Negri, Antonio (b. 1933)

Abstract

Antonio Negri has been a prominent and controversial political philosopher and activist, as well as a cultural critic, for over 40 years. Born August 1, 1933 in Padua, Italy, the younger son of a militant communist couple, he excelled in school, completing his doctorate and earning an academic post in “state doctrine”(equivalent to the Anglo‐American field of philosophy of law) at the University of Padua by age 25. Along the way he studied philosophy in the UK, France, and Germany, lived on a kibbutz in Israel for a year, and became politically active in the Catholic Youth Action movement and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). His doctoral thesis became his first book, Stato e diritto nel giovane Hegel (State and Right in the Young Hegel) (1958); this was soon followed by other works on German philosophy and social theory. Negri's overall project in these early works up to and including Political Descartes (1970) was to demonstrate how the disciplines of philosophy, law, and social science had legitimated the capitalist state from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries.