Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

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Complex, ambitious, disquieting, and ultimately hopeful, Multitude is the work of a couple of writers and thinkers who dare to address the great issues of our time from a truly alternative perspective. The sequel to 2001's equally bold and demanding Empire continues in the vein of the earlier tome. Where Empire's central premise was that the time of nation-state power grabs was passing as a new global order made up of "a new form of sovereignty" consisting of corporations, global-wide institutions, and other command centers is in ascendancy, Multitude focuses on the masses within the empire, except that, where academics Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri are concerned, this body is defined by its diversity rather than its commonalities. The challenge for the multitude in this new era is "for the social multiplicity to manage to communicate and act in common while remaining internally different." One may already be rereading that last sentence. Indeed, Empire isn't breezy reading. But for those aren't afraid of wadding into a knotty philosophical and political discourse of uncommon breadth, Multitude offers many rewards. --Steven Stolder

From Publishers Weekly
Empire (2000)—the surprise hit that made its term for U.S global hegemony stick and presciently set the agenda for post–9/11 political theory on the left—was written by this same somewhat unlikely duo: Hardt, an American political scientist at Duke University, and Negri, a former Italian parliament member and political exile, trained political scientist and sometime inmate of Rome's Rebibbia prison. This book follows up on Empire's promise of imagining a full-blown global democracy. Though the authors admit that they can't provide the final means for bringing that entity about (or the forms for maintaining it), the book is rich in ideas and agitational ends. The "multitude" is Hardt and Negri's term for the earth's six billion increasingly networked citizens, an enormous potential force for "the destruction of sovereignty in favor of democracy." The middle section on the nature of that multitude is bookended by two others. The first describes the situation in which the multitude finds itself: "permanent war." The last grounds demands for and historical precursors of global democracy. Written for activists to provide a solid goal (with digressions into history and theory) toward which protest actions might move, this timely book brings together myriad loose strands of far left thinking with clarity, measured reasoning and humor, major accomplishments in and of themselves. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* In this follow-up to their successful Empire (2000), academics Hardt and Negri take on the ambitious task of predicting the future shape of global socioeconomic structure or, using their terminology, the "biopolitical" character of twenty-first-century Earth. The operative concept of their analysis is that the future will look much like the Internet; human social, political, economic, and cultural behavior will, thanks to new circuits of cooperation and collaboration, tend toward a global sovereignty structured like the distributive network. The trend toward the empowered, globally networked "multitude" is a trend toward democracy, in a loose sense of the term, but unlike many other march-toward-democracy books, this one does not assume democracy as inevitable telos but rather an exciting, peaceful possibility to be attained--if we can get away from our current climate of self-perpetuating global violence. Unlike most current books about war and democracy, Hardt and Negri's impressive work sheds politics for philosophy and factionalism for foresight. A rare and exciting work of synthesis, this selection nicely blends some of the most cutting-edge scholarly work on globalization into a relatively accessible package. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


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Blend warmed-over Chomsky with dashes of Althusser and a pinch of Marx. Stir in some half-cooked network theory. Serve over a slab of post-Fordism. Voila: you've got a lovely critique of imperialism, perfect for serving at a faculty lunch. Hardt (Duke Univ.) and Negri (Univ. of Padua) follow up their Empire (not reviewed) with a presupposition that global politics is dominated not by a mere one or two powers (though, of course, the US is prominent) but by a network of advanced nation-states and their clients: the Empire, with a capital E. "Empire spreads globally its network of hierarchies and divisions that maintain order through new mechanisms of control and constant conflict," they write. "Globalization, however, is also the creation of new circuits of cooperation and collaboration that stretch across nations and continents and allow an unlimited number of encounters." These other circuits, they suggest, are the voice of the Multitude, an alternate network that holds the last best hope for democracy. "The conditions are emerging today," Hardt and Negri hold, "that give the multitude the capacity of democratic decision-making and that thus make sovereignty unnecessary." You may not want to hold your breath waiting for the state to wither away as the world's masses get hip to the Internet. There are thickets of prose here to give you pause nonetheless: "What we really need are weapons that make no pretense to symmetry with the ruling military power but also break the tragic asymmetry of the many forms of contemporary violence that do not threaten the current order but merely replicate a strange new symmetry." "Feminist struggles, antiracist struggles, and struggles of indigenouspopulations too are biopolitical in the sense that they immediately involve legal, cultural, political, and economic issues, indeed all facets of life." "Numerous contemporary wars neither contribute to nor detract from the ruling global hierarchy, and thus Empire is indifferent to them." And so on. Just the thing for those who want their earthly salvation served up by postmodern social scientists. For the rest of us, thank the heavens, we've got Gore Vidal.


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