surprisingly, they ultimately engender a defensive account of transnational
democracy in which global publics and civil society do little more than
inXuence or counter-steer the commanding heights of global authority. The
self-legislation of the deliberative citizen is thereby reduced to one of its
presuppositions, a free-wheeling deliberative civil society. Without more
eVective institutional devices, however, existing global power holders will
continue to disregard global civil society if they so desire.
Another potential errorXows from the imagery of an ‘‘anonymous’’ and
‘‘subject-less’’ civil society. Of course, a lively deliberative democracy is only
anonymous and subject-less in ametaphoricalsense. If a legitimate delibera-
tive democracy rests on genuinely free and equal opportunities foreveryone
to deliberate about matters impacting them, the resulting deliberative process
will in reality rest on the input ofnumeroussubjects. Properly speaking, it is
neither anonymous nor subject-less. Indeed, its core ideal makes it incum-
bent on us to ensure thateveryonemight have the opportunity to participate
meaningfully in public debate and deliberation and shape decision-making.
As noted in the previous section, deliberative democracy is not per se the
‘‘rule of deliberative reasons,’’ but instead should be properly understood as
the ‘‘self-rule of citizens by (deliberative) reasons.’’ The danger here is that the
translation of deliberative democracy into anonymous and subject-less dis-
course risks downplaying indispensable democratic attributes of deliberative
democracy; it may also lead those who reproduce this imagery to embrace
correspondingly misleading institutional proposals. Deliberative democracy
only deserves to be described as democratic if deliberation is undertaken by
(concretely situated human) subjects for the sake of achieving self-rule or
self-legislation. The peril at hand is that this translation threatens unwittingly
to privilege (‘‘anonymous,’’ ‘‘subject-less’’) deliberation over democracy by
downplaying the central place ofself-legislating (and deliberating) subjectsto
democracy. As the German critical theorist Ingeborg Maus similarly worries,
by transforming the principle of popular sovereignty into freelyXuctuating,
subject-less deliberation, in Habermas’ theory ‘‘communicatively generated
power threatens to become nearly ubiquitous’’ (Maus 1996 , 875 ). But this
move potentially makes it diYcult to assure the strict legal accountability of
state actors to the sovereign people, which Maus rightly describes as a
necessary precondition of democratic self-legislation (Maus 1992 ). To
whom exactly are state agents to be made accountable if the demos is always
Xuid and subject-less? How are its desires to be eVectively funneled and
ultimately given binding general legal form if communicative power is both
100 william e. scheuerman