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Empire

by Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri

Harvard University Press, 2000

478 Pages, $18.95

ISBN: 0-674-00671-2

You think that globalization is just a device for smothering revolutionary potential, do you? The authors of Empire argue otherwise. One of them, Michael Hardt, is an associate professor in the Literature Program at Duke University. The other, Antonio Negri, has taught political science at the Universities of Paris and Padua. Currently, he is so ineffably progressive that he is actually being held in Rome's Rebibbia prison for the radical violence of decades past. 

Empire analyzes the current world situation, reformulates contemporary Leftist theory to accommodate it, and tentatively points the way toward the overthrow of post-historic capitalism. The work is relentlessly postmodern; it connects with classical Marxism chiefly to explain why it is no longer relevant. The authors' thesis is that would-be revolutionaries are mistaken if they oppose globalization as such. Globalization really is the end of history, and there is no going back. However, the form that the globalized world is assuming, which the authors call the Empire, is a corruption of the post-historic world. The task of revolutionaries is to find where the Empire is vulnerable.

The problem is that, to use one of the authors' metaphors, the Empire is Saint Augustine's City of God. As you might imagine, it's a tough nut to crack. Like the Roman Empire, it seems to its subjects to be permanent, eternal, and necessary. It has no outside, at least in principle, and internally it distinguishes neither male nor female, Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free. It does not rest on conquest, but on consensus. The Empire is the post-historical incarnation of eternal justice. The Empire does not merely happen to exist, like a historically contingent state does; rather, the Empire must exist, at least as an ideal. It closes the gap that opened in the Renaissance between the ethical and the juridical. Its wars are just wars, police actions against opponents who can marshal no principled claims against it. No civil or military stresses remain that might threaten it; the Empire is always in a crisis, so its acts are emergency measures that trump the ordinary law of the sovereignties and corporations that comprise it.

The authors point out that the Empire is not really a state. It does indeed have state-like organs, such as the UN, the IMF, and the WTO. For that matter, it even has a tripartite anatomy. At the top of the top third is the United States, or at any rate its military and cultural power. Immediately below are the G7 countries, or rather their command of the world's money. In the middle third are the governments and corporations that carry out the routine functions of governance. In the bottom third are the NGOs, churches and other organs of civil society. These latter represent the People of the Empire, just as the middle tier represents its aristocracy and the top third the royal power. (The authors are very impressed by the description of the late Roman Republic given by Polybius in the second century B.C.)

Despite its specific constitutional structures, however, the great strength of the Empire is its lack of a center. It has no weak links whose loss might bring the system down. Strictly speaking, it has no administration. Unlike the Weberian bureaucratic state, it does not seek to treat all equally, but to treat every situation individually. For that matter, it has no geography: the old divisions between First, Second and Third Worlds have collapsed. The difference between France and India in the world system, for instance, has become a matter of degree rather than kind. 

The Empire is imperial, not imperialist. Imperialism, in the authors' analysis, was simply the extension of European nationalism outside Europe. The Empire arose precisely because capitalism could not endure if the divisions between nations were not dissolved. The authors count the loss of national sovereignty, and even of national identity, as no great tragedy. Nations themselves, as well as the Peoples that comprised them, were largely confected for the benefit of early capitalist production. While the authors acknowledge there was a point in history when the state could act as a wall against the intrusive power of capital, the cost of maintaining this wall was excessive. Nationalism meant imposing an identity on the "multitude," the persons of which the human race actually consists. They became an artificial People, with all that implies in terms of xenophobia and the potential for intergroup violence. The real desire of the multitude, say the authors, is neither local identity, nor the "Kantian reverie" of a universal polity, but to live as a single species.

According to the authors, politics is "ontological." The way that power works in a society defines what things there are and who people are. The authors say that the distinctive feature of modern society, starting with the Renaissance, is the progressive elimination of the "transcendent" element from Western thought. Because of this, as time went on, the powers-that-be were less and less able to justify their power by appeal to anything beyond actual human life. The first and most obvious casualty was the divine-right theory of kingship. However, the following regime of liberalism, though governing in terms of the secular Social Contract, directed attention away from the real multitude and toward the phantasmal People. Though Marxism exploded the chimera of nationalism, even classical Marxism had its "outside." It explained the capitalist world by recourse to the still non-capitalist world, and it looked for motivation to the vision of an apocalyptic revolution and the millennium of socialism to follow. With the coming of the Empire, the outside was gone entirely. The only sort of ontology that the postmodern mind can entertain is wholly "immanent": everything is contained within the human world as it exists.  There can be no appeal to past or future, or to any non-human world, including nature, which is also a social construct.

