Political Theory

http://ptx.sagepub.com Book Review: Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time
Miguel Vatter Political Theory 2005; 33; 917 DOI: 10.1177/0090591705275784 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ptx.sagepub.com

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points of commonality among diverse social movements, if not in their specific goals, then the directions and dynamic of politics undertaken within them in response to repressive government policy and liberal ideology. Politics at the Margins thus points political theory in a refreshing direction, making political theory work for the people doing politics. Nadine Changfoot Trent University

LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AND THE SOCIAL ACCELERATION OF TIME, by William E. Scheuerman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. 286 pp. $42.00 (cloth).
DOI: 10.1177/0090591705275784

William Scheuerman is the author of two previous books dedicated to the crisis of liberal rule of law in Weimar Germany, as analyzed by the early Frankfurt School and by Carl Schmitt. Liberal rule of law and the forces that threaten it remains his topic in this new book, which he now approaches through a hypothesis coming from innovative recent research in German sociology (p. xv) according to which we are experiencing a fundamental temporal misfit between the social acceleration of economical and social practices and the corresponding liberal political institutions (p. 47). A typical statement of the scenario conjured up in this book runs as follows: legislators are required to take their time in order to struggle with the burdensome duty of generating norms suitable to future developments. Yet the ever more hectic pace of change in the social and economic universe which lawmakers are supposed to coordinate seems oblivious to the prerequisites of sensible legislation (p. 47). The outcome, according to Scheuerman, is that parliaments might delegate lawmaking duties to an executive pictured by classical liberal theory as best equipped to tackle fast-moving social and economic developments that call for an immediate response (p. 49). Liberal democracy is then faced with the prospect of an executive prerogative . . . destined to permeate political life (p. 51), thereby threatening the fundamental principle of the separation between legislative power and executive rule. Scheuerman ends his book by suggesting some technical politico-legal reforms through which speed might be successfully transformed into an ally rather than an enemy of liberal democracy (p. 70). The strongest part of this book is found in its central chapters (chaps. 3-5), where Scheuerman analyses the stunning proliferation of exceptional and

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emergency powers in contemporary liberal democracy (p. 65) Scheuerman expresses alarm at the steady erosion of the grasp of legislation on social reality. Here he is on familiar, quintessentially Schmittian terrain. Schmitt believes that the validity of a legal order depends on its capacity to grasp real life itself (Schmitt, Political Theology, 15), and not on its foundation in either transcendent moral values or factically given law.1 Additionally, Schmitt argues that whether law applies to reality is something determined outside of the form of the law, in a state where this form is suspended. Hence his provocative conclusion that the rule of law advocated by liberal democracy always presupposes a state of exception to law that it cannot account for, and whose actuality it represses at its own cost and peril. Scheuermans book brings Schmitts intuitions up to date with respect to the most recent developments in the practices of constitutional amendment, statutory lawmaking, and globalized international law. Of particular interest is the fourth chapter, where he discusses Schmitts claim that one of the fundamental ways in which the state of exception has entered into civil life in contemporary liberal democracies is through the management of economic crises by way of emergency powers. It is unfortunate that in his knowledgeable discussion of emergency powers Scheuerman does not engage the works of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben which today offer the most significant and influential theoretical treatment of the state of exception.2 Whereas Scheuerman claims that social acceleration lies at the root of the proliferation of states of exception, Agamben offers a bio-political account of the reasons for which the attempt to master life through law can only be achieved through the suspension of law. Agamben ultimately wants to reject the Schmittian demand that the legal form ought to grasp the real. Scheuerman, on the other hand, seems to accept the above demand. His fundamental thesis is that the real slips by the law because it is characterized by a social acceleration that is out of synch with the temporal fundaments of liberal rule of law. The first two chapters attempt to defend this thesis and, in my opinion, they are the least convincing parts of this book. By social acceleration Scheuerman means that the time it takes to do particular activities has been steadily decreasing (p. 9), as evidenced in technological acceleration, the acceleration of the pace of social change, and the heightened tempo of everyday life (p. 13). He identifies the two main sources of such speeding up in the dynamics of modern capitalism (p. 16) and the competitive state system (p. 23). Unfortunately there is hardly any discussion of the claim that the successful harnessing of speed (p. 19) in both capitalism and modern warfare is the determining factor for the obtaining of profit and victory, respectively. What is missing here, in other words, is a discussion of the rela-

