{"id":175944,"date":"2026-03-17T12:39:33","date_gmt":"2026-03-17T20:39:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=175944"},"modified":"2026-03-17T15:09:56","modified_gmt":"2026-03-17T23:09:56","slug":"when-the-epistemology-collapses-stephen-park-turner-and-the-post-liberal-catholic-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=175944","title":{"rendered":"When the Epistemology Collapses: Stephen Park Turner and the Post-Liberal Catholic Project"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is no famous direct encounter between the sociologist Stephen P. Turner<\/a> and the Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule<\/a>. They operate in different institutional worlds and have rarely, if ever, addressed each other by name. Turner works in the philosophy of social science and the sociology of knowledge. Vermeule works in constitutional law and Catholic political theory. The absence of a direct debate, however, obscures something important: Turner’s central arguments quietly dismantle the epistemic foundations on which Vermeule’s entire project rests, and they do the same to the broader post-liberal Catholic movement that includes Patrick Deneen<\/a> and Sohrab Ahmari<\/a>. The failure to recognize this connection is not accidental. Taking Turner seriously is uncomfortable for everyone.
\nThe core of Vermeule’s project, as articulated in his common-good constitutionalism and integralist writings, rests on several interlocking claims. A thick moral tradition exists, running from classical natural law through Thomistic philosophy into modern jurisprudence. That tradition carries genuine continuity across time. Trained elites, judges and administrators formed within it, can access it and apply it to contemporary governance. The goal of constitutional interpretation, on this account, is not to maximize individual liberty or reconstruct original intent but to direct social life toward the common good. The framework is not just political. It is epistemological. It says: we know what the good is, and we know how to apply it.
\nThat last sentence contains the root error Turner would identify. The entire project rests on essentialism: the belief that the tradition is a carrier of a determinate essence, a stable moral content that exists independently of any particular interpreter and gets passed down through the generations to those trained to receive it. Vermeule does not merely appeal to tradition as a useful resource. He claims to recover it, and recovery implies there is something fixed to find, not something being constructed in the present. Natural law has specific content. The common good has a determinate shape. Thomistic jurisprudence identifies something real about human flourishing that skilled interpreters can access and apply. Without this essentialist commitment, the entire architecture of common-good constitutionalism collapses into what Turner would say it actually is: a contemporary coalition selecting and reinterpreting past materials to justify current authority claims.
\nTurner’s work, particularly in The Social Theory of Practices<\/a>, Explaining the Normative<\/a>, and The Politics of Expertise<\/a>, attacks this essentialist picture at its root. Traditions are not containers for determinate moral content. They are historically produced and perpetually reconstructed sets of texts, arguments, practices, and institutional forms that each generation reshapes in light of its own situation and incentives. What gets transmitted is not an essence but raw material. The appearance of continuity is produced by interpreters, not discovered in the material itself. When Vermeule reads Aquinas and finds support for a strong administrative state oriented toward the common good, he is not retrieving what Aquinas essentially meant. He is producing a reading that his present coalition finds useful, and then treating that reading as if it were the tradition speaking rather than a contemporary interpreter selecting.
\nThe mysterious transmission Turner identifies is where the essentialist commitment becomes most philosophically exposed. If the tradition carries a determinate essence, there must be some account of how that essence travels from Aquinas to a Harvard law professor in the twenty-first century, through centuries of fragmentary and contested institutional life, reformation and counter-reformation, revolution and restoration, the collapse of Christendom and the rise of the modern state. MacIntyre’s answer, which Vermeule imports wholesale, is that the tradition is a living practice with internal standards of reasoning that allow practitioners to participate in an ongoing argument across time. But that answer only works if traditions cohere and self-correct in the way MacIntyre describes. Turner’s sociological account says they do not. What actually travels across generations is fragments, contested interpretations, and reconstructions shaped by the incentives and power structures of each era. The essence, if it exists at all, is not what gets transmitted. What gets transmitted is raw material that each generation reshapes in its own image while claiming to recover something prior.
