how the brain works. Ranking reason as a weak influence on humanity feels right to many readers. Feeling right falls short of evidence, and some of the psychology behind it is contested.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42717],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-195472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t