Like this new area of research, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's best-selling study is unapologetically interdisciplinary in character. Its authors are willing to paint in broad strokes, in the process eagerly digesting a plethora of materials drawn from legal studies, politics, economics, philosophy, anthropology, cultural studies, comparative literature, and critical theory. Franz Kafka and Herman Melville are made to rub shoulders with Baruch Spinoza and Karl Marx; the postmodernist ideas of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari are interspersed with the modernist insights of Hans Kelsen, Otto Bauer, and Max Weber.

Mixing passionate revolutionary appeals with abstract philosophical investigations and detached sociological analyses, Empire constitutes a fascinating tapestry of innovative ideas, brilliant interpretations, flamboyant provocations, shameless exaggerations, and bold generalizations. The 400-plus pages of text pulsate with creative energy, taking the reader on an intellectual roller coaster ride that too often relies on dense language and esoteric terminology. The book incorporates Negri's long-standing sympathies for the central themes of the “autonomist movement” within 1970s Italian communism: skepticism of “big government, big business, and big labor” (p. 350); the “quest for workers' autonomous self-government” (p. 349); and “the multitude's right to self-control and autonomous self-production” (p. 407). Hardt's influence is most obvious in the study's poststructuralist emphasis on the biopolitical (re)production of social life under conditions of late capitalism, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another (see, especially, pp. 22–41).

At the core of the study, one finds the authors' insistence that “Empire” represents a radically new paradigm of authority and control—a “new global order” composed of a series of national and supranational organisms that supersede old, nation-state-centered forms of sovereignty. For Hardt and Negri, “Empire” is not merely a metaphor but a promising theoretical concept signifying a “political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world” (p. xi). In their view, this single logic of globalization operates in all spheres of social life, perhaps most visibly in the regulation of human interaction, the formation of global markets, the creation of new technologies, the expansion of vast circuits of material and immaterial production, and the generation of gigantic cultural flows. No longer opposed by an extrasystemic “outside,” this new form of sovereignty constitutes a regime that effectively encompasses the “spatial totality” of the entire globe (pp. 353, 413). Wielding enormous powers of oppression and destruction, Empire neither establishes a territorial center nor relies on fixed boundaries, but “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” (pp. xii–xiii) As a regime “with no temporal boundaries and in this sense outside of history or at the end of history” (p. xv), Empire thus dwarfs any particular imperialist project previously undertaken by single nation-states.

Indeed, one of the major debates in globalization studies revolves around the question of whether the current “spatial reorganization of production” (James Mittelman) and the apparent “compression of time and space” (David Harvey) really constitute an entirely new phenomenon. On this issue, Hardt and Negri clearly side with other “hyperglobalizers,” such as Susan Strange, Kenichi Ohmae, William Greider, and Martin Albrow, who argue that globalization defines a new epoch of human history, a fundamental reconfiguration of the framework of human action in which nation-states are becoming increasingly less important actors (see, especially, pp. xi, 5–20, 336). Unfortunately, however, Hardt and Negri never discuss in sufficient detail contrary empirical evidence provided by such globalization skeptics as Paul Hirst, Graham Thompson, and Linda Weiss, who conclude, first, that current world flows of trade, investment, labor, and ideas are by no means historically unprecedented and, second, that national governments seem to possess enduring powers to regulate economic activities. This omission points to a systemic flaw that prevades Empire: its authors' reluctance to engage fully the rapidly growing, diverse body of literature on the subject of globalization.

After a descriptive analysis of the present features of Empire and a long interpretation of the historical transition from imperialism to Empire, Hardt and Negri conclude on an optimistic note, suggesting that the creative forces of the exploited and subjugated producers that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a “counter-Empire”—an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges fueled by the multitude's “will to be against” (p. 210). Struggling for global mobility, global citizenship, a guaranteed social wage, and the right to the reappropriation of the means of production, this subjugated multitude is poised to invent new democratic expressions and new forms of constituent power.

In this context, Hardt and Negri's discussion of the subversive effects of a political demand for global citizenship is simply superb (pp. 396–400). A direct response to a globalizing world, mass migration and increasing mobility contain a truly revolutionary potential to undermine economic inequalities and asymmetrical power relations that are rooted in an anachronistic defense of fixed boundaries and spatial divisions separating the Northern and Southern hemispheres. Calling for subversion, insurrection, and biopolitical self-organization, Hardt and Negri end their study by introducing the heroic figure of the “militant” as the one who best expresses the life of the multitude. A cross between St. Francis of Assisi and a Wobbly organizer, the counter-imperial militant engages with new vigor in a “revolution that no power will control,” thus posing against the misery of Empire “the irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist” (p. 413).

The greatest virtue of the book lies in its authors' ability to construct a new grand narrative of globalization that draws on relevant insights from diverse left traditions such as Marxism, anarchism, existentialism, poststructuralism, critical theory, critical race theory, subaltern studies, and feminist theory. Yet, contrary to its professed philosophical eclecticism, Empire remains stubbornly wedded to dogmatic Marxist categories that reify production (albeit in its postmodern, {“biopolitical”} version), reaffirm a communist teleology, and reduce the political arena to a “field of pure immanence” (p. 354). Unable to resolve the tension between the posture of revolutionary subjectivism and that of detached objectivism, the authors frequently fall prey to a deterministic view of globalization as a “structurally inevitable” and “irreversible” process (p. 336)—politically disempowering constructions that are the hallmarks of both Marxist and neoliberal ideology.

While rightfully criticizing “ideological master narratives” that are partly responsible for producing the very conditions they purport to explain, Hardt and Negri nonetheless accept all too easily Marxist and neoliberal representations of globalization as an all-encompassing process driven by a single capitalist logic. It is one thing to argue that modernity has both touched and transformed even the remotest corners of this earth, but it is quite another to suggest that the alleged “systemic totality” of Empire is no longer opposed by a qualitatively different “outside.” To this reviewer, Hardt and Negri's account of globalization is hard pressed to explain the current renaissance of patriotic discourses that reify the nation-state as the chief provider of security against terrorist attacks from the antimodernist “outside”—or, conversely, exclusivist narratives that glorify the nation-state as the chief supporter of antimodernist struggles against the menacing secular “outside.”

Still, Empire ought to be required reading for those interested in what is shaping up to be the most significant issue of our time.