Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s Empire is a landmark book in the sense that the authors present a philosophical vision from a humanitarian perspective regarding the impact of globalization. Hardt and Negri argue that globalization is not eroding sovereignty but changing it into a system of dispersed and supranational institutions. They call this new world order that strongly veers off from established doctrine, Empire.
Hardt and Negri argue that the new Empire encompasses all aspects of modern existence. Empire is not a philosophical concept or an imperialist structure, instead the authors define this supranational order as “a decentred and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers” (Hardt and Negri xii). Rejecting traditional theorists like Marx and Engels, the authors provide a unique vision of a postmodern global economy that may necessarily be the predecessor to theories from Foucault, Levi-Strauss, and Derrida. Hardt and Negri do not believe in light of the postmodern global economy that any nation-state, not even the United States, can act as the main imperial hub controlling the world. In fact, one of the purposes behind Empire was to disabuse any notions in the minds of readers that former conditions or past developments that helped capitalist countries become international powers exist today. The authors instead, “Insist on asserting that the construction of Empire is a step forward in order to do away with any nostalgia for the power structures that preceded it and refuse any political strategy that involves returning to that old arrangement, such as trying to resurrect the nation-state to protect against global capital” (Hardt et al., 43).
New accelerated capital forms prevents the local from acting as any kind of barrier. Only a strategy that is based on an international perspective can hope to counter-b...