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.
