By Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri
Harvard University Press2000
Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.
- Ani DiFranco
Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for
comes about in spite of their defeat, and then it turns out not to be
what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant
under another name.
- William Morris
Preface
Empire is materializing before our very eyes. Over the past several decades, as colonial regimes were overthrown and then precipitously after the Soviet barriers to the capitalist world market finally collapsed, we have witnessed an irresistible and irreversible globalization of economic and cultural exchanges. Along with the global market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule -in short, a new form of sovereignty. Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world.Many argue that the globalization of capitalist production and exchange means that economic relations have become more autonomous from political controls, and consequently that political sovereignty has declined. Some celebrate this new era as the liberation of the capitalist economy from the restrictions and distortions that political forces have imposed on it; others lament it as the closing of the institutional channels through which workers and citizens can influence or contest the cold logic of capitalist profit. It is certainly true that, in step with the processes of globalization, the sovereignty of nation-states, while still effective, has progressively declined. The primary factors of production and exchange- money, technology, people, and goods-move with increasing ease across national boundaries; hence the nation-state has less and less power to regulate these flows and impose its authority over the economy. Even the most dominant nation-states should no longer be thought of as supreme and sovereign authorities, either outside or even within their own borders. The decline in sovereignty of nation states, however, does not mean that sovereignty as such has declined.
Throughout the contemporary transformations, political controls, state functions, and regulatory mechanisms have continued to rule the realm of economic and social production and exchange. Our basic hypothesis is that sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire.
The declining sovereignty of nation-states and their increasing inability to regulate economic and cultural exchanges is in fact one of the primary symptoms of the coming of Empire. The sovereignty of the nation-state was the cornerstone of the imperialisms that European powers constructed throughout the modern era. By ''Empire,'' however, we understand something altogether different from ''imperialism.'' The boundaries defined by the modern system of nation-states were fundamental to European colonialism and economic expansion: the territorial boundaries of the nation delimited the center of power from which rule was exerted over external foreign territories through a system of channels and barriers that alternately facilitated and obstructed the flows of production and circulation. Imperialism was really an extension of the sovereignty of the European nation-states beyond their own boundaries. Eventually nearly all the world's territories could be parceled out and the entire world map could be coded in European colors: red for British territory, blue for French, green for Portuguese, and so forth. Wherever modern sovereignty took root, it constructed a Leviathan that overarched its social domain and imposed hierarchical territorial boundaries, both to police the purity of its own identity and to exclude all that was other.
The passage to Empire emerges from the twilight of modern sovereignty. In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow.
The transformation of the modern imperialist geography of the globe and the realization of the world market signal a passage within the capitalist mode of production. Most significant, the spatial divisions of the three Worlds (First, Second, and Third) have been scrambled so that we continually find the First World in the Third, the Third in the First, and the Second almost nowhere at all. Capital seems to be faced with a smooth world-or really, a world defined by new and complex regimes of differentiation and homogenization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization. The construction of the paths and limits of these new global flows has been accompanied by a transformation of the dominant productive processes themselves, with the result that the role of industrial factory labor has been reduced and priority given instead to communicative, cooperative, and affective labor. In the post modernization of the global economy, the creation of wealth tends ever more toward what we will call bio-political production, the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another.
Many locate the ultimate authority that rules over the processes of globalization and the new world order in the United States. Proponents praise the United States as the world leader and sole superpower, and detractors denounce it as an imperialist oppressor. Both these views rest on the assumption that the United States has simply donned the mantle of global power that the European nations have now let fall. If the nineteenth century was a British century, then the twentieth century has been an American century; or really, if modernity was European, then post modernity is American. The most damning charge critics can level, then, is that the United States is repeating the practices of old European imperialists, while proponents celebrate the United States as a more efficient and more benevolent world leader, getting right what the Europeans got wrong. Our basic hypothesis, however, that a new imperial form of sovereignty has emerged, contradicts both these views. The United States does not, and indeed no nation-state can today, form the center of an imperialist project. Imperialism is over. No nation will be world leader in the way modern European nations were.
The United States does indeed occupy a privileged position in Empire, but this privilege derives not from its similarities to the old European imperialist powers, but from its differences. These differences can be recognized most clearly by focusing on the properly imperial (not imperialist) foundations of the United States constitution, where by ''constitution'' we mean both the formal constitution, the written document along with its various amendments and legal apparatuses, and the material constitution, that is, the continuous formation and re-formation of the composition of social forces. Thomas Jefferson, the authors of the Federalist, and the other ideological founders of the United States were all inspired by the ancient imperial model; they believed they were creating on the other side of the Atlantic a new Empire with open, expanding frontiers, where power would be effectively distributed in networks. This imperial idea has survived and matured throughout the history of the United States constitution and has emerged now on a global scale in its fully realized form.
