Although political theorists have long shared the intuition of a crucial relationship between space and democracy, space has remained under-theorized in political theory. Responding to this omission, Margaret Kohn argues that spatial configurations serve as powerful social forces that can naturalize social divisions or call them into question. Kohn therefore attempts to fill the theoretical gap by exploring the social dimension of local popular spaces in pre-fascist Italy: namely, chambers of labor, houses of the people, and cooperatives. She calls these "radical democratic spaces" because they are political spaces located outside the state where disenfranchised groups generate power.

Kohn begins by laying out her theoretical framework and positions herself within political thought. She identifies various strands of thought that have all rejected space as an important aspect of political or social transformation: "the mind-body dualism that dismissed space as part of the material world; the Cartesian, scientific attitude with its aspirations to universality and abstraction at the expense of locality; the Derridean critique of 'pure presence'; the current obsession with globalization" (19). Moreover, she argues, liberalism and Marxism have associated progress with rationalization and universalization as opposed to the localized and seemingly static characteristics of space. All of these various perspectives have focused their attention on time and disregarded space.

While Kohn does not seek to overturn this focus in the time-space dichotomy to privilege spatial analysis, she argues that "both time and space contain elements of fixity and flux" (23) and must therefore be studied together for their convergences and contradictions. Spaces are cathexes of transformative desire, integrating individuals into shared conceptions of reality and political power. With regard to her specific examples from pre-fascist Italy, she argues that houses of the people were functional spaces that became focal points for organizing otherwise dispersed political energies. She contrasts these with spaces such as the disciplinary factory, designed to maximize surveillance and atomization. Indeed, she argues, Marxian and Gramscian myths like the disciplinary factory, the proletariat, and scientific socialism have simply obscured the truly radical spaces of resistance.

Kohn also positions herself within political thought in terms of the public sphere, one of the few instances she identifies in intellectual history where space has been examined. In contrast to the Habermasian notion of the bourgeois public sphere of cafes and Masonic lodges, Kohn's text seeks to examine what she calls the "popular public sphere," a space for popular politics that often transcended the line between private and public. In spaces like the chambers of labor and cooperatives, she argues, working-class poor created new representative institutions that became integrated into the system of local government. The spatiality of these community organizations, Kohn emphasizes, is vital to their formation: the physical concentration of bodies inside these popular spaces is what gives them their political legitimacy and empowers the poor individuals within them.

Kohn's analysis therefore combines theoretical and empirical forms of analysis, employing historical (even archaeological in the Foucaltian sense) techniques in an attempt to answer normative questions about the role of space in democracy and popular mobilization. She distinguishes her approach, however, from critical theory in that she is concerned not with revealing how democracy masks actual domination, but rather with "emancipatory moments" during periods of domination.

This begins with an analysis of the cooperative, "a nonprofit, democratically managed business that aims to fulfill social needs through collective organization" (69-70). According to Kohn, there were 567,450 cooperatives in Italy in 1902. These organizations created spaces of encounter in which in social transformation became possible. Spatial relations ranging from seating patterns to interpersonal distance within the cooperative served to build solidarity and political activity. The cooperative provided a location for individuals to "experience themselves as economic agents, and act as citizens" (86), fusing bonds among a heterogeneous group that ranged from factory workers to peasant farmers to shopkeepers.

Kohn suggests that this political socializing force of the cooperative helps explain the rise of mutual aid societies and the birth of workers' movements. For example, she displays that there is no compelling correlation between occupation and socialist voting, leading her to emphasize the role of the cooperatives in fusing bonds of solidarity among a diversity of individuals.

Two other spatial constructions advance Kohn's argument of the value of spatial analysis: houses of the people and chambers of labor. Both, developments of the late nineteenth century, served as symbolic and functional points of reference for communal life. While houses of the people provided spaces for community activities and meetings between diverse individuals, the chambers of labor served as centers of coordination for worker activities that linked isolated workers' organizations into effective coalitions. These spaces, like the cooperatives, physically forged bonds of solidarity. They also provided participatory spaces that empowered individuals otherwise excluded from the bourgeois public sphere; they offered "protected space[s] in which to explore and develop an alternate set of values, policies, and institutions" (109).

The various informal meetings and debates that took place within these three spaces were the mechanisms through which socialist and popular political positions crystallized. Through a wide spectrum of examples, Kohn shows that the very buildings that housed these communal institutions were designed to facilitate debate and participation, to allow the greatest possible opportunity for communal life.

For Kohn, the development of these key communal spaces helps explain not only the birth of national workers' movements, but also the socialist turn toward local politics, a shift Kohn labels "municipalism." She defines municipalism, after the reformist socialist leader Filippo Turati, as a political approach to community that stresses citizens "governing through participation in associations such as the chamber of labor that blur the line between state and civil society" (139). The municipality, like the cooperatives and the houses of the people, were intended to disperse concentrated power and foster solidaristic associations. This vision, which began in Italy in the pre-fascist period and reemerged after World War II, directly follows for Kohn from the spaces of resistance developed during the nineteenth century.

Thus for Kohn, spaces of resistance like the chambers of labor and houses of the people were important "not only for their direct contribution to mobilization; they were also read by both workers and their adversaries as reference points in a struggle over the possible meaning of democracy, an intervention in the debate over popular control" (154). However, Kohn neglects to discuss other aspects of working-class social life that might also have contributed to these imagined possibilities for democracy. For example, the role of religion and religious institutions like the Catholic Church, often cited in the historiography of worker movements, is conspicuously absent from the story Kohn tells.

Still, Radical Space will be of interest to scholars far beyond her empirical focus on Italian working-class life. Theorists engaged not only in the debates over the past and future of democracy, but also those exploring the role of deterritorialization in the age of global integration will find her book insightful and provocative. Although behavioralists and positivists may not find her methodology compelling, Kohn's theories on the importance of microspaces of resistance and radical democracy should nevertheless prove quite provocative.

Noam Lupu, The University of Chicago

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