Empire and Imperialism: A Critical Reading of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

Extract

Empire and Imperialism: A Critical Reading of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Atilio A. Boron, London: Zed Books, 2005, pp. 141.

Michael Walzer, reflecting in a 2002 Dissent article (vol. 49, Spring) upon the compelling issues in world politics, asked “Can there be a decent Left?” After reading Atilio A. Boron's impassioned and derisive critique of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), one wonders whether today there can be an empirically sophisticated, coherent Left. (Negri, by the way, spent seventeen years in Italian prisons for his involvement with the Red Brigade and the murder of Italian politician Aldo Moro.) Boron, a professor of political theory at the University of Buenos Aires claims, no doubt rightly, that the last three decades, embracing the end of the Cold War, the impact of neo-liberal policies on the “periphery” and sweeping technological changes, have necessitated a reformulation of leftist thinking. The influential Empire, which advances a root-and-branch restructuring of socialist thought, though hugely popular among anti-globalization groups and already translated into over a dozen languages, is to Boron emphatically not it. While paying obeisance to Hardt and Negri's “noble intentions and intellectual and political honesty” (4–5), the author proceeds to shred virtually all their main contentions.