Product Description

Imperialism as we knew it may be no more, but empire is alive and well. It is, as the authors demonstrate in this work the new political order of globalization. It is easy to recognise 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 US constitutionalism, with its tradition of hybrid identities and expanding frontiers. This book 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 post-modern society - to new forms of racism, new conceptions of identity and difference, new networks of communications and control, and new paths of migration. They also show how the power of transnational corporations and the increasing predominance of post-industrial forms of labour and production help to define the new imperial global order. More than analysis, "Empire" is also an utopian work of political philosophy, a new Communist Manifesto. Looking beyond the regimes of exploitation and control that characterise today's world order, it seeks an alternative political paradigm - the basis for a truly democratic global society.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #61477 in Books
• Published on: 2001-08-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 478 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's Empire has already caused quite a storm. After "anti-capitalist" demonstrations and books such as Naomi Klein's No Logo and George Monbiot's Captive State, a vacuum seemed to exist for an extensive, coherent philosophical take on where our world is going. Empire seeks to fill that gap by asking where globalisation comes from, what it means and whether or not it is a good or bad thing.

Negri, a Marxist imprisoned for his beliefs and his involvement with the Italian hard-left, and Michael Hardt, an English literature professor who had previously acted as Negri's translator (and the translator of an important, though philosophically more arcane, precursor to Empire, Giorgio Agamben's The Coming Community) have produced a key post-Marxist text (which builds on many of the arguments in Nick Dyer-Witheford's excellent Cyber-Marx) that views its world through lenses bequeathed to it by the best of the French post-structuralists. Negri and Hardt's accomplishment has been to apply the sometimes difficult work of theorists such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (especially A Thousand Plateaus) and Jacques Derrida to describe a world that has undergone a paradigm switch to a new Empire (in a way not dissimilarly than Thomas Keenan does particularly in his chapter on Marx's rhetoric in the much undervalued Fables of Responsibility). According to Negri and Hardt, this new Empire is the result of the transformation of modern capitalism into a set of power relationships we endlessly replicate that transcend the nation state (so anti-imperialism is out as a progressive politics). Vitally, the authors argue that the multitude, through their many struggles, pushed the world to this point and it is the multitude who can push through to a much better world on the other side of globalisation.

This is an optimistic, wide-ranging, defiant challenge of a book and Negri and Hardt should be commended on their erudition as much as their vision. While questions undoubtedly remain after reading the text, these should not stop the interested reader in coming to, and learning from, this profound piece of work. --Mark Thwaite

Review
"One of the rare benefits to the credit [of the contemporary Empire] is to have undermined the ramparts of the nation, ethnicity, race, and peoples by multiplying the instances of contact and hybridisation. Perhaps, at least this is the hope forwarded by these two Marx and Engels of the internet age, it has thus made possible the coming of new forms of transnational solidarity that will defeat Empire." - Aude Lancelin, Le nouvel observateur; "A sweeping neo-Marxist vision of the coming world order. The authors argue that globalisation is not eroding sovereignty but transforming it into a system of diffuse national and supranational institutions - in other words, a new 'empire'...[that] encompasses all of modern life." - Foreign Affairs

The Sunday Times, 15 July 2001
[Empire] presents a philosophical vision that some have greeted as the next big thing in the field of humanities, with its authors the natural successors of names such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault... It has been described by Frederic Jameson, a leading left-wing literary critic in America, as the first great new theoretical synthesis of the new millennium.

Customer Reviews

Fierce in its attack, sweeping in its scope
Negri and Hardt will be remembered for this work. Books of this intelligence are difficult to find. This book should hearten democratic and progressive students of Socialism and Marxism. Although the prose and referencing lends itself to the academic reader, this does not blunten the strength of its attack on the undemocratic nature of modern capitalism. Readers that don't have a background in political thought might best wean themselves onto this book by digesting a few other books on the history of political thought. Also reading Naomi Klein's No Logo prior will help clarify the reader on the current state of neo-liberal capitalism. As I said above it is not an easy read, but in the end very rewarding. There is hope for a more democratic, equitable future and it lies with thinkers and doers such as Sn Negri and Mr Hardt.

Imperialism into Empire or the Empire of Imperialism?
Hardt and Negri have a gut feeling about the future of global capitalism, one perhaps giving the town-criers of defeat among today's Left at least pause for thought. Neo-Marxists with gut feelings? It could not be otherwise. It is hard to believe there was ever a half-century of such whirlwind change and it is maybe all mortals are entitled to given especially the awesome complexiety of the impact of future science. Chiming with a spate of warnings of ever greater corporate might (most recently, Hertz,Klein and Monbiot), the authors, challenging along the way numerous Left orthodoxies, undertake to reveal its meaning in a far wider historical and philosophical context. There is in the world a new source of authority, a new category by which global politics and culture are understood. Supplanting imperialism is 'empire', which, though no less rapacious, is the creature of the major powers no longer. There is no 'inside' of metropolitan Capital and an 'outside' of its expansion. It has become territorially unhooked, supervenient, engulfing global social life in its entirety. The gut feeling - "the telos we can feel pulsing" - is that the modulation of imperialism into 'empire' is however just the condition of its vulnerability.

