{"id":182032,"date":"2026-04-14T11:07:52","date_gmt":"2026-04-14T19:07:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=182032"},"modified":"2026-05-15T05:41:41","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T13:41:41","slug":"the-philosopher-of-the-primate-brain-alliance-theory-and-the-naturalization-of-carl-schmitt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=182032","title":{"rendered":"The Philosopher of the Primate Brain: Alliance Theory and the Naturalization of Carl Schmitt"},"content":{"rendered":"

Carl Schmitt<\/a> thought he had discovered the essence of politics. What he discovered was the surface expression of evolved coalition psychology. His framework feels compelling because it resonates with how we are wired. David Pinsof<\/a>, Martie Haselton, and Douglas Sears, in their development of Alliance Theory<\/a>, supply what Schmitt could not: a bottom-up, empirically tractable account of why the friend\/enemy distinction arises, why it feels metaphysically weighty, and why it proves so resistant to liberal neutralization. Schmitt was right about the what. He was wrong about the why. He thought he was a philosopher of the state. He was a chronicler of the primate brain.<\/p>\n

The Concept of the Political<\/em><\/a> (1932) offers a deceptively simple thesis. The political is not a domain of subject matter, like economics or law. It is an intensity, the most extreme degree of association and dissociation, crystallized in the distinction between friend and enemy. The friend is not someone you like. The enemy is not someone you hate. Both are collective categories. The friend is the group with whom you stand in existential solidarity. The enemy is the public hostis whose existence, not whose moral failings, threatens your way of life. The sovereign’s authority rests on a single capacity: the power to decide the exception, the moment when normal legal and moral norms are suspended in confrontation with that enemy. Schmitt argued that liberalism’s attempt to replace this antagonism with procedure, economic calculation, or universal law was not an advance but a evasion, a failure to reckon with the irreducibly conflictual character of collective human life.<\/p>\n

Alliance Theory<\/a> reframes this entire apparatus as an emergent feature of coalitional psychology. Humans are, as Pinsof and his colleagues argue following John Tooby, coalitional animals. We possess dedicated cognitive equipment for alliance formation and maintenance: we choose allies based on similarity, transitivity, and interdependence; we sustain those alliances through a battery of propagandistic biases that excuse allies’ wrongdoing, amplify allies’ grievances, and attribute allies’ successes to internal virtue and failures to external circumstance. These are not incidental features of social life. They are adaptations, selected for because alliance formation produced survival advantages across the long run of human evolutionary history. The friend\/enemy distinction maps directly onto this architecture. The friend is a transitive ally or a member of one’s coalition. The enemy is a rival or a rival’s ally. What Schmitt presents as a conceptual and ontological bedrock turns out, under this lens, to be ordinary cognitive output.<\/p>\n

This reframing dissolves the metaphysical gravity of Schmitt’s writing without dismissing what he observed. When he describes the “shiver” of the political, the sense of existential stakes that no economic or legal vocabulary can capture, he is describing the phenomenological experience of a mind operating at maximum coalitional stress. The brain shuts down nuance under high-stakes alliance conditions. Emotional signaling intensifies. The categories of friend and enemy harden. What Schmitt treats as the depth of political reality is the biological signal of a cognitive system that has maximized its social investment in a specific coalition. The depth is real as an experience. It is not a property of politics as a distinct domain of human existence. It is the predictable output of machinery that operates identically in faculty politics, religious schisms, corporate succession disputes, and interstate war. The difference between these cases is scale, not kind.<\/p>\n

