Hardt and Negri: Empire, Multitude and Globalisation

Abstract

In Empire and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire Hardt and Negri offer a radical reading of the contemporary world political economy and an agenda for revolutionary change. Their radicalism is presented as new. They perceive the contemporary world as operating in a novel way. Political power is no longer concentrated in states; state sovereignty has given way to imperial sovereignty. Hardt and Negri are theorists of globalisation, who take the contemporary world to function in a way that is distinct from its modern past. The power that states have harnessed and wielded and which has been criticised by preceding modern critics is no longer to be inspected and denounced from a standpoint that is situated outside the boundaries of the power exercised by states and empire. New imperial power is exercised globally and has no inside or outside. They observe,

There is a long tradition of modern critique dedicated to denouncing the dualisms of modernity. The standpoint of that critical tradition, however, is situated in the paradigmatic place of modernity itself, both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, at the threshold of the point of crisis. What has changed in the passage to the imperial world, however, is that the border no longer exists, and thus the modern critical strategy tends no longer to be effective. (Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 183)