Luke Ford

Adrian Vermeule is a Harvard Law professor who converted to Catholicism and became one of the most provocative legal theorists in American academia. He advances what he calls Common Good Constitutionalism, a framework that rejects the liberal premise that the state should remain neutral among competing visions of the good life. In his account, law is not and never has been neutral procedure. It always imposes values. The question is which values, and whether those in power have the honesty to say so. He argues for stronger executive authority, legitimate hierarchy, and a state willing to direct society toward substantive moral ends rooted in the classical legal tradition. That position, coming from a tenured professor at the center of American legal education, has generated a response from the dominant academic coalition ranging from serious intellectual engagement to accusations of fascism.
Read through David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory, both Vermeule and his critics become legible in ways that pure intellectual debate obscures.
Vermeule began his career inside mainstream liberal legal academia. His early work on administrative law and constitutional theory was technically accomplished and coalitionally unremarkable. His conversion to Catholicism and subsequent pivot toward post-liberal thought represent a coalitional relocation rather than just an intellectual one. He moved from the mainstream liberal legal coalition toward a network of Catholic integralist and post-liberal thinkers, while retaining his position at Harvard. That combination is what makes him high-impact. An outside critic making similar arguments would be easy to ignore. An inside node advancing them forces engagement and signals that these ideas are not safely fringe.
His closest intellectual peer is Patrick Deneen at Notre Dame, whose Why Liberalism Failed argues that liberalism fails not despite its internal logic but because of it, dissolving community, eroding tradition, and producing the isolation and inequality it claims to remedy. Deneen provides the diagnosis. Vermeule provides the program. Where Deneen points toward localism and cultural renewal, Vermeule reaches for state power. Where Deneen theorizes, Vermeule operationalizes, translating critique into legal doctrine, administrative theory, and arguments about how courts and agencies should actually act. That division of labor reflects the different institutional positions of Notre Dame and Harvard in the elite ecosystem.
Notre Dame sits at the elite periphery rather than the center. Its explicitly Catholic intellectual tradition gives it some insulation from mainstream liberal academic pressure, which means post-liberal ideas can be developed and refined there without immediate expulsion. The institution provides what Alliance Theory might call a semi-protected niche, a space where alternative frameworks can achieve coherence and teachability before facing the full force of coalition enforcement. Harvard has no equivalent insulation. It sits at the center of elite networks, feeding into government, courts, and media. Ideas there must translate into something that can operate within existing power structures, or they face containment. Vermeule’s choice to stay at Harvard rather than retreat to a friendlier institution is tactical. His presence forces the dominant coalition to engage rather than ignore, and it signals to observers that these arguments can survive inside the core.
The broader network includes Gladden Pappin, Chad Pecknold, Sohrab Ahmari, and Rod Dreher, figures who vary in how explicitly state-focused their post-liberalism runs but who share the conviction that liberal neutrality is a myth and that institutions need substantive moral direction. Together they form what Alliance Theory identifies as a counter-elite coalition: people with elite credentials and access to mainstream platforms who are not trying to reject institutions but to capture and redirect them. Critics tend to collapse distinctions among them because coalition-level threat perception does not require fine-grained analysis of internal differences.
The movement from critique to institutional threat follows a repeatable sequence. Ideas gestate in peripheral niches, where language and concepts develop in relative safety. They gain coherence through books, recurring terminology, and portable arguments. Networks form around conferences and journals. Then bridge figures emerge, insiders with elite credentials who translate the critique into system-relevant language. That translation is the moment of maximum sensitivity for the dominant coalition, because it converts abstract dissent into actionable proposals about how courts and agencies should actually behave. Before that translation, ideas are interesting and containable. After it, they become potentially influential and much harder to dismiss. Vermeule sits at that translation point, and his 2022 book Common Good Constitutionalism continues to generate symposia and serious responses, including Jan-Werner Müller’s 2025 analysis questioning whether the framework veers toward rule-by-law authoritarianism.
His critics respond at the level of coalition threat rather than intellectual argument. Andrew Gelman, a Columbia statistician not known for culture war engagement, calls him a fascist-supporting academic and draws parallels to fellow travelers of authoritarian movements in the 1930s. The label is not a precise analytic category. It is a coordination signal that raises the stakes to regime-level threat, bypasses normal norms of collegial engagement, and forces side-taking across the academic network. The specific objection is structural: rejection of state neutrality, acceptance of hierarchy, and openness to strong executive power maps, in the perception of the dominant coalition, onto the historical sequence by which liberal institutions gave way to authoritarian ones. The direction of travel feels dangerous regardless of where Vermeule himself would draw the line.