The figure of the sovereign undergoes a parallel transformation. On Schmitt’s account, the sovereign who decides the exception reveals the ultimate ground of political order. He does not apply law; he steps outside it, confronting the existential threat that law cannot address. Alliance Theory<\/a> reinterprets this figure as an efficient coordination hub in an alliance network. The act of naming the enemy is not a mystical decision. It is a solution to a coordination game. When the sovereign identifies the hostis, he activates shared propagandistic biases across the coalition: victim biases sharpen, perpetrator biases mobilize, attributional asymmetries align. The coalition achieves common knowledge of who counts as us and who counts as them. Suspending norms in that moment is not a revelation of political truth. It is a test of alliance loyalty, a demand that allies abandon general rules to support a specific coalitional move, thereby incurring sunk costs that bind them more tightly to the network. Sovereignty persists only as long as the network accepts the sovereign’s signals as its primary coordination focal point. When the sovereign can no longer name the enemy in a way that activates the coalition’s biases, sovereignty has not merely failed. The network has reconfigured around a new hub.<\/p>\n

This account also relocates Schmitt’s value as an intellectual. He was not simply navigating alliances; he competed in a market for elite usefulness. His friend\/enemy framework gave elites a prestigious language for performing decisive coalition leadership. To “decide the exception” is not only to coordinate action. It is a status display, a demonstration that one can name the enemy, suspend norms, and move the coalition. Schmitt produced high-prestige coalition technology. His ideas were adopted not because they were analytically superior to liberal alternatives but because they enhanced the value of elites who deployed them within high-intensity coalitions. Pinsof’s paper argues that elites are not more ideologically coherent than the masses; they are more attuned to alliance structures and more skilled at producing justificatory narratives. Elite coherence is an illusion created by skillful alliance signaling under reputational pressure. Schmitt exemplified this pattern. His theoretical consistency was a performance of alliance reliability, not the output of a mind working from stable first principles.<\/p>\n

Schmitt’s biography illustrates the model. His alignment with the Nazi regime beginning in 1933, his rapid production of legal and intellectual justifications for its actions, and his eventual marginalization once the coalition no longer found him useful have been treated by interpreters as evidence of either tragic conviction or cynical opportunism. Alliance Theory<\/a> offers a cleaner, non-moralizing account. Schmitt joined when doing so was professionally and socially profitable, when transitivity and interdependence with the rising super-alliance made alignment advantageous. He contributed propagandistic labor, excusing the coalition’s actions, amplifying its grievances, framing its opponents as existential threats. He was discarded when the alliance structure shifted and he ceased to enhance the coalition’s value. He was not a convinced ideologue. He was not a pure opportunist. He was an elite performing the functions elites perform, with unusual theoretical sophistication. The friend\/enemy framework he developed was simultaneously his analytical instrument and the tool he used to rationalize each successive move. His work is not merely explained by Alliance Theory<\/a>. It is an instance of the phenomenon it describes.<\/p>\n

This self-referential quality becomes most visible in the function of moral language. Schmitt understood that legal and moral vocabularies mask underlying antagonisms. Alliance Theory<\/a> specifies the masking process more precisely. Moral language functions as coalitional encryption. It allows alliance members to signal loyalty and coordinate action without explicitly stating their interests. It disguises coordination as principle. It creates plausible deniability across mixed audiences who might not share the coalition’s commitments. When Schmitt writes about existential enemies and the necessity of sovereign decision, he encodes coalition boundaries in morally charged language that activates victim biases, perpetrator biases, and attributional asymmetries. He is not merely describing political antagonism. He is performing it, in the elevated register available to a legal intellectual, for an audience that benefits from the performance. Political theory, on this account, is a high-level propaganda layer built on evolved bias machinery.<\/p>\n

This explains what would otherwise appear as the bewildering incoherence of political belief systems. Conservatives and liberals alike maintain combinations of positions that no unified philosophy generates. They apply moral principles selectively, defending allies and attacking rivals with the same rhetorical tools, inverting the principles when the targets change. Pinsof and his colleagues document this symmetry empirically: the same propagandistic biases operate across ideological lines, producing mirror-image inconsistencies. Schmitt observed this incoherence and interpreted it as evidence that liberalism’s universalist pretensions were philosophically bankrupt. Alliance Theory<\/a> shows that the incoherence is not a failure of liberal philosophy specifically. It is the functional signature of belief systems operating as alliance maintenance tools rather than truth-tracking instruments. Belief systems are not designed to model the world. They are designed to mobilize support for allies and opposition to rivals. Apparent ideological inconsistency is the system working as intended.<\/p>\n

