Over the last decade, a series of works offering a comprehensive vision of the state of the world after the end of the Cold War have enlivened the tenor of mainstream intellectual life. These have sought to capture the experience of American victory over Communism, and lesser adversaries at home and abroad. Conceived in the spirit of monumental portraits of old, depicting a princely commander gazing reflectively out of the canvas, a still smoking battlefield in the far background, the genre has been a speciality of the American Right (or indistinguishable Centre). Its various practitioners—Fukuyama, Nye, Huntington, Luttwak, Friedman, Brzezinski—have seized the opportunity to survey the full extent of the field of US hegemony in geo-politics, economics and mass culture. That was to be expected. Yet what is often most striking in this body of work is not so much its crass triumphalism—in some cases, an exaggerated charge—as the sporadically brutal candour with which it registers the harsh realities of the incoming American Century. A sub-tone of foreboding—a still hint of sic transit—lurks in the depths of the canvas. In varying degrees, it is the dangers of relaxation or hubris that are typically the leitmotif of concluding chapters.
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. After years of living in French exile, Negri is now serving out the sentence he received in Italy in the early eighties, during the crack down on the Far Left, writing as an inmate of the Roman prison system that once held Gramsci under fascism. But the work he and Hardt have written owes very little to the precedent of the Prison Notebooks. Few messages could be further from that harsh strategic reckoning than the argument of Empire. Its burden is that, appearances to the contrary, we live in a springtime of peoples, a world overflowing with insurgent energies. In a period where others merely cast about for silver linings, Hardt and Negri announce a golden age.
Empire develops its rousing theme in an attractive variety of registers. The collaboration between American literary theorist and Italian political philosopher has produced a strange and graceful work, of rare imaginative drive and richness of intellectual reference. Theoretically, and to some extent architectonically, Hardt and Negri situate themselves in the line of Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaux. Their work freely crosses disciplinary boundaries, venturing reflections on law, culture, politics and economics with a repertoire of concepts ranging from the canon of European classical philosophy to the findings of contemporary American social science and cultural studies, not to speak of side-lights from Céline or Kafka, Herman Melville or Robert Musil. However counter-intuitive its conclusions, Empire is in its own terms a work of visionary intensity.
Hardt and Negri open their case by arguing that, although nation-state-based systems of power are rapidly unravelling in the force-fields of world capitalism, globalization cannot be understood as a simple process of de-regulating markets. Far from withering away, regulations today proliferate and interlock to form an acephelous supranational order which the authors choose to call ‘Empire’. The term, as they use it, refers not to a system in which tribute flows from peripheries to great capital cities, but to a more Foucauldian figure—a diffuse, anonymous network of all-englobing power. Hardt and Negri claim that the sinews of this phantasmic polity—its flows of people, information, and wealth—are simply too unruly to be monitored from metropolitan control centres. Their account of its origins adds a few striking nuances to a now familiar story. An older, statist world of ruling class and proletariat, of dominant core and subject periphery, is breaking down, and in its place a less dichotomous and more intricate pattern of inequality is emerging. ‘Empire’ could be described as the planetary Gestalt of these flows and hierarchies. The logic of this volatile totality evades and transgresses all the inherited divisions of political thought: state and society, war and peace, control and freedom, core and periphery; even the distinction between systemic and anti-systemic agency is blurred beyond recognition. The advent of this Empire is thus not merely a momentous episode in world history, it is an event of considerable ontological importance, heralded here in the voice of impassioned prophecy.
The political order of this latest stage of capitalism has a universal mission of pacification, comparable to those Empires of the past that strove to embrace the known world. Virgil is cited to convey the sheer magnitude of the change: ‘The final age that the oracle foretold has arrived; the great order of the centuries is born again.’ While Hardt and Negri discern a clean break between this system and the state-based colonialisms that preceded it, they place great stock in more ancient genealogies for this postmodern Empire. Those who want to understand the new universe should look to the writings of Polybius, who sought to explain to stupefied contemporaries how it was that Rome had risen to become master of the Mediterranean world. Polybius held that Rome had transcended the unstable cycles of the classical polis because its constitution mixed monarchy, aristocracy and democracy in proportions that checked the degenerative potential inherent in any unalloyed form of government. Hardt and Negri argue that the new world order can be envisaged as an analogous structure, in which US nuclear supremacy represents the monarchical, the economic wealth of the G7 and transnational corporations the aristocratic, and the internet the democratic principle—Bomb, Money and Ether composing the contemporary version of the constitution of the Roman Republic, on the morrow of its defeat of Carthage. But if this use of Polybius suggests an Empire at the threshold of centuries of ascendancy, other classical allusions—Montesquieu or Gibbon—imply eclipse or decline: tropes not just of universal order, but of decadence, transvaluation and crumbling limites. In this register, Hardt and Negri liken potential revolutionaries of today to Christians of the later Roman Empire, witnessing the inexorable hollowing out of the terrestrial order of things, and the beginnings of a new, rejuvenating era of barbarian migrations. Parallels with the Ancient World, central to the rhetorical strategy of Empire, oscillate between alternative meanings: do they point to the rising or the falling fortunes of global capitalism?
Overall, the book suggests the latter. Empire, its authors insist, did not emerge out of the defeat of systemic challenges to capital. On the contrary, its existence stands as a resounding, if paradoxical, testimony to the heroic mass struggles that shattered the Eurocentric old regime of national states and colonialism. Running through the work is the fervent belief that contemporary capitalism, although seemingly impervious to anti-systemic challenge, is in fact vulnerable at all points to riot and rebellion. The increasing importance of immaterial, intellectual labour in high value-added sectors of the economy is shaping a collective labourer with heightened powers of subversion. An ineradicable plebeian desire for emancipation is stoked by the increasingly apparent malleability of all social relationships and permeability of all borders. This global multitude, embracing all those who work, or are just poor, from computer scientists in Palo Alto to slum-dwellers in São Paulo, no longer imagines communities as integral nations. But mere heteroglossia or hybridization offer no trenchant alternative. For the ideology of Empire has become a supple, multicultural aesthetic that deactivates the revolutionary possibilities of globalization. Far from being oppositional, academic enthusiasts for diversity articulate the inclusive logic of a spontaneous order that no longer depends upon a metaphysics of natural difference and hierarchy.
Multiculturalists are not the only ones on the Left to be bluntly disabused. Hardt and Negri also question the notion that even the most blameless NGOs are agencies of a global civil society pitted against the established powers. Rather they can be compared to the Dominicans and Franciscans of late feudal society, functioning as ‘the charitable campaigns and mendicant orders of Empire’. Media-staged crusades by Amnesty International or Médecins Sans Frontières play an essential role in mobilizing public opinion behind humanitarian interventionism. It is no surprise that their critique of its jargon relies heavily on the writings of Carl Schmitt: