Tacit Sovereignty: Stephen Turner, Carl Schmitt, and the Sociology of Convenient Power

Carl Schmitt’s assault on liberal constitutionalism is one of the most searching acts of political demystification in the twentieth century. In Political Theology (1922) and Constitutional Theory (1928), Schmitt argued that liberalism survives by denying the very condition of its possibility. Procedures are declared neutral. Law is said to stand above politics. Sovereignty is announced to have dissolved into impersonal rules. Yet in moments of crisis the mask slips. Someone decides. The exception appears. And the supposedly rule-bound order reveals its dependence on an underlying will. Schmitt’s conclusion was that liberalism is not simply mistaken but constitutively evasive. It obscures power precisely where power is most consequential.
The argument has proven enduringly persuasive because it names something real. Yet Schmitt left a decisive gap. He provided no sociological account of why liberal fictions persist with such tenacity, why their beneficiaries believe them so sincerely, or why he himself was immune to an equivalent critique. Stephen Turner’s work on tacit knowledge fills that gap and then turns the same instrument against Schmitt. Turner’s framework, developed across The Social Theory of Practices (1994), Explaining the Normative (2010), and Understanding the Tacit (2014), treats many normative and institutional beliefs not as explicit doctrines but as tacit, practice-sustaining commitments whose truth value is secondary to their function. They coordinate action, stabilize coalitions, and legitimate power. Turner calls these “good bad theories”: good because they enable social coordination, bad because they misdescribe the realities they ostensibly explain. Applied symmetrically, this framework reveals that both liberal proceduralism and Schmittian decisionism are convenient beliefs serving different coalitions. Schmitt exposed one set of fictions and exempted his own. Turner closes that exemption. The result is not a synthesis of liberalism and decisionism but something more unsettling: a sociological realism that treats all sovereignty claims, including Schmitt’s, as tacit practices embedded in the interests of those who most urgently advance them.
The starting point is Schmitt’s diagnosis, which deserves its full force before Turner’s acid test is applied. Liberal constitutionalism, Schmitt contended, attempts to depoliticize politics. Parliamentary debate, judicial review, and administrative procedure are presented as neutral arbiters of conflict. The sovereign is supposedly absorbed into a framework of rules that no individual will commands. Yet this is precisely the deception. Every constitutional order confronts the exception: the emergency, the crisis, the moment when rules run out and a concrete decision must be made. Liberalism’s proceduralism does not eliminate the sovereign moment. It displaces and conceals it, relocating decisional power in courts, agencies, and economic elites who exercise authority while professing fidelity to neutral law. “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” The liberal claim to have transcended this reality is not a description of how power works. It is an ideological veil.
The veil is most opaque to those who benefit from it. This is Schmitt’s central sociological observation, even if he did not develop it sociologically. Those whose substantive preferences are already encoded in existing procedures experience the outcomes of those procedures as the neutral application of law. Dissenters experience the same outcomes as sovereign decisions disguised as procedure. The asymmetry is structural. The coalition that holds institutional power believes most fervently in procedural neutrality because procedural neutrality secures its position without requiring it to acknowledge that the position is held.
Turner’s framework explains precisely why this belief is so durable and so sincere. The problem is not that liberal actors consciously lie about neutrality. Conscious lying would be fragile. The problem is that the belief in neutrality is tacit, embedded in practices that sustain it without explicit endorsement. Judges and administrators operate within interpretive routines. Those routines generate outcomes. The outcomes reflect historically sedimented preferences. Yet because the process is mediated through canons, precedents, and procedural requirements, participants experience the results as emergent from the rules rather than chosen by them. The belief in neutrality is not a rhetorical performance layered over cynical self-interest. It is a genuine feature of the tacit knowledge through which institutional actors navigate their world. Turner’s account of tacit knowledge resists collective-mind explanations: the shared presuppositions are not stored in any group consciousness but sustained through individual improvisations that happen to coordinate. The coordination succeeds not because participants have explicitly agreed on its terms but because the practices produce results that confirm the beliefs that sustain those practices. The circularity is self-sealing.
This reframing sharpens Schmitt’s critique while also explaining something Schmitt himself could not explain, namely why the liberal fiction does not collapse under exposure. Schmitt assumed that naming the deception would dissolve it. Turner shows why it does not. The fiction is not merely rhetorical. It is performative and infrastructural. Without the belief in neutrality, liberal institutions would face permanent legitimacy crises. Every outcome would be experienced as a power move. The belief in neutrality is what makes broad-tent governance possible in complex, heterogeneous societies. It recruits participants, including opponents of particular decisions, into ongoing acceptance of the system as such. Proceduralism is, in Turner’s terms, a form of coalitional encryption. By speaking the language of neutrality, a dominant coalition exercises power while denying it constitutes a coalition. It recruits third parties, the general public, the bureaucracy, the lower courts, who would resist naked group dominance but accept outcomes narrated as the law’s own demand. Schmitt thought he could replace this with honesty. Turner shows that honesty about power is a poor coordination strategy for large societies. Decisionism as a general social theory strips away the encryption that makes complex governance legible and tolerable.
This is where the argument turns against Schmitt. His symmetry problem is not incidental. It is the most important thing Turner reveals about him. Schmitt presents decisionism as sober realism, the unvarnished recognition that sovereignty persists and that the exception will always come. Yet this preference carries its own functional appeal that has nothing to do with its descriptive accuracy. The image of the decisive sovereign, the concrete authority that can name the enemy and act, resonates precisely with those who expect proximity to that authority. It flatters the political intellectual who imagines himself a counselor to power, the jurist whose skills are most valuable in moments of crisis rather than routine administration, the nationalist who distrusts the procedural constraints that frustrate his coalition’s ambitions. Decisionism is a good bad theory for a specific social type and a specific political coalition. It is good because it coordinates action among high-intensity groups who share a common enemy and require a focal point for mobilization. It is bad because it romanticizes the moment of decision while ignoring the dense network of advisors, institutional dependencies, and tacit conventions within which even the most decisive sovereign operates. The sovereign who “decides” is always already embedded in practices that shape what counts as a decision, what options are legible, and what outcomes will be accepted as authoritative.
