Major news outlets and publications have devoted significant attention to the rise of “post-liberalism,” a political and ideological movement in defiance of classical liberalism. Its central claim — that individual rights and free markets have degraded social cohesion and damaged traditional moral order — is increasingly popular. Even Vice President JD Vance is calling himself “post-liberal.”
A crucial aim for postliberalism is to reorient politics toward the “common good.” But that formulation conceals the movement’s central problem: what constitutes the common good, who decides, and what happens when officials’ views of “common good” conflict with individual liberty?
Patrick Deneen — perhaps the most prominent postliberal thinker — told The New York Times that postliberalism “seeks to promote, especially, an idea of the economy and markets that serve ordinary people…broadly called … the common good.” Offering a jurisprudential vision for postliberalism, Adrian Vermeule of Harvard argues courts and other institutional actors should interpret the Constitution, statutes, and administrative decrees in ways that advance the “common good.”
Postliberals rarely firmly declare what the common good means. Vermeule does cite the ragion di stato (“reason of the state”) tradition, which describes the legitimate ends of government: justice, peace, and abundance. But that explains little. For one, these precepts of the classical tradition are so general and abstract that in practice it would be possible to justify almost any positive law. Even more difficult for the postliberals to address, however, is that the American constitutional order rejected ragion di stato, instead charging government with promoting “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” with “property” also protected by due process in the Bill of Rights.
That tension leaves postliberals with two approaches: argue that the American founding’s liberal nature means it was inherently flawed, or reinterpret the Founding to claim the founders did not value individual liberty as a primary component of the common good.
Criticizing the Founding
Many take the first option. Deneen’s Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future offers a paradigmatic example. In that work, he writes:
The American constitutional order… represented belief in a ‘new science of politics,’ specifically, a system in which a designated elite would govern with an aim to advancing an ideal of progress while rendering tractable any recalcitrant popular resistance.
This criticism of the founding closely mirrors Charles Beard’s famously progressive reading of the Founding in his book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. There, Beard argues that the government was “so constructed as to break the force of majority rule and prevent invasions of the property rights of minorities.” Deneen writes similarly in Regime Change that “the constitutional design was originally created to allow the ascendance of an economic elite.”
On this point, Deneen arrives surprisingly close to Beard’s progressive interpretation of the Constitution: both portray its institutional restraints as mechanisms through which elites were empowered to suppress popular resistance to the resulting unequal economic order.
But Deneen’s Beardian account mistakes the refinement of popular judgment for its suppression. In the Federalist Papers, Publius grounded the Constitution’s authority in republican government and ultimately in the people. Representation, bicameralism, separated powers, and federalism were intended to transform immediate political passions into the deliberate sense of the community, not to silence popular opposition for the benefit of an economic elite. Deneen also reduces the Declaration to deracinated individualism, while largely ignoring its grounding of equality and liberty in natural law, divine authority, and duties that precede government. His account substitutes a class-based caricature for serious engagement with the founders’ conception of ordered liberty. Deneen acknowledges the liberal character of the founding and rejects it openly.
Mischaracterizing the Founding
Vermeule takes the second approach: denying the centrality of individual liberty to the founders’ vision of the common good, while attempting to conscript its institutions into the postliberal project. But the common good is not so determinate, and few set out to advance the “common bad.” Liberals, libertarians, progressives, and conservatives all identify goods they regard as shared — peace, prosperity, justice, health, security, and ordered liberty. The dispute occurs over how those goods should be ranked and by what means (and what degree of coercion) government may legitimately pursue them. Vermeule largely evades this question. As the law professor Lawrence Solum observes, although Vermeule says much about the common good, he says very little about its substantive component, “happiness or flourishing.” This vagueness allows Vermeule to present a preferred bundle of substantive outcomes as if it followed from a neutral classical formula.
More fundamentally, his account treats liberty as a rival to the common good rather than one of its constitutive elements. As the professor James Stoner observes, liberty “antedates the rise of liberalism and is part of the common good, not its opponent.” In this framework, even liberty need not always prevail — the common-law and founding traditions recognized police powers, moral regulation, and public necessity. But they also required government to justify intrusions on liberty through established law, enumerated powers, due process, and popular consent. Vermeule reverses that presumption, subordinating individual rights to officials’ judgments about communal flourishing.
Ordered Liberty Is a Common Good
For the founders, government did not define human flourishing and then distribute rights accordingly. The Declaration identified life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as prepolitical rights and made their protection the purpose of legitimate government, while grounding governmental power in popular consent. The Constitution translated that principle into limited and enumerated powers, federalism, separated institutions, due process, and express protections for individual liberty. These arrangements did not reduce the common good to atomistic autonomy. They assumed that ordered liberty would permit families, churches, associations, markets, and political communities to pursue genuine human goods without requiring officials to impose a single comprehensive account of flourishing.
Liberty was not seen as one private good competing with a collective good, but an essential part of institutional arrangements that allow people with vastly different conceptions of “flourishing” to live in tolerance and cooperation. Government could, and did, preserve order, punish wrongdoing, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. But the constitutional order was an attempt to constrain governments and officials from treating an invocation of public good as sufficient constitutional warrant for coercive action.
A pluralistic society needs a common institutional framework precisely because its members will disagree about ultimate ends. The rule of law, ordered liberty, private property, free association, and other constitutional restraints explicitly allow people to pursue many genuine “goods” without first requiring political agreement about the highest form of human flourishing.
Liberal constitutionalism embodies a conception of the common good — one centered on ordered liberty, peaceful cooperation, plural institutions, and limits on coercive power. Postliberalism attempts to reverse that relationship, making liberty contingent on officials’ judgments about what is conducive to flourishing. To do so, postliberals must either reject the American constitutional tradition (Deneen) or rewrite it beyond recognition (Vermeule).
The common good postliberals prescribe — in which individual liberty is merely a revocable concession from the state — is not the common good the founders sought to secure.
