{"id":183670,"date":"2026-04-21T06:56:24","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T14:56:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=183670"},"modified":"2026-04-21T09:39:05","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T17:39:05","slug":"schmitt-under-merciers-eye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=183670","title":{"rendered":"Schmitt Under Mercier and Doris"},"content":{"rendered":"

Carl Schmitt built a political theory that assigns constitutive force to sovereign decision, mythic mobilization, and the friend-enemy distinction. Schmitt recognized the prior political existence of the people as the ground any decision operates on. Constitutional Theory places pouvoir constituant before any sovereign act. Acclamation governs the leader’s continued authority. Substantive homogeneity precedes politics and conditions what any sovereign can do. Schmitt is not a voluntarist who thinks the leader conjures the demos.
\nThe critique operates on the margin Schmitt left to the sovereign and to mythic articulation. Hugo Mercier<\/a> and John M. Doris<\/a>, read together, shrink that margin further than Schmitt allowed.
\nHugo Mercier’s argument supplies the cognitive half<\/a>. Humans did not evolve to be gullible. Open vigilance runs in proportion to stakes. For matters that bear on vital interests, people run rigorous checks on what they are told. Workplace rumors about layoffs run at 80-100% accuracy because employees track who said what and verify against their own knowledge. Soldiers in Caplow’s WWII study transmitted accurate operational rumors because errors had consequences. Hawaiians rejected the Pearl Harbor sabotage rumors about Japanese-Americans because they could see for themselves.
\nFor matters that do not bear on personal stakes, vigilance runs weakly because running it is not worth the cost. This is where reflective beliefs live. The Chinese citizen who believes the United Airlines settlement was $140 million, the American truther who holds meetings in unsecured auditoriums, the Pakistani shopkeeper who says Israelis orchestrated 9\/11. These people profess the beliefs. They do not act on them because the beliefs are reflective, held without rigorous vigilance precisely because the stakes are low. Intuitive beliefs drive behavior. Reflective beliefs sit inertly.
\nMass persuasion mostly fails. Propaganda succeeds, when it succeeds, by building on existing consensus, confirming existing values, bolstering existing prejudices. Mercier quotes Kershaw on Nazi propaganda, and the general principle holds. Demagogues surf opinion they did not create. The leader who tries to pull a population against the grain of existing commitments discovers he cannot. Beliefs often follow behavior rather than producing it. People who want to commit atrocities look for moral justification. Doctors who want to treat want theories to back them up.
\nJohn M. Doris<\/a> supplies the behavioral half. Lack of Character<\/a> and the situationist research<\/a> it draws on show that behavior tracks situation<\/a> more tightly than disposition. Doris is not denying that character exists. He accepts consistency within similar situations<\/a>. What he denies is globalism, the view that broad traits produce consistent behavior across situations<\/a>. The domain-specificity of practical life means the upstanding public servant can be a faithless husband without contradiction because the marital and political domains engage different cognitive, motivational, and evaluative structures. Reliability is proportional to situational<\/a> similarity.
\nThe Holocaust material is central for Doris. There are not enough monsters to go around to produce mass killing. The perpetrators were ordinary men whose previous lives showed ordinary compassion. Major Trapp wept while issuing murderous commands. The Reserve Police Battalion drank heavily because sober life was intolerable. Mengele brought sugar to children he was about to send to the crematoria. These are not hypocrites performing virtue. They are people whose dispositions are real within their prior domains and whose behaviors in the killing situations are produced by the situational architecture the regime engineered. Moral drift accomplishes what monstrous character would have to accomplish on the globalist view.
\nThe combination cuts against Schmitt at three points.
\nTake the friend-enemy distinction first. Schmitt presents the distinction as the criterion of the political and the sovereign’s act of naming as the decisive articulation of the community’s self-understanding. Grant that the people must have prior political substance capable of receiving the naming. The question remains what happens in the moment of articulation.
\nMercier shows why the moment does less than Schmitt assigns to it. The population that has a stake in the naming runs vigilance on it. The population without stakes holds the naming as reflective belief, available for profession but inert with respect to behavior. Nazi propaganda did not produce operational anti-Semitism in populations that lacked prior anti-Semitic commitment. In regions where pre-Nazi anti-Semitism ran high, the propaganda found soil prepared for it. In regions where it ran low, propaganda produced backlash. The naming reached coalitions already prepared. It did not reach the rest.
