Political Spaces and Global War

by Carlo Galli, Elisabeth Fay (Translator), Adam Sitze (Editor)

Political theorists have long debated whether globalization marks a novel form of political and economic order or is simply a reconfiguration of older capitalist and imperialist imperatives. Carlo Galli contends that it is neither; rather, globalization is the development, in a new and destructive direction, of the unstable and precarious equilibrium that constituted modern political space from its very inception.


The first book by Galli, the influential Italian historian of political thought, to be translated into English, Political Spaces and Global War offers a provocative genealogy of the global age. By connecting the foundations of classical and modern political thought to the concrete arrangements of geographical space that inform those concepts, Galli reveals globalization to be, qualitatively and quantitatively, an extreme torsion of modern political space. Central to Galli's understanding of the fundamental instability of modern political space is that warfare, usually seen as a breakdown in the prevailing order, can no longer be distinguished from politics-globalization is, in effect, a world of war.


Tracing the concept of political space from Greek and Roman philosophy to the post-9/11 period, Galli shows that the modern nation-state, in theory and practice, contains within it the conditions for both its own implosion (into totalitarianism) and explosion (as globalization). To move beyond this crisis, he argues, the logic of modern political space and the national boundaries that define it must be boldly reimagined.

304 pages, Paperback

First published October 26, 2010

About the author

Ha insegnato Storia delle dottrine politiche all'Università di Bologna. È presidente, dal 2009, della Fondazione Gramsci Emilia-Romagna. Ha ideato e dirige numerose collane scientifiche presso editori come il Mulino e Laterza. Ha partecipato a convegni e seminari in diverse Università europee, statunitensi e sudamericane. Ha diretto l’Enciclopedia del pensiero politico (Roma – Bari, Laterza, 2000, II ed. 2005). Collabora con periodici culturali e politici in Italia e all’estero, ed è editorialista politico per alcuni dei più importanti quotidiani nazionali. Dal 2018 fa parte del Comitato direttivo dell’associazione di cultura e politica “il Mulino”.

Reviews

[Mitya · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Schmitt took a term from the medieval Catholic thinker Nicholas de Cusa: complexio oppositorum. According to Galli, Schmitt understood the complexio neither as a dialectical synthesis (a simple coincidence of opposites), nor as an eclectic relativism (a jumble of plural and variegated qualities), but rather as "a form in which life and reason coexist without forcing," a single heirarchy the integrity of which derives, above, all, from the way it reconciles and preserves many different, even opposed forms of life in the single "glorious form" of Christ's Person. For Schmitt, Galli argues, the genealogical significance of the complexio is not theological but political: Schmitt is interested in the complexio because of the way in which its mode of representation—the extreme publicity and visibility through which all opposites coincided in the immediate mediacy of Christ's Person—in turn being called into a relatively stable and enduring political order."

The history of modern political space is one of conflict and division between the particular universal and the universal particular in the absence of the complexio oppositorum.