The Theory, Born at Harvard, That Could Remake Right-Wing Jurisprudence

The Crimson ^ | October 03, 2025 | Sophie Gao and Jocelyn E. Shek

[Red Badger]

Communism isn't 'new', Harvard Crimson...............

[sauropod]

Haavaad serves up a fresh steaming pant load. Cuz they know so much better than you. 🙄🙄🙄

[Political Junkie Too]

"Common good" already reached the Supreme Court in the form of the Kelo v City of New London case when the Supreme Court interpreted the 5th amendment takings clause for "public use" as "public good" to justify seizing the private property of one person to give to another who would put it to more profitable use for the city.

-PJ

[GrootheWanderer]

I don’t think you read the article.

[Bubba_Leroy]

Since the “switch in time that saved nine” under FDR, the Constitution has said whatever any five out of nine Supreme Court Justices want it to say at any point in time. Of course, one problem with a ruling oligarchy of Supreme Court Justices is that a different five Justices can always decide that they want the Constitution to say something else.

Another problem is that having every aspect of our lives governed by an oligarchy of Supreme Court Justices, who are never elected but instead appointed for life, is that it kind of contradicts that pesky democracy thing, but democrats are already committed to destroying democracy in order to save it.

[absalom01]

The clever kids at the Crimson definitely need an editor, but it’s fascinating to see Carl Schmitt all of a sudden return to prominence. First it was James Lindsay calling out Matt Walsh, and now he’s mentioned in the pages of the Harvard undergraduate newspaper.

When James was droning on about Matt’s embrace of the “friend enemy distinction” I vaguely remembered something about the guy from a half-forgotten undergraduate course on the runup to the 2nd world war. Schmitt was definitely an obscure figure, but now, it’s a name on the lips of all of the elite.

What in the world is going on with these people?

[Fai Mao]

Repackaged Jeremy Bentham is all this is.

Hedonist calculus for the 21st century.

The Pessimist cals it “The Tyranny of the 51%” or, maybe just it isn’t just the Pessimist.

[Tench_Coxe]

IMHO, Vermule may be good intentioned, but the road to hell is paved with them.

[arthurus]

It is the same old thing the left has been peddling for a century. Read into the Constitution anything you want It is a “living”document and if you water it properly it can grow new limbs and eyes to suit leftist sensibilities.

[circlecity]

Every dictator and tyrant who ever existed claimed he was working for the common good.

[Fai Mao]

Repackaged Jeremy Bentham is what this appears to be to me.

Hedonist calculus for the 21st century.

The Pessimist calls it “The Tyranny of the 51%” or, maybe it isn’t just the Pessimist.

Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperatives are better. Sometimes things are right, or wrong, regardless of how we feel about them, or what our culture, laws, or government says is “best” for the majority

[Jim Noble]

I don’t think you read the article.

If commenting on posts on FR required reading the original article, all the posts going back to 1997 would fit on a single page.

[sopo]

Reminds me of the mother of the sick little girl in The Sixth Sense, who kept urging her daughter to take her medicine because it was “good for her. “

[DesertRhino]

“a new reading of the Constitution which promotes “legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive” that ultimately “encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.””

The article is too long and wordy. Just a lot of communist collectivist authoritarian sophistry.

[Jamestown1630]

This is a little scary; from Wiki:

“A convert to Catholicism, Vermeule has become an advocate of integralism, a form of modern legal and political thought originating in historically Catholic-dominant societies and opposed to the Founding Fathers’ ideal of division between church and state. Integralism in practice gives rise to state order (identifiable as theocratic) in which the Common Good has precedence over individual autonomy, the value prioritized by American democracy. Rather than electoral politics, the path to confessional political order in integralist theory is “strategic ralliement”, or transformation within institutions and bureaucracies, that lays the groundwork for a realized integralist regime to succeed a liberal democratic order it assumes to be dying. The new state would “exercise coercion over baptized citizens in a manner different from non-baptized citizens”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Vermeule

[anton]

If originalism had prevailed we wouldn’t be in this MNRA mess.

[sopo]

“just authority in rulers can be exercised for the good of subjects, if necessary even against the subjects’ own perceptions of what is best for them.” Learned in Ninth grade, the final line of an essay is the most important. This guy needs to be marked down as an anti-Constitutionalist. We were never subjects, that was what the Revolution was about . This is a throw back to divine right of kings.

[EnderWiggin1970]

I don’t think you read the article.

Well, I read the article, and I still don't have a clue what this "common good" doctrine that this professor espouses actually is. Just lots of tangential verbage and people yelling at it and bits and pieces about what might have influenced it and so on. But if I had to write a short essay explaining it I would fail utterly. Somehow this doesn't surprise me, as Harvard is full of idiots these days who think creating word salads counts as having an intellect.

[Jamestown1630]

It looks like a ‘theocracy’ is what he wants to see.

[sopo]

“That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” —an obscure quotation , known only to persons educated beyond a J.D from Harvard.
or, even more obscure :”that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”