What Then Shall We Do: The Work Schmitt Left

Gregory Cochran occupies a distinctive space in modern intellectual life as a physicist who treated human history as a branch of biology. His work represents a departure from the consensus that human evolution slowed to a crawl once culture took over. To understand his contribution, one must look past the specific controversies to the logic and temperament he applied to the study of human variation.
Carl Schmitt’s central insight remains one of the most unsettling and durable descriptions of political life ever produced. The political is not reducible to ethics, economics, or aesthetics. It is defined by the distinction between friend and enemy. Sovereignty appears most clearly in the decision on the exception. Every concrete order rests on an originary act of appropriation, division, and stabilization.
The secondary literature oscillates between two dead ends. On one side sits historical contextualization that treats Schmitt as a pathological artifact of Weimar collapse, a cautionary tale about what happens when legal formalism buckles under existential pressure. On the other sits ideological appropriation, left and right alike mining him for usable concepts while performing ritual distance from his conclusions. Both approaches evade the central question: do Schmitt’s categories track the evolved structure of human social life, and if so, how can they generate empirically testable, predictive models? A Schmitt scholarship answers that question without deference to academic comfort. The friend-enemy distinction is real. Sovereignty is exercised in exceptions. Every order rests on prior appropriation. These are hypotheses about human nature that can be tested.
The most important single development is to root the friend-enemy distinction in coalitional psychology while extending it beyond external antagonism to include intra-group status competition. Schmitt described the distinction as existential, marking the highest intensity of association and dissociation. Evolutionary science supplies the machinery he could only intuit. Humans are a coalitional species shaped by recurrent intergroup competition. We possess specialized adaptations for in-group favoritism, out-group hostility, norm enforcement, and coordinated aggression. These are not cultural accidents. They are stable features of our psychology confirmed across experimental economics, cross-cultural anthropology, and social neuroscience. Parochial altruism, the coupling of within-group generosity with between-group hostility, is an evolutionarily stable strategy, not a historical pathology.
But stopping there understates the phenomenon. The friend-enemy distinction is not only a boundary between groups. It is a sorting device within groups. Individuals signal their value as allies by how they identify and punish enemies. Vigilance becomes a display. Moral intensity becomes a credential. Punitive enthusiasm functions as costly signaling of coalition loyalty. This produces a force Schmitt did not fully theorize. Political conflict is not only external. It is internally competitive. Members of a coalition compete to demonstrate who is most loyal, most vigilant, most willing to incur costs on behalf of the group. Under these conditions, the identification of enemies tends to escalate not because external threats necessarily increase but because internal status competition rewards stronger and more visible performances of commitment. Political movements radicalize through a tournament logic that Schmitt’s framework identifies but cannot explain. A biopolitical realism that incorporates status competition can explain it precisely.
The second major development concerns sovereignty and legitimacy. Schmitt’s famous dictum, that sovereign is he who decides on the exception, is routinely misread as authoritarian apologetics. In evolutionary terms it describes the adaptive necessity of fast, centralized decision-making when normal rules fail. Human groups repeatedly faced acute, time-sensitive threats that could not be resolved by consensus. Selection therefore favored both the capacity for decisive leadership and the complementary willingness of followers to defer to it under pressure. But decision alone is insufficient. Groups do not obey force in the abstract. They obey force that is narratively coded as protective, lawful, ancestral, or necessary. Every exception requires two stories: a story about danger and a story about authority. The threat must be framed as real and urgent. The decision-maker must be framed as the proper agent to respond. Sovereignty is therefore not merely the capacity to decide. It is the capacity to have decisions recognized as binding. That recognition depends on reputation, ritual, institutional embedding, and narrative. A leader who declares an exception without prior credibility fails. The same decision from a credible figure produces compliance across populations with widely varying explicit political beliefs. Modern research on leadership emergence, testosterone-mediated dominance, and cortisol-regulated stress response maps onto this picture cleanly. Sovereignty is decision plus belief, biological predisposition plus cultural encoding.
The third development, and perhaps the most epistemically important, is the incorporation of error management theory into Schmittian decisionism. A purely realist reading risks a crude conclusion: if friend-enemy distinctions are natural, they track reality. Evolutionary science complicates this at the root. Human threat-detection is biased toward overactivation. The cost of failing to detect a real enemy was historically catastrophic and consistently higher than the cost of mistakenly identifying a neutral party as hostile. This means political cognition is systematically prone to false positives. Ambiguous rivals get perceived as existential threats. Minor conflicts escalate into absolute antagonisms. Crucially, these tendencies can be exploited. Elites can manufacture exceptions by activating latent threat systems. Media environments can amplify cues that fire ancestral alarm responses at industrial scale. Demagogues convert uncertainty into perceived existential danger without necessarily lying about anything specific. The implication is sharp and corrective. The friend-enemy distinction is real as a psychological capacity, but its concrete content is unstable, manipulable, and frequently inaccurate. A biopolitical realism must therefore distinguish between the existence of enemy cognition and the validity of any particular enemy identification. This move strengthens rather than weakens Schmitt. It preserves his core insight while explaining the frequency of overreaction, paranoia, and manufactured crisis in modern politics, and it prevents the theory from sliding into a justification of whatever antagonisms happen to emerge.
