Political Geography 31 (2012) 250–253
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Political Geography
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo
Review essay
Carlo Galli, Carl Schmitt, and contemporary Italian political
thought
Political Spaces and Global War, C. Galli. University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis (2010).
Ich verliere meine Zeit und gewinne meinen Raum: ‘I lose my time
and win my space’. With this quote from Carl Schmitt, Carlo Galli
tellingly opens Political Spaces and Global War. This reference to
Schmitt is indeed revealing of the ways in which Galli understands
space in relation to ‘the political’, an understanding that marks,
directly or indirectly, all of his considerations on ‘the spatial’ found
in this volume. To be sure, Political Spaces and Global War consists of
three short books in one. It includes the translation of two essays
published by Galli in Italian at the beginning of the past decade
(Spazi Politici, 2001, 133 pp. and La Guerra Globale, 2002, 54 pp.),
and a long introductory essay penned by Adam Sitze (75 pp.),
a sort of book-within-the-book, both in terms of content and aims.
The choice to publish this volume can be interpreted in several
different ways. On the one hand, it must certainly be welcomed,
since it represents the first translation, at least in the form of
a book, of the work of one of the most prominent contemporary
Italian historians of political thought. So introducing Galli’s contri-
bution to the analysis of modern European thought is, indeed,
a much needed intervention in the contemporary debate con-
cerned with the redefinition of ‘the political’. On the other hand,
the sudden ‘discovery’ of Galli’s work on the part of English
speaking academia (and the related publishing industry) may be
possibly linked to a growing and more general interest, internation-
ally, for Italian political philosophy, an interest largely sparked by
the enormously influential work of philosophers like Giorgio
Agamben and Antonio Negri, but also by the increasing popularity
of scholars like Roberto Esposito, Paolo Virno, Gianni Vattimo,
Mario Tronti, Christian Marazzi, and many others (as recently illus-
trated by Chiesa and Toscano in their The Italian Difference, 2009;
see also Esposito, 2010). The analysis of this impact is beyond the
scope of this short essay, but it is useful to keep this background
in mind when considering the appearance of Political Spaces and
Global War. More specifically, the potential interest for Galli’s
work can be linked to the growing international literature on Carl
Schmitt, a topic on which Galli has in many ways an unparalleled
expertise (p. xi).
Geographers should thus pay attention to the appearance of
a book of this kind outside of geography, since some of its tenets
engage directly, albeit often in a rather problematic way, with the
spatialization of politics. Nonetheless, the contribution of what Galli
defines as ‘political geography’ is deliberately kept at the margins of
his argument – a ‘decision’ that per se deserves further scrutiny and
engagement.
doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.10.004
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 sophisti-
cated connoisseur of German philosophy and political thought
(1973). In particular, all along his very successful career, he estab-
lished himself as a widely respected ‘schmittologist’: Galli is not
only probably the most authoritative ‘interpreter’ of Schmitt’s rela-
tionship to Italian academia (1981), but his monumental Genealogia
della Politica. Carl Schmitt e la crisi del pensiero moderno (1996, 939
pp.) is possibly the most comprehensive interpretation of Schmitt
in relation to modern European political thought ever published.
Galli is also the editor-in-chief of Filosofia Politica – a highly influen-
tial journal in Italian political philosophy (Roberto Esposito is one of
the other editors) – and a very active political commentator for La
Repubblica, Italy’s highest circulation national newspaper. All in all,
Galli is today a very well known public intellectual, now also
directly involved in politics, with his collaboration with the Partito
Democratico.
Galli’s biography is well illustrated by Sitze’s comprehensive
review (again, a sort of book-within-the-book), which has the merit
to introducing the Anglophone readership not only to Galli’s work,
but also, at least in part, to the Italian political context of the 1970s,
in which Galli was trained and during which the crisis of the state
was deeply felt by many intellectuals of the left, giving life to
different forms of experimental political thought (pp. xvi–xx).
