Empire (review)

Ambitious in scope and panoramic in execution, Empire is an account of how the present world order has come to be. This account encompasses a history of political ideas from early Roman times to the present global empire. It serves to develop the authors' principal arguments for understanding the nature of global society today—that the drive to maintain global power and the potential to resist this power do not represent two opposing social factions but reside within a single global ecumene ("It is not the two that recompose in one, but the one that opens into two"—as Hardt and Negri quote the Chinese revolutionaries [48]). The almost organic conceptualization of power to both rule and resist aligns with Foucault's position, whereas the call to revolution on a global scale (the currency of "Workers of the world unite") is most certainly Marxian. This intriguing primary combination of Foucault and Marx applied to the analysis of the current world order and globalization represents an innovative historical-theoretical turn.

Empire is, in the authors' words, a "concept" that demands its own theoretical development and not a "metaphor" that would entail drawing analogies from history. Empire is an overarching sovereign power that claims no territorial moorings. The supranational subsumes the national, and the juridical structure of the supranational is increasingly being reproduced at the national level, whereas prior to the coming of age of the United Nations as an originary point for Empire, law at the national level constituted the model for law at the supranational level. Empire exercises juridical power through both coercion and consent (Gramsci's hegemony comes to mind). The totality of Empire's influence on the very fabric of the social on a global scale is testimony to its biopower.

Drawing the genealogy of Empire is a daunting task that the authors have tackled with considerable energy. Part 1 of the book addresses the stuff of Empire ("The Political Constitution") today. They carefully distinguish Empire from previous regimes of imperialism. Imperialism was motivated by the desire for a certain global social formation at a future point in time, whereas with Empire, the global domain has already formed. Unlike the foregrounding of nation and nationalism under imperialism, the rule of Empire is not limited by geography (it is planetary, global). The authors locate the seeds of Empire in the rationale for the formation of the United Nations. However, it supersedes the idea behind the formation of the UN and thus the UN itself, in its power to enforce a universal notion of right through, if necessary, just war. The imperial machine is everywhere, influences everything, and this biopower of Empire is fueled by the communication industries. If imperial power is immanent, the authors argue (and provide evidence accordingly), we must recognize that resistance to this power is immanent as well. Resistance has manifested itself in several instances in recent history such as the Tiananmen Square demonstration, the Chiapas's revolt, the Intifida (we might add the first and second), and the labor strikes in France and South Korea. It may not be possible to logically cohere these conflicts as resistance to Empire, the authors say, but we must recognize that at a certain level, the relatively localized conflicts directly attack the disciplinary power of Empire.

Part 2 addresses sovereignty as a fundamental characteristic of Empire. The authors trace the history of the concept of sovereignty from the introduction of early modern ideas in Europe to its present form, as crystallized in the (new) imperial power. Sovereignty is understood as a "transcendent apparatus" that exercises its power to impose order within a social system. With the advent of modernity, this apparatus has emerged from the people (the proletariat) who have vested in the governing polity the power conferred through representation. Sovereignty became an instrument of legitimation of power willingly accorded by society. This power transferred to the idea of the nation-state, and...