In March 2025, over ninety Harvard Law colleagues issued a statement on rule-of-law concerns amid rising political tensions. Vermeule responded with an open letter to students affirming his commitment to teach law without fear or favor, while critiquing what he characterized as selective outrage among signatories. In July 2025 he published a piece in the New York Times on lower-court defiance of Supreme Court directives, framing the threat to judicial integrity as coming from within the judiciary rather than from outside it. Those moves illustrate his tactical flexibility. He positions himself not as an enemy of legal order but as a critic of the liberal coalition’s monopoly on defining what legal order requires. That positioning keeps him visible and polarizing simultaneously, which is precisely where a bridge figure needs to be.
The question of how he maintains credibility despite his 2020 election fraud tweets is worth addressing directly, because on the surface those statements should be costly inside elite academia. The answer is that elite credibility is domain-specific rather than global. Vermeule’s status anchors are his administrative law scholarship, his constitutional theory, and his institutional position at Harvard. His election commentary sits in a different domain, public-facing political rhetoric, and elite systems routinely compartmentalize. As long as his legal scholarship remains serious and his institutional role intact, his core credibility survives the tweets. He was already positioned as heterodox and contrarian before 2020, which means the tweets did not create a new category of concern. They reinforced an existing one. In Alliance Theory terms, once someone is established as outside the dominant coalition’s comfort zone, additional deviation carries diminishing marginal reputational cost. Critics use the tweets as evidence of danger. Supporters discount them as overstatement or noise. Institutions treat him as controversial but legitimate. That split perception prevents unified reputational collapse. The tweets narrow and polarize his credibility without destroying it, which is a meaningful difference. The deeper pattern is that dislodging an established figure from a high-status institution requires more than controversial public claims, unless those claims directly violate the core norms the institution feels compelled to enforce. Harvard has not reached that threshold with Vermeule, and the reasons it has not are themselves a data point about how coalition protection works.
What gives him traction beyond the quality of his arguments is that he exploits real cracks inside the dominant coalition rather than manufacturing grievances. The claim that law is neutral procedure has weakened across the political spectrum. Courts make visibly value-laden decisions. Constitutional interpretation shifts with politics. Administrative agencies shape outcomes through discretion rather than rule. Once neutrality looks like a myth, his core move becomes harder to dismiss. He also presses the fault line between the coalition’s equality commitments and its procedural ones. When those two pillars conflict, as they do in affirmative action debates, speech restriction controversies, and administrative discretion battles, Vermeule demands that people choose. That demand resonates because the inconsistency is real and felt. He also benefits from a structural symmetry with progressive legal thought that makes his position harder to expel as alien. Progressive legal theory has already moved toward outcome-oriented reasoning and questioned the myth of the value-free judge. Vermeule mirrors that methodological structure while inverting the values. The dominant coalition has accepted the method in one direction. Rejecting it categorically in his direction requires a consistency it does not always have.
The deeper question his emergence raises is whether liberal systems can repair their internal contradictions without losing legitimacy. The dominant coalition might patch and stabilize, absorbing enough criticism to reduce pressure without fundamental change. It might drift further toward equality-first governance, accepting more interventionist and moralized policy at the cost of legitimacy among those who value procedural neutrality. It might correct toward procedure-first governance, strengthening free speech and rule-based constraints while fracturing internally over equality commitments. If none of those reconciliations holds, the system fragments into parallel institutions with incompatible norms of legitimacy, already visible in diverging media ecosystems, academic subfields, and policy frameworks.
Vermeule’s minority position grows more visible as the dominant coalition struggles to sustain the appearance of procedural neutrality. Ideas do not become threatening when articulated clearly. They become threatening when they find a pathway into power. His continued presence at Harvard, his engagement with live legal debates, and his connection to a networked counter-elite that stretches from Notre Dame into conservative political circles means that pathway exists and remains under active construction. Whether the dominant coalition contains him through reputational enforcement or whether his framework achieves wider institutional uptake depends less on the strength of the arguments than on how well liberal systems manage the contradictions he has spent his career exposing.