This brief contextualization, I trust, provides a clear sense of the
ambition and, at the same time, the complicated intellectual (and
genealogical) implications of an editorial operation such as this
one. Before spending some time on the content of the book(s), I
would like to submit three brief critical notes in this respect. The
first has to do with the choice of translating these two ‘minor’
books, instead of Galli’s seminal work on Schmitt. This latter is
not only much more indicative of his personal and professional
trajectory, but it includes possibly the most original elements of
his scholarly contribution, something that would have made
a significant impact on the contemporary literature on the German
legal theorist. The books translated here are neither the best part of
his production, nor particularly important for the present day
debate on the relationship between space and politics. Global War
in particular reads very much like a collection of materials pub-
lished elsewhere, missing clear references to the key literature,
something of very scarce academic interest. The relative marginal-
ity of these two books is somewhat implicitly confirmed by Sitze’s
introduction, which largely focuses on ‘Galli the schmittologist’,
 Review essay / Political Geography 31 (2012) 250–253
and in particular on his seminal Genealogia, and less than one
would expect on the books included in this volume.
Second, Sitze’s commentary – the kind of introduction that
possibly authors like Agamben and Esposito should have had and
did not have when they first appeared in English – spends quite
of bit of time in emphasizing the relevance of the Bologna experi-
ence and Italian politics of the 1970s as the intellectual context
for Galli’s work. While this is certainly helpful, what is less
convincing is the way in which Sitze seems to link Galli to the
work of some key radical thinkers in 1970s Italy, as if they were
similarly the by-product of the political momentum that the
country was experiencing. This association is potentially problem-
atic – although Sitze is clear about their distance in reading Schmitt
(p. xxi) – since the relationship between Galli (his political stance
but also his work) and, for example, the so-called post-workerist
left, that is, scholars like Tronti, Negri, but also Venetian philoso-
pher Massimo Cacciari (see p. xxi, but also Lotinger and Marazzi,
2007; Chiesa & Toscano, 2009) is only mentioned but never fully
explained. More should be said, for example, about how the atmo-
sphere of those years, dominated as it was by the so-called ‘strategy
of tension’, affected Galli’s work – if it did – while in the meantime
clarifying his relationship to the most radical versions of Italian
political thought of those very years.
Third, Bologna is presented by Sitze as an almost mythical site of
production and circulation of political thought. However, we are
told very little about the contemporary context in which Galli
works, and in which he published both of the two books here trans-
lated and, more importantly Genealogia. For example, Galli never
mentions Franco Farinelli, a prominent geographer and intellectual
figure working in Bologna at the same university, whose work has
extensively – and very convincingly – analyzed the relationship
between Western (also political) thought and space (1992, 2001,
2008). Farinelli has also famously theorized the cartographic
reasoning that seems to be at the foundations of (at least part of)
Galli’s understanding of the artificial nature of capitalist and ratio-
nalist spatial thinking. How is it possible that Galli ignores someone
who literally works next door on very similar topics? Also, why
does Sitze’s criticism engage only with the Bologna of the 1970s,
but not the contemporary political context (the ‘Berlusconi years’,
so to speak) in which Galli’s more recent work was elaborated?
My point here is that, while recognizing the ‘power of Bologna’ as
a site where political thought was and remains strongly linked to
the tradition of its university and to its political history as a strong-
hold of the Italian Left is important and helpful, what emerges here
is a rather partial picture that may induce the reader to see facile
links between different streams of progressive or radical Italian
political thought that remain, instead, to be fully investigated.
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 thor-
ough, 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 Guerra Globale, Galli borrows heavily
from other thinkers (e.g. Appadurai, Luttwak, Sassen), ignores
others (e.g. Castells and a huge body of related literature on space,
identity, and postmodernity), introduces glaring factual errors (at
one point the Taliban is conflated with Al Qaeda), has some
mistranslations (‘stato sociale’ is consistently translated as ‘social
State’ when Galli is referring to the welfare state), and overall
displays a disconcerting tendency to indulge in unsubstantiated
251
grand claims – sadly, something typical of certain popular-
pseudo-academic literature in Italy. In short, this piece does little
but detract from the insights of Spazi Politici which, while flawed
and perhaps not the best representative of Galli’s writings, none-
theless can make a significant contribution for English speakers
who seek to engage with contemporary Italian political theory.
