Adrian Vermeule is a conservative legal scholar at Harvard Law School and one of the most prominent advocates of postliberalism in American legal thought. His concept of “common good constitutionalism” proposes replacing liberal proceduralism — the treatment of constitutional law as a neutral framework for adjudicating competing interests — with a substantive vision of the common good rooted in classical natural law.
Core ideas
- Common good constitutionalism: Vermeule argues that the liberal commitment to procedural neutrality is itself a substantive moral position disguised as neutrality. His alternative proposes that law should be explicitly ordered toward the common good, understood through natural law tradition. This means judges and legislators should not pretend to be neutral arbiters but should actively pursue moral ends — specifically, the ends Vermeule identifies with Catholic social teaching.
- Critique of originalism: Vermeule breaks with conservative originalism (the doctrine that the Constitution should be interpreted according to its original meaning) by arguing that originalism is a species of liberal proceduralism. It treats the Constitution as a text to be decoded rather than an instrument to be directed toward its proper end.
- Integration from strength: Vermeule advocates that traditional Catholics and other postliberals should not withdraw from liberal institutions but occupy them — using the administrative state’s existing power to redirect it toward substantive moral ends. This distinguishes his approach from the “Benedict Option” withdrawal advocated by Rod Dreher.
Significance for this research
Vermeule appears in emsenn’s analysis of postliberalism as one of the thinkers who inherits fascist grammar while escaping its historical discredit. In “A storm is a storm is a storm” (2025-09-22), emsenn shows how Vermeule’s framework follows the same six-step sequence — crisis, pure community, corrupt enemy, suffering-as-sacrifice, destiny, inevitability — but replaces fascism’s racial vocabulary with theological vocabulary. The structural function is identical: the assertion that liberal neutrality is fraud justifies the seizure of institutional power for substantive moral ends defined by the community in question.
Within cybernetic postliberalism, Vermeule represents the explicit articulation of what californication performs implicitly: the claim that liberal proceduralism has failed and must be replaced by substantive authority. The difference is that californication replaces it with affective self-regulation, while Vermeule proposes replacing it with theological natural law.
Notable works
- Common Good Constitutionalism: Recovering the Classical Legal Tradition (2022)
- “Beyond Originalism” (The Atlantic, 2020)
- The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic (2011, with Eric Posner)
Related
- Postliberalism — the intellectual tradition he advances
- Patrick Deneen — fellow postliberal thinker
- Carl Schmitt — political theologian whose framework Vermeule inherits
- Fascist grammar — the rhetorical sequence his framework reproduces
- enemy distinction — Schmitt’s concept underlying Vermeule’s politics