Empire by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt

Empire is a text written by Marxist philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. The book, written in the mid 90s, was published in 2000 and quickly sold beyond its expectations as an academic work. In general, the book theorizes an ongoing transition from a "modern" phenomenon of imperialism, centered around individual nation-states, to an emergent postmodern construct created amongst ruling powers which the authors call Empire (the capital letter is distinguishing), with different forms of warfare: "..and if, according to Hardt and Negri's Empire, the rise of Empire is the end of national conflict, the "enemy" now, whoever he is, can no longer be ideological or national. The enemy now must be understood as a kind of criminal, as someone who represents a threat not to a political system or a nation but to the law. This is the enemy as a terrorist.... Hardt and Negri get this absolutely right when they say that in the "new order that envelops the entire space of... civilization", where conflict between nations has been made irrelevant, the "enemy" is simultaneously "banalized" (reduced to an object of routine police repression) and absolutized (as the Enemy, an absolute threat to the ethical order")." They proceed to elaborate a variety of ideas surrounding constitutions, global war, and class. Hence, the Empire is constituted by a monarchy (the United States and the G8, and international organizations such as NATO, the IMF or the WTO), an oligarchy (the multinational corporations and other nation-states) and a democracy (the various NGOs and the United Nations). Part of their analysis deals with "imagine[ing] "resistance to it", but "the point of Empire is that it, too, is "total" and that resistance to it can only take the form of negation - "the will to be against". The Empire is total, but economic inequality persists, and as all identities are wiped out and replaced with a universal one, the identity of the poor persists This description of pyramidal levels is a replica of Polybius' description of Roman government, hence the denomination "Empire". Furthermore, the crisis is conceived as inherent to the Empire. Negri & Hardt are also heavily indebted to Michel Foucault's analysis of biopolitics and Gilles Deleuze's philosophy. Before that book, Negri was best known for having written The Savage Anomaly (1981), a milestone book in Spinozism studies which he wrote in prison. Empire is thus, unsurprisingly, also influenced by Spinoza. The ideas first introduced in Empire (notably the concept of multitude, taken from Spinoza) were further developed in the 2004 book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, which was also written by Negri and Hardt. It was published by Harvard University Press in 2000 as a 478-page hardcover (ISBN 0-674-25121-0) and paperback (ISBN 0-674-00671-2).