Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 2000) ISBN: 0674006712, £12.99pbk.

Globalisation seems impossible to escape: it envelops us, dominating academic, media and policy discourses. It is both a phrase that has caught the zeitgeist and a pointed polemical tool. The literature analysing globalisation seems to be growing exponentially, overwhelming anybody brave (or foolhardy) enough to try and digest the variegated spectrum of positions on the topic. Unfortunately quality rarely follows quantity. For all the millions of words, the felled trees, there has been little profound, sustained political reflection on the process(es), on its intellectual roots and structure, and on the radical potential that it may contain. Empire is a glowing exception to this, a stunningly ambitious, multi-faceted, and richly suggestive book. Much lauded since it’s original publication, it can rightly claim to be the most important critical-theoretic analysis of the topic yet attempted.

Empire sets out to develop an innovative analysis of the contemporary global order. Whilst Hardt and Negri share the radical political convictions of those who claim that in globalisation we are witnessing a ‘new imperialism’, they argue that instead of seeing a repeat of an old form of domination – with the US assuming the place, for example, of nineteenth-century Britain - the contemporary global condition represents a novel departure from that which went before. Indeed it signals (that most abused of terms) a ‘paradigm shift’ in the constitution of global political-economic order.

In its place they articulate, via a reading of Marx projected through the prism of Deleuzian and Foucaultian categories of thought, a notion of a postmodern global Empire: ‘a decentred and deterritorialising apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers’ (xii). This universal form has emerged from the slow death of modernity, and as we stand on the precarious edge of a postmodern epoch Empire is the form that the spatial and temporal organisation of capital is rapidly assuming. ‘The single and univocal pinnacle of world command is…articulated by the transnational corporations and the organization of markets. The world market both homogenises and differentiates territories, rewriting the geography of the globe’ (p. 310). Moreover, and in line with neo-liberal prophets, Hardt and Negri proclaim the transformation of conceptions of sovereignty, of the end of the nation-state as power container and locus of politics. ‘The end of colonialism and the declining power of the nation are indicative of a general passage from the paradigm of modern sovereignty towards the paradigm of imperial sovereignty.’ (p. 137).

For Hardt and Negri, imperialism was defined traditionally by the creation of strongly demarcated political boundaries, by the division of the world into an inside/outside mode of organisation. In contradistinction, this new form of Empire cannot be reduced to state forms and their spatial projection, for states are losing their power to shape events. ‘Empire can only be conceived as a universal republic, a network of powers and counterpowers structured in a boundless and inclusive architecture’ (p. 166) and as such it is essential to comprehend the ‘novelty of the structures and logics of power that order the contemporary world.’ (p. 146). This form of Empire, then, has no centre, no boundaries, no edges, although of course there is a definite hierarchy with the US at the pinnacle. This is as a result of a new form of power, ‘network’ power, which is dissipated throughout the system, without a grounded territorial base; rather it envelops the globe in flows of money, ideas, internalised systems of representation and so forth. It is both omnipresent and inherently slippery.

So, what next? Although there is no escape from Empire, Hardt and Negri show a remarkable degree of optimism with regards to the future, seeing contained within Empire the dialectical resources to transform its modes of power and control. Such a transformation can come about only through the power of the ‘multitude’- the ‘productive, creative subjectivities of globalization’ (p. 60). Their optimistic analysis highlights one of the main weaknesses of the book, namely its lack of sustained social, political or economic analysis. The concept of Empire is thus suggestive, penetrating, but ultimately very difficult to operationalise or even apply adequately. Furthermore, they offer little advice or guidance as to how the multitude can resist Empire, and this is one of the most undeveloped aspects of the book. However, at least in affirming the possibility they challenge the pessimism of inevitability that besets much work on globalisation.

It would be impossible to provide an adequate summary of, let alone review, the many and varied theoretical twists and turns that Hardt and Negri embark upon to reach their stunningly (over) optimistic conclusions. Suffice it to say that their marriage of recent continental philosophy and Marxism is both instructive and problematic. From the former they gain a powerful sense of the formative, constitutive power of ideas and discourse, of the role of the mind and indeed the body in politics, as well as a healthy distrust of totalising forces. However, they lose the ability to carry out concrete analysis, and thus undermine the plausibility of many of their arguments. What is lost in the blizzard of high-theory is adequate historical and economic analysis; sweeping generalisations abound, and sentences cover centuries. The book, despite its apparent confidence is therefore pervaded by vagueness. Perhaps the greatest weakness of the book, however, is not primarily theoretical: the role of the United States is consistently underplayed as a result of the desire to project Empire on a truly global scale.

Despite these criticisms, this is a fascinating book, bold, intelligent and ultimately humane - although they may well quibble with this claim! - and it represents, I think, the most important work of left-wing political theory to have emerged during the last decade.