Integralism vs Progressivism

The two traditions disagree about what politics is for at the most foundational level any political theory has to answer. Integralism, descending from Pope Leo XIII's Immortale Dei (1885) and revived in contemporary form by Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneen, and Sohrab Ahmari, treats political authority as properly subordinated to religious truth. The post-French-Revolution settlement, with its religious-liberty arrangements and its assumption that politics is downstream of popular consent, was on the integralist reading a category mistake about what political authority actually is. Progressivism, descending from the Roosevelt-Croly-Addams Progressive Era and the broader social-scientific reform tradition, treats political authority as an instrument for remedying industrial-capitalist dislocation through expertise, regulation, and patient institutional reform. One tradition wants the social scientist with a clipboard; the other wants the theologian with a confessor. The argument runs deeper than the slogans on either side.

TL;DR

• Integralism wants political authority subordinated to Catholic theological truth; progressivism wants political authority directed at social-scientific reform of industrial capitalism.
• Both reject pure liberal proceduralism, but from opposite directions: integralism from above (truth claims), progressivism from below (outcome claims).
• The two traditions overlap on antitrust, labor protection, and family policy in ways that surprise observers from twenty years ago, even as they remain incompatible on the deepest questions of religious liberty and pluralism.

Side-by-side

Where they agree

Both traditions reject pure liberal proceduralism, and the rejection produces more overlap than either side advertises. The mainstream Anglo-American liberal commitment to procedural neutrality treats politics as the management of disagreement among citizens who hold different visions of the good. Integralism rejects this because the procedural framework cannot evaluate the theological truth claims integralism treats as foundational. Progressivism rejects it in operational practice, even when it accepts the framework in principle, because procedural neutrality has consistently blocked the social-scientific reform program. When courts struck down New Deal legislation in the 1930s, when supermajority requirements blocked Voting Rights Act enforcement, when constitutional originalism constrained administrative-state authority, the progressive response was to push back against procedure for outcome-oriented reasons. The two rejections of procedure run in opposite directions, but they share a common impatience with the framework's claim to neutrality.

Both traditions have a substantive conception of the common good that operates as more than the sum of individual preferences. Integralism's common good is the natural-law order articulated in the Catholic theological tradition. Progressivism's common good is the welfare-enhancing institutional infrastructure the Progressive Era and New Deal built: antitrust enforcement, public health, social insurance, regulatory protection. Both traditions are willing to override individual preferences when those preferences conflict with what each treats as the substantive good. The mechanisms differ; the substantive impulse is shared.

Both have absorbed antitrust commitments since 2016 in ways that surprise observers from twenty years ago. The progressive Brandeisian antitrust revival, carried by Tim Wu's The Curse of Bigness (2018) and Lina Khan's tenure at the FTC, treats corporate concentration as a structural threat to democratic self-government. Sohrab Ahmari's Tyranny, Inc. (2023) makes a parallel integralist case for using state authority against corporate power on grounds adjacent to integralist political theology. Patrick Deneen's broader post-liberal critique includes substantial economic-interventionist content drawn from Catholic social teaching (Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno). The two traditions arrive at overlapping antitrust positions through different routes, and the coalition geometry inside the post-2016 American right has scrambled the older boundaries.

Both have substantial family-policy commitments. Integralism supports active state policy directed at traditional family formation, restrictions on contraception and abortion, and constraints on gender-related institutional accommodation. Progressivism supports family-policy expansion through paid parental leave, expanded child tax credits, universal pre-K, and robust childcare subsidies. The two programs share the institutional commitment to using state policy to support family life. The substantive disagreement about what constitutes a family, and what the state should do about non-traditional family arrangements, is sharp. The shared commitment to family policy as a state project is real.

Where they diverge

The deepest divergence is over what politics is for. Integralism treats political authority as properly subordinated to religious truth. The post-French-Revolution settlement was on the integralist reading a category mistake. Politics should take its shape from theological truth claims that liberal procedure was never competent to evaluate. Progressivism treats political authority as an instrument for remedying the specific dislocations industrial capitalism produced. Walter Lippmann's Drift and Mastery (1914) gave the analytical defense: social-scientific reform can replace political-machine governance, and the result is better outcomes than either populist or laissez-faire alternatives. The Progressive Era institutional outputs (the FTC, the Federal Reserve, the Pure Food and Drug Act, women's suffrage) were all built on this premise. Integralism would dismantle most of them; progressivism would expand them.