In Spazi Politici, Galli engages – albeit sometimes with a degree
of superficiality – with the huge bulk of literature that has made
European political thought as we know it. Traveling across the
continent, he touches upon, in a somewhat genealogical fashion,
many of the key protagonists of that tradition, while showing
how it was always inherently associated to a specific idea of space,
or, more generally, of the spatial:
The space that shall interest us is specifically political space. It is
even more precisely, the space of the implicit political represen-
tations in which and through which political thought supports
itself. Our first hypothesis in this work, in fact, is that space is
one of the inescapable dimensions for politics; it is through
specifically spatial representations [.] that political theories
form their concepts, arrange their actors, and devise the aims of
politics in terms of collaboration and conflict, order and
disorder, hierarchy and equality [.] in our emphasis we are
dealing with a dimension that is much less conspicuous than
time; there have been many more methodical and sophisticated
reflections on progress, secularization, or the end of history than
on the relationship between space and politics (p.4).
Galli’s understanding of space is in many ways very ‘Schmittian’,
as is his take on ‘the political’. His very broad historical analysis
stretches across the centuries, from the ancient Greeks to the Modern
era, via Medieval and Christian spatialities, to illustrate the links that
connect, in a rather complicated but fascinating way, Machiavelli to
Thomas Moore, Hobbes to Rousseau and all the other ‘founding
fathers’ of European political thought to follow. His genealogical
reconstruction of these political spatialities places particular
emphasis on Hegel and Kant, and on their ways of understanding
the question of space in relation to modern politics. While Marx is
briefly mentioned and quickly dismissed (pp. 73–76), Galli grants
a surprising degree of attention to Ernst Jünger and his idea of ‘total
mobilization’, which is put into relation with the explosive tensions
of the 1900s between, on the one hand, ideas of universal and flat
space (the spaces of the State and of capitalism, but capitalism, again,
is only in the background of this reconstruction), and, on the other,
the parallel return of ‘place’, especially but not only in German
thought (pp. 94–96; pp. 143–145). While Galli must be praised for
engaging with Jünger – a forgotten source in English speaking
academia, possibly because of his totalitarian leanings during the
1920s and 1930s – one wonders why no mention is made here of Fou-
cault and his highly influential speculations on power and space.
Sitze’s essay reflects at length on how Galli positions himself as
a ‘non schmittian schmittologist’ and on how from this position
he famously argues that engaging with Schmitt in order to under-
stand globalization and postmodernity is of no use. For Galli, reading
the present through a schmittian lens is deceiving for two main
reasons: first, because we are presented today with an a-spatial
regime (p. 156), while Schmitt’s understanding of the political is
based on a specific, solid and concrete conception of space. Second,
because Schmitt was eminently a man of his time, and only in that
perspective should we read both his political leanings and his spatial
thinking. This explains why Galli proposes his ‘analysis of modern
political space’ as an analysis that ‘will allow us a first comprehen-
sion, in the negative, of global political space’ (Italics added).
In this perspective, a key element that Spazi Politici develops
historically is the (also spatial) tension between the universal and
the particular, something that some geographers would probably
252 Review essay / Political Geography 31 (2012) 250–253
read as the tension between Euclidian, or better, ‘cartographic’
space and place (Farinelli, 2008). Galli often refers to the space
produced by the modern secular state as a form of ‘geometry’,
a geometry inherently in tension with the ‘return of the local’ and
with the question of place – especially as formulated within
German thought of the 1800s and 1900s. While Galli’s under-
standing of place (pp. 76–82) is superficial and seems oblivious of
all that has been written on it in the past century or so, and while,
again, he seems to ignore the influential work done on the same
topic by his Bologna colleague Franco Farinelli, at the same time,
his insistence on this tension is helpful in addressing the crisis of
the modern state also as a spatial question. Regrettably, there is
no room here to expand on this. However, it may suffice to say
that in Spazi Politici the universal-particular dialectic is also linked
– although this link is not fully developed – to the question of the
immanence–transcendence dialectic in the constitution of modern
politics, a set of tensions at the origin of the permanent crisis of the
state, a crisis that Galli invites us to investigate in spatial terms.
