CHARLES PENNAFORTE
Understanding contemporary international developments through different lenses.
Karl Marx in the first lines of his striking essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte), published in 1852, writes: “Hegel remarks somewhere thatall great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. A few lines further on he writes: “Men make their
own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances already existing, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in
order to present this new scene in worldhistory in time-honored disguise and borrowed language”.
Historical and political dynamics lend themselves to a series of interpretations. They are sometimes convergent, sometimes divergent, sometimes complementary. One of these frameworks is constituted by the writings and analyses of neo-Marxist authors. Professor Charles Pennaforte in the present book draws largely on those authors, for instance Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi, Beverly Silver, Antonio Gramsci, Luciano Gruppi, Antonio Negri, Michael Hart. Immanuel Wallerstein’s contributions to the analysis of contemporary societies through the concepts of the World-Economy and World-Systems Analysis are well known. Professor Charles Pennaforte provides a clear, dense and solid synthesis of this important scientific contribution, recalling that its origins lies in François Braudel’s Ecole des Annales, Marxism and the Dependency theory. The process of economic globalization is studied in a precise, clear and detailed way by Professor Charles Pennaforte through the neo-Marxist perspective.
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