The failure of liberalism, on this account, is deeper than Schmitt recognized. He argued that liberalism fails because it denies the political, because it refuses to confront the irreducibility of the friend\/enemy distinction. Alliance Theory<\/a> shows that liberalism fails because it misunderstands human cognition. Liberalism assumes that beliefs derive from values. Alliance Theory<\/a> shows that beliefs derive from alliances. Liberalism attempts to use truth and universalism as its primary coordination tags, to build a system of neutral procedures and impartial institutions on the premise that participants can be induced to suspend their coalitional equipment. But because humans use belief systems for alliance maintenance, liberal institutions inevitably get captured by coalitional forces. The neutral judge is a cognitive impossibility. The impartial bureaucrat is a cognitive impossibility. They are not impossible because individuals lack virtue; they are impossible because the cognitive architecture that would support genuine neutrality was not what got selected for. Liberalism is a coordination strategy that forbids its own operations. Schmitt saw this as a failure of liberal will. It is a failure of liberal architecture.<\/p>\n

The volatility of political alignments follows naturally from the same framework. Alliances are partly stochastic. Small initial conditions, historical accidents, contingent personal connections, arbitrary early commitments, can cascade into large and stable coalition structures. Once those structures form, belief systems reorganize around them. What appears as ideological transformation is usually post hoc rationalization of new coalition realities. Belief systems are lagging indicators of alliance change, not leading causes. The extraordinary volatility of Weimar politics, which Schmitt theorized from within, was not an anomaly that required a special theory of political exception. It was a transparent case of the underlying stochastic process operating without the stabilizing institutions that normally slow coalition realignment. The sudden reversals of position that confound observers of contemporary politics, on trade, on foreign adversaries, on institutional norms, follow the same logic. When alliance structures shift, belief systems follow, and the intellectual labor of justification proceeds rapidly, performed by elites whose reputational constraints require the appearance of principled continuity.<\/p>\n

What Schmitt elevated into a distinct domain of human existence, the political, is continuous with the ordinary operations of social cognition. States are super-alliances. War is escalated coalition conflict. Sovereignty is high-centrality positioning in an alliance network. The exception is a coordination signal that tests and hardens alliance bonds. Ideology is post hoc propagandistic labor justifying alliances that formed for other reasons. None of this denies Schmitt’s descriptive accuracy. His account of the friend\/enemy distinction captures something real about how political antagonism feels and how it operates. But the reality it captures is not the essence of a distinct political domain. It is the surface expression of coalitional psychology operating at the scale of states.<\/p>\n

Schmitt saw that the friend\/enemy distinction could not be neutralized. He was correct. Alliance Theory<\/a> shows why the neutralization project was always futile: the distinction is not a feature of political theory or a habit of political culture that better institutions might dissolve. It is a feature of the human mind. It will reappear in any institution sufficiently stressed, whether that institution calls itself liberal, procedural, technocratic, or deliberately apolitical. The reappearance is not a failure of the institution’s values. It is the return of the cognitive baseline.<\/p>\n

The final irony is that Alliance Theory<\/a>, in naturalizing Schmitt, also naturalizes Schmitt’s critics. Liberal theorists produce technologies of neutralization that help low-intensity, broad-tent trade coalitions coordinate. Schmitt produced a technology of enmity that helped high-intensity coalitions coordinate. Pinsof’s theory is a technology of de-masking: it steps outside the friend\/enemy distinction to describe the distinction itself. But the theory also predicts that even this apparently neutral scientific account will eventually function as a coalitional weapon, deployed by those who wish to delegitimize political movements by labeling their convictions as mere coalition signals. No analytical stance remains permanently outside the process it analyzes. The theory, too, will be recruited.<\/p>\n

