Empire

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 <i>False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness</i> Empireis a bold move away from established doctrine. Hardt and Negri's insistence that there really is a new world is promulgated with energy and conviction. Especially striking is their renunciation of the tendency of many writers on globalization to focus exclusively on the top, leaving the impression that what happens down below, to ordinary people, follows automatically from what the great powers do. -- Stanley Aronowitz * The Nation * 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 <i>We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture</i> An extraordinary book, with enormous intellectual depth and a keen sense of the history-making transformation that is beginning to take shapea new system of rule Hardt and Negri name Empire imperialism. -- Saskia Sassen, author of <i>Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization</i> 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 <i>Almanac of the Dead</i> 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 iek, author of <i>The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology</i> Empire is one of the most brilliant, erudite, and yet incisively political interpretations available to date of the phenomenon called 'globalization.' Engaging critically with postcolonial and postmodern theories, and mindful throughout of the plural histories of modernity and capitalism, Hardt and Negri rework Marxism to develop a vision of politics that is both original and timely. This very impressive book will be debated and discussed for a long time. -- Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of <i>Provincializing Europe</i> 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

Michael Hardt is Professor of Literature and Italian at Duke University. Antonio Negri was an independent researcher and writer. He was formerly a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Paris and a Professor of Political Science at the University of Padua.

Preface 1. The Political Constitution of the Present 1.1 World Order 1.2 Biopolitical Production 1.3 Alternatives within Empire 2. Passages of Sovereignty 2.1 Two Europes, Two Modernities 2.2 Sovereignty of the Nation-State 2.3 The Dialectics of Colonial Sovereignty 2.4 Symptoms of Passage 2.5 Network Power: U.S. Sovereignty and the New Empire 2.6 Imperial Sovereignty Intermezzo: Counter-Empire 3. Passages of Production 3.1 The Limits of Imperialism 3.2 Disciplinary Governability 3.3 Resistance, Crisis, Transformation 3.4 Postmodernization, or The Informatization of Production 3.5 Mixed Constitution 3.6 Capitalist Sovereignty, or Administering the Global Society of Control 4. The Decline and Fall of Empire 4.1 Virtualities 4.2 Generation and Corruption 4.3 The Multitude against Empire Notes Index