Product Description

Where does the nation-state end and globalization begin? In Territory, Authority, Rights, one of the world's leading authorities on globalization shows how the national state made today's global era possible. Saskia Sassen argues that even while globalization is best understood as "denationalization," it continues to be shaped, channeled, and enabled by institutions and networks originally developed with nations in mind, such as the rule of law and respect for private authority. This process of state making produced some of the capabilities enabling the global era. The difference is that these capabilities have become part of new organizing logics: actors other than nation-states deploy them for new purposes. Sassen builds her case by examining how three components of any society in any age--territory, authority, and rights--have changed in themselves and in their interrelationships across three major historical "assemblages": the medieval, the national, and the global.

The book consists of three parts. The first, "Assembling the National," traces the emergence of territoriality in the Middle Ages and considers monarchical divinity as a precursor to sovereign secular authority. The second part, "Disassembling the National," analyzes economic, legal, technological, and political conditions and projects that are shaping new organizing logics. The third part, "Assemblages of a Global Digital Age," examines particular intersections of the new digital technologies with territory, authority, and rights.

Sweeping in scope, rich in detail, and highly readable, Territory, Authority, Rights is a definitive new statement on globalization that will resonate throughout the social sciences.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #211932 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Review
The book is a magisterial work of major theoretical importance and merits the close attention of scholars of global change in general and of globalization in particular. It illustrates the crucial role of historical analysis in making sense of contemporary socio-political phenomena.
(Richard W. Mansbach International History Review )

[Sassen] take[s] a broad view of territory, authority and rights from the middle ages to the era of globalization, to argue that this denationalization is itself influenced by what happened when the nation state was built. She believes the process of globalization is shaped, channeled and enabled by institutions and networks that were originally designed to build the nation state, including the rule of law and respect for private authority. Globalization builds on these institutions and networks and gives them a new direction.
(Narendar Pani Economic Times )

An erudite and spirited defense of the only approach to public policy that has brought mankind sustained economic growth, widespread alleviation of poverty, and embedded respect for the worth and dignity of the individual.
(Economic Affairs )

[A] magisterial work of enormous scope and penetrating analysis. . . . [T]his work will stand as the leading exploration of the subject for many years.
(Paul Kantor Political Science Quarterly )

University of Chicago sociologist Sassen, a leading scholar of globalization, argues convincingly that while much 'denationalization' characterizes globalization, nation building and globalization are not oppositional. . . . This work makes a significant contribution to the globalization literature.
(Choice )

One of Sassen's distinctive strengths is in studying in their full complexity the local sites of globalization, including financial centers like New York and London. . . . Sassen's work clearly reflects an understanding of the end of the globalization debate. She explains in detail how the activists often associated with 'antiglobalization' values or causes have themselves become effective global actors.
(Robert Howse Harvard Law Review )

Saskia Sassen's latest book is a significant advance in globalization studies. . . . In sum, the analytics that Sassen lays out provides away to explain and understand and explain transformation through a more complete, and complex, lens. It allows for--indeed, it demands--demands a closer look into the dynamics of change on a local scale.
(Richard Gioioso Journal of Regional Science )

Review
Territory, Authority, Rights takes up pivotal sources of friction in a process of globalization too often seen as simple and inexorable. With clarity and insight Sassen shows how the meaning of each is reconfigured in contemporary social change. Her work is essential to making sense of practical problems as well as theoretical issues.
(Craig Calhoun, Social Science Research Council )

From the Back Cover

"Territory, Authority, Rights takes up pivotal sources of friction in a process of globalization too often seen as simple and inexorable. With clarity and insight Sassen shows how the meaning of each is reconfigured in contemporary social change. Her work is essential to making sense of practical problems as well as theoretical issues."--Craig Calhoun, Social Science Research Council

"Saskia Sassen is a spectacularly original thinker. She offers us not only new concepts, but often a new vocabulary. Her central insight in Territory, Authority, Rights, that understanding globalization actually requires focusing on the national-or more precisely, the phenomenon of 'denationalization' of many familiar domestic institutions and processes-opens the door to reimagining and retheorizing some of the most fundamental physical and political elements of our world."--Anne-Marie Slaughter, Princeton University

"In this brilliant and pioneering work, Saskia Sassen provides a whole new way of thinking about globalization and political development generally. This is a stunning achievement. One of the beauties of the book is its careful historical analysis that puts the globalizing present in the contexts of the past. However, not only is the message important, but also the author's way of illustrating the story in wonderful detail, so we are reading specifics as well as sweeping abstract ideas."--Yale H. Ferguson, Rutgers University, Newark