Schmitt was right that the political could not be wished away. He was wrong that it required its own ontology. The political is not a rarefied domain of sovereignty and existential decision. It is what coalition psychology looks like when the stakes are high enough. Schmitt felt the weight of that psychology as philosophical necessity. He experienced it from inside a coalition that needed him to feel exactly that. He was not the philosopher of the state he believed himself to be. He was, with more clarity than he could have tolerated, the philosopher of the primate brain.<\/p>\n

The Buffered Self<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Schmitt’s central theoretical claim is that modern political and legal categories are secularized theological concepts. Political Theology<\/em><\/a> opens with the formulation that all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts. Sovereignty derives from divine omnipotence. The exception corresponds to the miracle. The constitutional order mirrors the divine order. The analogy is not merely rhetorical. Schmitt argued that the structural features of theological concepts carry over into their secular replacements even as the explicit theological content is stripped away.
\nThis is an early version of what Charles Taylor’s framework<\/a> later identified systematically as the operation of buffered modernity on porous categories. Modern political concepts retain structural features of their theological origins while operating within the immanent frame that buffered modernity constructs. Schmitt saw this structural carryover clearly. He saw it decades before Taylor did. His analysis anticipated substantial portions of what Taylor would later develop.
\nSchmitt’s Catholic formation provided him with phenomenological access to what theological concepts actually were when they operated in their original porous framework. He could see the secularized versions as secularized because he knew the original versions from within. Protestant theologians and secular liberal theorists typically lacked this access. They worked from positions already too distant from the original porous framework to see the structural carryover Schmitt identified. Schmitt’s Catholicism gave him analytical resources that thoroughly buffered positions could not generate.
\nSchmitt and Taylor reach substantially different conclusions from analyses that share significant features. Taylor’s analysis is broadly sympathetic to what buffered modernity has accomplished while also identifying what it has lost and what it cannot do. Taylor wants to preserve what modernity has gained while recovering access to what it has lost. His framework is therefore analytical-diagnostic, aimed at understanding.
\nSchmitt’s analysis moves in different directions. He uses the identification of theological residues in modern politics to argue that liberal constitutionalism is fundamentally incoherent. The incoherence shows up specifically in the problem of the exception. Liberal legal order presupposes that law covers all situations. But specific situations arise that law cannot anticipate. In those situations, sovereign decision exceeds legal determination. The exception reveals that the legal order depends on decisions that the order itself cannot authorize. Liberal proceduralism cannot account for the foundational decision that establishes procedural order in the first place.
\nFrom this analysis Schmitt draws conclusions that take him in distinctly authoritarian directions. If liberal constitutionalism cannot account for its own foundation, then the actual foundation must be identified. Schmitt identifies it as sovereign decision that establishes the political unity within which legal order subsequently operates. The political unity requires identification of friend and enemy. The identification cannot be reduced to legal categories. It operates at the existential level of political life itself.
\nTaylor’s framework can accommodate Schmitt’s analytical observations about the theological residues in modern political concepts. Taylor’s framework does not support Schmitt’s political conclusions. The observations can be made without endorsing the conclusions. Schmitt’s political conclusions follow specifically from his substantive commitments, not merely from his analytical observations.
\nWhere does Schmitt himself stand on the buffered-porous axis? The question is more complex than similar questions about most of the figures we have analyzed because Schmitt’s position shifted substantially across his career in ways that illuminate what the axis itself can do and cannot do.
\nThe young Schmitt wrote from within Catholic porous commitment. His 1923 book Roman Catholicism and Political Form celebrated the Catholic Church as a specific form of political life that combined juridical rationality with transcendent authority. The celebration was not merely analytical. It reflected commitments Schmitt held from his Catholic formation.
