This essay aims to explore what it takes to globalize conceptual history by dealing with two analyses of the concept of state that in different ways and with different objectives called for a reassessment of its history and for the need to make a step beyond 'methodological nationalism'. One is that of Otto Brunner, who, based on the history before the European modern state, assesses the need to disentangle constitution from statehood to be able to comprehend the social and political forces producing unity and order. The other one is that of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak who starts from colonial and postcolonial state to investigate the non-correspondence of the global history of statehood to the history of its concept and to affirm the need to understand them against the backdrop of global capitalism. Contrasting Brunner's and Spivak's positions allows highlighting some of the major theoretical challenges that a global stance on conceptual history entails.

This essay stitches together the fragments of Marx's work on the United States that are scattered in newspaper articles, letters, notes, in some digressions in his early writings, in his economic manuscripts and in Capital (1867). The main aim is to show that what we can call a “global history of the Civil War” emerges from his pen: a history that is global not simply in a geographical sense, that is, because it expands the European space beyond the Atlantic and towards the Pacific, but also because of the general meaning it takes on in the history of capitalism. The essay highlights how the Civil War opened the Marxian issue of emancipation, his vision of class struggle and his view of the working class, to the presence of a black proletariat that interacted with the struggle of the white working classes, the latter of which until then had been the main focus of his work. It also highlights how the different and disarticulated voices of labor – slave and free, black and white –...

Nella crisi dell’ordine politico tra Medioevo ed Età moderna, la vita e l’azione profetica della “santa viva” Caterina da Racconigi (1486–1547) consentono di rileggere il nesso tra politica e teologia, mostrandone aspetti spesso trascurati. Il carisma profetico di Caterina è politico perché consiste nel coraggio di dire la verità davanti al popolo e ai potenti. Mentre critica le gerarchie, la sua ansia di rinnovamento religioso è il segno di una indisciplinata razionalità profetica.

The essay offers a new understanding of Henry Charles Carey's (1793-1879) social science. As one of the major intellectuals of the antebellum period that actively participated in the Republican Party, Carey's works marked a reinterpretation of US nationalism in which the State became the guarantee of the exceptional American social order against social conflict and economic crisis following the capitalistic transition. Protectionism was conceived as a political measure to defend the harmony of the nation's interests. His social science should be understood as an attempt to scientifically re-legitimize the order: as a social science of the American nation.

This chapter aims to discuss some of the conceptual underpinnings of the prospect of knowledge socialism. I analyze selected characteristics of knowledge socialism found in current literature, especially in Michael A. Peters’ works and related authors. I discuss its condition(s) by methodically posing the question of who takes part in knowledge, based on an introduced concept of distribution of the knowable. I point to the issues related to the notion of general intellect and to the indispensability of considering the consequences of digital transformation. I argue that for knowledge socialism to work out a viable alternative to the current developments of knowledge capitalism, one has to rethink the core importance of externalization and commodification for knowledge.

L'articolo ricostruisce la crisi e la riaffermazione dell'ordine patriarcale nell'Inghilterra del Seicento e primo Settecento a partire dai testi di Sir Robert Filmer, John Locke, Mary Astell e delle predicatrici, profetesse e petitioners. The article explores the crisis and reaffirmation of patriarchal order in Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth century England starting from the texts of Sir Robert Filmer, John Locke, Mary Astell and female preachers, prophets and petitioners.