We should emphasize that we use ''Empire'' here not as a
metaphor, which would require demonstration of the resemblances
between today's world order and the Empires of Rome, China,
the Americas, and so forth, but rather as a concept, which calls
primarily for a theoretical approach. The concept of Empire is
characterized fundamentally by a lack of boundaries: Empire's rule
has no limits.
First and foremost, then, the concept of Empire posits
a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality, or really
that rules over the entire ''civilized'' world. No territorial boundaries
limit its reign.
Second, the concept of Empire presents itself not as
a historical regime originating in conquest, but rather as an order
that effectively suspends history and thereby fixes the existing state
of affairs for eternity. From the perspective of Empire, this is the
way things will always be and the way they were always meant to
be.
In other words, Empire presents its rule not as a transitory moment in the movement of history, but as a regime with no temporal boundaries and in this sense outside of history or at the end of history. Third, the rule of Empire operates on all registers of the social order extending down to the depths of the social world. Empire not only manages a territory and a population but also creates the very world it inhabits. It not only regulates human interactions but also seeks directly to rule over human nature. The object of its rule is social life in its entirety, and thus Empire presents the paradigmatic form of biopower. Finally, although the practice of Empire is continually bathed in blood, the concept of Empire is always dedicated to peace-a perpetual and universal peace outside of history.
The Empire we are faced with wields enormous powers of oppression and destruction, but that fact should not make us nostalgic in any way for the old forms of domination. The passage to Empire and its processes of globalization offer new possibilities to the forces of liberation. Globalization, of course, is not one thing, and the multiple processes that we recognize as globalization are not unified or univocal. Our political task, we will argue, is not simply to resist these processes but to reorganize them and redirect them toward new ends. The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges. The struggles to contest and subvert Empire, as well as those to construct a real alternative, will thus take place on the imperial terrain itself-indeed, such new struggles have already begun to emerge. Through these struggles and many more like them, the multitude will have to invent new democratic forms and a new constituent power that will one day take us through and beyond Empire.
The genealogy we follow in our analysis of the passage from imperialism to Empire will be first European and then Euro- American, not because we believe that these regions are the exclusive or privileged source of new ideas and historical innovation, but simply because this was the dominant geographical path along which the concepts and practices that animate today's Empire developed - in step, as we will argue, with the development of the capitalist mode of production. Whereas the genealogy of Empire is in this sense Eurocentric, however, its present powers are not limited to any region. Logics of rule that in some sense originated in Europe and the United States now invest practices of domination throughout the globe. More important, the forces that contest Empire and effectively prefigure an alternative global society are themselves not limited to any geographical region. The geography of these alternative powers, the new cartography, is still waiting to be written-or really, it is being written today through the resistances, struggles, and desires of the multitude.
In writing this book we have tried to the best of our abilities to employ a broadly interdisciplinary approach. Our argument aims to be equally philosophical and historical, cultural and economic, political and anthropological. In part, our object of study demands this broad interdisciplinarity, since in Empire the boundaries that might previously have justified narrow disciplinary approaches are increasingly breaking down. In the imperial world the economist, for example, needs a basic knowledge of cultural production to understand the economy, and likewise the cultural critic needs a basic knowledge of economic processes to understand culture. That is a requirement that our project demands. What we hope to have contributed in this book is a general theoretical framework and a toolbox of concepts for theorizing and acting in and against Empire.
Like most large books, this one can be read in many different ways: front to back, back to front, in pieces, in a hopscotch pattern, or through correspondences. The sections of Part 1 introduce the general problematic of Empire. In the central portion of the book, Parts 2 and 3, we tell the story of the passage from modernity to post modernity, or really from imperialism to Empire. Part 2 narrates the passage primarily from the standpoint of the history of ideas and culture from the early modern period to the present. The red thread that runs throughout this part is the genealogy of the concept of sovereignty. Part 3 narrates the same passage from the standpoint of production, whereby production is understood in a very broad sense, ranging from economic production to the production of subjectivity. This narrative spans a shorter period and focuses primarily on the transformations of capitalist production from the late nineteenth century to the present. The internal structures of Parts 2 and 3 thus correspond: the first sections of each treat the modern, imperialist phase; the middle sections deal with the mechanisms of passage; and the final sections analyze our postmodern, imperial world.
We structured the book this way in order to emphasize the importance of the shift from the realm of ideas to that of production. The Intermezzo between Parts 2 and 3 functions as a hinge that articulates the movement from one standpoint to the other. We intend this shift of standpoint to function something like the moment in Capital when Marx invites us to leave the noisy sphere of exchange and descend into the hidden abode of production. The realm of production is where social inequalities are clearly revealed and, moreover, where the most effective resistances and alternatives to the power of Empire arise. In Part 4 we thus try to identify these alternatives that today are tracing the lines of a movement beyond Empire.
This book was begun well after the end of the Persian Gulf War and completed well before the beginning of the war in Kosovo. The reader should thus situate the argument at the midpoint between those two signal events in the construction of Empire.
More General Analysis of "Empire"
More Information on Former Empires and Comparative Analysis
