Authors | Michael Hardt Antonio Negri |
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Country | United States |
Language | English |
Subjects | Globalization International relations |
Publisher | Harvard University Press |
Publication date | 2000 |
Media type | Print (hardcover and paperback) |
Pages | 478 |
ISBN | 0-674-25121-0 (hardcover) ISBN 0-674-00671-2 (paperback) |
OCLC | 41967081 |
325/.32/09045 21 | |
LC Class | JC359 .H279 2000 |
Preceded by | Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form |
Followed by | Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire |
Part of a series about |
Imperialism studies |
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Empire is a book by post-Marxist philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Written in the mid-1990s, it was published in 2000 and quickly sold beyond its expectations as an academic work. [1]
In general, Hardt and Negri theorize an ongoing transition from a "modern" phenomenon of imperialism, centered on individual nation-states, to an emergent postmodern construct created among ruling powers which the authors call "Empire" (the capital letter is distinguishing), with different forms of warfare:
... according to Hardt and Negri's Empire, the rise of Empire is the end of national conflict, the "enemy" now, whoever he is, can no longer be ideological or national. The enemy now must be understood as a kind of criminal, as someone who represents a threat not to a political system or a nation but to the law. This is the enemy as a terrorist ... In the "new order that envelops the entire space of ... civilization", where conflict between nations has been made irrelevant, the "enemy" is simultaneously "banalized" (reduced to an object of routine police repression) and absolutized (as the Enemy, an absolute threat to the ethical order). [2] : 6 [3] : 171–172
Hardt and Negri elaborate a variety of ideas surrounding constitutions, global war, and class. Hence, the Empire is constituted by a monarchy (the United States and the G8, and international organizations such as NATO, the International Monetary Fund or the World Trade Organization), an oligarchy (the multinational corporations and other nation-states) and a democracy (the various non-government organizations and the United Nations). Part of the book's analysis deals with "imagin[ing] resistance", but "the point of Empire is that it, too, is 'total' and that resistance to it can only take the form of negation - 'the will to be against'. [3] : 173 The Empire is total, but economic inequality persists, and as all identities are wiped out and replaced with a universal one, the identity of the poor persists. [4]
Empire was published by Harvard University Press in 2000 as a 478-page hardcover ( ISBN 0-674-25121-0) and paperback ( ISBN 0-674-00671-2).
The book's description of pyramidal levels is a replica of Polybius' description of Roman government, hence the Empire denomination. Furthermore, the crisis is conceived as inherent to the Empire.
Hardt and Negri are heavily indebted to Michel Foucault's analysis of biopolitics, [5] as well as the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, especially their book A Thousand Plateaus . A number of concepts developed by Deleuze and Guattari – such as multiplicity, deterritorialization, nomads, and control – are central to Empire's claims. Before Empire, Negri was best known for having written The Savage Anomaly (1981), a milestone book in Spinozism studies which he wrote in prison. Empire is thus, unsurprisingly, also influenced by Spinoza. It is also influenced by the work of Carl Schmitt, in particular his theory of sovereignty, as well as Niccolò Machiavelli.
The ideas first introduced in Empire (notably the concept of multitude, taken from Spinoza) were further developed in the books Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004), Commonwealth (2009), and Assembly (2017), which were also written by Hardt and Negri.
Empire has been described by the London Review of Books as "the most successful work of political theory to come from the Left for a generation." [6] The book has been highly influential on numerous debates within the left, and has even been called "a bible of the anti-globalisation movement" by one critic and "the most influential book in recent decades on a classic sociological theme". [7] [8] In a review of the book, Slavoj Žižek stated that the book "sets as its goal, writing the Communist Manifesto for the twenty-first century." [9]
Gopal Balakrishnan, reviewing the book for the New Left Review, wrote that when compared with influential conservative books such as Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, "Comparable totalizations from the Left have been few and far between; diagnoses of the present more uniformly bleak. At best, the alternative to surrender or self-delusion has seemed to be a combative but clear-eyed pessimism, orienting the mind for a Long March against the new scheme of things. In this landscape, the appearance of Empire represents a spectacular break. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri defiantly overturn the verdict that the last two decades have been a time of punitive defeats for the Left." [10]
Empire has created important intellectual debates around its arguments. Certain scholars have compared the evolution of the world order with Hardt and Negri's world image in Empire. [11] A number of publications and debates centered on the book, both positively and negatively. [12] [13] Hardt and Negri's theoretical approach has also been compared and contrasted with works of 'the global capitalism school' whose authors have analyzed transnational capitalism and class relations in the global epoch. [14]
Hardt and Negri published an essay titled "'Empire' 20 Years On" in the November/December 2019 edition of New Left Review , in which they provide a critical analysis of the book's legacy and their perspective on it looking back. [15]
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to critical theory:
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual. He is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New York University and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's Department of Philosophy. He primarily works on continental philosophy and political theory, as well as film criticism and theology.
