Cheap Empire (Book) (Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri) Price

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Customer Reviews of Empire

Good: Some very interesting insights into how the world is changing and how transnational institutions are really developing into more than mere window dressing. The idea of 'multitude' certainly opens things up a bit and frankly its pretty slick as a catchword.

Bad: I actually think that, theoretically, Negri and Hardt are retrograde. Hard to get into it here without jargon, so I apologize in advance. I feel that Negri recapitulates the crude neo-Stalinism of Althusser and Balibar. Negri has been moving away from his roots in Italian autonomist Marxism for almost two decades. Whatever they are doing, it really isn't related to Marx, but rather a radical redressing of currently fashionable bourgeois ideology (post-structuralism and a revamped Spinozism, basically) which breaks fundamentally with Marx's critique of capital and which will, in the end, drive people away from Marx.

Negri and Hardt appeal to young radical intellectuals much as Althusser did in the 1960's and 1970's, and it will be just as poisonous. From the rejuvenation of structuralism, functionalism, and politicism, they run to the praise of the Militant (in place of Althusser's Party) as the creative force of revolution, against an inert, suicidal mass. The elitism is appalling, as is the incipient Leninism.

Simon Clarke's work in the book "One Dimensional Marxism", and his essays on Nicos Poulantzas in issues 2 and 5 of Capital and Class make a good starting critique. Follow it up with the hard to find essay "Beyond Autonomy and Perversion" by Werner Bonefeld and "From Capitalist Crisis to Proletarian Slavery" by George Caffentzis. This provides the beginning of a thorough critique.

Whichever way you look at it, however, this book has to be dealt with seriously and there is really nothing else which attempts a serious theorization of globalization outside of bourgeois social theory. I gave it four stars for provocation.

not for the popcorn munching, beer guzzling crowd.
taking aside the maddeningly convoluted prose, the authors have a point: imperialism is over, long live the Empire. This new global world order, as they point out, is everywhere, not linked to a specific nation or place. If binLaden had read this book, he would not have tried sep11th. In fact, the Empire is protean, merely reconfigures itself after any attack, stronger than ever. Impossible to be destroyed, since everything is whithin it, it could at most, be changed through the sum of individual actions of those belonging to the multitude, which means us. Actually this is good news for the USA, since it will be integrated in a previleged position into a higher order, perennial entity, and will be spared the decline that befell other supernations, something many right wing halfwits failed to notice, as u can see by the negative reviews here. Extremely conceptual, this book shows why all the old leftist strategies no longer work. The enemy has changed, and maybe it isnt even an enemy. So lets cheer...long live the Empire! may it change to more democratic ways ( its big on B-52s and short on worlwide consensus).

The Emperor Has No Clothes! Beware.
Junk! A pretentious tract that stubbornly applies verbs to abstractions, delights in pompous reification, and curses clarity of thought and word. Some of the historical commentary has limited value; most of the text is like the very worst Hegelian philosophy with few emergent insights. The infamous critisms of Hegel apply exponentially to this text.

By confining themselves inside a tangled web of abstractions the authors can say whatever they want about anything. Their subjects are compound abstract conceptualizations to which various verbs and adjectives are applied. Their elaborate word-play, however, never deigns to address the real world we live in.

Contrast their text with real philosophers and social commentators from Aristotle to Kant to Edmund Wilson to E.O Wilson and you too will feel betrayed by investing time in this worthless text. Abtractions must be grounded in realty and must have real-world referents to acquire validity.

Here the error of subjectivism becomes painfully palpable as your eyes wander amidst a fierce wreck of nouns, pronouns, adverbs and verbs strung together in every possible concatenation, until your good sense revolts and you throw the **** thing into the garbage where it belongs!

For all you read, do and think, follow this one simple rule:

Say what you mean, mean what you say, and always use the clearest and most direct language.