Multitude War and democracy in the age of empire

Michael Hardt, 1960-

Book - 2004

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Subjects
Published
New York : The Penguin Press 2004.
Language
English
Main Author
Michael Hardt, 1960- (-)
Other Authors
Antonio Negri, 1933- (-)
Item Description
Sequel to: Empire.
Physical Description
xviii, 427 p.
Bibliography
Includes index.
ISBN
9781594200243
  • Preface: Life in Common
  • 1. War
  • 1.1. Simplicissimus
  • Exceptions
  • Golem
  • The Global State of War
  • Biopower and Security
  • Legitimate Violence
  • Samuel Huntington, Geheimrat
  • 1.2. Counterinsurgencies
  • Birth of the New War
  • Revolution in Military Affairs
  • The Mercenary and the Patriot
  • Asymmetry and Full-Spectrum Dominance
  • 1.3. Resistance
  • The Primacy of Resistance
  • From the People's Army to Guerrilla Warfare
  • Inventing Network Struggles
  • Swarm Intelligence
  • From Biopower to Biopolitical Production
  • 2. Multitude
  • 2.1. Dangerous Classes
  • The Becoming Common of Labor
  • The Twilight of the Peasant World
  • Two Italians in India
  • The Wealth of the Poor (or, We Are the Poors!)
  • Demonic Multitudes: Dostoyevsky Reads the Bible
  • Excursus 1. Method: In Marx's Footsteps
  • Death of the Dismal Science?
  • 2.2. De Corpore
  • Global Apartheid
  • A Trip to Davos
  • Big Government Is Back
  • Life on the Market
  • 2.3. Traces of the Multitude
  • The Monstrosity of the Flesh
  • Invasion of the Monsters
  • Production of the Common
  • Beyond Private and Public
  • Carnival and Movement
  • Mobilization of the Common
  • Excursus 2. Organization: Multitude on the Left
  • 3. Democracy
  • 3.1. The Long March of Democracy
  • Crisis of Democracy in the Era of Armed Globalization
  • The Unfinished Democratic Project of Modernity
  • Debtors' Rebellion
  • The Unrealized Democracy of Socialism
  • Revolt, Berlin 1953
  • From Democratic Representation to Global Public Opinion
  • White Overalls
  • 3.2. Global Demands for Democracy
  • Cahiers de doleances
  • Convergence in Seattle
  • Experiments in Global Reform
  • Back to the Eighteenth Century!
  • Excursus 3. Strategy: Geopolitics and New Alliances
  • Iconoclasts
  • 3.3. Democracy of the Multitude
  • Sovereignty and Democracy
  • May the Force Be with You
  • The New Science of Democracy: Madison and Lenin
  • Notes
Review by Choice Review

This is the sequel to Hardt and Negri's much discussed work Empire (CH, Oct'00), in which the authors argued that the system of power in the world today differs from earlier forms of domination in that it is not centered in a particular state or other sovereign entity. Rather, it involves a coordinated system of "network power" that includes nation-states, supranational organizations, multinational corporations, and other entities. In the current work, Hardt and Negri argue that "empire" is opposed by "the multitude," by the vast majority of men and women throughout the world who, caught up in the processes of globalization, are creating "new circuits of cooperation and collaboration that stretch across nations and continents." The multitude is becoming increasingly self-organizing, creating new forms of production through collaborative networks such as the open source movement in IT. This development holds out the promise of democracy, but one that is akin to 19th- and early-20th-century anarchist visions of a self-directing social order rather than to the centralized models of contemporary liberal-democracy. Like its predecessor, this is a controversial book, but it is an important text offering an essential perspective on the world today. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. General readers; upper-division undergraduates and above. J. D. Moon Wesleyan University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist 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 2004 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (On sale Aug. 9) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

