One might suppose that a book offering so many grand pronouncements touching on many academic disciplines would be well documented, but the scholarship in this book is simply a joke. In this regard, Empire calls to mind, by contrast, Martin Van Crevald's The Rise and Decline of the State (1999), a similarly ambitious book whose close arguing and wealth of historical detail put Hardt and Negri to shame. The idea of the latter pair seems to be that the more sweeping the assertion, the less evidence is called for, a rhetorical strategy mastered by the French but only imperfectly realized in the sodden English on offer here.
Hardt and Negri explain, for example, that the Enlightenment would not have happened if Europeans had not needed to distinguish themselves from colonial populations they sought to rule. ("The dark Other of European Enlightenment stands at its very foundation.") The footnote to which one is directed, however, cites only a single 1995 monograph dealing with the relationship between literacy and colonization in the Renaissance.
When they finally get around to explaining the fall of the Soviet Union, Hardt and Negri don't even acknowledge, let alone refute, the argument that socialism is bound to wreak economic havoc by making economic calculation impossible. Instead, they claim the real problem was the Soviets' failure to move to the more fluid managerial practices appropriate to postindustrialism, a thesis they say they share "with many scholars of the Soviet world." Turning again to the footnote, one finds only one concurring authority: Fredric Jameson, the famous Marxist literary critic and Hardt's senior colleague at Duke, who shows up elsewhere as an expert on the attitudes of international workers.
The slovenly index contains no entries for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the WTO, NATO, the European Union, or the G-7, and none of these key organizations of globalism comes in for sustained analysis in the text. (For that matter, there is nothing that could really pass for a detailed analysis of any event or institution in the whole book.) The longest entry in the index belongs, justly, to Karl Marx, whose thought, as supplemented by the work of cutting-edge economists V.I. Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, is presented as the still-indispensable guide to economics.
As an explanation of globalization, then, or as a blueprint for how such globalization might be overcome, whatever that might mean, Empire does not have much to offer. What it does offer is a repackaging of the past several decades of left-wing academic critique under the umbrella of a new paradigm -- new enough, anyway, to allow for a revamping of old arguments by literature professors and other humanists who need to publish. The world as described by Hardt and Negri does not really exist. But it is the world that many humanists may be talking about until the next Big Idea comes along.
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