Ian Clark has written two books about international legitimacy. Linked by Clark's conviction that legitimacy is a normatively freighted practice, related to but not to be confused with moral, legal, and constitutional practices, the two books are complementary in design. The first (Legitimacy in International Society, 2005) forthrightly accepts a guiding premise of the English School: States are members of a distinct society, reflected in common rules and institutions that have grown up over several centuries. In that book, he holds that the core principles legitimating any society, including international society, depend on a social bond or sense of obligation.

In the book under review, Clark extends his analysis to “world society,” by which he means all those social movements and transnational networks that have grown up in response to international society and the massive, many–faceted impact it has on our lives. In turn, this move calls attention to the constructivist literature focused on the normative impact that global social movements and transnational networks have had on international society. If world society has provided international society with a stock of new principles reflecting a changing normative climate, then international society has given world society “a juridical basis for its norms” (p. 33) and thus a framework within which to foster its normative concerns. Several case studies substantiate the normative development of this mutual relationship over two centuries.

Clark's conceptualization of the two societies and their evolving relationship would seem to be an exemplary yet unexplored instance of the process of agent-structure co-constitution (cf. p. 178). International society is a passive structure within which world society functions as an agent, acting through the many transnationally organized groups committed to normative change. At the same time, international society functions as an agent, acting on behalf of states, monitoring and regulating the structure of world society. So far, so good: Agents are structures, and structures agents, depending on an observer's perspective.

Unfortunately, Clark's largely implicit conception of agency is unconvincing. Agents must have powers. International society may be seen to possess such powers, at least in a limited sense, when leading states join together and act on its behalf. Even if the author tends to personify international society to an unwarranted degree (for example, he asks how “international society comes to know what it wants,” p. 175, his emphasis), its powers are institutionalized in and through international conferences, principled statements, and legal instruments. By contrast, world society is “more inchoate than its international counterpart” yet still has “some recognizable substance” (p. 22)—recognizable in the historical record. Given Clark's concession that the “notion of world society is notoriously slippery” (p. 6) and his tendency to personify world society fully as much as he does international society (“it is best seen through its own internal search for an acceptable collective identity,” p. 188), one wonders if the substance in question isn't simply his projection onto an inchoate social reality.

Turning to Clark's case studies, the historical record is less clear than he thinks. His first case is the abolition of the international slave trade, in which Britain took the lead after Napoleon's defeat. Given resistance from other states, conceptualizing abolition as international society's response to pressure from world society is less convincing than construing it as an act undertaken by members of the abolition movement, churches, Parliament, and government ministries, working together for normative change, aided by British hegemony and allied movements in other countries. An upwelling of humanitarian sentiment on many fronts supported this active conjunction, which in turn gave incipient liberal society, domestic and international, lasting normative color.

The Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907 give Clark his second case. Surprisingly, he dismisses the conferences's success in rendering the customary law of war into multilateral conventions. For international society, this was business as usual. Yet privately associated international lawyers had been preparing draft instruments for more than two decades—texts available for conference delegates to act on when the opportunity unexpectedly presented itself. Instead, Clark dwells on the Martens clause (preambular language for one of the 1899 Conventions), which speaks of “the laws of humanity and the dictates of public conscience.” Although he interprets this reference to conscience as emblematic of The Hague's turn toward “prioritizing the interests of humanity” (p. 82), it is a familiar trope in eighteenth-century natural law discourse, and it reappears in the rhetoric of the international lawyers whose drafts made the 1899 Conventions possible.

Clark's third case investigates the discussion of racial equality at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. While he sees this episode as an “encounter” between international society and “a norm emanating from world society” (p. 84), the evidence suggests that the norm in question should be labeled “equality of races,” not “racial equality.” Japan had an interest in the former as an international society norm; it would take decades for world society (here meaning liberal sentiment) to be ready for the latter norm. The author's fourth case treats the acknowledgment of labor in the League Covenant and the creation of the International Labor Organization as the normative development of international society's concern for social justice. Missing here is crucial context provided by the emergence of functionally defined international institutions mobilizing technical expertise for dealing with social problems.

Clark's fifth case is the inclusion of human rights language in the United Nations Charter. He suggests that the process of normative change is less the doing of the U.S. government than conventional opinion holds, emphasizing, for example, the role of the Latin American states at San Francisco. In this context he identifies Ricardo Alfaro, delegate from Panama, as a key figure. He should also have noted that Alfaro was not just a Washington “insider,” having spent much of his public life there, but a member of a closely knit, influential community of lawyers whose connections and commitments make any distinction between Clark's two societies unintelligible.

Clark's last case is the elevation of democracy as an international society norm in the 1990 Charter of Paris. At best, this is a norm whose reach is limited to the liberal world, notwithstanding the universal pretensions with which liberal norms are typically cloaked. Overall, he has remarkably little to say about liberal ideology and the way it has conditioned modernity's normative scaffolding. Rather, he interprets the norms he has studied as “piecemeal precursors of what was eventually to become an integrated set of norms guaranteeing universal human rights” (p. 182). Piecemeal, yes; integrated, no; universal, hardly.

To see these norms as marking moments in the human rights movement is simply anachronistic. To imply that human rights mark the impending integration of international society and world society runs against Clark's claim that the two societies are autonomous. He tells us nothing about the structure of an integrated society. In such a society, how could states' agents have the powers that sovereignty confers on them today? Will world society eventually deny international society its legitimacy?