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Democracy Across Borders: From Dêmos to Dêmoi, James Bohman (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), 232 pp., $35 cloth.
In this highly persuasive account of transnational democracy, James Bohman focuses on extending the political subject from a unitary people, the dêmos, to plural and overlapping dêmoi. Bohman, the Danforth Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University, notes the extensive interdependence that characterizes the new circumstances of global politics, and argues that states have reacted either by strengthening state boundaries and increasing centralized authority or by delegating political authority to agents beyond the state. According to Bohman, the first approach has proved ineffective, and the second has led to the proliferation of principal/agent relationships in such areas as international finance, whereby the agents rather than the citizen-principals set the terms of the relationship. As a result, citizens risk losing the ability to initiate public deliberation and to "influence the terms of cooperation with others and not be ruled by them" (p. 27). These normative powers comprise the core of their status as democratic citizens, and their absence renders them vulnerable to political domination.
While many global governance scholars diagnose a global democratic deficit and conclude that the world order is in need of more democracy, Bohman interestingly posits that the more fundamental issue at stake is the democratic criterion itself. Defining democracy as "that set of institutions and procedures by which individuals are empowered as free and equal citizens to form and change the terms of their common life together, including democracy itself (p. 45), he asks what it would mean for a transnational polity to be sufficiently democratic. Following John Dewey, he responds to the "new social...