Antonio Negri was an Italian political philosopher known as one of the most prominent theorists of autonomism, as well as for his co-authorship of Empire with Michael Hardt and his work on the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Born in Padua, Italy, Negri became a professor of political philosophy at the University of Padua, where he taught state and constitutional theory. Negri founded the Potere Operaio group in 1969 and was a leading member of Autonomia Operaia, and published hugely influential books urging "revolutionary consciousness".
Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).
Michael Hardt is an American political philosopher and literary theorist. Hardt is best known for his book Empire, which was co-written with Antonio Negri.
Ernesto Laclau was an Argentine political theorist and philosopher. He is often described as an 'inventor' of post-Marxist political theory. He is well known for his collaborations with his long-term partner, Chantal Mouffe.
Multitude is a term for a group of people who cannot be classed under any other distinct category, except for their shared fact of existence. Though its use dates back to antiquity, the term first entered into the lexicon of political philosophy when it was used by figures like Machiavelli, Hobbes, and most notably, Spinoza. The multitude is a concept of a population that has not entered into a social contract with a sovereign political body, such that individuals retain the capacity for political self-determination. A multitude typically is classified as a quantity exceeding 100. For Hobbes the multitude was a rabble that needed to enact a social contract with a monarch, thus turning them from a multitude into a people. For Machiavelli and Spinoza both, the role of the multitude vacillates between admiration and contempt. Recently the term has returned to prominence as a new model of resistance against global systems of power as described by political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their international best-seller Empire (2000) and expanded upon in their Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004). Other theorists recently began to use the term include political thinkers associated with autonomist Marxism and its sequelae, including Sylvère Lotringer, Paolo Virno, and thinkers connected with the eponymous review Multitudes.
John Holloway is a Marxist-oriented lawyer, sociologist and philosopher, whose work is closely associated with the Zapatista movement in Mexico, his home since 1991. It has also been taken up by some intellectuals associated with the piqueteros in Argentina; the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement in South Africa and the Anti-Globalization Movement in Europe and North America. He is currently a professor at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the Autonomous University of Puebla.
Autonomism, also known as Autonomist Marxism, is an anti-capitalist social movement and Marxist-based theoretical current that first emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerism. Later, post-Marxist and anarchist tendencies became significant after influence from the Situationists, the failure of Italian far-left movements in the 1970s, and the emergence of a number of important theorists including Antonio Negri, who had contributed to the 1969 founding of Potere Operaio as well as Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno and Franco "Bifo" Berardi.
Open Marxism is a critical Marxist school of thought which critiques state socialism and party politics, stressing the need for openness to praxis and history through an anti-positivist method grounded in the "practical reflexivity" of Karl Marx's own concepts. The "openness" in open Marxism also refers to a non-deterministic view of history in which the unpredictability of class struggle is foregrounded.
Jason Barker is a British theorist of contemporary French philosophy, film director, screenwriter, and producer. He is a professor of cultural studies at Kyung Hee University in the Graduate School of British and American Language and Culture, and visiting professor at the European Graduate School, where he teaches in the Faculty of Media and Communication alongside Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière, Avital Ronell, Slavoj Žižek, and others.
Alan Johnson is a British political theorist and activist. He is a senior research fellow at the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre. Previously he was Professor of Democratic Theory and Practice at Edge Hill University.
Gopal Balakrishnan was a professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, until he was fired due to allegations of sexual assault.
This is a list of articles in continental philosophy.
Marx Reloaded is a 2011 German documentary film written and directed by the British writer and theorist Jason Barker. Featuring interviews with several well-known philosophers, the film aims to examine the relevance of Karl Marx's ideas in relation to the Great Recession. The film's title is a wordplay on The Matrix Reloaded, the sequel to The Matrix, which is parodied in the documentary.
According to the political theorist Alan Johnson, there has been a revival of serious interest in communism in the 21st century led by Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou.
A. Kiarina Kordela (; is a Greek-American philosopher and critical theorist. She is a professor of German Studies and founding director of the Critical Theory Program at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN.
Post-Marxism is a perspective in critical social theory which radically reinterprets Marxism, countering its association with economism, historical determinism, anti-humanism, and class reductionism, whilst remaining committed to the construction of socialism. Most notably, post-Marxists are anti-essentialist, rejecting the primacy of class struggle, and instead focus on building radical democracy. Post-Marxism can be considered a synthesis of post-structuralist frameworks and neo-Marxist analysis, in response to the decline of the New Left after the protests of 1968.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Marxism:
The Peterson–Žižek debate, officially titled Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism, was a debate between the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek on the relationship between Marxism, capitalism, and happiness. Moderated by Stephen J. Blackwood, it was held before an audience of 3,000 at Meridian Hall in Toronto on 19 April 2019.
The problem, as they see it, is that "postmodernist authors" have neglected the one identity that should matter most to those on the left, the one we have always with us: "The only non-localizable 'common name' of pure difference in all eras is that of the poor" (156) ... only the poor, Hardt and Negri say, "live radically the actual and present being" (157)."
Indeed, it is the irrelevance of political beliefs or ideas and their replacement by what (thinking to follow Foucault) Hardt and Negri call the ìbiopoliticalì, that mark the special contribution of the discourse of terrorism, which we might more generally call the discourse of globalization.
Quotations related to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri at Wikiquote