Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire
Encyclopedia
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire is a book written by Antonio Negri
and Michael Hardt
published in 2004. It is a sequel to the 2000 book, Empire
.
, an apparently chaotic set of controls and representative
organizations which, on closer inspection, forms a pyramidal power-structure
that is composed of three progressively broader tiers:
It is in this last tier that, albeit indirectly, the multitude
appears as the "Other of the People": “The democratic forces that in this framework ought to constitute the active and open element of the imperial machine appear rather as corporative forces, as a set of superstitions and fundamentalisms, betraying a conservative, when not downright reactionary, spirit. […] This limited sphere of imperial ‘democracy’ is configured as a People (an organized particularity that defends established privileges and properties) rather than as a multitude (the universality of free and productive practices).” It is the role of Empire to mold the multitude, via mechanisms of representation, into a People, to transcendentally confiscate the ostensibly chaotic and thus ‘dangerous’ immanent force of the multitude and reconfigure (or reterritorialize) its multiplicity into one will. Empire, Hardt and Negri write, is an apparatus of capture that lives off the vitality of the multitude.
The multitude plays a prominent part in Empire, and not in the least for its revolution
ary potential to establish what Baruch Spinoza
called an absolute democracy
, to subvert the allegedly post-disciplinary societies of control and their concomitant biopower--in short, to attack post-industrial capitalist hegemony with effective weaponry
.
Hardt and Negri conclude their analysis with a chapter that focuses directly on the multitude and end with an optimistic outlook:
in 1999 and in Genova
in 2001, along with the creation of the World Social Forum
in Porto Alegre
, also in 2001, seemed to substantiate the optimistic outlook at the end of Empire. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001
seem, however, to have worked as a pivotal point with respect to this development—offering, one might cynically conclude, the dwindling Empire, in a Hobbesian
fashion, the chance to defend itself against the multitude through the production of a culture of fear
.
Multitude addresses these issues and as such picks up the thread where Empire has left of. In order to do so, Hardt and Negri argue, one must first analyze the present configuration of war and its contradictions. This analysis is performed in the first chapter, after which chapters two and three focus on multitude and democracy, respectively.
Multitude is not so much a sequel as it is a reiteration from a new point of view in a new, relatively accessible style that is distinct from the predominantly academic
prose style of Empire. Multitude remains, the authors insist, despite its ubiquitous subject matter and its almost casual tone, a book of philosophy which aims to shape a conceptual ground for a political process of democratization rather than present an answer to the question ‘what to do?’ or offer a program for concrete action.
Antonio Negri
Antonio Negri is an Italian Marxist sociologist and political philosopher.Negri is best-known for his co-authorship of Empire, and secondarily for his work on Spinoza. Born in Padua, he became a political philosophy professor in his hometown university...
and Michael Hardt
Michael Hardt
Michael Hardt is an American literary theorist and political philosopher perhaps best known for Empire, written with Antonio Negri and published in 2000...
published in 2004. It is a sequel to the 2000 book, Empire
Empire (book)
Empire is a text written by post-Marxist philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. The book, written in the mid-1990s, was published in 2000 and quickly sold beyond its expectations as an academic work.-Summary:...
.
Context
Empire analyzed the formation of a new global geopolitical orderGlobalization
Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...
, an apparently chaotic set of controls and representative
Representation (politics)
In politics, representation describes how some individuals stand in for others or a group of others, for a certain time period. Representation usually refers to representative democracies, where elected officials nominally speak for their constituents in the legislature...
organizations which, on closer inspection, forms a pyramidal power-structure
Hierarchy
A hierarchy is an arrangement of items in which the items are represented as being "above," "below," or "at the same level as" one another...
that is composed of three progressively broader tiers:
- A replica of PolybiusPolybiusPolybius , Greek ) was a Greek historian of the Hellenistic Period noted for his work, The Histories, which covered the period of 220–146 BC in detail. The work describes in part the rise of the Roman Republic and its gradual domination over Greece...
