I wonder if Empire—the nearly 500-page reader-proof tome by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri—is about to make a comeback. The book has long-since disappeared into well-deserved oblivion.
But when it was first published some twenty years ago, it took the world—at least the gullible world of academia and adjacent media middens—by storm.
The venerable literary Marxist Fredric Jameson opined that it was “the first great new theoretical synthesis of the new millennium.” The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek—a plausible replacement for Jameson as the world’s trendiest academic Marxist—declared that it is “nothing less than a rewriting of the The Communist Manifesto for our time.”
Further down the intellectual food chain, Emily Eakin, a journalist for The New York Times, delivered herself of an ecstatic summary, simultaneously certifying and increasing the book’s prestige. Perhaps, she speculated, it is the “Next Big Idea,” the successor to structuralism and deconstruction in the halls of literary academia. It is too soon to say for sure, she cautioned, but, possessed as it is of “the formal trappings of a master theory in the old European tradition,” the book “is filling a void in the humanities.”
Neither blurb writers nor cultural journalists write under oath, of course. But even with all of the appropriate discounts, this is an exceptional outpouring. At the time, Hardt was a thirty-something associate professor in the literature program at Duke. His co-author, Antonio Negri (1933-2023), was an Italian political philosopher in his late sixties who is described on the book’s dust jacket as “an independent researcher and writer and an inmate at Rebibbia Prison, Rome.” I will say more about Negri below.
Empire’s combination of owlish scholarly pretentiousness, on the one hand, and bristling Communist militancy, on the other, more or less guaranteed it at least a respectful audience in the academy.
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Author: Ruth King
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