“Either democracy is global or it is not democracy” asserts Raffaele Marchetti in opening his book (p. 1). It is indeed about time that contemporary democratic theory and practice caught up with this idea, though the matter might also be stated as one of degree: that to the extent decisions are produced at the global level, democracy too must be global. William Scheuerman and Marchetti both make genuine contributions to the emerging conversation about globalizing democracy.

Scheuerman's main contention is that theorists of the Frankfurt School of critical theory—notably the by-now largely forgotten legal theorist Franz Neumann and the far-from-forgotten Jürgen Habermas—are essential for thinking about how to craft a much-needed political response to economic globalization.

On Scheuerman's account, Neumann is mainly an advocate of classic rule of law virtues: Law should always be general, clear, public, prospective, and stable. Neumann was writing at a time when the main challenge to the rule of law came from Nazism and fascism, not globalization; but Scheuerman argues that much of this analysis can be transported to the new context. Under the Nazis, large corporations were happy to take advantage of the special privileges granted to them by the regime, whose legality came only in subordinating law to the national interest as defined by the Nazi leadership. Today, large transnational corporations seek law that is “soft” in its reliance on alternative dispute resolution and corporate codes of conduct, is riven with particular exemptions, and so can easily be bent to corporate economic interests. Thus against a long tradition extending back to John Locke, Scheuerman, following Neumann, believes that capitalism and the rule of law do not go hand in hand, that capitalists are happy to dispense with legal constraints when it suits their short-term financial interests.

Neumann wrote against the grain of many on the left who saw law mainly in terms of defense of privilege and hierarchy. And Scheuerman writes against the grain of those who today believe that effective global business regulation can be crafted without a fully developed legal framework of the sort we currently see only within nation-states. He mostly ignores the empirical evidence presented by those who have catalogued existing and largely nonformal global business regulation (for example, John Braithwaite and Peter Drahos, Global Business Regulation, 2000), aside from debunking the odd alleged success story. Scheuerman believes, too, that welfare state programs work best when they “rely on classic legal modes.” He contrasts the success of Social Security, which was developed in this legalistic mode, with the failure of 1960s Great Society programs, which relied on informal cooperation (p. 81). This kind of legalism may find support in a U.S. context; but he does not consider the possibility that there might be substantial variation across different liberal democracies on this question (and on many other questions).

In the second half of the book, Scheuerman turns to Habermas, and while agreeing with him that democracy needs to be rethought in a globalizing world, finds most of Habermas's own efforts wanting. In particular, Scheuerman believes that Habermas vacillates between two models of deliberative democracy. One is radical and unrealistic in the degree of popular control it seeks; the other is conservative and defensive (defensive in the sense both of defending welfare state accomplishments against neoliberalism and of seeking only democratic influence over authority, rather than control of public authority). Scheuerman also finds little in Habermas on how to combat asymmetries of power. Writers on transnational democracy influenced by Habermas do, on Scheuerman's account, succumb to at least one of these deficiencies. And cosmopolitan democrats are further condemned because the global framework of cosmopolitan law they insist on contains only a massive set of rights enforced by the judiciary—without any constraint on the discretionary authority of judges and courts of the sort that Neumann's classic rule of law virtues would provide.

The rule of law provides just about the only solid ground on which Scheuerman stands, amid a more general negativism. The book does contain one paragraph (p. 150) on what he thinks should be done in the way of global democracy, but the reforms proposed in that paragraph are very marginal. Revealingly, Frankfurt School Perspectives contains no concluding chapter, and the final sentence of the book is a criticism of Habermas. Yet the book is full of learned and original commentary on Neumann, Habermas, and the issues of law and democracy they engage. Scheuerman provides an incisive analysis of attempts to globalize democracy, and all those interested in this project would do well to read this book and attend to his warnings.

Not least Raffaele Marchetti. Marchetti takes his bearings from cosmopolitan moralists and democrats who in recent years have developed a program of institutional design for the international system that would build toward direct accountability to the people of the world—not via their state governments. But Marchetti is an ultra-cosmopolitan. He believes that existing cosmopolitans have made too many concessions to the way the world currently works, seeking to involve stakeholders rather than ordinary citizens, happy to build upon existing intergovernmental arrangements, and tolerating too many exclusions. He wants to replace the international system, not reform it. He seeks a “cosmo-federalism” that “would entail revising all international organizations in order to allow the direct participation of citizens through direct elections” (p. 151). This project is grounded in a consequentialist morality whose key values are freedom and the welfare of the world's people.

The world government Marchetti proposes would be fully democratic (in electoral terms). At least one source of authoritarianism—foreign policy reasons of state in the face of hostile neighbors—would disappear, because there would be no foreign policy in such a world. He admits that all this may seem utopian, but concludes the book by pointing to the variety of successful movements (for national democracy, women's enfranchisement, voting rights for African Americans in southern states, and the end of apartheid in South Africa) that once seemed equally utopian. But his ambition far exceeds any of these earlier projects.

Marchetti combines his uncompromising normative model with a “social cosmopolitanism” that highlights the agency of social justice movements operating in transnational civil society, grounding their activism in local understandings, directing their efforts against existing dominant institutions, and paving the way for the larger project. Here, he is assigning a role to transnational activists they would probably not choose for themselves. And Scheuerman might say that Marchetti has fallen into the Habermas trap of oscillating between two models of democracy, one utopian and unrealistic, the other overly defensive—because current transnational social movements seek only to influence power, rather than gain power.

The virtue of Marchetti's book lies less in its “subaltern, thick, embedded, and rooted … social cosmopolitanism” (p. 101), more in its having staked out an extreme position that should become a point of reference in future debates. Marchetti argues for this position not just as a pure exercise in wishful thinking—plenty of world federalists have done that before. Instead, his proposals are grounded in a comprehensive understanding of existing thinking about ethics and global justice, democracy and international institutions. He is aware of likely critics, from nationalists and realists to cultural leftists and liberal internationalists, and crafts responses to them.

Scheuerman and Marchetti are right that democracy's fate depends in large part on how well it confronts and meets the challenges presented by globalization. Their own responses set out two poles: one hesitant, wary, and skeptical about existing proposals, the other overconfident and dismissive of constraints. Somewhere between these two poles lies the territory in which transnational democracy will have to be constructed.