Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

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.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Sociology, History, Academic

448 pages, Paperback

First published October 18, 2004

About the author

Michael Hardt is an American literary theorist and political philosopher perhaps best known for Empire, written with Antonio Negri and published in 2000. It has been praised as the "Communist Manifesto of the 21st Century."
Hardt and his co-author suggest that what they view as forces of contemporary class oppression, globalization and the commodification of services (or production of affects), have the potential to spark social change of unprecedented dimensions. A sequel, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, published in August 2004, details the notion, first propounded in Empire, of the multitude as possible locus of a democratic movement of global proportions.
The third and final part of the trilogy, Commonwealth, appeared in the Fall of 2009.

Reviews

[Felipe]

La propuesta es interesante; el rechazo a la dialéctica materialista me parece poco operativo en términos políticos; la descripción rizomática de los movimientos geopolíticos globales se explica mejor desde las contradicciones dialécticas y el movimiento opostivo de fuerzas contradictorias. Foucault y Marx se me hace un poco complejo juntarlos, pero como se resuelven las diferencias es interesante y práctico metodológicamente.