Empire and BeyondISBN: 978-0-7456-4048-8
Paperback
300 pages
November 2008, Polity
|
Today, Empire no longer has an outside: it no longer tolerates
realities external to itself. Hence every war cannot but be a civil
war, an internal battle, a domestic strife. But if the enemy is
always within, militarization is part and parcel of normalization
and every war necessarily appears as a policing operation. And yet
has the sun really set on the old materialist dream of transforming
social conflict into the beginnings of liberation? In the cracks of
Empire one can discern an emergent capacity to remould the world.
The anti-Empire is represented by the multitude, the collection of
impassioned and desiring individuals whose potential for action
offers the best hope for a better world.
In this book Antonio Negri explains the key concepts and methods which he and Michael Hardt have used to analyse Empire and the new forms of power and counter-power that are shaping and reshaping our world today. Through five introductory lectures and several supporting texts Negri constructs a democratic discourse on globalization, renews the premises of a materialist analysis of social and political life and offers some glimpses of the future.