\nDoris adds that even among those for whom the naming survived their vigilance, behavioral response depended on situation. The German who agreed with the ideology but lived in a neighborhood where his Jewish neighbors were familiar and his social network included families who would disapprove of participation in a pogrom may not have participated. The same German, transferred to a frontier town in occupied Poland where peer composition, officer framing, and physical arrangement ran differently, may have participated without having changed his beliefs. Browning’s Ordinary Men shows this precisely. Reserve Police Battalion 101 contained men with varied ideological commitments. Participation in mass murder tracked situation, not belief. Peer presence, officer framing, the structure of the killing operations, the availability of alcohol, the absence of witnesses outside the unit. Schmitt’s picture treats the political community as mobilized by shared recognition of the enemy. Doris shows that recognition and mobilization are different problems, and mobilization runs through situational engineering that the naming does not supply.
\nTake mythic mobilization second. Schmitt’s Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy treats political myth, Sorel’s general strike, the nationalist myth of the nation, the fascist myth of the state, as capable of binding populations to action. Schmitt concedes the myth requires a people prepared to receive it. He still credits the myth with generative force in organizing action around shared commitment.
\nMercier’s evidence on religious conversion cuts against the generative claim. New religious movements grow through preexisting ties. Friends recruit friends. Families bring family members. The myth comes after the social investment. Belief follows involvement. Iannaccone’s line, which Mercier cites, captures it. Strong attachments draw people into religious groups. Strong beliefs develop slowly or not at all. The same pattern runs in political mobilization. Fascism in interwar Europe recruited through networks of veterans, frustrated professionals, and small businessmen whose material position pushed them toward nationalist politics. The myth of the state ratified coalitions that existed. It did not assemble them from unaffiliated Italians who heard the myth and converted.
\nDoris extends the point. Even among those whose prior commitments prepared them for the myth, behavioral activation depended on situation. The nationalist at the rally behaves differently from the same nationalist at home reading a newspaper. The rally engineers the situation. Peer presence, visual symbolism, physical arrangement, and collective movement produce behavior the same person would not produce elsewhere. Schmitt credits the myth with the mobilizational work. Doris says the situation does most of the work. The myth provides the ideological cover under which the situation operates. Strip the situation and the myth mobilizes no one. Strip the myth and the situation often produces the behavior anyway under different ideological cover. This is why comparable mass behaviors appear across regimes with opposed myths. The situations rhyme. The myths diverge.
\nTake the decision on the exception third. Schmitt’s sovereign is the one who decides when the normal order suspends. The decision constitutes sovereignty by demonstrating that law is grounded in a decision outside law. Grant that the decision operates within the constraints of popular acclamation. The decision still carries substantial weight in Schmitt’s picture as the act that reveals and sustains sovereignty.
\nMercier’s evidence on reputation and trust reframes the decision. The sovereign who decides is spending credit his audience has extended to him provisionally. The credit lasts until reality checks it. For populations with stakes in the decision, vigilance remains active. They evaluate whether the decision fits their prior sense of the leader’s competence and benevolence. They update on how the decision works out. Hitler’s decisions retained force while painless military victories accumulated. After Stalingrad, as Kershaw documents, the vigilance that had been suspended under success reactivated under failure. The sovereign did not become less decisive. The audience stopped extending credit because the stakes had become personal. Schmitt treats the decision as the ground. Mercier suggests the decision is the downstream product of ongoing audience trust that could withdraw whenever reality intruded on the audience’s interests.
\nDoris adds that the audience’s willingness to extend credit tracks situation. The German population of 1941 and the German population of 1944 are largely the same population placed in different situations. The situational features that produced compliance in 1941, peer conformity, information control, visible regime success, reduced costs of obedience, shifted by 1944. Peer networks fractured as men died or were captured. Information control loosened as foreign broadcasts penetrated. Regime success visibly failed. Costs of obedience rose as the war came home. The same people whose dispositions supposedly supported the regime withdrew their support when the situation changed. Schmitt’s account of sovereignty cannot explain this because his theory treats sovereignty as constituted by decision and acclamation without registering how tightly acclamation tracks situational features the sovereign does not control.