To what extent can Adrian Vermeule be compared to German sociologist Hans Freyer?
The comparison has real substance, and it also has real limits. Understanding both requires looking at what Freyer and Vermeule actually share and where they part ways.
Hans Freyer was a sociologist of the Weimar Conservative Revolution, a movement that rejected liberal democracy not from nostalgia for a feudal past but from a conviction that liberalism had failed to give modern mass society any coherent form or collective meaning. He belonged to what historians call radical conservatism, and while he was initially not opposed to National Socialism, he eventually became disillusioned and moved into passive opposition. Hungarian Conservative After the war, he developed a form of conservatism adaptable to the industrial age. The arc of his career, from radical to moderate, is central to understanding him. Jerry Z. Muller’s book The Other God that Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism by Jerry Z. Muller examines exactly this trajectory, arguing that Freyer’s case illuminates how gifted intellectuals can move from radical anti-liberalism toward a chastened, post-catastrophe conservatism that still retains the old critique of liberal individualism but abandons the revolutionary ambition.
Freyer and Carl Schmitt, as Muller argued, used their intellectual and rhetorical gifts to help undermine support for liberal democracy in Germany, and indeed intended to do so. That is the key phrase: intended to do so. Freyer did not merely criticize liberalism in the abstract. He wanted to replace it with a strong, unified state in which the individual found meaning through total immersion in collective life.
Adrian Vermeule advocate integralism, a form of modern legal and political thought opposed to the division of church and state. Integralism gives the state an order in which the Common Good takes precedence over individual autonomy. His method, however, is not revolution from below. Rather than electoral politics, the path to confessional political order in integralist theory is what he calls “strategic ralliement,” a transformation within institutions and bureaucracies that lays the groundwork for an integralist regime to succeed a liberal democratic order he assumes to be dying.
This is where the comparison with Freyer becomes most compelling. Both men look at liberalism and see not a stable system to be reformed but a decaying order that carries within it the seeds of its own collapse. Vermeule argues that liberalism follows a deterministic process of decline and presents it as being propelled by an internal mechanism of relentless aggression, a kind of moral avant-gardism that can never be satisfied or reversed. Freyer made structurally similar arguments about liberal Weimar society, seeing it as incapable of generating the collective will a modern industrial state requires. Both argue from a position of intellectual confidence that history is moving their way, and both see themselves as helping the transition rather than merely describing it.
Vermeule has described his strategy as finding a position from which to sear the liberal faith with hot irons, to defeat and capture the hearts and minds of liberal agents, and to take over institutions the old order has prepared and turn them toward human dignity and the common good. This language of capture, of working within existing institutions to redirect them toward illiberal ends, echoes what Freyer described as a revolution from the right: not a mob storming the legislature but an elite reshaping the state from within.
The differences matter just as much. Freyer’s anti-liberalism drew on Volkish sociology, German nationalism, and a longing for organic community rooted in ethnicity and war experience. His 1931 booklet Revolution from the Right concluded that a true revolution could only come from the right, with the purpose of establishing a unified state in which the individual found meaning in a closed society directed by a common will with a single collective purpose. Vermeule draws on Aquinas, Catholic natural law, and the classical legal tradition. His framework is Thomist and explicitly religious rather than völkisch. He reaches for a universal theological grammar where Freyer reached for ethnic and historical particularity.
Vermeule has long argued for power concentrated in the executive with minimal interference from other branches, and his common good constitutionalism completes the picture by grounding that deference in natural law conceived as divine ordinance. Yu Freyer wanted a strong state too, but his came from below, from the revolutionary energy of the Volk, not from above, from divine law mediated through Catholic doctrine. This is not a small difference. It separates a kind of romantic nationalist vitalism from a scholastic theocratic project.
There is also the question of scale and consequence. Freyer worked in a broken republic with active paramilitaries in the streets, hyperinflation, and a genuine mass movement willing to overturn everything. Vermeule writes in a constitutional democracy with a strong judiciary, an entrenched legal culture, and a pluralistic society deeply resistant to his project. His institutional path to integralism might strike many observers as more aspiration than plan. His critics on the right have made exactly this point, noting that integralism as a political program has no real constituency and works mainly as a provocation and a thought experiment, however sincere its author.
