La «memorabile alleanza» tra il potere del denaro e il potere delle armi nella teoria generale di Giovanni Arrighi (The «memorable alliance» between the power of money and the power of sword in Giovanni Arrighi's general theory)

A «memorable alliance», in Max Weber’s words, quoted by Giovanni Arrighi, was established in the latter half of the xv century between the rising states and the sought-after and privileged capitalist powers: such an alliance was at the core of the development, in time and space, of the expansion and geometric progression capitalist world-economy. In Arrighi’s theory (now remembered mostly because it announced the decline of capitalist West and it detected its symptom in the prominence of finance), war plays a central role, which evolves and changes from the early modern age to the early xxi century. The history of the us cycle of accumulation – empire of production and, later, of finance – is marked by war: World Wars, Cold War, Reagan’s «military Keynesianism», up to Bush and Powell’s project for a «New American Century». The object of the essay is the role fulfilled by war in Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century (1994) and Adam Smith in Beijing (2007)