Political Spaces and Global War

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.

Carlo Galli is professor in the Department of Historical Disciplines at the University of Bologna and president of the Gramsci Institute, Emilia-Romagna.