In my view, the best part of the book is where Galli put these ques-
tions in relation to Kant (p. 86) and Hegel and their respective real and
imagined ‘world political spatialities’. This is possibly the terrain
where Galli can provide the most fruitful contribution to the contem-
porary discussion on space and the political, also in relation to
Schmitt’s place within that same discussion. This is also where Galli
explicitly links (again, without further developing his argument)
Hegel’s geographies to the founding fathers of modern geography:
.in Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history, meanwhile, the
universality of the Spirit’s space is even more explicitly deter-
mined by particularity. Relying on the historically based geog-
raphy of Karl Ritter, and in (mutual) opposition to the physical
geography of Alexander von Humboldt, Hegel describes the
journey of logos in geographically determined and spatially
limited ways. The historio-geographical linearity of the path taken
by Spirit – which proceeds along the privileged Mediterranean
vector from the east to the west, from Asia to Europe – implies
a verdict of exclusion for Africa and America [.] from this
geographical foundation of Weltgeschichte (world history) (p.72)
Despite this rather superficial presentation of 19th century
German thought (and in particular of the erdkunde project, Minca,
2007), what is of interest here is the suggestion that the history
of geographical thought – and of the spaces of the political – should
be read in connection with Hegel and Kant, a suggestion (and a link)
that geographers should probably engage within full (see Farinelli,
2001; also Olsson, 2004).
The main problem with this otherwise fascinating excursus,
however, is Galli’s rather confused conceptualization of space, pre-
sented in the first pages of the book (pp. 5–6):
our second hypothesis is that the spatial representations that
are implicit in political thought derive from the concrete
perception and organization of geographic space as experienced
by a given society. The implicit spatial representations of polit-
ical thought, in other words, refer back to the explicit
displacement of space realized by the concrete articulations of
power and powers on the world stage
our third hypothesis [.] is that modernity entertains a partic-
ularly difficult relationship with space, in which the dominant
element is political (centered on the Subject, State and Society),
and not space understood in a natural sense
finally, our fourth hypothesis [.] is that the politico-spatial
categories of the Modern are no longer usable today.
For Galli, space seems to be sometimes a ‘measure of the real’,
that is, a theory of space – while at other times, he refers to
space as something ‘out there’, something very concrete. It
may well be that Galli thinks that space is both – but then this
should be made clear in the first place. The result is that after
reading Spazi Politici three times I am not yet sure what ‘kind
of space’ he is conceptualizing in relation to politics. This
perplexity gets even greater when Galli discusses the ‘a-spatial’
condition of globalization (p. 157). Or, when he refers to the arti-
ficiality of spatial thinking (compared to place thinking?) (see
pp. 85). This is an important point, since the entire collection
(the three books/essays that make Political Spaces and Global
War) is marked by this lack of clarity about the conceptualization
of space. I am left with the impression that this is also the result
of the confusion/overlapping between terminologies of space
and territory – two concepts normally kept clearly distinct in
both Italian and Francophone geography– that dominates Galli’s
account.
What is also missing is a clear definition of power, in relation to
space. How can space be related to politics with no clear conceptu-
alization of power? I would like to suggest, with the risk of falling
into the trap of disciplinary parochialism, that some of these prob-
lems could have possibly been avoided Galli had been interested in
engaging with some of the literature in critical geography of the
past few decades where those very concepts are discussed at length
and in rather sophisticated ways. Interestingly, Galli does refer to
geography in several passages of Spazi Politici, but he seems to
get most of the references wrong. And when he compares his
project with that of ‘political geography’, it is not at all clear what
the nature of this latter project is supposed to be.