’ description of RomanAncient RomeAncient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
governmentGovernmentGovernment refers to the legislators, administrators, and arbitrators in the administrative bureaucracy who control a state at a given time, and to the system of government by which they are organized...
, the only remaining superpowerSuperpowerA superpower is a state with a dominant position in the international system which has the ability to influence events and its own interests and project power on a worldwide scale to protect those interests...
, the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, followed closely by a handful of other nation-stateNation-stateThe nation state is a state that self-identifies as deriving its political legitimacy from serving as a sovereign entity for a nation as a sovereign territorial unit. The state is a political and geopolitical entity; the nation is a cultural and/or ethnic entity...
s (roughly, those represented in the G8G8The Group of Eight is a forum, created by France in 1975, for the governments of seven major economies: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In 1997, the group added Russia, thus becoming the G8...
). Together they control the primary global monetary instruments, and a handful of supranational institutions such as the World Trade OrganizationWorld Trade OrganizationThe World Trade Organization is an organization that intends to supervise and liberalize international trade. The organization officially commenced on January 1, 1995 under the Marrakech Agreement, replacing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade , which commenced in 1948...
, NATO, and the International Monetary FundInternational Monetary FundThe International Monetary Fund is an organization of 187 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world...
. - The aristocraticAristocracyAristocracy , is a form of government in which a few elite citizens rule. The term derives from the Greek aristokratia, meaning "rule of the best". In origin in Ancient Greece, it was conceived of as rule by the best qualified citizens, and contrasted with monarchy...
tier, in which resides transnational corporations and the general set of sovereignSovereigntySovereignty is the quality of having supreme, independent authority over a geographic area, such as a territory. It can be found in a power to rule and make law that rests on a political fact for which no purely legal explanation can be provided...
nation-states. - The democratic-representational comitia—the United Nations General AssemblyUnited Nations General AssemblyFor two articles dealing with membership in the General Assembly, see:* General Assembly members* General Assembly observersThe United Nations General Assembly is one of the five principal organs of the United Nations and the only one in which all member nations have equal representation...
, religious organisations, the mediaMass mediaMass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
, and Non-governmental organizationNon-governmental organizationA non-governmental organization is a legally constituted organization created by natural or legal persons that operates independently from any government. The term originated from the United Nations , and is normally used to refer to organizations that do not form part of the government and are...
s, which together are supposed to represent the People in the global constitution.
It is in this last tier that, albeit indirectly, the multitude
Multitude
Multitude is a political term first used by Machiavelli and reiterated by Spinoza. Recently the term has returned to prominence because of its conceptualization as a new model of resistance against the global capitalist system as described by political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in...
appears as the "Other of the People": “The democratic forces that in this framework ought to constitute the active and open element of the imperial machine appear rather as corporative forces, as a set of superstitions and fundamentalisms, betraying a conservative, when not downright reactionary, spirit. […] This limited sphere of imperial ‘democracy’ is configured as a People (an organized particularity that defends established privileges and properties) rather than as a multitude (the universality of free and productive practices).” It is the role of Empire to mold the multitude, via mechanisms of representation, into a People, to transcendentally confiscate the ostensibly chaotic and thus ‘dangerous’ immanent force of the multitude and reconfigure (or reterritorialize) its multiplicity into one will. Empire, Hardt and Negri write, is an apparatus of capture that lives off the vitality of the multitude.
The multitude plays a prominent part in Empire, and not in the least for its revolution
Revolution
A revolution is a fundamental change in power or organizational structures that takes place in a relatively short period of time.Aristotle described two types of political revolution:...
ary potential to establish what Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch de Spinoza and later Benedict de Spinoza was a Dutch Jewish philosopher. Revealing considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's work was not fully realized until years after his death...
called an absolute democracy
Absolute democracy
Absolute democracy is an extreme form of a collective perception of order, based by the need of the human mind to control its surroundings and conduct a predictive view of perceiving the collective world....
