Assembly is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s most recent attempt to survey the dynamics of power under contemporary global capitalism and to identify the fissures within that reveal immanent possibilities of popular resistance. Taking their cue, and their title, from the international proliferation of encampments, occupations, and assemblies that followed the financial crisis of 2008—from Zuccotti Park to Tahrir Square, Gezi to Biblia and the Puerta del Sol—Hardt and Negri further develop the distinctive conceptual vocabularies they first articulated in Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), and Commonwealth (2009), while also departing from these earlier works, in part by absorbing the arguments of some of their most trenchant critics. Most notably, Assembly urges readers to disenthrall themselves of the “fetish of horizontality” (p. xiv) and its debilitating suspicion of institutions and political leadership. Writing under the sign of Machiavelli, and proclaiming the creation of a “new Prince,” Hardt and Negri now affirm a “new political realism” that charts “a way forward to not only take power but to pose what kind of power we want and who we want to be.” No more solely prefigurative politics; no more beautiful souls; no more “unarmed prophets,” who, as Machiavelli warned, are “not only useless but dangerous to themselves and others” (p. 7). In Assembly, Hardt and Negri affirm a realist politics of the multitude in order to better understand the failures of egalitarian movements of the Left, and to more effectively respond to the victories of a resurgent neo-fascist Right.

This realist turn will strike some as a significant departure, since one of the most familiar criticisms of Hardt and Negri’s earlier work was that it was invested in a naïve political romanticism rooted in an ontology of the inherently emancipatory desire of the immanent and self-organizing multitude. Ernesto Laclau memorably described their theory of the multitude as a metaphysical wish and a “gift from Heaven” (Laclau, On Populist Reason, 2002, p. 240). While Hardt and Negri have responded to such criticisms in the past, their response sets the frame of the new book and explains its central preoccupations. We now read that the “multitude designates a radical diversity of social subjectivities that do not spontaneously form together but instead require a political project to organize” (p. 69). The multitude, now conceived as a “political project” and “communitary anthropogenesis,” must “move from the ontology of the common to a project of its political affirmation” (p. 238). The multitude must also, therefore, be understood through its internal relation to tactics and strategies, coordination and mobilization, and leadership. Assembly not only engages with Machiavelli, Marx, and Gramsci, but also with Pareto, Mosca, Weber, and Schumpeter. While Hardt and Negri reject recent efforts on the theoretical Left to resurrect “the corpse of the modern vanguard party” (p. 8), Assembly places them in the orbit of contemporary neo-Jacobins attempting to reconcile radical egalitarian political commitments with a realist view of politics that embraces a new role for leadership, even if stopping short of Slavoj Žižek’s disturbing call for “a new figure of the Master” (p. 44).

An indication of what Hardt and Negri mean by political realism can be glimpsed from what they learn from Machiavelli, or how they, as Negri had already influentially done in his earlier work, bring Machiavelli into resonant articulation with Marx. Rather than a theorist of raison d’etat, Machiavelli is “a man of revolution, of constant mutation, of constituent power” (p. 98); rather than counseling the glory-seeking new prince who recognizes it is better to be feared by the people than loved, Hardt and Negri’s Machiavelli recognizes that power is generated first from below in the incessant popular struggle for freedom; and rather than turning Machiavelli into a theorist of “the autonomy of the political,” they approach him as a preeminent theorist of social conflict, for whom “political action can no longer be considered autonomous but always completely embedded in the circuits of social and economic life” (p. 45). To understand the workings of power and identify immanent sources of resistance we must “descend into the abode of social production and reproduction” (p. 63). Political theory is also and always a social theory.

Applying this realist orientation to contemporary capitalism means treating “neoliberalism” as a reactionary effort to contain and canalize, extract and accumulate, the free and expansive powers of social production and reproduction generated from below. As in their earlier collaborations, Hardt and Negri offer extended and elusive discussions of how the contemporary stage of capitalism engenders both new forms of domination and new emancipatory capacities. “Political realism,” they write, “consists in recognizing the tendency animated by the movements of contemporary society, illuminating the desires embedded in them, and bringing the future back to the present” (p. 284). If Marx and Engels were brilliantly and brutally clear about how the social, economic, geographical, and political conditions of industrial capitalism dialectically produced the system’s “gravediggers” in the form of a revolutionary class-conscious proletariat, Hardt and Negri more ambiguously assert that the “circuits of social cooperation” and unregulated diffusion of intelligence, social knowledges, and technological skill characteristic of contemporary capitalism produce “insurgent coalitions among diverse social subjectivities” (p. 205). The table they provide to explain how the productive process is “ever more cooperative and socialized” under contemporary capitalism helps a bit (pp. 192–193), but some of their earlier work does a better job of articulating why under current conditions “without the common, capital cannot exist” (p. 29).

The multitude is presented in the new book as a “political project,” but it is also continually referred to as a “symptom” of this deeper social reality. Hardt and Negri deploy a host of metaphors to capture the dynamic relationship they envision between the incessantly productive ontology of the common and the political project of the multitude—an army of worms, a swarm of bees, a chemical precipitate, Kleist’s enchanted marionettes, and so on—but the discussion centers around the question of the “new Prince” conceived as a “political articulation that weaves together the different forms of resistance and struggles of liberation in society today” (p. 18). The “new Prince” is not a leader or a party—although they elaborate an important tactical role for leaders, leaving strategy to the movements—but rather the “center of gravity” or interface where the multitude as productive social ontology of the common meets the multitude as political project of collective emancipation.

Presumably, this is where “assembly” comes in, but unlike other keywords in Hardt and Negri’s conceptual arsenal—“empire,” “multitude,” “commonwealth”—assembly is never theoretically elaborated in the book that takes it as a title. It is a timely concept that nevertheless remains so capaciously vague—it “is meant to grasp the power of coming together and acting politically in concert” (p. xxi)—that it is not at all clear how it could operate as the kind of “effectual truth” they admiringly derive from Machiavelli. Hardt and Negri describe assembly in the book’s opening pages as “a lens through which to recognize new democratic political possibilities” (p. xxi), but if it applies equally to crowds and church congregations, labor unions and legislative bodies, how does this productive “lens” really contribute to enabling the emergence of “new political subjectivities”? Once the term appears in the book’s preface, it more or less disappears until the exhortation of its final pages. Assembly proclaims a new political realism of the radical egalitarian Left, and it offers an engaging extension of Hardt and Negri’s longstanding and important political collaboration, but the political vision of assembly it affirms in the end remains yet another plea and another wish.