This is a powerfully synthesising, scholarly, impassioned, and for many no doubt an uplifting work. It is of the genre of Fukuyama's The End of History, which in its conservative politics and bad philosophy gets much wrong but whose basic point we fret might ultimately be right. The object of Empire, however, is to show not the improbability of anything beyond unversal capitalism, but the immanence of its opposite, namely, Marx's famous 'the end of pre-history', marked by peoples' collective control over lives hitherto entrapped in the service of private profit.

Whether it will convince is another matter. Flattering some but intimidating others, an obstacle will be its cosmic abstractions and prose in places suggesting its authors also harbour something against the English language; heavy weather is made of ideas clear enough without their post-structuralist trappings and there are passages, the more where portents of postmodernism are read into classical literatures, likewise risking the stock Anglo-Saxon complaint of Contintental pretension. Fashionable and widely debated it will be, and of a book exuding analytical verve, moral optimism and sustained political intelligence, making the reader - agreeing or not - appreciatively grin, thankfully so much the better. Its shortcoming will be found in imprecision exactly what it wishes to convince us of.

Begin this taxing book, this reader suggests, in the middle (Section 3.4), with its eloquent synopsis - the anchor of the argument - of the profundity of changes being wrought by post-industrialization. What follows is that received, more especially Marxist, categories must adapt accordingly. The industrial proletariat, while by no means gone, is in a sphere subordinate to now vastly enlarged 'immaterial' labour - labour whose produce is essentially mental and/or affective. What Empire sees in its underpinning 'informatization' - elaborating Marx's forecast of a 'general intellect' - is just that socialization of labour which, for the authors as for Marx, anticipates a society rid of capitalism and which now augers to be its subversive agent. Enveloping 'empire' is premised on the widest diffusion of knowledge and competencies; it markets visions of heavenly possibilities; it tends to the flattening of geographic, racial, ethnic, sexual and linguistic boundaries; it forces or draws great numbers into mobility and migrations; it globalizs communications and founds dense networks of mass interrelationships; it jumbles - 'hybridizes' - cultural, national, occupational and life-style identities; its values seep into every corner. What Empire compresses into changed 'subjectivities' are consequences rightly in the centre of its case, and it lucidly argues that, at bottom, they brought the downfall of Soviet communism.

These new 'subjectivities' indeed point to a different future. But that 'empire' should be conceived as an alternative paradigm to imperialism remains doubtful and may in the end prove politically unhelpful. Both are emanations of capitalism and, not impossibly, history may see them not as colliding but mutually reinforcing. Empire seems too unconscious of the now kaleidoscopic ways of 'desiring' and looking at the world, i.e., of just those unrevolutionary mentalities of which capitalism is its author and 'empire' its illuminating description.

However, no fantasy is proposed of a coming abrupt transfer from capitalist to worker. Empire's focus is on movements in real world productive capacities and what they appear to necessitate for the breakdown of national and cultural barriers and for increased possibilities of loci of instabilities, of mass rejection, refusal, rebellion and solidarities. For all but ultra-revolutionaries, the world, notwithstanding the horrors we daily witness, is a better place; better on the one side that capitalism is - what Marx foresaw - an engine of wealth creation without precedent; better on the other only because the cruel logic of accumulation has been thwarted, re-directed, paradoxically enhanced, by the myriad struggles and skilled labours of poeople, in metropolis and dominions, at once it beneficiaries and victims.

Too little pointed-up perhaps is the massive extent to which, even allowing for bulk and politically sanctioned theft, corporate business, transnational or otherwise, is already in the domain of the public - administered and ministered to - and thereby moot whether capitalism is less constitutive of post-industrial society than that it is clamped, heavily cocooned and the more irrelevantly on top. Empire is absolutely right in its aside that boardroom opponents of Big Government should be on their knees praying for its perpetuation. For Hardt and Negri the public - the 'multitude' -is already Emperor and doesn't yet know it, and their optimism is in their implication of how little it might take to push the corporate fatcats finally off the hill.

This book is a scholarly work that is very challenging.
Empire offers a view of internationalism in the postmodern era and the onset of globalised Imperialism. I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in understanding how to combat hidden forms of domination that Negri and Hardt bring to the surface. It's very dense and complicated, but definitely worth it. "Empire" allows readers to recognise current structural powers and where the world economy and foreign powers are headed. Mostly theoretical. Enjoyable.