These two books offer thematic collections of essays that sum up the career trajectories of two distinguished political philosophers, though one of those trajectories is sadly and prematurely concluded. Fred Dallmayr continues his recuperation of German idealism (G. W. F. Hegel: Modernity and Politics, 2003), as well as of classical Western and non-Western voices (Dialogue Among Civilizations: Some Exemplary Voices, 2002); Iris Marion Young's seminal contributions to democratic theory and the nature of democratic justice (Justice and the Politics of Difference, Inclusion and Democracy, 1990) more and more took on, as the title of this posthumous work suggests, the need to adapt that theory to the challenges of globalization.

At first glance, these two works seem to be about the same theme: the reality of globalization as American military and economic hegemony, and the threats to democratic equality everywhere that this reality entails:

“[These] essays are inspired by contemporary social movements that call multinational corporations to accountability and question the global military hegemony of the United States” (p. 2).

“I turn attention to such issues as the proper and improper ways of spreading democracy globally, the possibility of ‘transnational’ citizenship, the problem of politicized ‘evil’” (p. xv).

“[D]emocracy is under siege nearly everywhere, being held hostage to huge military-industrial complexes and almost routinely surrendered to ‘national security’ interests” (p. 154).

“At this historic moment we live under global dictatorship” (p. 145).

“[Mobilizing democracy] cannot happen through military coercion and force. The use of force violates the axioms of mutual recognition and respect” (p. 163).

I have mixed these quotations up deliberately to make the point about this convergence of interests; the interested reader can treat this like a matching identification test. Both authors, moreover, emphasize the need for cross-cultural recognition of others in the readings of texts and in the valuation of actions; and both insist that a narrow focus on national boundaries and national cultures prevents us from understanding much that is of importance in the contemporary world. An obvious difference between the two is apparent in the very titles, though the desired end is similar: Dallmayr's essays are mostly readings in reflective philosophy, intended to be pedagogical; Young's are reflective explorations of the possibilities of action, intended to produce a “response” to global “challenges.” For each of them, this has almost always been the case. Thus, despite the apparent similarity of political concerns, their philosophical spirit moves in different directions.

What most truly grips Dallmayr's interest is the prospect not of revolution in the nature of global institutions and American foreign policy but of revolution in the way human beings live their daily lives. Young's perennial theme was “justice”; his theme is “the good life.” The way to the good life is not—as least not for his purposes here—through collective action as much as it is through pedagogy, the pedagogy of “love,” self-abnegation, “tolerance,” “genuine religion,” public spiritedness, and the kind of spirituality that seeks “the divine”: the second cited quotation concludes, “and the role of religious faith in our predominantly secular—or perhaps postsecular—age.” The “chief addressees of the text are ordinary laypeople” (p. xii); several of his chapters are addressed to “the streetwise people in the marketplace” (with little success to be expected, I fear, unless “ordinary laypeople” are senior liberal arts majors at elite institutions). This pedagogy is to be found in an attentive reading of “timely classics.” Dallmayr pursues it across time, space, and disparate cultural milieux, through often revealing and always admiring elucidations of a deliberately multicultural collection of thinkers: from Aristotle and Confucius through St. Francis of Assisi, St. Bonaventure, the medieval Indian poet-thinker Jnanadev, Nicholaus of Cusa, St. Augustine, the Baron de Montesquieu, Friedrich Schiller (an especially evocative appreciation), and on up to Hans-Georg Gadamer, the Confucian expert William T. de Bary, Paul Ricoeur, Walter Lippmann and Michael Sandel (oddly), and Martin Heidegger—all of whom presumably have in common that they taught or advocated moderation in material pursuits, restraint in the exercise of power, and radical connectedness in human relationships. (The inclusion in this pantheon of Heidegger, who surely held “streetwise people,” das Man, in the utmost contempt, is at best puzzling.)