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. Voilà: 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 indigenous populations 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. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The possibility of democracy on a global scale is emerging today for the very first time. This book is about that possibility. It is about what we call the project of the multitude. The project of the multitude not only expresses the desire for a world of equality and freedom, not only demands an open and inclusive democratic global society, but also provides the means for achieving it. That is how our book will end, but it cannot begin there. The possibility of democracy is obscured and threatened today by the seemingly permanent state of conflict across the world. Our book must begin with this state of war. Democracy, it is true, remained an incomplete project throughout the modern era in all its national and local forms, and certainly the processes of globalization in recent decades have added new challenges, but the primary obstacle to democracy today is the global state of war. In our era of armed globalization, in fact, the modern dream of democracy may seem to have been definitively lost. War has always been incompatible with democracy. Traditionally, democracy has been suspended during wartime and power confided temporarily in a strong central authority to confront the crisis. When today the state of war is not only global in scale but also long-lasting, with no end in sight, then the suspension of democracy also becomes indefinite or even permanent. Democracy thus appears to be entirely irretrievable, buried deep beneath the weapons and security regimes of our global state of war. Never has democracy been more necessary than today, in this situation of global conflict. No other path will provide a way out of the fear, insecurity, and domination that permeate our world at war; no other path will lead us to a peaceful life in common. Democracy, it would seem, has never been more impossible or more necessary. This book is the sequel to our book Empire , which focused on the new, global form of sovereignty. That book attempted to interpret the tendency of global political order in the course of its formation; that is, to recognize how, from a variety of contemporary processes, a new form of global order is emerging that we call empire. Our point of departure was the recognition that contemporary global order can no longer be understood adequately in terms of imperialism as it was practiced by the modern powers, based primarily on the sovereignty of the nation-state extended over foreign territory. Instead, a "network power," a new form of sovereignty, is emerging today that includes as its primary elements, or nodes, the dominant nation-states along with supranational institutions, major capitalist corporations, and other powers. This network power we claim is "imperial," not "imperialist." Not all the powers in empire's network, of course, are equal. On the contrary, some nation-states have enormous power and some almost none at all, and the same is true for the various other corporations and institutions that make up the network--but despite inequalities they must cooperate together to create and maintain the current global order along with all of its internal divisions and hierarchies. Our notion of empire thus cuts diagonally across the debates that pose unilateralism and multilateralism or pro-Americanism and anti-Americanism as the only global political alternatives. On the one hand, we argued that no nation-state, not even the most powerful one, not even the United States, can "go it alone" and maintain global order without collaborating with the other major powers in the network of empire. On the other hand, we claimed that the contemporary global order is not characterized and cannot be sustained by an equal participation of all, or even the set of elite nation-states, as in the model of multilateral control under the authority of the United Nations. Rather, severe divisions and hierarchies, along regional, national, and local lines, define our current global order. Our claim is not simply that unilateralism and multilateralism as they have been presented are not desirable but that they are not possible given our present conditions and that attempts to pursue them will not succeed in maintaining the current global order. When we say that empire is a tendency we mean that it is the only form of power that will succeed in maintaining the current global order in a lasting way. One might thus respond to the U.S. unilateralist global projects with the ironic injunction adapted from the Marquis de Sade: "Américains, encore un effort si vous voulez être imperials!" ("Americans, try again if you want to be imperialists.") We also claimed that empire rules over a global order that is not only fractured by internal divisions and hierarchies but also plagued by perpetual war. The state of war is inevitable in empire and war functions as an instrument of rule. Today's pax imperia , like that in the times of ancient Rome, is a false pretense of peace that really presides over a state of constant war. All of that analysis of empire and global order, however, was part of the previous book and there is no need for us to repeat it here. This book will focus on the multitude, the living alternative that grows within empire. You might say, simplifying a great deal, that there are two faces to globalization. On one face, empire spreads globally its network of hierarchies and divisions that maintain order through new mechanisms of control and constant conflict. 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. This second face of globalization is not a matter of everyone in the world becoming the same, but rather it provides the possibility that, while remaining different, we discover the common that allows us to communicate and act together. The multitude too might thus be conceived as a network: an open and expansive network in which all differences can be expressed freely and equally, a network that provides the means of encounter so that we can work and live in common. Excerpted from The Ebk Multitude: War and Democracy in The by Hardt All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.