Empire is a sweeping book with a big-picture vision. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that while classical imperialism has largely disappeared, a new empire is emerging in a diffuse blend of technology, economics, and globalization. The book brings together unlikely bedfellows: Hardt, associate professor in Duke University's literature program, and Negri, among other things a writer and inmate at Rebibbia Prison in Rome. Empire aspires to the same scale of grand political philosophy as Locke or Marx or Fukuyama, but whether Hardt and Negri accomplish this daunting task is debatable. It is, however, an exciting book that is especially timely following the emergence of terrorism as a geopolitical force.

Hardt and Negri maintain that empire--traditionally understood as military or capitalist might--has embarked upon a new stage of historical development and is now better understood as a complex web of sociopolitical forces. They argue, with a neo-Marxist bent, that "the multitude" will transcend and defeat the new empire on its own terms. The authors address everything from the works of Deleuze to Jefferson's constitutional democracy to the Chiapas revolution in a far-ranging analysis of our contemporary situation. Unfortunately, their penchant for references and academese sometimes renders the prose unwieldy. But if Hardt and Negri's vision of the world materializes, they will undoubtedly be remembered as prophetic. --Eric de Place


Stanley Aronowitz, The Nation
"Empire...is a bold move away from established doctrine.


Emily Eakin, New York Times
"[This] book is full of...bravura passages...[F]or the moment, Empire is filling a void in the humanities.


Michael Elliott , Time
"Globalization’s positive side is, intriguingly, a message of a hot new book.


Sunday Times [UK]
Empire presents a philosophical vision that some have greeted as the 'next big thing' in the field of the humanities.


Book Description
Imperialism as we knew it may be no more, but Empire is alive and well. It is, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri demonstrate in this bold work, the new political order of globalization. It is easy to recognize the contemporary economic, cultural, and legal transformations taking place across the globe but difficult to understand them. Hardt and Negri contend that they should be seen in line with our historical understanding of Empire as a universal order that accepts no boundaries or limits. Their book shows how this emerging Empire is fundamentally different from the imperialism of European dominance and capitalist expansion in previous eras. Rather, today's Empire draws on elements of U.S. constitutionalism, with its tradition of hybrid identities and expanding frontiers. Empire identifies a radical shift in concepts that form the philosophical basis of modern politics, concepts such as sovereignty, nation, and people. Hardt and Negri link this philosophical transformation to cultural and economic changes in postmodern society--to new forms of racism, new conceptions of identity and difference, new networks of communication and control, and new paths of migration. They also show how the power of transnational corporations and the increasing predominance of postindustrial forms of labor and production help to define the new imperial global order. More than analysis, Empire is also an unabashedly utopian work of political philosophy, a new Communist Manifesto. Looking beyond the regimes of exploitation and control that characterize today's world order, it seeks an alternative political paradigm--the basis for a truly democratic global society.


About the Author
Antonio Negri is an independent researcher and writer and an inmate at Rebibbia Prison, Rome.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Dear Peter,
You asked me to try to explain how I came to work on the book of Michael Hardt and Toni Negri and why I became enthusiastic about it and sought to persuade my colleagues that it was a book for us to publish and a very important one at that. In the 80s and 90s it seemed as if in the United States "official culture" of the Beltway and Ivory Tower was getting more and more remote from life as it was led by most Americans. The Clinton affair obsessed official culture and was of no concern to most people. What Greil Marcus calls "that weird Old America" was getting buried under more and more fancy chrome and veneer. When the manuscript that C.L.R. James called "the Struggle for Happiness" came out in 1993 as the book American Civilization, I fell in love with his picture of the promise of happiness that he argued the U.S. offered the world in this book he wrote on the eve of being kicked out of the country because he was a member of the Communist Party. He was absolutely upbeat about the promise held by the set-up of the U.S. republic. But in the U.S. in the 90s on Left and Right all one could see were pessimists. Then along came this book. I had known Michael for years because of my long-term interest in Italian things (I wrote my dissertation on Italian and English poetry), and he had advised me on a number of occasions. I knew of Tonio's work on Spinoza. When Michael offered me the book, it took me a while to understand what it was about. First of all , it was a shock to find true Marxists embracing the U.S. Constitution and for some of the same reasons thatC.L.R. James had. Second, it took me some time to understand the concept of the "multitude" and to see how it connected to that weird Old America that Marcus talks about and to the mass of non-elite Americans who were increasingly being ignored as the 90s wore on. I was wrestling with what it was that made me discontented with Richard Rorty's view of the United States in his Achieving Our Country. I was worried about the alienation of blacks and youth in the U.S. I was interested in globalization and was unsatisfied with knee-jerk rejections of it. This book is surprisingly pro-US for a book from the Left, but there is an important proviso that the US must live up to its radical democratic potential. The multitude is sovereign. This seemed to be a book that could shock into thought people stuck in ideological ruts Left and Right. We are an educational press. Helping people to think is our business. Our policy at the Press is that of Mao, "Let a thousand flowers grow." We are resolutely committed to publishing as diverse a list as possible. We had committed to publishng The Black Book of Communist. Our Board was enthusiastic about publishing this book. It has been a pleasure to work with Michael and Toni. I visited Toni last year in Rome at the apartment in Trastevere where he spends his day-time release hours from prison and we talked about this book, prison reform, and the poetry of Leopardi.
— (Lindsay Waters, Editor, Harvard University Press)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Imperialism as we knew it may be no more, but Empire is alive and well. It is, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri demonstrate in this bold work, the new political order of globalization. It is easy to recognize the contemporary economic, cultural, and legal transformations taking place across the globe but difficult to understand them. Hardt and Negri contend that they should be seen in line with our historical understanding of Empire as a universal order that accepts no boundaries or limits. Their book shows how this emerging Empire is fundamentally different from the imperialism of European dominance and capitalist expansion in previous eras. Rather, today's Empire draws on elements of U.S. constitutionalism, with its tradition of hybrid identities and expanding frontiers.