\nTurner is careful not to reduce this observation to a simple dismissal of tradition’s political weight. Political traditions made of messy, tacit material do have serious staying power. That is precisely why they cannot simply be replaced, and why they resist transplantation. The durability is real. But it is a different kind of durability than the one Vermeule claims. A tradition endures not because it carries a stable extractable essence but because its very messiness and internal resistance make it hard to dislodge. This is a crucial distinction. Vermeule needs the tradition to be a reliable guide with determinate content. Turner’s point is that it is better understood as a stubborn historical presence, one that shapes what is politically possible without supplying the clean normative content that a governing program requires.
\nMichael Oakeshott’s account of tradition deepens this diagnosis in ways that cut directly against the essentialist move. For Oakeshott, a rich tradition sustains itself through its long-term underlying tensions. The tensions are not impurities waiting to be resolved by a sufficiently trained interpreter. They are the tradition. What gives it resilience and depth is precisely that it holds competing tendencies in unresolved relationship, allowing different actors in different circumstances to draw on it in different ways. The moment you claim to have identified the essence of a tradition and to be applying it faithfully, you have replaced the tradition with your own reading of it. You have resolved the tensions rather than inhabiting them. And a tradition with its tensions resolved is no longer a tradition. It is a doctrine, and doctrines are far more brittle than the living inheritances they claim to represent. Vermeule’s classical legal tradition is not a recovery. It is a resolution, and in resolving the tensions he claims to transmit, he produces something new while presenting it as something ancient.
\nThe philosophical spine of Vermeule’s world is Alasdair MacIntyre<\/a>, and the clash between Turner and MacIntyre is where the essentialist problem becomes most precise. MacIntyre’s After Virtue<\/a> argues that modern liberalism destroyed coherent moral frameworks, leaving only emotivism and bureaucratic management in their place. The solution, for MacIntyre, is to recover tradition-based rationality: the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition as a living inheritance that carries internal standards of reasoning and can guide human action toward genuine flourishing. The key word is carries. MacIntyre’s tradition is not merely a historical residue. It is a vehicle for moral knowledge with its own internal logic of development and self-correction. That is an essentialist claim, and it is precisely the claim Turner dismantles.
\nTraditions lack the unity and stability MacIntyre attributes to them<\/a>. Transmission involves distortion, selective reconstruction, and persistent unresolved disagreement rather than faithful inheritance. Tacit knowledge of the kind MacIntyre’s tradition-based rationality requires thrives in small, stable communities where accountability is immediate and shared context is genuine. Scale it to a modern nation-state, filter it through centuries of institutional change, and it ceases to be knowledge in any robust sense. It becomes a label applied after the fact to justify what a group is already doing. Authority within a tradition stems from social recognition and institutional positioning, not from epistemic mastery of an essence. Strip MacIntyre from Vermeule’s framework and what remains is a group of contemporary actors saying: this is what the tradition essentially teaches, and we are the ones qualified to apply it. Turner’s response is that the essence is their construction, the tradition is their raw material, and the qualification is their coalition’s credential.
\nThis last point came into sharp focus during the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. Vermeule’s public claims of voter fraud<\/a> at that time showed exactly the susceptibility Turner would predict: high-confidence claims resting on weak evidence, rapid uptake of coalition narratives, failure to maintain the epistemic discipline his own theory requires. A system built on the premise that trained elites can exercise disciplined prudential judgment needs its central figures to model that discipline under pressure. Instead, what Turner’s framework would lead anyone to expect is what appeared: an expert embedded in networks, responding to coalition stress by aligning with coalition narratives. Not an anomaly. A confirmation.
