Empire and Beyond

Book excerpt: 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.