Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

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Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Author	Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Political Science Marxism Globalization Philosophy Postmodernism
Publisher	Penguin Books
Publication date	2004
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages	448 pp.
ISBN	1-59420-024-6
OCLC	54487542
Dewey Decimal	321.8 22
LC Class	JC423 .H364 2004
Preceded by	Empire
Followed by	Commonwealth

Part of a series about
Imperialism studies
Theories Dependency theory Ecologically unequal exchange Intercommunalism Neo-Gramscianism Neocolonialism North–South model Social imperialism Super-imperialism Superprofit Three Worlds Theory Ultra-imperialism Unequal exchange Uneven and combined development World-systems theory
People Samir Amin Giovanni Arrighi Paul A. Baran Charles Bettelheim Nikolai Bukharin Arghiri Emmanuel John Bellamy Foster Andre Gunder Frank Michael Hardt Rudolf Hilferding J. A. Hobson Vladimir Lenin Rosa Luxemburg Antonio Negri Kwame Nkrumah Huey P. Newton Walter Rodney Paul Sweezy Leon Trotsky Immanuel Wallerstein
Works The Accumulation of Capital Empire (Hardt and Negri book) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa Imperialism (Hobson) Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism Monopoly Capital Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire Naked Imperialism
Related Banana republic Economic development Illicit financial flows Global North and Global South Lumpenbourgeoisie Neo-Marxism Prebisch–Singer hypothesis Primitive accumulation of capital Third worldism
Category
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Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire is a book by post-marxist philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, published in 2004. It is the second installment of a "trilogy" also comprising Empire (2000) and Commonwealth (2009).

Summary[]

Multitude is divided into three sections: "War," which addresses the current "global civil war";^[1] "Multitude," which elucidates the "multitude" as an "active social subject, which acts on the basis of what the singularities share in common";^[1] and, "Democracy," which critiques traditional forms of political representation and gestures toward alternatives.

Multitude addresses these issues and elaborates on the assertion, in the Preface to Empire, that:

"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."^[2]

The rapid growth of the alter-globalisation movement, evident in the large protests in Seattle in 1999 and in Genova in 2001, along with the creation of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, also in 2001, seemed to substantiate the optimistic outlook at the end of Empire. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and subsequent rise of state-sponsored "counter-terrorism" seem, however, to have complicated this optimism.

Notes[]

Further reading[]

• Welsh, John. (2016) The shadow: alter-visibility in an empire of the seen. Distinktion 17(1): 57-77. [1].

External links[]

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

• Review of Multitude, by Eric Mason
• The village voice review, by John Giuffo
• A deconstructive reading of Multitude
• "The Collaborator and the Multitude: An Interview with Michael Hardt" Hardt talks about Multitude, the sequel to Empire. (2004)
• Timothy Rayner (2005). Refiguring the multitude: From exodus to the production of norms. Radical Philosophy 131.