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.
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.
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.
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.