What the comparison ultimately reveals is a recurring type: the credentialed, academically serious anti-liberal intellectual who argues that the liberal order is not just mistaken but structurally doomed, and who believes that the role of the intellectual is not to patch liberalism but to accelerate or channel its replacement. Freyer was that type in Weimar. Vermeule might be that type now. The key difference is that Freyer’s project found a catastrophic real-world vehicle. Vermeule’s has not, and may never.
Would not all these thinkers, liberal or anti-liberal, benefit from evolutionary psychology which helps you to understand that different politics suit different situations?
The answer is yes, but with important caveats depending on which thinker you apply it to.
Evolutionary psychology argues, at its core, that human beings carry competing psychological tendencies shaped by ancestral environments: tendencies toward cooperation and toward competition, toward in-group loyalty and toward openness to strangers, toward hierarchy and toward egalitarianism. Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory, which draws heavily on evolutionary psychology, suggests that different political orientations reflect genuine moral intuitions that all have some adaptive basis. Conservatives, on this account, weight loyalty, authority, and sanctity heavily. Liberals weight care and fairness. Neither is simply wrong. Both reflect something real about what groups need under different conditions.
Applied to Freyer, evolutionary psychology offers a partial corrective. Freyer’s longing for organic community, collective meaning, and a unified state reflects something recognizable in the evolutionary literature: the human need for belonging, for a coherent in-group narrative, for shared purpose. Humans are tribal. That need is real. What evolutionary psychology would challenge in Freyer, however, is his assumption that this need can be fully satisfied by the state, and that satisfying it justifies totalitarian unity. The evidence from evolutionary biology suggests that human groups function best at moderate scales, that hierarchy and egalitarianism exist in tension, and that no single political arrangement suits all environments. Freyer’s revolutionary certainty sits badly with this.
Vermeule might find evolutionary psychology even more uncomfortable. His project rests on a Thomist natural law that holds certain political and moral arrangements to be objectively correct, derivable from divine reason. Evolutionary psychology cuts against this by naturalizing the very moral pluralism he wants to overcome. If different people genuinely weight different moral foundations because those foundations all solved real adaptive problems in ancestral environments, then the integralist project of subordinating a diverse society to a single confessional order looks less like the recovery of natural law and more like the imposition of one tribe’s moral grammar on others who carry equally natural but different grammars. Haidt’s framework, in particular, makes Vermeule’s universalism hard to sustain.
Liberal thinkers fare somewhat better but not without their own problems. Classical liberals tend to assume that rational self-interest and individual autonomy sit at the base of human nature. Evolutionary psychology complicates this sharply. Humans are not primarily rational maximizers. They are rationalizers, constructing post-hoc justifications for conclusions driven by emotion, social pressure, and tribal loyalty. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber’s book The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argues that reason did not evolve to help individuals find truth or make better decisions. It evolved to help us justify our actions to others and evaluate the justifications others offer. This means that the liberal faith in deliberative democracy, rational public discourse, and persuasion through argument rests on a flawed picture of what human cognition actually does.
Where evolutionary psychology most helps all of these thinkers is in its insistence on context-dependence. The same human being can express radically different political and social behaviors depending on environmental conditions: stress levels, resource scarcity, perceived threat, group size. Authoritarian tendencies strengthen under threat. Openness and cooperation expand under security and abundance. This suggests that Freyer’s desire for a strong unified state might speak to something real that conditions of crisis amplify, without that making it correct or desirable as a permanent arrangement. It also suggests that liberal individualism might flourish precisely in the conditions of relative safety and prosperity that make its assumptions seem natural, and that those assumptions are less universal than liberals typically believe.
The thinker who sits most comfortably with evolutionary psychology is probably Edmund Burke, who stands behind all of these figures as a kind of ancestor. Burke’s argument that inherited institutions encode accumulated social wisdom, that traditions survive because they solve real human problems, and that abstract rationalism tends to destroy working solutions in pursuit of perfect ones, maps onto evolutionary thinking quite well. Traditions as repositories of tested social technology is essentially an evolutionary argument. Neither Freyer nor Vermeule is really a Burkean, despite sometimes borrowing Burkean language. Freyer wanted revolution. Vermeule wants capture and transformation. Burke would have been suspicious of both.