Abstract

Hardt and Negri's Empire is a welcome and often inspiring antidote to the defeatism that has infected so much of the left. Their analysis includes a number of important insights, such as the capacity of American forms of power to penetrate other states. But their political economy is crude, and the promising discussions they open drift towards an empire without any material center. At the same time, their revolutionary commitments to transformation from below refuses to engage the complexities of agency and organization. In the end we are, disappointingly, left with a virtual empire confronting a virtual proletariat.