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tion between the speeding up of certain activities and power. For instance, with regards to the relation between speed and capitalist exploitation of labor, Scheuerman could have looked for support in the impressive attempt to analyze the new orders of capitalism in terms of a Simmelian theory of money and its relation to speed, time and spatial location found in the recent work of French sociologist Luc Boltanski.3 What I also missed in this book on contemporary law is a discussion of the relation between speed, temporality, and normativity. For instance, in order to illustrate his thesis of a time lag between the temporal fundament of liberal legislation and social acceleration, Scheuerman cites a passage from Lockes Second Treatise which supposedly describes the proper tasks of prospective legislation as aspiring to foresee, and so by laws to provide for, all accidents and necessities that may concern the public (p. 29, citing from Second Treatise, para. 160).4 He forgets to add that the citation comes from Lockes discussion of the prerogative that the executive may have over the legislative on the grounds that it is impossible to foresee, and so by laws to provide for (my emphasis). Rather than planning and coordinating future state-intervention in society and the economy, as Scheuerman implies, legislation for Locke is bound to dispense justice, and decide the rights of the subject by promulgated standing laws, and known authorized judges (para. 136). The temporal horizon of liberal justice and rights does not seem to be the future, which would leave Locke open to Scheuermans objection that lawmakers are inevitably forced to make predictions about the likely course of a potentially significant array of succeeding social trends (p. 30), but rather the presumptively atemporal normativity associated with natural law: the law of nature stands as an eternal rule to all men, legislators as well as others (para. 135). The study of the temporal fundaments of liberal democracy advocated by Scheuerman is an important and worthwhile endeavor, but it should be carried out with a view to examining their internal relation to the normative foundations of liberal rule of law, as well as to the power relations that make it possible for individuals to become subjects of law. To confront the situation in which popular assemblies are expected to do nothing less than react effectively to a multiplicity of rapid-fire changes in social and economic life (p. 48), Scheuerman thinks we should be looking for ways to speed up the practices that generate legitimacy for the law. Perhaps it would be equally as important to understand why the law has been made to take upon itself such a burden. The fate of law in the modern world may then seem to be less determined by social acceleration than by the kind of dynamics to which Arendt and Foucault, among others, draw attention: the disappearance of political space in and through the rise of the social, and the

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replacement of political power (popular sovereignty) by biopower. For this reason, I have some doubts whether Scheuermans proposed solution, which draws on the idea of reflexive law promoted by Teubner (another product of recent German social scientific discourse), is adequate to the problems his own book helps to raise. Teubners idea of law as a regulated self-regulation (p. 212) of socioeconomic processes and interests still seems attached to the belief that a self-regulative pursuit of interests is in principle possible. Such a belief seems to require that law become instrumental to interested pursuits, and in that way no longer capable of providing for the disinterested regulation of such pursuits. As a consequence, all interests, including ones in regulation, get increasingly pursued in a manner that is literally speeding out of control. Perhaps we should not rush to discard the seemingly oldfashioned, liberal idea of law according to which a political association worthy of its name is one in which rules are followed for their own sake, and not as a means towards some end that is not itself law. We need not give in to the Schmittian demand that law grasp real life. For this demand may in the end simply be at the service of a biopolitics that wishes to dispense with law as such. Miguel Vatter Northwestern University

NOTES
1. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). 2. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); and Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 3. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2005). 4. John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1980), 84.

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