\nBy the late 1920s, Schmitt’s commitments had begun shifting. His analytical work continued using Catholic frameworks. His actual political commitments moved toward authoritarian German nationalism that sat uneasily with Catholic universalism. By 1933, Schmitt aligned with the Nazi regime, joined the party, wrote defenses of the Nuremberg laws and of the R\u00f6hm purge, and participated in specifically antisemitic scholarly activities. The alignment contradicted substantial portions of Catholic teaching. Schmitt’s continued Catholic identification during this period was compromised in ways the Church eventually recognized when he was effectively excommunicated in 1950.
\nAfter the war, Schmitt was banned from German universities and lived in semi-retirement in Plettenberg until his death in 1985. His later work returned to more philosophical and historical themes. His engagement with Catholicism became more ambivalent. He died having received Catholic last rites but having spent decades in a specifically complicated relationship with the tradition of his upbringing.
\nWhat Taylor’s framework helps see about this trajectory. The young Schmitt operated from porous Catholic commitment that gave him analytical access to the theological residues in modern political concepts. His analysis of sovereignty, the exception, and political theology drew on resources his Catholic formation provided. The analysis was substantive scholarly work that continues to be engaged long after it was produced.
\nThe middle Schmitt used the analytical resources in service of political conclusions that contradicted the substantive commitments those resources originally supported. Catholic political theology provides resources for critiquing liberal proceduralism. It does not support aligning with totalitarian regimes that murder the political enemies liberal proceduralism would at least procedurally protect. Schmitt’s alignment with the Nazi regime required him to use his analytical resources in directions his formational commitments should have prevented. The requirement was met through compartmentalization rather than through resolution of the underlying contradictions.
\nThe late Schmitt could not quite acknowledge what the middle Schmitt had done. His postwar writings returned to more abstract historical and philosophical themes without substantial accounting for the specifically political commitments he had undertaken in the middle period. The avoidance left him in a position of analytical sophistication combined with moral evasion that subsequent readers have had to sort through.
\nPolitical Theology<\/em><\/a> identifies theological residues in modern political concepts. The identification is analytically powerful. It has become a widely used framework for understanding how modern political orders operate. The book has been read by theorists across the political spectrum. Leftist thinkers including Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben have drawn on it. Rightist thinkers have drawn on it. Liberal thinkers who want to understand their own commitments have drawn on it. The analytical power of the book exceeds the specific political conclusions Schmitt drew from it.
\nSchmitt’s analytical contributions can be separated from his political commitments in ways that many scholars’ works cannot. Marxist scholars typically produce work whose analytical content is difficult to separate from Marxist political commitments. Liberal scholars typically produce work whose analytical content reflects liberal political commitments. Schmitt produced analytical content that has been usable by scholars whose political commitments substantially differ from his own.
\nSchmitt’s observations describe structural features of modern political life. The features can be observed from various positions. The conclusions drawn depend on substantive commitments separate from the observations themselves. Schmitt drew authoritarian conclusions. Others can draw democratic conclusions from the same observations. The observations stand separately from any particular politics.
\nThe Concept of the Political<\/em><\/a> argues that political life is characterized by the friend-enemy distinction. The distinction is not merely one feature among many. It is the specific feature that makes political life political. When the distinction disappears, political life as such disappears. Other forms of human interaction remain. But what Schmitt calls the political no longer operates.
\nThe friend-enemy distinction operates at a level that resists full buffering. It involves commitments that cannot be reduced to procedural agreements or rational calculations of interest. It involves recognition of who belongs to one’s political community and who threatens it. The recognition is not purely cognitive. It is specifically phenomenological in ways that pure buffered analysis typically cannot engage.
\nLiberal political theory has difficulty with this claim because liberal political theory proceeds from thoroughly buffered assumptions. Liberal citizens are assumed to engage each other through procedural exchange of reasons. The exchange does not require recognition of enemies. It requires recognition of fellow citizens whose disagreements can be worked out through procedures. Schmitt argues this picture misses what actually sustains political life. The procedural exchange operates within a prior political unity that depends on the friend-enemy distinction. Without the prior unity, the procedural exchange has no stable ground.
