While the political ramifications of social acceleration have preoccupied thinkers in a variety of disciplines at least since the Industrial Revolution, and contemporary works by such thinkers as Paul Virilio, David Harvey, James Der Derian, and William Connolly have highlighted various modes of speed, many in political science have been slow to pay heed. William Scheuerman's book aims to redress this lag in the discipline, taking up the theme of social acceleration from these and other authors and using it to frame a wide-ranging assessment of transformations to liberal democratic legal and political institutions.

Scheuerman's study builds on his previous work dealing with Carl Schmitt's critique of liberal democracy and emergency law. Updating Schmitt's earlier diagnoses, Scheuerman presents a “discouraging story” about the unbalancing of the separation of powers resulting from increasing demands for flexible, rapid political responses to social change. As Schmitt demonstrated (in both theory and practice), such requirements favor expanded executive discretion and “motorized lawmaking” over the deliberative procedures and stable public norms of parliamentary legislation. While the resulting erosion of popular accountability and the rule of law in the twentieth century has been widely underestimated by both scholars and publics, Scheuerman suggests, representative institutions might be reformed in such a way as to catch up with other institutions and processes, especially those associated with the global capitalist economy. His interdisciplinary ambitions and empirically broad scope inevitably yield mixed results. Rather than a comprehensive analysis of acceleration—which operates throughout as more a supposition than the testable hypothesis he claims—Scheuerman's valuable contributions are his reconstruction of temporal suppositions of classical liberalism and especially his detailed demonstration of their incompatibility with institutional changes in the twentieth century. His well-documented account of the blurring of normal and emergency legislation, domestic and foreign policy, and political and economic rule are all very timely. The result is an impressive and sobering overview of challenges that accelerated politics pose to popular participation, as well as some intriguing, if largely hortatory, suggestions for further research and possible reforms.

Scheuerman frames his project as a series of “grand” speculations regarding the likely effects of social acceleration on the separation of powers (Chap. 2), followed by an empirical evaluation of actual change (Chaps. 3–5). Given the retrospective character of these speculations, the latter is something of a conceit, though one followed through in an earnest manner. The discussion of social acceleration itself (Chap. 1) is the most problematic, as indicated by his defensive repudiation of “categorical mushiness” in favor of “empirical” rigor (p. 23). Scheuerman himself provides a fairly cursory taxonomy of technological, social, and experiential acceleration and then goes on to attribute change broadly to capitalist production and interstate conflict (drawing especially on David Harvey, Anthony Giddens, and Virilio). By treating various modes of social acceleration as so many factors of a “relatively autonomous” dynamic (p. 18)—a notion credited to Hartmut Rosa—rather than analyzing their reciprocal effects, Scheuerman invites charges of reification, and is led at times to tautological formulations: “… if we are correct to postulate that speed inevitably breeds the need for more speed, then it would make sense that modern society tends to experience ever more intense forms of social acceleration” (p. 22).

By contrast, the author's exposition of temporal aspects of the separation of powers—distinguishing legislative, executive, and judiciary rule by their prospective, momentary, and retrospective temporalities, respectively—makes for an instructive discussion. He draws out these themes from texts by Locke and Mill, showing how they set the stage for the subsequent expansion of executive power. Speed favors the executive branch, classically understood as the proper site of “energetic” government (p. 49). As he shows in Chapters 3 and 4, it also transforms other branches, leading to increased judicial activism and open-ended statutes that allow for extensive administrative discretion. Rapid change poses particularly severe tests for the least mutable legal norms, namely, constitutional law, the subject of Chapter 3. Taking off from Schmitt's 1950 discussion of emergency lawmaking, Chapter 4 describes the “motorization” of ordinary legislation, whereby careful deliberation and broad participation give way to hurried decisions and extensive delegation of authority to nonlegal agencies. Here Scheuerman highlights the expansion of emergency powers in response not so much to military but to economic crises, an often underappreciated “bedfellow” of neoliberalism for which he provides an instructive genealogy (p. 109).

This last argument, along with the subsequent reconstruction of temporal factors dictating the legal requirements of market forms and their mutual transformation (Chap. 5), comprise the best parts of the book. In the latter, Scheuerman offers a powerful retort to the common equation of free markets and the rule of law. As organized capital's pace increased, it left behind its dependence on prospective, stable legislation, and called forth new modes of flexible or “soft” legal control, and now often dispenses with legal regulation altogether in favor of administrative “self-regulation” (pp. 159–60). He writes, “In an astonishing historical reversal discretionary authority for the sake of global business now threatens the liberal democratic nation-state, whereas international business often gains directly from nongeneral, irregular regulations” (p. 169). He also marshals extensive research on the growth of the “imperial presidency” in the realm of economic policy. However, while these developments appear logical given classical assumptions, executive authority may itself not be well suited to fast-paced decision making, given the bureaucratic complexity of modern administrations. Scheuerman thus argues that the bias in favor of executive action or judicial autonomy and against popular modes of legislation is itself anachronistic. Under severe time pressure, bureaucratic agencies are themselves prone to haphazard decisions, and often fall prey to transnational economic organizations.

While convincing, these discussions render Scheuerman's emphasis on acceleration per se, rather than specific (especially economic) mechanisms, questionable. Indeed, in Chapter 5, capitalism becomes the prime motor of social acceleration itself (p. 158). Further, it is particularly economic government that challenges representative processes. Other conflicts, he suggests, are by contrast at least partially subject to new global legal norms, such as those embodied in human rights law (p. 182). A similar problem attends his separation of “social” speed from legal responses to it. By rejecting Schmitt's attribution of normative decay to positive law in favor of an emphasis on acceleration, Scheuerman sets up something of a false alternative—Schmitt himself linked positivism to free trade—as his discussion of legal reforms in the final chapter implies. There, Scheuerman dismisses conservative calls for social deceleration in favor of “temporal reformism,” exploring possibilities for accelerated forms of deliberation and lawmaking that might keep pace with social change and thus facilitate some degree of popular sovereignty. Along these lines, he cites a number of imaginative proposals for reforming the regulations of the Federal Communications Commission, breaking up corporate media, de-commercializing the Internet, and providing for electronic direct democracy, and he explores in some detail the potential application of “reflexive law” on the global level. All of these proposals lead to the paradox that such reforms (aimed at facilitating increased popular control over immense capitalist enterprises) themselves require broad and effective popular pressure (and the time for it), as he recognizes (p. 223). This is the only place where he seriously confronts the limits of his focus on formal institutions. As he notes, “Speed cries out for transnational governance while simultaneously undermining normatively acceptable forms of it” (p. 226). Yet, by subsuming other avenues of political action in a somewhat one-sided account of “social acceleration,” Scheuerman is left with what he has shown are relatively marginal resources for deliberative norms and representative legislation. His defense of the rule of law, unlike his analysis of its erosion, is therefore more principled than practical, though his concluding discussion of “reflexive law” as a route to de-centralized deliberative democracy is very intriguing.

However, if Scheuerman leaves us facing many of the dilemmas posed by Schmitt, this remains an important contribution. As he rightly insists, many still need to be provoked to fully confront current trends toward authoritarian economic and political rule and formulate creative responses.