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Book by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt
other books

Empire is a book by post Marxist philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Written in the mid 1990s, it was published in 2000 and quickly sold beyond its expectations as an academic work.

Empire was published by Harvard University Press in 2000 as a 478 page hardcover and paperback .

The book's description of pyramidal levels is a replica of Polybius' description of Roman government, hence the Empire denomination. Furthermore, the crisis is conceived as inherent to the Empire. Hardt and Negri are heavily indebted to Michel Foucault's analysis of biopolitics, as well as the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, especially their book A Thousand Plateaus. A number of concepts developed by Deleuze and Guattari – such as multiplicity, deterritorialization, nomads, and control – are central to Empire's claims. Before Empire, 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. It is also influenced by the work of Carl Schmitt, in particular his theory of sovereignty, as well as Niccolò Machiavelli. The ideas first introduced in Empire (notably the concept of multitude, taken from Spinoza) were further developed in the books Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004), Commonwealth (2009), and Assembly (2017), which were also written by Hardt and Negri.

Empire has been described by the London Review of Books as "the most successful work of political theory to come from the Left for a generation." The book has been highly influential on numerous debates within the left, and has even been called "a bible of the anti globalisation movement" by one critic and "the most influential book in recent decades on a classic sociological theme". In a review of the book, Slavoj Žižek stated that the book "sets as its goal, writing the Communist Manifesto for the twenty first century." Gopal Balakrishnan, reviewing the book for the New Left Review, wrote that when compared with influential conservative books such as Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, "Comparable totalizations from the Left have been few and far between; diagnoses of the present more uniformly bleak. At best, the alternative to surrender or self delusion has seemed to be a combative but clear eyed pessimism, orienting the mind for a Long March against the new scheme of things. In this landscape, the appearance of Empire represents a spectacular break. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri defiantly overturn the verdict that the last two decades have been a time of punitive defeats for the Left." Empire has created important intellectual debates around its arguments. Certain scholars have compared the evolution of the world order with Hardt and Negri's world image in Empire. A number of publications and debates centered on the book, both positively and negatively. Hardt and Negri's theoretical approach has also been compared and contrasted with works of 'the global capitalism school' whose authors have analyzed transnational capitalism and class relations in the global epoch. Hardt and Negri published an essay titled "Empire 20 Years On" in the November/December 2019 edition of New Left Review, in which they provide a critical analysis of the book's legacy and their perspective on it looking back.