Empire (review)

Abstract

Hailed as the new "Communist Manifesto" on its dust jacket, this hefty tome may be worthy of such distinction. Their second collab-oration (following 1994's The Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of State-Form), in Empire Hardt and Negri analyze the multiple processes of globalization--the worldwide saturation of capital, the steady "bourgeoisification" of the globe, the withering of the nation-state, the postimperialist political landscape, etc.--and argue that the new sovereign, the new order of the globalized world, is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule they designate (capital "E") Empire. As good philosophers in the Deleuzian tradition do, the authors create concepts: Empire is neither a metaphor nor a term by which other historical empires can be characterized. Rather, distinguished by a lack of boundaries, a suspension of history, and an extreme form--or the logical conclusion--of Foucauldian bio-power, the new Empire masks its conquest in the guise of peacemaking. Is this then merely another critique of U.S. foreign policy à la Chomsky's The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo? Hardly. Though allocated a privileged status in the logic of Empire, neither the United States nor any other single nation-state is the superpower Svengali pulling the strings behind the scenes. Gliding on a smooth, unstriated plane of fluid boundaries and hybrid identities, Empire operates beyond the nation-state, beyond imperialism, unlimited and unbounded by any geographical region--a topography at once liberating and daunting for any progressive political project. [End Page 253]