As responses to the conundrums of universalism or particularity, the sovereign national state or cross-cultural communities, national citizenship or multicultural citizenships, these elucidations are—for at least this reader—moving but lacking in visible engagement. Perhaps because of the ordering of the essays, in which philosophical and theological expositions of the clash between the material and spiritual have pride of place, at first glance Dallmayr's references to the violence and destructiveness of war, the depredations of global corporations, or U.S. imperialism come to seem like a series of appendices tacked on to the appreciations that really capture his deepest interests; this is so even though the most political of the essays, “Paths beyond the Nation-State,” moves from a strong critique of Alistair MacIntyre's “circumscribed particularism” to an appreciation of Iris Young's “eloquent” defense of “‘multicultural’ or ‘differentiated’ citizenship” (p. 199).

Several of the essays in Young's volume are indeed eloquent; their topics will seem much more familiar to most democratic theorists, and perhaps to “ordinary laypersons” as well. She writes for a “global public sphere,” criticizing Jürgen Habermas's call for a “European public sphere” and insisting instead that movements in “the global South” (p. 2) should lead the way to a hopeful transnationalism that ought to be based on “a principle of local self-determination enacted in the context of [diverse] global governance structures” (pp. 34, 37). Like Dallmayr, she looks to a multicultural past—in her case, though, she looks not to different theological/philosophical traditions but rather to the structures and procedures of the Iroquois Confederacy. In an important essay, “Two Concepts of Self-Determination,” this call for a past-inflected future is based on a trenchant critique of the Hobbesian conception of national sovereignty; she argues rather for the self-determination of indigenous peoples conceived of as “non-domination” and “noninterference” (pp. 40, 44).

In the central section of the collection, “War and Violence,” Young elaborates on Hannah Arendt's distinction between “power” and “violence,” and having set out a list of conditions that might justify violence, asserts that “few real-world acts of violence satisfy these conditions” (pp. 94–95), concentrating quite unexpectedly on the “official violence” of police brutality. Here, contrasting Arendt with Max Weber, she notes (correctly, I think) that “the idea that the state is nothing but monopoly on the legitimate use of violence slides easily for many people into the idea that the use of violence by the legitimate agents of a legitimate state is itself legitimate” (p. 98). Continuing this critique in a consideration of “so-called humanitarian intervention,” she argues that both domestic and international police power cannot be justified by “appeal to prior authorization,” but rather only by a “showing that the consequences of violent acts will prevent more harm than they produce” (p. 103).

This argument leads her to a somewhat but not entirely persuasive reconsideration of the Kosovo intervention. I say “not entirely” in that the apparently abstract utilitarian argument, much as she attempts to bolster it retrospectively, requires us in a sense to know the unknowable future. In contrast, there is a concrete political argument against the Iraq intervention that does not apply to Kosovo: namely, that authorizing a regime dedicated to the destruction of the rule of law in its own territory to implement that very rule of law elsewhere is like authorizing a wolf to guard a sheepfold. Whatever the (perhaps) foreseeable problems in Kosovo, that was not one of them.

In any event, here it seems to me to be quite unclear who will be the authorizing audience of this or any other “showing,” in a world of almost totally mediated, and totally dominated, communication; one thinks, for example, of Colin Powell's wholly false yet communicatively successful demonstration of the alleged Iraqi nuclear weapons program before the United Nations in 2003. This problem of audience poses difficulties for Young just as for Dallmayr, as perhaps it does for all critical thought in an era marked by the many varieties of more or less successful domination that they both emphasize.

That admittedly daunting problem aside, for me the highlight of this collection is the essay, reprinted from Signs (2003), on “The Logic of Masculinist Self-Protection”—a logic that most importantly undergirds the Bush administration's assault on the rule of law and bid for unchecked executive power, justified as a trade-off of individual and social rights for protection: the state as a “protection racket” (a term borrowed from Susan Rae Peterson and Charles Tilly). This, of course, is the logic of the traditional version of marriage. Any attempt by me to summarize her development of this analogy is bound to be unsatisfactory; I can only recommend it as the most important contribution yet to post-9/11 political thought, and hope that it will become required reading in courses on feminist theory and politics, democratic theory and politics (if the two can be separated), constitutional law, and indeed any discussion of contemporary U.S. politics. To be fair, though, Young might have disagreed with my choice of “highlight” here; she herself concluded this collection with an essay, more straightforwardly based in her primary field of ethics, on “Responsibility, Social Connection, and Global Labor Justice”—must-reading, again, for anyone who hesitates before buying that very lovely silk shirt that happens to have been produced by sweated labor in the Philippines.

