Book Review: Law’s Abnegation: From Law’s Empire to the Administrative State, by Adrian Vermeule

• Author: Melissa Schwartzberg
• Date: 01 December 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591717752381
• Published date: 01 December 2018
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

980 Political Theory 46(6)

egalitarian grounds, then citizens need a robust account of how to evaluate

the considerable religious politicking that will be an inevitable part of choos-

ing between them. Laborde has thus shown that liberal egalitarianism

demands robust criteria for the democratic evaluation of religious politics,

criteria that political theorists have yet to clearly supply.4

Liberalism’s Religion is thus a major theoretical accomplishment, one that

ought to shape theoretical analysis of religion and politics by liberal egalitar-

ian, democratic, and critical theorists long into the future.

Notes

1. Winifred Sullivan’s The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2007) clearly lays out this view. For other related

work, see Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity

(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Elizabeth Shakman Hurd,

Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2015); Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a

Secular Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

2. Richard W. Garnett, “The Freedom of the Church,” Journal of Catholic Social

Thought 4 (2007); Steven D. Smith, “The Jurisdictional Conception of Church

Autonomy,” in The Rise of Corporate Religious Liberty, ed. Micah Schwartzman,

Chad Flanders, and Zoë Robinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016);

Victor M. Muniz-Fraticelli, The Structure of Pluralism (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2014).

3. Laborde’s careful attention to the limits history places on liberal states’ relation-

ship to religion is evident in this neologism: nonestablishment is preferable to

disestablishment because the former does not presume the historical existence of

a corporate religious institution that was disentangled from state power while the

latter does.

4. I do so in my forthcoming book, Chains of Persuasion: Religion in a Democratic

Way of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Law’s Abnegation: From Law’s Empire to the Administrative State, by Adrian Vermeule.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.

Reviewed by: Melissa Schwartzberg, Politics, New York University, New York, NY, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0090591717752381

In the conclusion to Law’s Empire, Ronald Dworkin invoked an “old trope”

of “sentimental lawyers”: “law works itself pure.”1 Dworkin held that one