Globes - 9781584351603

All history is the history of struggles for spheric expansion.--fromGlobes

In Globes -- the second, and longest,volume in Peter Sloterdijk's celebrated magnum opus Spheres trilogy -- the author attempts nothingless than to uncover the philosophical foundations of the political history -- the history ofhumanity -- of the last two thousand years. The first, well-received volume of the author'sSpheres trilogy, Bubbles, dealt with microspheres: the factthat individuals, from the fetal stage to childhood, are never alone, because they alwaysincorporate the Other into themselves and align themselves with it. With Globes,Sloterdijk opens up a history of the political world using the morphological models of the orb andthe globe, and argues that all previous statements about globalization have suffered fromshortsightedness. For him, globalization begins with the ancient Greeks, who represented the wholeworld through the shape of the orb. With the discovery of America and the first circumnavigations ofthe earth, the orb was replaced by the globe. This second globalization is currently giving way tothe third, which we are living through today, as the general virtuality of all conditions leads to agrowing spatial crisis.

Peter Sloterdijk tells here the true story ofglobalization: from the geometrization of the sky in Plato and Aristotle to the circumnavigation ofthe last orb -- the earth -- by ships, capital, and signals.