\nAndrew Gelman’s skepticism about expert calibration<\/a> reinforces the point from a different angle. In his New America essay on overconfidence in research and policy<\/a>, Gelman argues that standard paradigms of expert reasoning lead practitioners to extract apparent discoveries from noise and to exaggerate effects even in controlled conditions. His concept of the garden of forking path<\/a>s, developed with Eric Loken, demonstrates that even researchers acting in good faith produce overconfident conclusions when they make data-dependent choices along the way. If the tradition does not carry a determinate essence but only raw material open to multiple interpretations, then the trained jurist’s confident recovery of the common good is subject to exactly this kind of systematic distortion. The forks in the interpretive path are invisible to the interpreter because the essentialist commitment tells him he is discovering rather than choosing. Hugo Mercier’s argumentative theory of reason<\/a> adds a further layer. Reason evolved not to track truth but to produce justifications for positions we hold on other grounds and to evaluate the justifications others offer in social contexts. Common-good reasoning, on this account, is doing what all reasoning does: serving coalition goals while presenting itself as the discovery of something that was always there.
\nThe critique of Patrick Deneen requires the same essentialist diagnosis, applied with slightly different emphasis. Deneen’s argument in Why Liberalism Failed<\/a> and Regime Change<\/a> is that liberalism destroyed a coherent way of life rooted in local community and that restoring the common good requires recovering what was lost. The essentialist commitment here is if anything more explicit than in Vermeule. Deneen believes there was a determinate thing, a genuine common form of life with identifiable moral content, that pre-liberal communities embodied and that liberalism corroded. His political program depends on this thing being real and recoverable, not merely imagined or selectively constructed.
\nTurner’s response, sharpened by Oakeshott, is that what those communities had was not an essence but a set of practices held together by local conditions, mutual dependency, scarcity, and unresolved internal tensions. The tensions were functional. They allowed the community to adapt, to hold competing demands in productive relationship, to mean different things to different members without flying apart. The moment Deneen describes the essence of that way of life clearly enough to use it as a political program, he has already left the tradition behind and entered the territory of ideology. He has resolved what was unresolved, made explicit what was tacit, and converted a living historical residue into a governing doctrine. What he then proposes to restore is not the original thing but his own systematization of it, which is precisely what Turner means when he says these guys think there is an essential thing that gets passed down in some mysterious way. The mystery is load-bearing. Without it, the recovery project has nothing to recover.
\nDeneen’s proposed aristopopulist alliance, in which a virtuous elite uses the state to protect ordinary people’s way of life, does not escape Turner’s critique of expertise by replacing technocratic credentials with moral ones. Any elite, regardless of its credentialing vocabulary, will behave as an interest group asserting jurisdiction. The new elite credentialed by adherence to tradition and the common good is not accessing an essence that the old technocratic elite missed. It is deploying a different moral language to claim the same institutional authority. A change in vocabulary. Not a change in mechanism.
\nWhat emerges from Turner, Gelman, and Mercier together is a picture in which Vermeule’s project looks structurally identical to the liberal technocratic order he criticizes. Both rest on essentialist claims about what kind of knowledge a trained elite possesses. Both present that knowledge as something more than coalition preference dressed in prestigious vocabulary. Both use the claim to special access, whether to neutral expertise or to determinate moral tradition, to justify institutional jurisdiction that would otherwise require explicit democratic warrant. The vocabulary differs. The mechanism does not. And the root philosophical error, the belief that there is a determinate essence being identified and transmitted, is the same in both cases.
\nWhat Turner offers is not a political critique of post-liberalism but a deeper one. He does not argue that Vermeule is authoritarian, though others do. He argues that the metaphysical commitment on which the entire project depends cannot be sustained. There is no determinate essence in the classical tradition waiting to be recovered. There is no mysterious transmission of moral content from Aquinas through the centuries to those trained to receive it. There is no neutral expert class whose formation gives them privileged access to the common good. What remains, once the essentialist picture dissolves, is a group of high-status actors saying: we should have authority, and here is our moral language for why. The tradition they invoke is a real historical presence with genuine staying power. Their claim to have identified its essence and to be faithfully transmitting it is not. And that distinction, between a tradition’s stubborn inertial weight and any particular coalition’s claim to own and apply its determinate content, is where Turner does his most precise and most devastating work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is no famous direct encounter between the sociologist Stephen P. Turner and the Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule. They operate in different institutional worlds and have rarely, if ever, addressed each other by name. Turner works in the philosophy … 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":[43153,42951,42905],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-175944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adrian-vermeule","category-epistemics","category-stephen-turner"],"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