\nThis is a specifically difficult argument for buffered political theory to refute. The refutation would need to show that buffered procedural exchange can sustain itself without the phenomenological commitments Schmitt identifies. The demonstration has not been convincingly produced. Liberal political orders have typically sustained themselves through specifically non-procedural means that operated tacitly within apparently procedural frameworks. When the non-procedural means erode, the procedural frameworks struggle.
\nTaylor’s framework helps see why Schmitt’s argument has analytical force despite its specifically uncomfortable political implications. Political life does seem to require phenomenological commitments that exceed what pure procedural exchange can generate. The commitments are not reducible to buffered categories. The requirement is a structural feature of political life rather than a contingent preference of specific political traditions.
\nTaylor’s framework is broadly sympathetic to liberal constitutional democracy while identifying its limits. Schmitt’s framework is substantially more critical of liberal constitutional democracy. Taylor accepts that buffered modernity has produced real goods that should be preserved. Schmitt argues that the buffered constitutional order rests on foundations it cannot justify from within and that the foundations are specifically illiberal.
\nThe challenge is not easily dismissed. Schmitt identifies specifically the same theological residues Taylor later identified. Schmitt draws substantially more critical conclusions. The difference between the conclusions cannot be resolved by pointing to factual features of the analysis. It reflects different substantive commitments applied to shared analytical observations.
\nTaylor would argue that Schmitt’s conclusions go beyond what the analytical observations support. The observations show that liberal constitutional order has theological residues. They do not show that liberal constitutional order is fundamentally incoherent or that it should be replaced with authoritarian alternatives. Schmitt’s move from the observations to the conclusions requires substantive commitments Taylor does not share.
\nSchmitt’s observations identify something Taylor’s framework cannot fully answer. Liberal constitutional order does depend on foundations it cannot fully justify through its own procedures. The foundations include phenomenological commitments that buffered citizens cannot always reliably generate when the commitments are most needed. Taylor’s framework can acknowledge this while arguing that the buffered constitutional order remains worth preserving despite its foundational difficulties. Schmitt’s framework argues that the foundational difficulties specifically require moving beyond buffered constitutionalism toward more substantive political orders.
\nHow should readers engage Schmitt’s work given his Nazi collaboration? The question has been debated extensively. Some scholars argue that the collaboration disqualifies his work from serious engagement. Others argue that his analytical contributions can be separated from his political choices. Still others argue that the analytical contributions themselves carry authoritarian implications that Schmitt’s political choices made manifest.
\nThe Nazi alignment does not invalidate the analytical insights. It does complicate what we do with them. Reading Schmitt seriously requires acknowledging that the insights come from someone whose political judgment appalls us today. Schmitt’s failure was instructive about what his analytical framework could and could not do. His framework could identify the inadequacies of Weimar liberalism. It could not prevent him from aligning with an alternative that was worse than what it replaced.
\nSchmitt has been read enthusiastically by specific contemporary theorists on both left and right. The left readings often emphasize his critique of liberal proceduralism as mask for actual power relations. The right readings often emphasize his sovereignty theory and his friend-enemy distinction as tools for rebuilding substantive political orders. The readings reach opposite political conclusions from shared analytical starting points.
\nThis pattern specifically illustrates what Taylor’s framework identifies about the ambiguity of analytical observations separated from substantive commitments. The observations can be deployed in various directions depending on prior commitments. Schmitt’s own trajectory illustrates the specifically dangerous possibilities. His observations were deployed in service of one of the twentieth century’s most destructive political movements. The observations themselves did not require the deployment. His substantive commitments did.
\nContemporary readers engaging Schmitt face the specific question of what commitments they bring to his work. Readers whose commitments are democratic and constitutionalist can use his observations to understand the specific difficulties their political order faces. Readers whose commitments are authoritarian can use the same observations to justify moving beyond constitutional order toward more substantive alternatives. The same analytical resources support different political projects.