\nThe three corrections compound. The friend-enemy naming reaches those whose stakes make them run vigilance on it, and that population is smaller than Schmitt assumes. Among those reached, behavior tracks situation. Mythic mobilization ratifies preexisting coalition formation, and activation depends on situational engineering. Sovereign decision is credit extended provisionally by audiences whose willingness to extend tracks situational features beyond the sovereign’s control. The Schmittian architecture survives the corrections only in reduced form. The sovereign articulates where articulation is possible. The myth provides vocabulary where vocabulary is needed. The decision operates where credit has been extended. None of these is nothing. None of these is what Schmitt’s theory, in its full form, claims.
\nA practical consequence follows for how political violence gets explained. Schmitt’s framework asks what the sovereign decided and what myth mobilized the people. Mercier and Doris ask which populations had stakes that activated their vigilance, which populations held the regime’s framings as reflective beliefs that could sit alongside contrary behavior, what situational engineering produced activation into action, and what features of context maintained or withdrew the credit extended to leaders. The second set of questions predicts cases better. It explains why the same rhetoric produces mass violence in one setting and fails in another. It explains why populations previously compliant become resistant without changing their beliefs. It explains why perpetrators so often fail to match the ideological profile the atrocity seems to require.
\nSchmitt’s admirers sometimes say these corrections miss the point. Schmitt, they say, is doing philosophy of the political, not social science of political behavior. The response does not help Schmitt. If the philosophy of the political does not cash out in claims about how political behavior works, it reduces to an aesthetic preference for certain political forms. The preference can be defended on its own terms. It cannot be defended as revealing the essence of politics, because politics as it happens is better described by stakes-proportional vigilance, reflective versus intuitive belief, and situational behavior than by decision, myth, and friend-enemy articulation.
\nThe smaller Schmitt who survives is a diagnostician of procedural thinness in liberal institutions when populations have shifted in ways the institutions cannot contain. This Schmitt identifies real vulnerabilities in parliamentary systems under certain conditions. The larger Schmitt, the theorist of sovereignty as decision and politics as myth, rests on a theory of leader-population relations that the cognitive and behavioral evidence together dismantle. The people do get a vote. The vote is a continuous exercise of vigilance calibrated to stakes, through which credit is extended or withdrawn. The behavior the vote produces tracks situational features the sovereign often cannot engineer. The political form that results is less the achievement of decision than the equilibrium of populations managing their reflective and intuitive beliefs through situations that make certain behaviors salient. Schmitt saw part of this. He did not see enough of it, and the part he missed is the part that matters most for predicting how politics moves.
\nMercier alone gives a cognitive account of why most political communication produces small effects. People run vigilance in proportion to stakes. Most political content reaches audiences whose stakes are low, so the vigilance is minimal and the resulting beliefs are reflective, available for profession but inert with respect to behavior. Where stakes are high, vigilance runs hard and persuasion against prior commitment fails. The framework explains why propaganda campaigns, intellectual projects, and charismatic appeals produce less behavioral change than their authors imagine.
\nUsed alone, Mercier can leave an impression that the question is mainly what beliefs people hold. Doris corrects this. Behavior is produced principally by situations, not by beliefs or traits. Even where vigilance produces the beliefs an intellectual wants the audience to hold, the behaviors that would follow those beliefs require situational architectures that the beliefs themselves do not create.
\nUsed alone, Doris can slide toward a view of humans as blank behavioral plastic shaped by whatever situation surrounds them. Mercier corrects this. People are not blank. They are processing messages through vigilance calibrated to their stakes, and the beliefs that result, whether intuitive or reflective, interact with the situations they encounter.
\nCombining them specifies a two-stage process. Messages get filtered by vigilance proportional to stakes. The beliefs that result range from intuitive beliefs that drive behavior to reflective beliefs that sit inertly. Action, when it occurs, is produced principally by the situational features the actor encounters, with the beliefs playing a role that ranges from substantial (for intuitive beliefs in situations that activate them) to minimal (for reflective beliefs in situations that do not).
