Here's another pointed review of Empire, the dreadful best-seller by Michael Hardt and convicted Red Brigade terrorist Antonio Negri, which celebrates “the irrepressible lightness and joy of being Communist."
Hardt and Negri seek to update Marx’s Capital for the era of economic globalization. In doing so, they plunder every imaginable recent source of academic foolishness, from postcolonialism to Queer Theory to French post–structuralism, and wed it to Marx, Lenin, and even Mao, making the book a kind of up–to–the–minute manual on how to get tenure in today’s university.
The author of this review sees the book's commercial success as an indication that the nutty far left is alive and well and more powerful and dangerous than ever. Perhaps so, but I'm skeptical. The bestseller lists are full of books that are frequently bought yet seldom actually read. Next time you're at a Barnes and Noble, just pick up this book and try to read one of its five hundred impenetrable pages at random-- have fun. Here's one sentence, quoted by Alan Wolfe in his excellent review in the New Republic:
The analysis of real subsumption, when this is understood as investing not only the economic or only the cultural dimension of society but rather the social bios itself, and when it is attentive to the modalities of disciplinarity and/or control, disrupts the linear and totalitarian figure of capitalist development.
Wolfe says that "Empire is to social and political criticism what pornography is to literature. It flirts with revolution as if one society can be replaced by another as easily as one body can be substituted for another." But a lot more tediously. The gushing New York Times review last year reflected poorly on its editorial policy, and the book's faddish popularity is no cause for celebration; but I doubt its "ideas" will ever be in a position to do much harm. After all, this is also a best-seller. So was this.
Finally, I just can't resist quoting what is perhaps my favorite sentence written about this (or any) book. This is from the Amazon.com "editorial review" by one Eric de Place:
if Hardt and Negri's vision of the world materializes, they will undoubtedly be remembered as prophetic.