\nAnalytical observations about the phenomenological foundations of political life do not determine political commitments. The commitments come from sources the observations themselves cannot generate. Schmitt’s work makes observations that remain analytically valuable while generating ongoing debate about what political conclusions they support.
\nSchmitt’s work has influenced substantial twentieth and twenty-first century political theory. Some of the figures we have analyzed operate within traditions Schmitt helped shape. Jack Balkin’s work on constitutional dictatorship draws on analytical resources Schmitt developed. Sanford Levinson’s work on the difficulty of constitutional orders that resist amendment draws on similar resources. Even thinkers far from Schmitt’s politics engage with his analytical framework because the framework identifies features of political life that other frameworks do not reach as directly.
\nThe analytical resources Schmitt developed continue to illuminate features of political life that subsequent theory has not replaced. The resources can be used by scholars whose commitments differ from Schmitt’s own. The use does not endorse Schmitt’s specific conclusions. It engages the analytical work separately from the conclusions.
\nSchmitt is productive for Taylor’s framework because his case shows the specifically difficult relationship between phenomenological formation and moral responsibility. His Catholic formation should have prevented his Nazi alignment. It did not prevent it. The formation provided resources that could have been deployed to resist Nazi commitments. Schmitt chose to deploy them in service of Nazi commitments instead. The choice was his. The formation did not make the choice. It made the choice possible by providing resources that could be deployed in various directions.
\nThis specifically complicates simple readings of phenomenological formation as determining political commitments. Porous religious formation does not automatically produce politically admirable conclusions. It produces specific resources that can be used in various ways. The uses depend on subsequent choices that the formation itself does not determine. Schmitt’s case shows this with specifically uncomfortable clarity. His Catholic resources were real. His use of them was disastrous. Both features must be held together to understand what he did.
\nSchmitt represents the specific possibility that formational resources generate analytical insights while leaving moral commitments undetermined. Most of the figures we have analyzed show alignment between their formational resources and their substantive commitments. Adlerstein’s Haredi formation aligns with his Orthodox commitments. Myers’s Jewish formation aligns with his specifically progressive Jewish commitments. The alignments are not automatic but they are substantial.
\nSchmitt shows what happens when the alignment breaks down. His Catholic formational resources remained operative in his analytical work even as his substantive political commitments moved in directions his formation should have prevented. The breakdown produced analytical work that continues to be engaged while the political commitments that accompanied the work are near universally rejected. The continued engagement is specifically possible because analytical resources operate somewhat independently of the commitments the resources are deployed for.
\nFormation provides resources. The resources generate capacities for specific kinds of work. The work can be directed in various ways by subsequent commitments. The commitments themselves are not determined by the formation. Schmitt’s case shows the specifically dangerous possibility when commitments diverge from what formation should have produced. His analytical work survives. His political legacy is specifically catastrophic. Both features must be held together.
\nWithout Taylor’s framework, Schmitt’s case often gets treated either as pure political disgrace that should disqualify engagement with his analytical work or as pure analytical brilliance that should be separated entirely from his political choices. Both treatments miss what the framework identifies. Schmitt produced analytical work that drew on specifically Catholic formational resources. He deployed the work in service of political commitments that contradicted what Catholic formation should have produced. The analytical work survives as resource for subsequent engagement. The political commitments remain specifically catastrophic. Engaging the combination honestly requires acknowledging both features as features of the same person whose formational resources enabled the analytical work and whose substantive choices determined the work’s specifically horrible deployment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Carl Schmitt thought he had discovered the essence of politics. What he discovered was the surface expression of evolved coalition psychology. His framework feels compelling because it resonates with how we are wired. David Pinsof, Martie Haselton, and Douglas Sears, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42763],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-carl-schmitt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t