"Territory, Authority, Rights is a bold new work by the leading scholar of globalization. It will undoubtedly engage the author's many fans, renewing the conversation about globalization that Sassen has shaped in such substantial ways over the past twenty years. But far more than merely bringing her readers up to date with her thinking, the book also represents a major new theorization of globalization. Profoundly multidisciplinary, it will reach new audiences, and in the process redefine the issues, possibilities, and theoretical stakes in globalization. Sassen responds to globalization's critics from both right and left, carving out a distinctive analytical path with critical foundations of its own. The result is persuasive and compelling--a brilliant achievement that will define the research agenda with respect to globalization for years to come."--Alfred Aman, Indiana University School of Law

Customer Reviews

Important intervention on globalisation
This is primarily a book about globalisation, though it also includes an extensive discussion of the historical emergence of the nation-state which serves to demonstrate its method and argue for parallels with the present. Rather than being a decline of the nation-state and of the national and local scales, Sassen interprets globalisation as often enacted through changes within the state itself, including the emergence of technical ministries, strengthening of executives and redefinition of state functions. The global is embedded and imbricated in the local and national by means such as the state construction of privatised regimes of regulation, the local construction of global cities and financial centres and the dependence of the entire cities on the concentration of resources in these nodes. So while a fundamental change has happened through globalisation, and it has led to the usual effects (interconnectedness, declining national scales etc), the picture here is both more complex and differently inflected.

Sassen argues that society as a complex system is inadequately expressed in unduly simplified schemas, which she implicitly associates with most other commentaries on globalisation. At a higher level of complexity and detail, the arguments of different approaches are all shown to have a certain validity but without the simplicity of their usual expression. She also shows why she thinks the tipping point for globalisation was in the 1980s, and why she differentiates this both from the global economy of the nineteenth century and from the earlier Bretton Woods regime. In this respect she makes a convincing case for her viewpoint, linking this temporalisation of change to an appreciation of the longer duration of some of the "capabilities" which made it up.

Sassen's method distinguishes between the emergence of specific institutions, techniques and social forms - what she calls "capabilities" - and the organisation of the entire system in a particular way, as an "organising logic" or "foundational" level. She claims that changes at the latter level do not necessarily require new capabilities; they can involve rearticulating existing capabilities into new combinations, and can also result from a cumulative development of capabilities. One thus ends up with a rejection of sudden breaks in history; rather, dramatic changes come about when flows already in operation reach a certain "tipping point" or "jump tracks", turning a change in capabilities into a change in organising logic. This account is developed first in relation to the emergence of the nation-state, then in relation to the changes associated with globalisation.

This is an important book which makes important points, but with certain weaknesses. Her method makes sense in principle, and her warnings about the importance of complexity and multiple factors are very necessary in a field prone to tendential oversimplifications. Her account of what changed and when is well argued and convincing, with plenty of empirical specificity. On the downside, a lot of the empirical detail of the book operates at a formal rather than a concrete level, concentrating on laws, financial instruments, institutional arrangements and so on, rather than on social relations as they actually happen. What is missing is a detailed engagement with how globalisation affects everyday life and how people respond to it. Such issues are discussed, but far more briefly than the institutional issues and without the depth of specificity on the relations involved, compared to the discussions of elites. She is too prone to assume that what is "constructed" as a "legal persona" also exists on the ground, in actual social relations (in terms of the emergence of the worker for example).

The book is somewhat repetitive and longer than it needed to be, and the case for connecting globalisation to the historical changes involved in the formation of the nation-state is not really explored. If the aim was to construct something akin to what is done by people such as Hannes Lacher and Arrighi and Silver, it really fails; these provide strong diachronic accounts tracing structures over time, whereas Sasser provides parallels which are at best suggestive. Among other things, an entire historical period, and notably the rise of the welfare state, are largely missing or skimmed over in this account.

The method at times veers towards eclecticism; Sassen has a fondness for synthesising different accounts and adopting a "bit of both" kind of approach, which means that rarely is anything left out, but at the same time, it is often unclear which forces are driving changes or why they happened one way rather than another. Descriptions of details are both excessive and uneven. In some sections, such as that on the Internet and social movements, the method is applied almost mechanically, without a real appreciation of the specificities of the assemblage concerned. While the emphasis of contingency seems to point to the possibility of many possible lines of escape from global capitalism, these possibilities are never mapped or made clear, leaving an unduly closed narrative which ends with the present. I'd also expected to read a lot more about the evolution, discursive articulation and transformation of the key concepts of the title - territory, authority and rights - and hence, something more like Foucault's "Society Must Be Defended" or "Territory, Security, Population", tracing the imaginaries and discourses associated with these concepts through their various institutional expressions. What one gets from Sassen is rather more of an empiricist use of these concepts, tracing how changes alter territorial regimes between scales, produce new rights and so on, without really linking these back to the basic concepts.