The fourth development concerns nomos. In The Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt traces how every legal order originates in an act of land-appropriation followed by division and cultivation. This is a proto-evolutionary account of institutional emergence that cultural evolution theory can now make precise. Nomos is a culturally transmitted adaptation that solves coordination problems at scale. Just as genetic evolution produced kin recognition and reciprocity, cultural evolution produced sacred boundaries, property regimes, and territorial myths that stabilize large-scale cooperation. The sequence Schmitt identifies, appropriation, division, cultivation, is the cultural analogue of niche construction. Groups build environments that then select for the traits required to maintain them. From this perspective the erosion of established nomoi under globalization is not simply a political event. It is an ecological disruption. When inherited coordination structures weaken, underlying coalitional instincts reassert themselves more directly. The resurgence of territorial politics, identity conflict, and border enforcement is a predictable response to the breakdown of previously stabilizing structures, not a regression to atavism. This turns Schmitt’s late work from historical elegy into predictive framework.
The fifth and most overlooked development is the incorporation of sex and reproductive strategy into political analysis. Schmitt largely ignored this dimension. Yet the political is also a theater for reproductive competition. The friend-enemy distinction is most intense among young males precisely because coalitional success in ancestral environments determined access to resources and mates. Periods of surplus unattached males, status instability, and mating exclusion correlate across societies with violence, authoritarian appeal, and intense in-group policing. Border enforcement, moral regulation of sexuality, and anxiety about group continuity often track reproductive interests as directly as territorial ones. These are not distractions from the political. They are among its deepest triggers. A Schmittian political theory that ignores sex and reproductive strategy describes the shadow of the political while missing much of the substance.
The sixth development is a structural correction to liberalism’s self-presentation. Liberal orders do not abolish friend-enemy distinctions. They displace and rename them. The enemy becomes a threat to norms, public health, democratic stability, or institutional integrity. The exception appears through emergency powers exercised by courts, agencies, or technocratic bodies. Sovereignty does not disappear. It becomes distributed, bureaucratized, and rhetorically softened. It is a regime of conflict management that depends on suppressing explicit recognition of the friend-enemy structure it continues to enact. As long as conflicts can be absorbed within institutional language, the underlying antagonisms remain partly concealed. Under stress the concealment breaks down and the neutrality that liberalism advertises reveals itself as a political position rather than an escape from politics. It succeeds only under conditions of relative stability, and that understanding what underwrites that stability requires precisely the kind of realism liberalism officially rejects.
The seventh and most fundamental correction is to Schmitt himself. His greatest analytical limitation is his treatment of the sovereign as a unified actor standing outside the social field. No such actor exists. Leaders are embedded in networks of patronage, institutional constraint, and status competition. Their decisions reflect not only abstract necessity but the interests of those around them, the information available to them, and the biological and social incentives structuring their choices. The exception is always filtered through a coalition. The sovereign decides, but the conditions of that decision are shaped by biology, kinship, and the internal distribution of power. Schmitt correctly identified the irreducibility of decision but failed to naturalize the decider. The sovereign is not outside biology. He is one of its instruments.
A serious extension of Schmitt requires moving from interpretation to testing. Do threat cues reliably intensify friend-enemy cognition across populations? Do individuals with higher sensitivity to dominance cues show greater support for exceptional measures? Do societies with eroding institutional coherence exhibit increased reliance on explicit boundary-making and antagonistic rhetoric? Do political movements with strong internal status competition escalate enemy identification more rapidly than those with weaker internal hierarchies? These are testable propositions. They can be examined through controlled experiments, longitudinal political data, and cross-cultural comparison. The goal is not to vindicate Schmitt as a thinker but to determine which parts of his framework correspond to stable features of human behavior and which reflect the particular anxieties of interwar European jurisprudence.
The result of this program is neither rehabilitation nor condemnation. It is transformation. Schmitt becomes not a prophet of authoritarianism but an early theorist of a set of mechanisms that can now be studied, measured, and predicted. Evolutionary science confirms the durability of coalition, hierarchy, threat sensitivity, and emergency decision. It also shows that these systems are noisy, manipulable, and prone to systematic error. Schmitt grasped the permanence of antagonism but not the cognitive biases and reproductive incentives that distort political judgment. The corrected Schmitt is more powerful than the canonical one because he is no longer protected from falsification.