Empire Burlesque: The profoundly silly book that has set the academic left aflutter.

• Author: Peyser, Tom
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Empire

Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 478 pages, $36.95/$18.95 paper

EMPIRE WAS THE academic press success story of last year. First published in March 2000 (the paperback appeared in August 2001), it has already gone through 10 printings--a blockbuster even by commercial press standards. It is set for translation into more than half a dozen languages, and discussion of its ideas has jumped from the book review to the style sections of The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times.

The book's success is owed partly to the grandeur of its topic--the nature and trajectory of globalization--and partly to the glamorous hint of danger brought by one of its authors, Antonio Negri, a former political science professor in Padua who was implicated in the 1978 murder of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro. Negri allegedly was the brains behind the terrorist Red Brigades that abducted and killed Moro and was even identified as the source of a taunting phone call to Moro's wife. After a long and complex series of judicial maneuvers, he is under a form of house arrest that would have made Galileo weep with envy, not for murder but for "membership in an armed band." His co-author, Michael Hardt, is a literature professor at Duke University; a school once on the cutting edge of avant-garde cultural studies. Hardt brings to the relationship knowledge of what American intellectuals want to hear as well as a command of the violated English that passes for elegance in the academy.

"Empire" is the name Hardt and Negri give to the system that they believe regulates global flows of information, capital, and people, "the sovereign power that governs the world." More succinctly, they call Empire "the enemy." For communists like Hardt and Negri, who deck out the old party line in rhetoric borrowed from post-structuralist Paris, globalization might seem to sound a death knell, at least if it means the triumph of capitalism and liberalism over centralized state planning and political repression. Their message, however, is one of revolutionary hope. Because Empire depends on both people's emancipation from older forms of repression and on "a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule," this latest and last stage of capitalist oppression is the one that--finally!--will dig its own grave.

For all the popular and academic excitement it has engendered ("a bold move away from established doctrine," exclaimed The Nation), the book is a breathtakingly incoherent hash, composed of loopy 1960s utopianism, apologetics for the Soviet Union, paranoia, and sheer blood lust. Neither author appears to have really been prepared to handle a book of this attempted scope. For economic analysis Hardt and Negri have at their disposal only the crudest kind of Marxist boilerplate. Of the growing body of richly detailed work on the cultural effects of globalization, such as that produced by cultural theorist John Tomlinson or sociologist Roland Robertson, hardly a word is breathed.

But in the end, one suspects, Hardt and Negri are not interested in being taken seriously by those actually trying to grapple with the transformations being wrought before our eyes. This is not a book for historians, policy experts, or economists. As the sociologist Stanley Aronowitz admiringly told The New York Times, "The most important thing about Empire is that Michael [Hardt] is addressing the crisis in the humanities, which has reached the point where banality seems to pervade the sphere." This crisis is not, as Aronowitz suggests, general, but rather the crisis of humanities professors on the left, who are starting to bore even each other to death as they pick over this or that text or social practice for signs of racism, classism, or sexism.

Clearly the big fish in these waters have already been landed. As Aronowitz notes, the enthusiasm with which Empire has been met probably owes a great deal to disheartened academics looking for a paradigm that will restore to them the frisson they recall from their first reading of Michel Foucault. Whatever the etiology of this success for Harvard University Press, Hardt and Negri have evidently hit upon what people want to hear. From that one can deduce that as the academic left has grown more...