Customer Reviews

Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages

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Famous Chicago sociologist, Saskia Sassen, returns with an ambitious new book on cities as the main locus of globalization. Despite being quite long (almost 500 pages!), it's quite an engaging reading. For someone interested in expanding his/her knowledge on the various facets of the process of globalization, including its economic, political and cultural dimensions, this volume is a must. In particular, I found very persuasive the way Sassen combines historical analysis with the most up-to-date reflection on modernity - the subtitle, "From Medieval to Global Assemblages", couldn't more accurate a description of what this book is really about.

Hard to do justice to an author like Sassen in a brief online comment, but her work is dynamite. Read it. It discusses the most important problem facing global society today. Sassen's work does not deal directly and extensively, at least the books I've read, enough with the problem of race, which, in my view, is what makes the situation so explosive. Her work is the type that urges people to want to do more in that direction. In the books I've read there are theoretical weaknesses that are unavoidable (much of this has been discussed very well and thoroughly by several competent scholars), yet it doesn't take anything away from the tremendous strengths that make Sassen the one author you can't afford not to read if you consider yourself well informed on the contemporary world. Read the literature about Sassen's work too.