At the same time, despite Sitze’s warnings to the reader about
the fact that this book does not follow the academic canon, Galli’s
reference to other disciplines (and to geography in particular) is
indeed present but rather unconvincing (p. 9):
the category that allows us to render premodern spaces intel-
ligible is political geography. With this term, we certainly do not
refer to the scientific discipline we know today, but to the
political quality of geography or, better, the intrinsic politicity of
space that unites and separates human groups made different,
as if by fate, because of their natural geographical location. We
will outline this originary of space with a brief excursus that
runs from the large scale to the small scale (from Indo-European
spatiality, to Europe, to the City and its internal struggle) and
then returns again to the large scale (to Empire and Christian
universalism).
There are at least two other striking examples of Galli’s rather
superficial approach to geographical thought. Not only is there no
reference to Geopolitik (or to Haushofer), but when discussing
geopolitics his main source appears to be General Carlo Jean and
his largely journalistic account entitled Geopolitica (1996). The
second, which is even more surprising considering Galli’s deep
knowledge of German theory and philosophy, is the complete
absence of Frederic Ratzel as a theorist of space and politics. These
conspicuous absences are complemented by a banal approach to
the question of borders, again a topic extensively discussed in
recent years in geography and beyond (see for instance Rumford,
2010; Vaughan-Williams, 2009). When these absences are
compiled with the numerous gaps in Guerra Globale, one is struck
as much by the lacunae in Galli’s thoughts as by his contributions.
This is surely not what the editor intended, and it serves as an
unfortunate introduction for readers who are not familiar with
Galli, as his contributions in his other writings are significant.
However, for experienced readers this presentation of some of Gal-
li’s lesser known works, and Sitze’s introduction to them, are
revealing.
 Review essay / Political Geography 31 (2012) 250–253
Conclusions
I conclude with a few remarks in order to complement a rather
harsh critique with a few positive considerations on the contribu-
tion that Political Spaces and Global War may bring to the contem-
porary 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 long essay
is precisely the kind of introduction that is sorely needed when a new
academic context together with a set of ideas are ‘translated’ and
brought to different intellectual shores, and I do believe that both
the author and the publisher must be praised for that.
A second positive element is the fact that Sitze’s introduction
deliberately focuses more on Galli’s oeuvre and, as a reflection of
that, on Schmitt and Schmittian studies, than on these two books.
This was a very wise decision, I believe, since the reader is left
with the desire and the curiosity to engage more in depth with Gal-
li’s work, well beyond the somewhat deluding experience of the
present two essays.
Thirdly, Galli dedicates the final pages of Spazi Politici to readings of
‘the global’ on the part of several contemporary scholars: Beck, Hoffe,
Habermas, Held, Rawls, Nussbaum, etc. but also Nancy, Negri and
Hardt. This account would have been potentially very fruitful – albeit
not entirely original – had only Galli decided to critically engage with
that debate and the related authors, but what we get instead is a rather
a-critical account of the same. This is a real pity, also because, again, his
discussion seems to marginalize key thinkers like Heidegger, Foucault
(barely mentioned), Bataille (completely absent) and many others.
While this is obviously a missed opportunity, Galli’s reflections on
the spaces of the global hint in a few passages at perspectives and
materials that the readership of this journal may find of interest.
His considerations on space and movement, following Jünger, and
his brief discussion of greater spaces a la Schmitt – but in this case
contra Schmitt – are certainly potentially profitable areas to explore
253
for the contemporary political geographer, together with the connec-
tions that he traces between Hegel and Kant and modern geography.
In conclusion, this volume could be read as a missed opportu-
nity to rethink the spaces of politics, but also, at the same time,
as an invitation to explore new venues by engaging with long
standing but sometimes forgotten (by geographers at least) lines
of thought. This last comment deliberately intends to be an invita-
tion to the publisher to consider a more comprehensive engage-
ment with Galli’s work – and to the reader to not be put off by
this rather odd attempt at an ‘anthology’.
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Claudio Minca
Cultural Geography Department, Wageningen University,
Droevendaalsesteeg 3, 6708 PB Wageningen, The Netherlands
E-mail address: claudio.minca@wur.nl