This is a book about politics and theory, Jürgen Habermas and Max Weber, and the place of history in sociopolitical enquiry. To begin with, it is a book in political theory that asks how democracy and the rule of law may be secured and advanced in supranational institutions such as the European Union as it is currently developing. In a dawning supranational age, it seeks to explore possibilities for freedom and equality in modes of governance beyond the state, through a mode of inquiry that is sensitive to historical specificity and to qualitative social transformation. It does so by engaging critically with Habermas's recently articulated vision of constitutional democracy in the EU and with Weber's less sanguine view of democratic possibilities in Europe in the early years of the twentieth century. But it is also a book about political (and social) theory: Once again by way of a critical engagement with Habermas and Weber, it makes the case for a method of normative theorizing that derives its evaluative standards from careful attention to history and to empirical reality, as opposed to a method that first formulates an ideal and only then examines historical and empirical factors to assess its feasibility. In this sense, it is a book about the past as future: John McCormick calls for a mode of inquiry that brings history back in to social and political theory; however, not history construed as a linear development across epochs—for example, from premodernity to modernity—but history construed as a series of intraepochal transitions characterized by conflicts that give rise to learning processes and, as such, yield knowledge. In other words, it calls for a critical Hegelian-Marxist philosophy of history.

In each of these respects, McCormick's book makes an important contribution. To begin with, taking the EU as a test case for theories of supranational governance, it constructively challenges the two currently dominant models. Showing how neither fits the new historical reality, which is marked by trends towards globalization, multiculturalism and postnationalism, McCormick makes the case for a qualitatively new form of polity. His argument is that both the sanguine supranationalists—Habermas belongs in this category—and the Euroskeptic intergovermentalists are operating with historically outdated frameworks, the former with a twentieth-century administrative/welfare state (Sozialstaat) model, which envisions the emerging EU as a kind of postnational welfare state, and the latter with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberal models, which conceive of its constituent states as independent rational actors who can opt in and out of treaties at will and who will determine the inner workings of EU policy through their still-considerable sovereign powers.

Against both of these, McCormick proposes a Sektoralstaat as the most appropriate normative-empirical model. By “Sektoralstaat,” he means a form of supranational governance that is multilevel and multisegmented. Such governance is characterized by its accentuation of deliberation among interested parties in microspheres of transnational policymaking, by its insulation of those spheres from governmental oversight and regulation, by its propensity to allow member states to opt in or out of different policy sectors (for example, energy, defense, trade, communication, welfare, and the environment), and by the novel kind of law appropriate for its purposes. The author claims that it results from a structural transformation of state and society and is, as such, qualitatively new.

McCormick's case for the Sektoralstaat depends in significant measure on the success of his argument that the criticized supranational and intergovernmental models employ anachronistic normative categories that do not fit the current historical reality. This argument is considerably strengthened by his powerful critique of Habermas and Weber in the preceding chapters, whose proposals are rejected on precisely the same grounds. Here, he focuses on their respective accounts of law, maintaining that at times of transformation of society and state, law is a good gauge for assessing the quality and extent of change. He argues that Habermas and Weber, too, pay insufficient attention to historical reality and make use of evaluative categories that are taken over without qualification from another epoch: Habermas, the category of a reformed Sozialstaat, Weber that of the nineteenth-century liberal state (Rechtsstaat).

The persuasiveness of McCormick's critique derives in part from his careful and scholarly discussions of the two theorists, which show him to be sensitive to their concerns and alert to the nuances of their accounts of law; but it also derives from a passionate argument against their respective methodologies. Whereas both stand accused of an anachronistic use of evaluative categories, in Habermas's case the criticism is developed into a full-scale attack on his “Kantian” move: Throughout the book, Habermas is sharply rebuked for his turn away from the critical Hegelian-Marxist approach employed in his 1962 book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. McCormick disapproves of his shift toward a Kantian idealism, which elucidates normative ideals in abstraction from their embodiment in specific social, political, and economic institutions; he claims that it seriously undermines the normative vision of his theory of communicative action and jeopardizes his recent efforts to account for state transformation in a supranational historical constellation. This argument about methodology is the second major concern of the book.

Moving outward from his critique of Habermas, McCormick argues that every convincing normative theory of society must be sensitive to historical change and attentive to empirical reality. Historically insensitive and empirically inattentive modes of analysis are held to be particularly ill-suited to grasping qualitative historical transfigurations: the ways in which possibilities for freedom and justice emerge by way of structural transformations of society and state. His general point is that lack of self-consciousness concerning history encourages social-scientific misdiagnoses of the present that then feed back into material reality, affecting the future deleteriously: They close off the emancipatory possibilities they aspire to open. He makes a strong plea for returning to the Hegelian-Marxist orientation of early critical theory as practiced in an exemplary fashion by Habermas in his Public Sphere book. For this, a revived and refined critical philosophy of history is deemed essential.

This is both the strength and weakness of the book.

Although few would deny that fine-grained, historically self-conscious, sociopolitical analyses are a crucial component of any worthwhile critical theory of society, McCormick shows that we cannot take them for granted. Moreover, he reminds us how much we can learn from such analyses and highlights the dangers of dispensing with them. However, it is one thing to call for sensitivity to historical change and attentiveness to empirical reality; it is another to say that the normative vision guiding a given theory must be extrapolated from the social institutions it analyzes. He takes over this aspect of the Hegelian-Marxist philosophy of history too uncritically. Hegel and Marx were able to think of history as a process of learning through contradiction and conflict only because they took its teleological character for granted. This is what makes Habermas so wary of their philosophies of history: As he puts it, they glean from historical processes the reason they have already put into them by way of teleological concepts. McCormick never addresses the teleological aspect of the methodology he advocates. He passes over this reason for Habermas's move away from the Hegelian-Marxist philosophy of history and does not consider the difficulties that follow when teleology is dispensed with. The main difficulty is obvious: Without teleological concepts, it is not easy to explain why we may speak of structural transformations as yielding normative possibilities at all.

McCormick himself runs up against this problem. In his penetrating discussion of the Sektoralstaat, he notes its dire implications for democratic rule, legal authority, and material equality and sees it as an open question whether this mode of governance is fundamentally incompatible with constitutional principles. At the same time, he emphasizes that he does not want to imply that we ought not to be hopeful about the future of democratic practices in supranational institutions and work to attain them. But, on a Hegelian-Marxist reading of history, it is not a matter of hope. On such a reading, as McCormick himself makes clear, emancipatory possibilities, if they exist, are immanent within social institutions and must be revealed by way of critical analysis of them. Revealing the emancipatory possibilities of the Sektoralstaat is a task for another book. But to do that, McCormick will either need to come clean about teleology or to rethink his advocacy of a Hegelian-Marxist methodology.

This is not to say that the Hegelian-Marxist tradition of social theory is exhausted. Weber, Habermas, and Transformations of the European State is testimony to its continued vibrancy. It succeeds admirably in showing that we can learn much from this tradition in our attempts to gain insight into our contemporary historical situation and to secure and advance democracy and the rule of law in the twenty-first century.