Empire

From Barnes & Noble

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)

Bookforum

Stretching back nearly twenty years, Antonio Negri's work has been until recently one of the best-kept secrets of Marxist theory in the United States… [Empire] is the culmination of Negri's lifework and a major contribution to Marx's uncompleted work on capitalism's international phase. Beyond its inherent scholarly merit, however, Empire provides a critical tool for understanding what the events following September 11th mean as history and politics.
— Curtis White

Choice

Hardt, an assistant professor of literature and a political scientist (and currently a prison inmate), has produced one of the most comprehensive theoretical efforts to understand globalization.

Cultural Critique

Hailed as the new Communist Manifesto on its dust jacket, this hefty tome may be worthy of such distinction… Hardt and Negri analyze the multiple processes of globalization…and argue that the new sovereign, the new order of the globalized world, is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule… Though Empire ties together diverse strands of often opaque structuralist and poststructuralist theory…the writing is surprisingly clear, accessible, and engaging… Hardt and Negri write to communicate beyond the claustrophobic redoubts of the academy… In short, Empire is a comprehensive and exciting analysis of the now reified concept of globalization, offering a lucid understanding of the political–economic quagmire of our present and a glimpse into the possible worlds beyond it.
— Tom Roach

Foreign Affairs

A sweeping neo-Marxist vision of the coming world order. The authors argue that globalization 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.

Journal for the Study of British Cultures

In their recent book Empire—a highly explosive analysis of globalisation—[the authors] take the effort to develop a full narrative of this new world order, of the global postmodern sovereignty and its counter-currents. It is therefore not so much a book on hybridity only, but rather an attempt to reformulate and redefine the political under conditions of globalisation. The result is a resolute tour de force delineating the genealogy of the postmodern regime as well as its consolidation as a new 'society of control' under conditions of world-wide 'real subsumption' which creates one smooth, global capitalist terrain.
— Dirk Wiemann

Le Nouvel Observateur

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 hybridization. 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

New Left Review

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… Hardt and Negri open their case by arguing that, although nation-state–based systems of power are rapidly unraveling in the force-fields of world capitalism, globalization cannot be understood as a simple process of deregulating markets. Far from withering away, regulations today proliferate and interlock to form an acephelous supranational order which the authors choose to call 'Empire' …Empire bravely upholds the possibility of a utopian manifesto for these times, in which the desire for another world buried or scattered in social experience could find an authentic language and point of concentration.
— Gopal Balakrishnan

New York Times

So what does a disquisition on globalization have to offer scholars in crisis? First, there is the book's broad sweep and range of learning. Spanning nearly 500 pages of densely argued history, philosophy and political theory, it features sections on Imperial Rome, Haitian slave revolts, the American Constitution and the Persian Gulf War, and references to dozens of thinkers like Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hegel, Hobbes, Kant, Marx and Foucault. In short, the book has the formal trappings of a master theory in the old European tradition… [This] book is full of…bravura passages. Whether presenting new concepts—like Empire and multitude—or urging revolution, it brims with confidence in its ideas. Does it have the staying power and broad appeal necessary to become the next master theory? It is too soon to say. But for the moment, Empire is filling a void in the humanities.
— Emily Eakin

Political Science Quarterly

This sprawling book is filled with original ideas and analyses, including some well-aimed critiques of postmodernism, dependency theory, world systems theory, anti-imperialism, and localism—and there is much more besides to stimulate the reader… This is an exciting and provocative book whose depth and richness can only be hinted at in so brief a review.
— Frank Ninkovich

Sunday Times

Hardt is not just bent on saving the world. He has also been credited with dragging the humanities in American universities out of the doldrums… [Empire] presents a philosophical vision that some have greeted as the 'next big thing' in the field of the humanities, with its authors the natural successors of names such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.

Symploke

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire…owes its density not to affected language—indeed, its manifesto-like communicative urgency is one of its greatest strengths—but to the exhilarating novelty of what it has to say… This is as simple, as apparently innocent, and as radically counter-intuitive when thought to its limit as the Sartrean dictum that existence precedes essence must have been in its time. It's not that this relation had never been thought before; the connection between the demands of labor unions and the development of the automated factory is well-known. But in Hardt and Negri's hands this relation becomes a powerful new way to theorize globalization and the development of capital itself… Hardt and Negri perform the urgent task of reclaiming Utopia for the multitude.
— Nicholas Brown

The Nation

Empire…is 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 Observer

How often can it happen that a book is swept off the shelves until you can't find a copy in New York for love nor money? …Empire is a sweeping history of humanist philosophy, Marxism and modernity that propels itself to a grand political conclusion: that we are a creative and enlightened species, and that our history is that of humanity's progress towards the seizure of power from those who exploit it.
— Ed Vulliamy

Time

Globalization's positive side is, intriguingly, a message of a hot new book. Since it was published last year, Empire…has been translated into four new languages, with six more on the way… It is selling briskly on Amazon.com and is impossible to find in Manhattan bookstores. For 413 pages of dense political philosophy—whose compass ranges from body piercing to Machiavelli—that's impressive.
— Michael Elliott

Aaron Shuman

[T]he real value of Empire, besides its restoration of people power to the center of Marxist historiography, lies in the intellectual credence and weight it gives the forms of political organizing and protest emerging now. When they hit you with Victorian novels like Das Kapital, you hit them with Empire.
— Bad Subjects