In conclusion, however, the “first glance” adverted to previously in considering Dallmayr and Young together was not quite a final glance. As an uncompromisingly secular democratic theorist like Young herself, I have always been in sympathy with her project, and have learned tremendously much from her work. And yet, looking at these two collections in tandem, one discovers that there is perhaps something missing from the secular project after all, though unlike Dallmayr, I would not call what is missing “faith” or “religion.” It is the case, though, that that greatest of secularists, Marx, had a teleology, or at least a secularized version of Hegel's teleology. He gave reason to believe, so long as one could go on believing it, that there was an historical movement toward a social order based on equal justice. The apparent disappearance of that putative movement, diagnosed at least as early as Georg Lukács's History and Class Consciousness (1923), has left not only the socialist Left but even the entire democratic Left in limbo (a description that Dallmayr might appreciate). All of Young's invocations of “contemporary grassroots movements,” and their demands for a place at the table, do not come close to creating the appearance of an irresistible worldwide movement for social justice and equal representation.

Fred Dallmayr makes no effort at all to invoke such a movement. But he addresses a different, and perhaps equally salient, problem. Democratic theorists consistently fail to grapple with the obvious truth that oligarchical institutions and unchecked capitalist accumulation account for only part of the democratic deficit; the sad truth about the way people actually behave, not only here but there, lies also at its heart. Dallmayr is no more a truly historicist Hegelian than Young was a truly historicist Marxist, and so he cannot say that people are beginning to behave with a spirit that could make democratic equality imaginable anymore than she can. And it is indicative that the word “environmental,” which denotes by far the greatest and most unaddressed material challenge facing all of us, North and South, rich and poor—and thus the greatest challenge facing democratic theory and practice—appears in neither of their indexes.

Dallmayr, however, does understand that the way we actually do behave is a serious issue, as evidenced by his recourse to the vocabulary of “evil,” and by the fact that he devotes dozens of pages to the concept of “virtue,” neither of which Young ever mentions. To be sure, the invocation of “virtue,” with its implicit elevation of “the genuine” and “the authentic,” is disturbing. So too are his all-too-frequent caricatures of liberalism, as in, for example, “the privatized ethics extolled by liberals” (p. xiii)—Mill? Dewey? Dworkin?—as well as the occasionally only grudging acknowledgment he makes of the unvirtuous Enlightenment's emancipatory effects—while devoting respectful pages to Heidegger, the modern philosopher who most strongly repudiates democratic values, emancipation of the oppressed, and the rule of law. Even more, to a reader who approaches all religions and conceptions of God with initial skepticism, the invocation of “genuine religion” is especially troubling, in that “genuine” is a restrictive category that apparently excludes all fundamentalisms, religious intolerance, and the compromises of excessive worldliness—as though these were somehow nongenuine forms of the category. Here it might be pointed out, after all, that if in the same way all excrescences were excluded from “genuine liberalism,” it might turn out to be every bit as profound as “genuine religion.”

Yet, as Dallmayr explicates it from St. Bonaventure to Schiller, “virtue” interestingly turns out to have unexpected connotations, for the modest attitude toward the material world promoted by the thinkers he most respects has everything to do with what is nowadays called “leaving a small carbon footprint.” This is no small conceptual amendment, and one worthy of consideration by all of us. I imagine that as a native German and a classicist who has done much to keep the German philosophical tradition alive in an Anglo-centric environment, Dallmayr would certainly not mind being associated with Rainier Maria Rilke, Germany's greatest modern poet, who wrote in his most famous poem that as you look at the “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” you understand that “You must change your life.” That injunction is certainly no substitute in democratic theory for the spirit of collective action that Young so eloquently described and promoted, but it may well be a necessary addition.