, to subvert the allegedly post-disciplinary societies of control and their concomitant biopower--in short, to attack post-industrial capitalist hegemony with effective weaponry
Cyber-warfare
Cyberwarfare refers to politically motivated hacking to conduct sabotage and espionage. It is a form of information warfare sometimes seen as analogous to conventional warfare although this analogy is controversial for both its accuracy and its political motivation.Government security expert...
.
Hardt and Negri conclude their analysis with a chapter that focuses directly on the multitude and end with an optimistic outlook:
"Certainly, there must be a moment when reappropriation [of wealth from capital] and self-organization [of the multitude] reach a threshold and configure a real event. This is when the political is really affirmed—when the genesis is complete and self-valorization, the cooperative convergence of subjects, and the proletarian management of production become a constituent power. […] We do not have any models to offer for this event. Only the multitude through its practical experimentation will offer the models and determine when and how the possible becomes real."
The book
The rapid growth of the anti-globalisation movement which showed its teeth in the large protests in SeattleWTO Ministerial Conference of 1999 protest activity
Protest activity surrounding the WTO Ministerial Conference of 1999, which was to be the launch of a new millennial round of trade negotiations, occurred on November 30, 1999 , when the World Trade Organization convened at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle, Washington,...
in 1999 and in Genova
27th G8 summit
-Overview:The Group of Seven was an unofficial forum which brought together the heads of the richest industrialized countries: France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada starting in 1976. The G8, meeting for the first time in 1997, was formed with the addition...
in 2001, along with the creation of the World Social Forum
World Social Forum
The World Social Forum is an annual meeting of civil society organizations, first held in Brazil, which offers a self-conscious effort to develop an alternative future through the championing of counter-hegemonic globalization...
in Porto Alegre
Porto Alegre
Porto Alegre is the tenth most populous municipality in Brazil, with 1,409,939 inhabitants, and the centre of Brazil's fourth largest metropolitan area . It is also the capital city of the southernmost Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. The city is the southernmost capital city of a Brazilian...
, also in 2001, seemed to substantiate the optimistic outlook at the end of Empire. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001
September 11, 2001 attacks
The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks (also referred to as September 11, September 11th or 9/119/11 is pronounced "nine eleven". The slash is not part of the pronunciation...
seem, however, to have worked as a pivotal point with respect to this development—offering, one might cynically conclude, the dwindling Empire, in a Hobbesian
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury , in some older texts Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, was an English philosopher, best known today for his work on political philosophy...
fashion, the chance to defend itself against the multitude through the production of a culture of fear
Culture of fear
Culture of fear is a term used by certain scholars, writers, journalists and politicians who believe that some in society incite fear in the general public to achieve political goals, for example......
.
Multitude addresses these issues and as such picks up the thread where Empire has left of. In order to do so, Hardt and Negri argue, one must first analyze the present configuration of war and its contradictions. This analysis is performed in the first chapter, after which chapters two and three focus on multitude and democracy, respectively.
Multitude is not so much a sequel as it is a reiteration from a new point of view in a new, relatively accessible style that is distinct from the predominantly academic
Academia
Academia is the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research.-Etymology:The word comes from the akademeia in ancient Greece. Outside the city walls of Athens, the gymnasium was made famous by Plato as a center of learning...
prose style of Empire. Multitude remains, the authors insist, despite its ubiquitous subject matter and its almost casual tone, a book of philosophy which aims to shape a conceptual ground for a political process of democratization rather than present an answer to the question ‘what to do?’ or offer a program for concrete action.
External links
- Review of Multitude, by Eric Mason
- The village voice review, by John Giuffo
- A deconstructive reading of Multitude
- "The Collaborator and the Multitude: An Interview with Michael Hardt" Hardt talks about Multitude, the sequel to Empire. (2004)
- Timothy Rayner (2005). Refiguring the multitude: From exodus to the production of norms. Radical Philosophy 131.