"This timely book brings together myriad loose strands of far left thinking with clarity, measured reasoning
and humor."
--Publishers Weekly, starred
"Impressive� a rare and exciting work of synthesis."
--Booklist, starred review
"Brilliant."
--The Village Voice
"An inspiring marriage of realism and idealism."
--Naomi Klein, author of No Logo
Penguin Group Web Site, August, 2005
Summary
From the world-renowned authors of Empire--a profound new vision of the reality of global war and the possibility
of global democracy
In their international bestseller Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri presented a grand unified vision of a
world in which the old forms of imperialism are no longer effective. But what of Empire in an age of "American
empire"? Has fear become our permanent condition and democracy an impossible dream? Such pessimism is profoundly
mistaken, the authors argue. Empire, by interconnecting more areas of life, is actually creating the possibility
for a new kind of democracy, allowing different groups to form a multitude, with the power to forge a democratic
alternative to the present world order.Exhilarating in its optimism and depth of insight, Multitude consolidates
Hardt and Negri's stature as two of the most important political philosophers at work in the world today.
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.
Table of Contents
Preface: Life in Common
1. War
1.1 Simplicissimus
Exemptions
Golem
The GLobla 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
From Democratic Representation to GLobal Public Demands
White Overalls
3.2 Global Demands for Democracy
Caheirs de doléances
Convergence in Seattle
Experiments in Global Reform
Back to the Eighteenth Century!
Excursus 3: Strategy: Geopolitics and New Alliances
3.3 Democracy of the Multitude
Sovereignty and Democracy
May the Force Be with You
The New Science of Democracy: Madison and Lenin