Ed Vulliamy

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

Emily Eakin

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

Michael Elliott

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

Slavoj Zizek

Today, in the midst of a difficult revolution of the forces of production, one attempts to revive the old ignominious and half-forgotten Marxist dialectic of forces of production and relations of production. How does the digitalization and the globalization of our lives influence not only the conditions of production in the narrow sense, but also our social existence, our customs and our (ideological) experience of social interaction? Marx readily paralleled revolutionary changes in production processes with a political revolution. His leitmotif was that the steam engine and other technical innovations of the 18th Century contributed considerably more to the revolution of the social quality of life than spectacular political events. Considering the unimaginable changes in production that are being accompanied by a sort of lethargy in today's political realm, isn't this guiding idea more relevant then ever? Because we are located in the midst of a radical transformation of society, of which we cannot clearly recognize the final consequences, many radical thinkers despair at the impossibility of taking adequate political measures.

Furthermore, the concepts that we use to describe the new constellation of forces of production and relations of production (post-industrial society, information society) continue to lack the form of true concepts. They remain theoretical emergency solutions: Instead of enabling us to reflect on historical reality (which these concepts create), they actually relieve us of our duty to think, even prevent us from thinking. The standard answer of postmodern trendsetters from Alvin Toffler to Jean Baudrillard is that we cannot think in this "new" way because we are stuck in the old industrial "paradigm." One would like to state against this commonplace that exactly the opposite is true: don't these attempts to overcome or to efface the concept of material production, in which one classifies the current transformation as a transition from production to information, in the end allow one to avoid the difficulty of reflecting on how this transformation itself is connected to the structure of collective production? In other words, isn't it actually the task at hand to, wherever possible, introduce the new developments into the concept of collective material production?

This is exactly what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri try to do in their new book Empire (Harvard University Press, Cambridge)--a book that attempts to write the communist manifesto anew for the 21st Century. Hardt and Negri describe globalization as an ambiguous "deterritorialization": victorious global capitalism penetrates into every pore of our social lives, into the most intimate of spheres, and installs a never-present dynamic, which no longer is based on patriarchal or other hierarchic structures of dominance. Instead, it creates a flowing, hybrid identity. On the other hand, this fundamental corrosion of all important social connections lets the genie out of the bottle: it sets in motion potential centrifugal forces that the capitalist system is no longer able to fully control. It is exactly because of the global triumph of the capitalist system that that system is today more vulnerable than ever. The old formula of Marx is still valid: Capitalism digs its own grave. Hardt and Negri describe this process as the transition from the nation-state to global empire, a transnational space which is comparable to Rome, where hybrid masses of scattered identities develop.

These postmodern politics concentrate on "cultural wars" and fight for their own recognition: their foundation is sexual, ethnic and religious tolerance--they preach the multicultural gospel. When one reads these authors work, it is often difficult to ward off the impression that we would exploit Turks and other immigrants because we are unable to tolerate their "otherness." Cultural and sexual intolerance serves as the key for economic tensions, not vice versa as it used to be explained in the good old days of orthodox Marxism. Thus, Hardt and Negri deserve much praise, since they enlighten us about the contradictory nature of today's turbocapitalism and attempt to identify the dynamic of the progressive powers at work. Their heroic attempt sets itself against the standard view of the left, who are struggling to limit the destructive powers of globalization and to rescue what there remains to rescue of the welfare state. This standard left wing view is imbued with a, perhaps too deeply, conservative mistrust of the dynamics of globalization and digitalization, which is quite contrary to the Marxist belief in the powers of progress.

Nevertheless, one immediately gets a foretaste, as a result of the authors' style, of the boundaries of Hardt and Negri's analysis. In their socio-economic analysis there is simply a lack of concrete, precise insight which is concealed in the Deleuzean jargon of multiplicity, deterritorialization, etc. It is no wonder that the three "practical" suggestions with which this book ends seem anticlimactic. The authors propose the political struggle for three global rights: The right to global citizenship, the right to social income, and the re-appropriation of the new means of production" (i.e. the access to and control of education, information, and communication). It is paradoxical that Hardt and Negri, the poets of mobility, multiplicity, hybridization, etc. call for three demands that are phrased in the current terminology of universal "human rights."

The problem with these demands is that they fluctuate between formal emptiness and impossible radicalization. Let's take the right to global citizenship: with that, one can in principle only agree-nevertheless, if this demand were meant to be taken more seriously than a celebratory formal declaration in typical UN style, then it would mean the total "destruction" of the carrying out of global laws and even the abolition of state borders. Under the present conditions, such steps would trigger an invasion of the USA and western Europe by cheap labor from India, China and Africa, which would result in a people's revolt against immigrants with figures like Haider appearing as their example for multicultural tolerance. The same is true with regards to the other two demands: for instance, the universal right to social income--naturally, why not? But how should one create the necessary socio-economic conditions for such a transformation?

This critique is not only aimed at secondary empirical details. The main problem with "Empire", is that the book falls short in its fundamental analysis of how (if at all) the present global socio-economic process will create the needed space for such radical measures like the ones that Marx tried to develop in his explanation of how the proletarian revolution would eliminate the basic antagonism of the capitalist means of production. In this respect, Empire remains a pre-Marxist book.
— Sueddeutsche Zeitung

Stanley Aronowitz

Empire...is a bold move away from established doctrine.
—The Nation

Stanley Aronowitz

...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.Nation

Sunday Times [UK]

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