Book Review: Assembly, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

AuthorSamuel A. Chambers
DOI10.1177/0090591718800751
Published date01 October 2019
Date01 October 2019
Subject MatterBook Reviews
/tmp/tmp-18if6lWhVm5RE0/input 800751PTXXXX10.1177/0090591718800751Political TheoryBook Reviews
book-review2018
Book Reviews
Political Theory
2019, Vol. 47(5) 724 –772
Book Reviews
© The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
journals.sagepub.com/home/ptx
Assembly, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2017, 346 pp.
Reviewed by: Samuel A. Chambers, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0090591718800751
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (H&N) do not practice “political theory” in
any of the standard professionalized forms operative today, particularly in
North America and the anglophone world: they are neither historians of politi-
cal thought, nor analytic or continental philosophers, nor social scientists.1 I
propose that H&N’s dispositif can best be understood as a twenty-first-century
inheritance and updating of what Michael Heinrich calls worldview Marxism.
In his re-presentation of Marx’s critique of political economy, Heinrich
provides a concise historical account of “worldview Marxism” as originating
in late nineteenth-century debates within the German Social Democratic
Party (SPD)—particularly in Friedrich Engels’s singular contribution, Anti-
Dühring
.2 Engels submitted the ideas of Eugen Dühring to rigorous and com-
prehensive critique, yet the content of Dühring’s thought matters less than its
systematic and exhaustive structure. Many workers and SPD members found
such an approach appealing: “Dühring’s success rested upon a strong desire
within the workers’ movement for a Weltanschauung, or ‘worldview,’ a com-
prehensive explanation of the world offering an orientation and answers to
all questions
.”3 In producing a methodical refutation of Dühring’s views,
Engels placed a set of “Marxist” ideas into the frame of an all-encompassing
worldview. The legacy of Engels’s text, as digested and appropriated within
the context of workers’ parties of the time, was to render dominant this
“worldview Marxism”—a set of ideas only loosely connected to Marx’s writ-
ings, and often utterly at odds with his critical analysis of a capitalist social
order. Worldview Marxism’s significance lay not in its critical or explanatory
force but in its “identity-constituting role: it revealed one’s place as a worker
and socialist, and explained all problems in the simplest way imaginable.”4
H&N are not orthodox, traditional, or nineteenth-century Marxists. Indeed,
they reject most of the tenets of that older Marxism, including economic deter-
minism, the epistemological privileging of class, and the inevitability of

Book Reviews
725
capitalist collapse. Despite references to Marx’s writings, Assembly contains
no real reading of Marx and absolutely no close engagement with the massive
recent literature on Marx, especially the renewed interest in his critique of
both classical political economy and the logic of capital.
Instead, H&N consistently work within—and their books seek to
develop—a worldview. The concepts they coin, the interpretations they offer,
and the predictive claims they make all interweave so as to provide that very
identity-constituting role of which Heinrich speaks. That worldview starts
with an ontological duality, named by the titles of the first two books of the
Empire Trilogy. “Empire” is the new form of sovereignty, a sovereignty not
of individuals or states but of a global order, a network of power. “Multitude”
is “the living alternative” to Empire. Like Empire, the multitude is also a
network: an “open and expansive network in which all differences can be
expressed freely and equally.”5 In the preface to Assembly, H&N explicitly
restate the terms of this duality: “social being thus appears as either a totali-
tarian figure of command [Empire] or a force of resistance and liberation [the
multitude]. The One of power divides into Two, and ontology is split into
different standpoints” (xviii). In H&N’s metaphysics, the multitude takes the
role of physis in Ancient Greek thought—literally, a growing force of nature.
Traditionally, physis was contrasted with nomos, meaning both “law” and
“norm” and conveying a sense of “rule” that straddles the line between pre-
scribed imperative and mere convention. I use the language of nomoi in an
attempt to capture both the key elements of H&N’s thought and a broader sense
of their method and approach. That is, Assembly contains a set of “laws”: some-
times these take the form of inviolable natural laws (of the present world);
sometimes they take the form of issued edicts (to bring about a future world). A
few examples from Assembly should serve to indicate the texture of these
nomoi and thereby bring into view the architecture of the book.
“power comes second”
The “totalitarian force” referenced above is never primary. While H&N consis-
tently speak of such a power, when they describe a global order of domination—
for example of “Capital” that “wields repressive weapons” (233)—they always
follow those descriptions by insisting that the force of Empire is never the first
mover. Rather, “power”—that is, a networked global force of domination—is
always “second,” always only “a response to the resistances and struggles for
liberation” (231, emphasis added). The multitude seeks freedom, and the actions
of the multitude are always paramount, even if critical analysis would often
appear to start with a description of “power” and its effects. This nomos seems
more like a truth of the empire/multitude universe that H&N describe for their
readers, almost as a deduction from their basic ontology.

726
Political Theory 47(5)
“vanquish sovereignty”
Chapter 3 of Assembly sets out to prove that we must reject the modern
account of political sovereignty and the modern model of sovereign power.
H&N first beseech their readers not to “mourn the loss of sovereignty” and
then later try...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT