Constitutional Self-Government and Common Good

In his latest essay at the Postliberal Order Substack, Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule takes aim at conservatives (or, as he likes to call us, “right-liberals”) who resist the post-liberal call for the vigorous exercise of unfettered political power. In it, he uses my recent Law & Liberty piece, “A Maxim for Power-Skeptical Conservatism,” as an example of a naïve failure to recognize that power inevitably infuses all aspects of social life.

To make his point, Vermeule considers two forms of the question “Who decides?” What he calls the “local” question is the familiar issue of how political authority is distributed between various political institutions. The “global” who-decides question is more abstract, asking whether anyone must make such decisions at all. Can’t we allow everyone to decide the issue for themselves, keeping government neutral? To this, Vermeule has an emphatic answer: Every public question is inevitably decided by an exercise of some form of power. We might as well embrace it.

JG

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John G. Grove

John G. Grove is the managing editor of Law & Liberty.

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In his latest essay at the Postliberal Order Substack, Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule takes aim at conservatives (or, as he likes to call us, “right-liberals”) who resist the post-liberal call for the vigorous exercise of unfettered political power. In it, he uses my recent Law & Liberty piece, “A Maxim for Power-Skeptical Conservatism,” as an example of a naïve failure to recognize that power inevitably infuses all aspects of social life.

To make his point, Vermeule considers two forms of the question “Who decides?” What he calls the “local” question is the familiar issue of how political authority is distributed between various political institutions. The “global” who-decides question is more abstract, asking whether anyone must make such decisions at all. Can’t we allow everyone to decide the issue for themselves, keeping government neutral? To this, Vermeule has an emphatic answer: Every public question is inevitably decided by an exercise of some form of power. We might as well embrace it.