Schmitt never confronts this reflexivity. He treats liberal proceduralism as convenient belief and decisionism as reality, applying the sociological suspicion in one direction only. Turner dissolves the asymmetry. Both positions are embedded in tacit practices. Both persist because they serve those who inhabit them. The liberal believes in neutrality because neutrality secures her position within the institutional order. The Schmittian believes in decision because decision promises to reorder that institutional landscape in his favor, or in favor of the sovereign he expects to advise. Neither is operating from a view from nowhere. Neither has access to a perspective outside the convenient beliefs that structure their vision.
Schmitt’s own biography is the most compelling evidence against his claimed exemption. His alignment with the Nazi regime from 1933, his rapid production of legal and intellectual justifications for its actions, his eager contribution to the coalition’s propagandistic requirements, and his eventual marginalization when the regime no longer needed him all follow a pattern Turner’s framework predicts. Schmitt did not join because he had dispassionately assessed the exception and concluded that the National Socialist sovereign best exemplified the decisionist principle. He joined because the rising coalition offered professional advancement, intellectual prestige, and proximity to power. His subsequent theoretical work, framing the regime’s actions in the language of sovereign decision and existential enmity, was the intellectual labor of coalition maintenance. It was, in Turner’s terms, the propagandistic labor that sustains convenient beliefs within a high-intensity group. The friend/enemy framework Schmitt had developed as analysis became the tool he used, in real time, to rationalize each successive coalitional move. His theory was not merely explained by the sociology of convenient belief. It was an instance of that sociology, performed at the highest register of juridical abstraction.
This reflexive point has implications beyond Schmitt’s biography. It suggests that decisionism fails as a general theory not because it misdescribes the exception but because it misidentifies where sovereignty actually resides in modern political orders. Turner’s analysis of expertise offers the more precise account. In the contemporary administrative state, the sovereign exception does not announce itself with the drama Schmitt’s framework anticipates. It migrates into technical determinations. Public health authorities determine what emergency measures necessity requires. Economic forecasters establish the parameters within which fiscal policy is possible. Climate scientists define the constraints within which energy policy must operate. These are Turnerian convenient beliefs operating at their most powerful. They claim the authority of neutral, technical knowledge, deploying the liberal fiction of procedural objectivity. But they perform the sovereign decision, resolving indeterminacy in ways that reflect the tacit preferences of the expert communities that produce them. The administrative state is the synthesis Schmitt did not foresee: it uses the rhetoric of neutral procedure to exercise the reality of the sovereign exception, shielded by the tacit authority of specialized knowledge that cannot be evaluated by those subject to its determinations.
Turner’s critique of expertise is therefore not a supplement to the Schmitt-liberalism debate but its resolution. Schmitt assumed the exception would always surface visibly, as a dramatic confrontation between a sovereign will and a legal order inadequate to crisis. Turner shows that modernity has developed far more effective techniques. The exception is rendered invisible by being narrated as technical necessity. The sovereign never appears because the decision is announced as the conclusion of a model, a protocol, a risk assessment. Those who make the determination experience themselves as reading results rather than making choices. The convenient belief that structures their tacit practice is that expertise produces findings rather than decisions. This is liberal proceduralism at its most sophisticated and its most opaque.
The broader implication is that sovereignty is not a fixed location or a metaphysical attribute. It is a moving target sustained by practices and beliefs that make its exercise intelligible and acceptable. In liberal regimes it migrates into courts, agencies, and professional expertise. In Schmittian imaginaries it condenses into the figure of the decisive leader. In both cases the underlying phenomenon is the same. Someone resolves indeterminacy. The coordination problem is solved. The difference lies in how that resolution is narrated and what convenient beliefs sustain the narration. Politics, seen through Turner’s lens, is the process by which one set of convenient beliefs is periodically replaced by another whenever the coordination costs of the former become prohibitive. Liberal proceduralism minimizes the internal coordination costs of governing a heterogeneous coalition. Schmittian decisionism minimizes the external coordination costs of mobilizing a high-intensity group against an identified enemy. Neither is more truthful than the other. Each serves a different coalition structure at a different level of social intensity.
This yields a final, chastened thesis. The sovereign never went away, as Schmitt insisted. But neither does the sovereign ever stand outside the convenient beliefs that narrate its authority, as Turner demonstrates. The liberal fiction of neutral procedure and the Schmittian fiction of decisive sovereignty are not opposed truth-claims. They are rival coordination technologies for different political conditions. The administrative state represents their unstable synthesis: a system that deploys the Schmittian exception under liberal cover, using technical expertise as the tacit sovereign that neither admits its nature nor can be held accountable in the terms liberalism supplies.
Schmitt taught that we could not escape the exception. Turner adds that we cannot escape the convenient beliefs through which we narrate it. The realist who exposes liberal fictions does not thereby escape the sociology of belief. He merely adopts a different set, one calibrated to his own coalition’s need for a theory of power that places him, or those he serves, closest to where decisions are made. The deepest insight the Turner-Schmitt encounter yields is therefore not that liberalism is hypocritical and decisionism is honest. It is that the demand for honesty about power is itself a convenient belief, advanced most urgently by those who expect the exposed sovereign to be their sovereign. That recognition does not dissolve political conflict. It clarifies what political conflict is always about: not which theory of sovereignty is true, but which convenient fiction will coordinate the next coalition.