Empire identifies a radical shift in concepts that form the philosophical basis of modern politics, concepts such as sovereignty, nation, and people. Hardt and Negri link this philosophical transformation to cultural and economic changes in postmodern society-to new forms of racism, new conceptions of identity and difference, new networks of communication and control, and new paths of migration. They also show how the power of transnational corporations and the increasing predominance of postindustrial forms of labor and production help to define the new imperial global order.

More than analysis, Empire is also an unabashedly utopian work of political philosophy, a new Communist Manifesto. Looking beyond the regimes of exploitation and control that characterize today's world order, it seeks an alternative political paradigm-the basis for a truly democratic global society. Michael Hardt is Assistant Professor in the Literature Program at Duke University. Antonio Negri is an independent researcher and writer and an inmate at Rebibbia Prison, Rome. He has been a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Paris and a Professor of Political Science at the University of Padua.

FROM THE CRITICS

Stanley Aronowitz - The Nation

Empire...is a bold move away from established doctrine.

Michael Elliott - Time

Globalization's positive side is, intriguingly, a message of a hot new book.

Ed Vulliamy - The Observer [UK]

How often [is a] book...swept off the shelves until you can't find [copies] in N.Y. for love nor money?

Emily Eakin - New York Times

[This] book is full of...bravura passages...[F]or the moment, Empire is filling a void in the humanities.

Sunday Times [UK]

Empire presents a philosophical vision that some have greeted as the 'next big thing' in the field of the humanities. Read all 8 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

By way of Spinoza, Wittgenstein, Marx, the Vietnam War, and even Bill Gates, Empire offers an irresistible, iconoclastic analysis of the 'globalized' world. Revolutionary, even visionary, Empire identifies the imminent new power of the multitude to free themselves from capitalist bondage. — (Leslie Marmon Silko, author of Almanac of the Dead)

Michael Hardt and Tony Negri have given us an original, suggestive and provocative assessment of the international economic and political moment we have entered. Abandoning many of the propositions of conventional marxism such as imperialism, the centrality of the national contexts of social struggle and a cardboard notion of the working class, the authors nonetheless show the salience of the marxist framework as a tool of explanation. This book is bound to stimulate a new debate about globalization and the possibilities for social transformation in the 21st century. — (Stanley Aronowitz, author of False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness)

An extraordinary book, with enormous intellectual depth and a keen sense of the history-making transformation that is beginning to take shape--a new system of rule Hardt and Negri name Empire imperialism. — (Saskia Sassen, author of Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization)

After reading Empire, one cannot escape the impression that if this book were not written, it would have to be invented. What Hardt and Negri offer is nothing less than a rewriting of The Communist Manifesto for our time: Empire conclusively demonstrates how global capitalism generates antagonisms that will finally explode its form. This book rings the death-bell not only for the complacent liberal advocates of the 'end of history,' but also for pseudo-radical Cultural Studies which avoid the full confrontation with today's capitalism. — (Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology)

The new book by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire, is an amazing tour de force. Written with communicative enthusiasm, extensive historical knowledge, systematic organization, it basically combines a kojevian notion of global market as post-history (in this sense akin to Fukuyama's eschatology) with a foucauldian and deleuzian notion of bio-politics (in this sense crossing the road of a Sloterdijk who also poses the question of a coming techniques of the production of the human species). But it clearly outbids its rivals in philosophical skill. And, above all, it reverses their grim prospects of political stagnation or the return to zoology. By identifying the new advances of technology and the division of labor that underlies the globalization of the market and the corresponding de-centered structure of sovereignty with a deep tructure of power located within the multitude's intellectual and affective corporeity, it seeks to identify the indestructible sources of resistance and constitution that frame our future. It claims to lay the foundations for a teleology of class struggles and militancy even more substantially "communist" than the classical Marxist one. This will no doubt trigger a lasting and passionate discussion among philosophers, political scientists and socialists. Whatever their conclusions, the benefits will be enormous for intelligence. — (Etienne Balibar, author of Spinoza and Politics)

Empire is a stunningly original attempt to come to grips with the cultural, political, and economic transformations of the contemporary world. While refusing to ignore history, Hardt and Negri question the adequacy of existing theoretical categories, and offer new concepts for approaching the practices and regimes of power of the emergent world order. Whether one agrees with it or not, it is an all too rare effort to engage with the most basic and pressing questions facing political intellectuals today. — (Lawrence Grossberg, author of We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture)