Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri: Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004)

The world-renowned authors of the international best-seller “Empire” follow with an astonishing, politically energizing manifesto that argues that some of the most troubling aspects of the new world order contain the seeds of radical global social transformation.

With “Empire,” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri established themselves as visionary theoreticians of the new global order. They presented a profound new vision of a world in which the old system of nation-states has surrendered much of its hegemony to a supranational, multidimensional network of power they call empire. Empire penetrates into more aspects of life over more of the world than any traditional empire before it, and it cannot be beheaded for it is multinoded. The network is the empire and the empire is the network.

Now, in “Multitude,” Hardt and Negri offer up an inspiring vision of how the people of the world can use the structures of empire against empire itself. With the enormous intellectual depth, historical perspective, and positive, enabling spirit that are the authors’ hallmark, “Multitude” lays down in three parts a powerful case for hope. Part I, “War,” examines the darkest aspects of empire. We are at a crisis point in human affairs, when the new circuits of power have grown beyond the ability of existing circuits of political sovereignty and social justice to contain them. A mind-set of perpetual war predominates in which all wars are police actions and all police actions are wars-counterinsurgencies against the enemies of empire. In Part II, the book’s central section, “Multitude,” they explain how empire, by colonizing and interconnecting more areas of human life ever more deeply, has actuallycreated the possibility for democracy of a sort never before seen. Brought together in a multinoded commons of resistance, different groups combine and recombine in fluid new matrices of resistance. No longer the silent, oppressed “masses,” they form a multitude. Hardt and Negri argue that the accelerating integration of economic, social, political, and cultural forces into a complex network they call the biopolitical is actually the most radical step in the liberation of humankind since the Industrial Revolution broke up the old feudal order. Finally, in “Democracy,” the authors put forward their agenda for how the global multitude can form a robust biopolitical commons in which democracy can truly thrive on a global scale. Exhilarating in its ambition, range, and depth of interpretive insight, “Multitude” consolidates Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s stature as the most exciting and important political philosophers at work in the world today.

Publisher Penguin Press, 2004
ISBN 1594200246, 9781594200243
427 pages

review (Tom Nairn, London Review of Books)
review (Eric Mason, Multitudes)
review (Thomas N Hale and Anne-Marie Slaughter, openDemocracy)
review (Bruce Robbins, n+1)
review (John Giuffo, Village Voice)
review (Nicholas Spencer, Electronic Book Review)

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