The Passage West

September 24, 2012
Acclaimed Italian philosopher and professor Marramao offers a penetrating and incisive study of the economic, political, and ideological frameworks of our current global political landscape in this English translation and revised edition of his latest book. His examination hinges on a discussion of globalization, state sovereignty, and westernization, and also touches on the contributions of diverse theorists such as Carl Schmitt, Max Weber, Karl Polanyi, and Jürgen Habermas. Marramao complicates binary tensions between the East and West, the global and the national, and the universal and the different in order to reframe these concepts within an intricate plurality of mutually contingent theoretical concepts. The central thesis of his argument contests that globalization is characterized by a simultaneously homogenizing and differentiating ideological, cultural, political, and economic passage to the West, which transforms both the West and its cultural Other. The unique structure of the book and the scholarly density of Marramao's ideas can at times seem impenetrable, but for an academic readership, this intelligent investigation is a worthy inheritance to the ideological terrain it discusses and is a significant contribution to the field of contemporary political philosophy.