{"id":194857,"date":"2026-06-22T18:19:19","date_gmt":"2026-06-23T02:19:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=194857"},"modified":"2026-06-22T18:31:31","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T02:31:31","slug":"adrian-vermeule-and-the-common-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=194857","title":{"rendered":"Adrian Vermeule and the Common Good"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cornelius Adrian Comstock Vermeule<\/a> (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<\/a>. He came to wide notice as a scholar of administrative law<\/a>, statutory interpretation<\/a>, 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>, a theory that draws on the classical legal tradition and on Catholic political thought and that defines itself against both originalism<\/a> and living constitutionalism<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

Vermeule was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, into a family of established academic standing. His father, Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule III<\/a> (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<\/a> (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<\/a>, became a literary scholar and a professor of English at Stanford University<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College<\/a> 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<\/a> from 1993 to 1994, and then for Justice Antonin Scalia<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n

After a period in practice and early teaching, Vermeule joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School<\/a> 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<\/a> in 2012, at the age of forty-three, and in 2020 he was appointed to the Administrative Conference of the United States<\/a>. He has authored or co-authored nine books and a substantial body of articles across constitutional law, administrative law, legislation, and national security law.<\/p>\n

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<\/i> (2006), Law and the Limits of Reason<\/i> (2009), and The System of the Constitution<\/i> (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.<\/p>\n

A connected theme, the defense of executive and administrative authority, runs through the middle period of his career. In The Executive Unbound<\/i> (2010), written with Eric Posner<\/a> (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<\/i> (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<\/a> that sought to revive judicially enforced limits on agency power. His collaboration with Cass Sunstein<\/a> (b. 1954) in Law and Leviathan<\/i> (2020) extended the argument by showing that administrative governance remains bound by longstanding principles of legality and reasoned decision.<\/p>\n

His conversion to Roman Catholicism in 2016 marks the decisive reorientation of his intellectual life. Reading Thomas Aquinas<\/a> (1225-1274), Joseph de Maistre<\/a> (1753-1821), and above all John Henry Newman<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n

From this position Vermeule emerged as a leading advocate of Catholic integralism<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/i>, and developed it at length in Common Good Constitutionalism<\/i> (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<\/i>, 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<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

Much of the controversy that surrounds Vermeule has gathered around his engagement with the German jurist Carl Schmitt<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Vermeule remains an active figure in public argument. He serves as a contributing editor at Compact<\/i>, co-founded the book-review journal The New Rambler<\/i> in 2015, and writes a Substack newsletter, The New Digest<\/i>. 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<\/a><\/i> and his replies to critics of common-good constitutionalism keep him engaged with the moving edge of doctrine.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The Great Delusion<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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

\nMy view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism\u2014everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights\u2014and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. \u201cHuman rights,\u201d Samuel Moyn notes, \u201chave come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities\u2014state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.\u201d
\n[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.
\nThe 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 whole 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.
\nSo 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.
\nVermeule 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.
\nA 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.
\nMearsheimer 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.
\nApply 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 the whole of 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.
\nMearsheimer 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.
\nIf 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.<\/p>\n

‘A Big Misunderstanding’<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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.
\nThis 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.
\nWatch 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.
\nWhy 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 whole 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.
\nTurn 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.
\nThe 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … 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":[551],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-194857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law"],"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