Review essayCarlo Galli, Carl Schmitt, and contemporary Italian political thoughtPolitical Spaces and Global War, , University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (2010)
Section snippets
The Bologna effect
As explained in the Editor’s Introduction, Galli teaches Storia delle dottrine politiche at the University of Bologna, a key site for the production of European political thought. Sitze insists at length on the ‘power of place’ (Bologna) in presenting Galli’s work and political context. Introduced as a student to the Frankfurt School, Galli demonstrated already in his early writings to be a sophisticated connoisseur of German philosophy and political thought (1973). In particular, all along his
Spazi Politici
Of the two Galli essays included in Political Spaces and Global War, the first, Spazi Politici (Political Spaces) is beyond doubt the more original and interesting. While Spazi Politici presents a thorough, if rather linear and conventional, ‘history’ of the relationship between space and politics, Guerra Globale is a 2002 reflection on globalization and the events of 11 September 2001 that adds little to the large body of popular and semi-academic literature already existing on the topic. In
Conclusions
I conclude with a few remarks in order to complement a rather harsh critique with a few positive considerations on the contribution that Political Spaces and Global War may bring to the contemporary discussion on these topics.
The first one is the question of contextualization. Despite my perplexities about how the ‘Bologna effect’ is presented by the editor, I believe this to be one of the best introductions to a new (at least for a specific audience) author that I have encountered. Sitze’s
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