Empire and the Terrain of Democracy

“What is necessary is an audacious act of political imagination to break with the past, like the one accomplished in the eighteenth century”.

- Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire.

Introduction

Attempts to theorize the conditions of democratic social struggle over the past two decades have often been framed by the political, economic and social forces which have fallen under the heading of globalization, neo-liberalism, or the ‘Washington Consensus’. More recently, the discussion on how to theorize the changes at play - both in terms of the new configurations of power that they indicate as well as the implications they hold for thinking democracy in today’s world - has turned towards the concept of ‘empire’. Recently reintroduced by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the concept has since been taken up by a growing body of literature.² For many, Empire is meant to signal a significant shift in world order where two forms of power - biopower and sovereign power - are reconfigured through patterns of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.³ Such reconfigurations raise important questions in regards to the possibilities of thinking democracy that may require us to reconsider the theoretical positions of left-leaning forms of radical democracy as they relate to envisioning democracy in non-national forms. Indeed, given Empire’s reconfiguration of power, how is it possible to theorize an understanding of democracy that is attuned to the specific forms of power relations that are at play under Empire and the spatial reconfiguration that they imply?

In order to explore this question, the paper begins by sketching the contours of Empire. The main purpose here is not to give an exhaustive discussion on Empire, but to layout the main relevant elements for our discussion of this new world order. Our focus is on the two main technologies of power of Empire, sovereign power and bio-power. From this point, we give a brief outline of Hardt and Negri’s conception of democracy as a possible post-Empire order. We argue that the authors are faced with a theoretical impasse in regards to their conception of democracy, which they make equivalent to the ‘absolute democracy’ of the multitude. This impasse requires them to rely on an epiphenomenal argument that not only undermines the democracy they wish to defend, but also means that their theory of democracy is not grounded within democracy’s own political imaginary. Based on a conceptual distinction between a politics of democracy and a democracy of politics, we argue towards an alternative conception that opens the possibility of theorizing an understanding of democracy within the confines of the forms and spaces of power set by Empire. As such, our aim is to sketch in broad terms an understanding of democracy that can account for the shaping of power configured by Empire.

Empire, the multitude and democracy

In their work Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argued that the present world order is marked by the deterritorialisation of capital relations and the increasing penetration of the latter within the biopolitical realm of the life of the human species. As opposed to past imperialist actions, in which geographical boundaries would clearly specify the imperial power from the colony, today’s global capital relations have escaped any such territorial specificity. Moreover, this lack of territorial specificity relates to geographical boundaries, as much as, socio-economic domains and actors. In this sense, no particular state or set of states (the United States, ‘core areas’, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)) or particular actors (multinational corporations) can claim, or be taken as having, exclusive control of the present world order. Global capital relations have established an imperial order that finds no geographical or social limits to the possible expansion of its ‘single logic of rule’.⁴

Others have added that Empire’s geographical and social expansion of capital relations is accompanied by complex patterns of global governmentality. Importantly, these patterns of global governmentality extend Empire’s rule into the biopolitical management of various areas of the life of populations while doing so from the vantage point of the global. As Mark Duffield notes in his analysis of global...