The Empire is not doomed in the sense that capitalism was doomed in Marx's Marxism. It does not have to disappear. However, neither is it essential to the postmodern world, so it is perfectly mortal. Since the Empire is a capitalist system, this would mean returning control of the means of production to the exploited producers. While the authors acknowledge that there are many oppressed workers in the old-fashioned, sweatshop sense of the term, they are most interested in knowledge and service workers, whose work is mostly verbal. The old proletariat, industrial and otherwise, has largely evaporated. What remains is the multitude, the basic human material that always underlay class society. In fact, the author's definition of labor as desire, or "general social activity," is hard to distinguish from culture. It is this upwelling of new desires and intentions that the Empire, wholly uncreative in itself, appropriates from the multitude to keep itself in business. In effect, the authors say, the Empire will be overthrown when the multitude seize control of culture for themselves.

While the Empire might seem to have a certain nightmarish omnipresence, its strength is also its weakness. Former versions of capitalist society had elaborate superstructures of national government and schools and churches. Today, these structures do not wholly contain the multitude, so that they everywhere confront the Empire directly. Their demands, therefore, can strike directly at the Empire's ability to appropriate their creativity. 

The multitude should demand global citizenship, in the sense of the unfettered right to travel. Thus, through migration and miscegenation, they can break down the ethnic categories that the Empire cultivates. The multitude should have free, unfettered access to the means of communication, which one might take to mean Internet and cable access as a right. Since the social product is no longer measurable, pay should be divorced from work, and a universal income guaranteed.

The authors say they do not have the slightest idea how these demands might be achieved, or even whether they would really constitute the overthrow of the protean Empire. Some organization will have to arise to bring about the change, a new form that arises from the limitless creativity of the multitude. While waiting for that to happen, they suggest that activists should stop thinking of themselves as representatives. The whole idea of representation is one of the tricks of transcendental thinking. Rather, activists must think of themselves as models, as inspirations. The authors cite Saint Francis of Assisi as an example, someone who simply walked away from the order of the world and invited others to follow.

It is easy to see how this book could cause so much commotion on the Left. Here we have a couple of radicals' radicals telling progressives everywhere that they should not just think globally and act locally, but act globally, too. Their dismissal of nature as a construct punctures some mighty sensitive environmentalist pieties. Some people's heads may explode when they read what the authors have to say about multiculturalism being the governing philosophy of the Empire. Nonetheless, having struggled through this book, I must warn readers that its blocks of dense text often reveal ideas of stunning banality. Take this snippet:

"…Is it possible for the system to sustain simultaneously political subjection and the subjectivity of the producer/consumer? It does not really seem so. In effect, the fundamental condition of the existence of the universal network, which is the central hypothesis of this constitutional framework, is that it be hybrid, and that is, for our purposes, that the political subject be fleeting and passive, while the producing and consuming agent is present and active. This means that, far from being a simple repetition of a traditional equilibrium, the formation of the new mixed constitution leads to a fundamental disequilibrium among the established actors and thus to a new social dynamic that liberates the producing and consuming subject from (or at least makes ambiguous its position within) the mechanisms of political subjection…."

At the risk of overlooking certain nuances, I think what they mean here is: "Consumers make bad citizens." The authors are not stupid people, and they do sometimes give lucid translations of their own arguments. For the most part, however, they cannot turn off the purple-prose machine.

The problems with their ideas go beyond the way they are expressed. Their depiction of post-medieval thought as the progress from nominalism to immanence is simply wrong. The Constitution of the United States may be, as they claim, the model for the "imperial" constitution of the globalized world. However, their insistence that the US Constitution is the acme of immanence is simply bizarre. Approaching the subject with such an ontology makes actual American constitutional history invisible and undiscussable. In fact, the authors often turn aside from obvious paths of inquiry because their philosophy does not provide a map.

Their book is full of allusions to the Roman imperial idea. They note that, in a sense, history has justified the cultural pessimists from Burckhardt to Spengler who predicted the disappearance of old Europe. However, the authors refuse to discuss a cyclical interpretation of the Empire, saying that: "We find this entire mode of reasoning completely inadequate … because every theory of cycles seems to laugh at the fact that history is a product of human action by imposing an objective law that rules over the intentions and resistances, the defeats and the victories, the joys and the sufferings of humans." This objection might need an answer, were it not part of a historical account that consists entirely of ironic outcomes and unforeseen consequences.

The biggest single problem with this book is that the authors never clearly explain what they are trying to do. They speak of revealing "the City of Man" under the corruption of the Empire, but we hear nothing about that City's constitution. They say this City of Man will in fact see the end of the human, in the sense of an anthropology that places man above nature. They hope to pursue a wholly immanent ethics, something along the lines of Foucault's "care of the Self."  They say that what they seek is a "re-total" rather than a "re-public." This language is not helpful.

The authors have had some kind words about the recent great demonstrations against the institutions of globalization, though they continue to point out the futility of opposing globalization itself. Those demonstrations were marked by contempt for free speech, public safety and human life. Quite likely, in those cosmopolitan riots, we saw what the City of Man really looks like. We can't say we were not warned.