The relationship to expertise diverges sharply. Progressivism is the social-scientist-with-a-clipboard tradition. The Federal Reserve, the FTC, the EPA, the CDC, the broader regulatory state are all progressive institutional outputs operated by professional technical experts whose authority rests on their training rather than on theological tradition. Integralism is suspicious of this kind of expertise. The Vermeule position on constitutional interpretation specifically rejects the originalist-textualist framework that has dominated the post-1985 American conservative legal movement in favor of natural-law-based interpretation rooted in Catholic theological tradition. The contest is over what kind of knowledge authorizes political decisions, and the two traditions answer it differently at the foundations.

The relationship to religious liberty diverges absolutely. Integralism's orthodox position is that religious liberty should be conditioned on alignment with Catholic natural-law commitments. Non-Catholic religious traditions, in the founding nineteenth-century integralist framework, have no equivalent claim to political protection. Vatican II's Dignitatis Humanae (1965) softened this position inside Catholic political theology, and the contemporary integralist tradition is split between orthodox commitments and post-Vatican-II accommodations. Progressivism's position is the inverse. Religious liberty is treated as a baseline civil-rights protection, with the contemporary tradition particularly attentive to the claims of religious minorities (Muslim Americans, Jewish Americans, non-Christian traditions broadly) whose political protection integralism would not extend. The First Amendment, in the progressive reading, is non-negotiable.

The empirical record diverges. Progressivism has produced most of the institutional reform program that defines twentieth-century American political life. The Progressive Era's antitrust, public-health, women's-suffrage, and labor-rights infrastructure; the New Deal regulatory state; the civil-rights legislative-and-litigation program; the post-2021 antitrust revival; the Inflation Reduction Act. Whatever the standing critiques of progressivism, the tradition has a substantial implementation record to defend. Integralism's historical institutional record is harder to point at. The 1929 Lateran Treaty institutionalised church-state cooperation inside Mussolini's Italy. Franco's post-Civil-War Spain combined Catholic institutional infrastructure with authoritarian governance. The pre-Vatican-II European Catholic political infrastructure produced mixed outcomes that the contemporary integralist tradition has been working to disentangle from. The post-2010 revival has been intellectually substantial without producing political implementation.

Who tends to hold each view

Contemporary integralists cluster around Catholic intellectual infrastructure: Harvard Law (through Vermeule), the University of Notre Dame (through Deneen and the broader post-liberal current), Catholic University of America, First Things in its more integralist moments, the Compact magazine ecosystem under Sohrab Ahmari, and the Josias online publication edited by Edmund Waldstein. Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and Regime Change (2023) carry the post-liberal Catholic intellectual case. The tradition has substantial influence inside Catholic intellectual contexts and very limited reach outside them. The American Catholic bishops have generally distanced themselves from explicit integralist political commitments; Pope Francis has been openly unsympathetic. The contemporary American populist-right intellectual ecosystem overlaps with integralism but does not fully share its commitments.

Contemporary progressives cluster around the post-2008 Democratic Party current, the Center for American Progress, the Roosevelt Institute, the Economic Policy Institute, the Working Families Party, the Justice Democrats, and the broader foundation-funded policy world. Elizabeth Warren's academic and political career produced the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the wealth-tax framework. AOC and the Squad carry the younger progressive wing. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance (2025) argues for a supply-side progressive turn. Heather McGhee's The Sum of Us (2021) makes the most influential contemporary case for solidaristic economic policy across racial lines. The European center-left parties (SPD, Labour, PSOE, the Italian PD) carry parallel progressive content in their specific national environments. The coalition is much larger and more institutionally embedded than the integralist counterpart.

What the Votely quiz would say

The Votely quiz places Integralism in the EM-GA macro-cell and Progressivism in the EL-GL, which puts them in opposite corners of the grid. Most quiz respondents who land between them are working out a specific question about whether substantive truth claims should constrain political authority or whether social-scientific reform should override traditional commitments. Take the quiz to see which side of that question your answers actually compose.