\nThis is why the combination cuts effectively against Schmitt. Schmitt’s sovereign decision assumes a one-stage process. The leader articulates, the population responds. Mercier breaks the first stage by showing that most populations hold most political content as reflective belief because their personal stakes are low, and the populations that do have stakes run vigilance rigorously enough to resist what does not fit prior commitment. Doris breaks the second stage by showing that even where beliefs get formed, action runs through situations that the leader’s articulation does not touch. The sovereign who names the enemy faces two independent failures. The naming may fail to penetrate vigilance where stakes are high, or may land as inert reflective belief where stakes are low. Even where it becomes intuitive belief for some, the situational architecture may not translate belief into action.
\nThe combination handles Browning’s Ordinary Men well. The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 did not need to be persuaded of Nazi ideology to participate in mass murder. Many did not hold strong ideological commitments. Mercier explains why propaganda did not produce ideological uniformity in the battalion. The situations of ordinary German life had not put the propaganda’s content at the center of most men’s vital interests, so vigilance had not processed it rigorously and the beliefs remained reflective for many of them. Doris explains why ideological uniformity was unnecessary for the atrocity. The situations the battalion operated in produced the behavior regardless of belief. Peer presence, officer framing, physical arrangement of the killing work, reframing of victims, availability of alcohol.
\nRunning the other direction, the combination explains cases of resistance. The German populations that withdrew support from Hitler after Stalingrad did not change their reflective beliefs in any deep sense. The situations changed, and the change brought their vital interests into contact with the war’s cost. Vigilance, previously unengaged because victory made the regime’s claims low-stakes, now engaged because hunger, death notices, and visible failure made the claims high-stakes. Mercier explains why the propaganda then lost its capacity to retain credit. Doris explains why the same population whose situational compliance had produced compliance now produced criticism and disengagement.
\nThe analytical range extends beyond political violence. Religious conversion, professional formation, ideological drift in institutions, the failure of educational interventions to produce lasting attitudinal change, the gap between survey responses and voting behavior, the disconnect between public commitments and private conduct. All sit on the same two-stage structure. Vigilance filters messages in proportion to stakes, producing intuitive and reflective beliefs in a mix that depends on what matters personally. Behavior gets activated by situations that may or may not align with the beliefs. Interventions that address only one stage predictably underperform.
\nThe combination disciplines two opposite temptations. The ideational temptation credits texts, arguments, and ideologies with social consequences they do not produce. Mercier corrects this by specifying that most such content reaches audiences as reflective belief or fails to penetrate vigilance at all. The dispositional temptation treats people as having stable characters that predict behavior across situations. Doris corrects this by showing that behavior tracks situation, that character appears within domains of situational similarity, and that the globalist assumption produces systematic overattribution.
\nWhen a commentator explains an outcome by the persuasiveness of an ideology, ask whether the population had vital stakes that would have activated rigorous vigilance, and whether the ideology’s content matched prior commitment the population already held. When a commentator explains behavior by the character of the agents, ask what the situations rewarded and whether the same agents in different situations would have behaved differently. These are quick diagnostics. They cut through much of what passes for political and cultural analysis.
\nOne limit is worth naming. The combination can tip toward a deflationary reading of human agency that neither Mercier nor Doris intends. Mercier’s humans are not pure reflective-belief holders. They do form intuitive beliefs on what matters to them and update those beliefs on evidence. Doris’s humans are not pure situational puppets. They do carry domain-specific reliabilities across similar situations. The combination is most useful when held as a corrective to ideational and dispositional overreach, not as a complete theory that eliminates belief and character as factors. Used with that discipline, it gives the sharpest available tool for analyzing how political forms produce political behavior. Used without the discipline, it can slide into reductive functionalism that loses the features of human life both theories preserve in their careful versions.
\nSchmitt’s theory needs the discipline removed. His sovereign commands publics by decision and myth. Mercier says publics run vigilance on their stakes and hold most political content as reflective belief. Doris says publics act from situations, not from the belief content the leader supplies. The sovereign’s work is real but narrow. It articulates what exists. It rides what situations produce. It extends into action only where stakes activate vigilance into intuitive belief and situations convert that belief into conduct. This is a smaller politics than Schmitt imagined. It is the politics that the evidence shows.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Carl Schmitt built a political theory that assigns constitutive force to sovereign decision, mythic mobilization, and the friend-enemy distinction. Schmitt recognized the prior political existence of the people as the ground any decision operates on. Constitutional Theory places pouvoir constituant … 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-183670","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