7.6 /10 1 Votes
Country United States Publisher Penguin Books Pages 448 pp. Preceded by Empire Genre Non-fiction | 3.8/5 Goodreads Language English Publication date 2004 Originally published 2004 Followed by Commonwealth | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Media type Print (Hardcover & Paperback) Subjects Political Science, Marxism, Globalization, Philosophy, Postmodernism Similar Michael Hardt books, Democracy books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire is a book by post-marxist philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, published in 2004. It is the second installment of a "trilogy" also comprising Empire (2000) and Commonwealth (2009).
Summary
Multitude is divided into three sections: "War," which addresses the current "global civil war"; "Multitude," which elucidates the "multitude" as an "active social subject, which acts on the basis of what the singularities share in common"; and, "Democracy," which critiques traditional forms of political representation and gestures toward alternatives.
Multitude addresses these issues and elaborates on the assertion, in the Preface to Empire, that:
"The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges."
The rapid growth of the alter-globalisation movement, evident in the large protests in Seattle in 1999 and in Genova in 2001, along with the creation of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, also in 2001, seemed to substantiate the optimistic outlook at the end of Empire. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and subsequent rise of state-sponsored "counter-terrorism" seem, however, to have complicated this optimism.