Modernity and the State: A Dialogue Between Empire, Multitude and a Shield of Achilles

Amidst the recent melee about globalization, two voices in particular have commanded considerable attention: those of Philip Bobbitt on the right and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri on the left. Bobbitt’s The Shield of Achilles (2002) was lauded in the conservative press as “an audacious, massively informed analysis of the nature of the modern state and of modern war” (Literary Review) and as “wide-ranging, ambitiously conceived and intelligently argued” (The Times Literary Supplement). The liberal press was less enthusiastic — the New Statesman, for example, criticized the book for “aspiring to prophecy of endless war.” On the left, the book was lambasted — according to New Left Review, “the individual sentences are lucid, even elegant, but their sum becomes corpulent and flabby — a dropsical mass more likely to limit than to attract or impress its target readership.”¹

Hardt and Negri’s work has met with similarly charged and varied responses, particularly on the Left, where two book-length collections of essays have already debated their unexpected bestseller Empire (2000). Leftist academics were quick to vaunt that text as “the first great theoretical synthesis of the new millenium” (Fredric Jameson) and as “nothing less than a rewriting of The Communist Manifesto for our time” (Slavoj Zizek), just as the liberal press heralded it as “the next Big Idea in the humanities” (The New York Times) and “the It book of postmodern philosophy” (Time Magazine). On the right, in contrast, The Sunday Times characterized Empire as “more a response to the sorry condition of the humanities in the US than a serious critique of globalization,” and the American magazine National Review scoffed that “Such a travesty is a tribute to the higher idiocy which only an imagination unconnected to reality is able to connect.”²

If Empire’s impact owed to the fact that it “broke with the pessimism of the established left in its view that globalization held new possibilities for resistance,” then the behavior of the United States since 11 September 2001 — manifest in the Homeland Security bill, Guantanemo Bay, and the “war on terror” — has significantly tarnished its early sheen. Hardt and Negri’s follow-up book Multitude (2004), moreover, has barely caused a stir and has attracted some downright condescending reviews. The New York Times, for instance, sneered that the book “deals with an imaginary problem and a real problem. Unfortunately, it provides us with an imaginary solution to the real problem,” and the Wall Street Journal remarked “Multitude will meet a need, scratching the insurrectionary itch of the West’s most privileged children.”³

Here, I want to read The Shield of Achilles alongside Empire and Multitude in the attempt to move beyond the ideological prejudices that attach themselves, seemingly automatically, to debates about globalization. Strangely, given the considerable attention that the first two works in particular have received, no critic to date has discussed them side by side. Only one critic has published on both books separately, and he made no attempt to disguise the strong political leanings of the editorial board on which he serves.⁴ Admittedly, comparing and contrasting Bobbitt’s scholarship with that of Hardt and Negri may seem a peculiar venture — neither the men themselves nor their published writings have anything obvious in common beyond a basic preoccupation with globalization. And yet, I would argue, it is precisely the differences at play within a common framework here that makes the tensions between these authors so productive and instructive. In the end, it is not so much the contradictions and schisms between their worldviews that proves striking, but, rather, the astonishing similarities and areas of consensus.

Influences

Philip Bobbitt, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri come from radically different backgrounds. Bobbitt has spent his life soaring effortlessly from one position of power and privilege to another. The nephew of former United States president Lyndon Johnson, he holds a chair in constitutional law and international relations at the University of Texas and has been a visiting fellow at both Oxford and King’s College, London. In Washington, he served as Associate Counsel to the President under...