Antonio Negri

Antonio Negri (born 1933 in Padua) is an Italian moral and political philosopher.

Life and work

Negri was an original member of the Italian Potere Operaio and the succeeding Autonomia group, and wrote together with many other famous autonomists associated with the "autonomia" movement of Italian workers, students and feminists of the 1960s and 70s, including Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, Sergio Bologna, Romano Alquati, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and François Berardi. He later wrote for Futur Antérieur (Future Perfect) with people such as Paolo Virno.

Best known as the co-author, with Michael Hardt, of Empire, Negri is currently free (while he is not allowed to take part in elections, or to teach) since spring 2003 after serving out a felony conviction, on charges that he and his writings were "moral culpable" in acts of violence stemming from his advocacy of "armed insurrection" against the Italian state during the 1960s and 1970s. Negri returned voluntarily from a 14-year exile in France in 1997, after having been elected in 1983 to the legislature while imprisoned and released on grounds of parliamentary immunity.

The prolific, iconoclastic, cosmopolitan, highly original and often dense and difficult philosophy writings of Negri attempt to come to critical terms with most of the major world intellectual movements of the past half-century, in the service of a new Marxist analysis of capitalism. The controversial thesis of Empire, that the globalization and informatization of world markets since the late 1960s has produced an unprecedented historical development — what he calls "the real subsumption of social existence by capital" — touches rather directly and forcefully upon a number of issues related to the Information Society, the Network Economy, and globalization, which may account for the relatively high degree of mainstream interest it attracted when it was published in 2000.

Empire has grown in influence since its publication and has inspired many projects around the world. Some of these include noborders, Libre Society, KEIN.ORG, NEURO-networking europe, D-A-S-H, and many others.

The sequel to Empire, called Multitude, was published in August of 2004.

Historical Milieu

Perhaps the most telling synopsis of Negri's project comes from a neoliberal critic, John Reilly, who calls Empire "a postmodern plot to overthrow the City of God."

In fact, Negri's involvement in the early 1950s with the Catholic Worker Movement and liberation theology seems to have left a permanent mark upon his thought: one of his most recent works, Time for Revolution (2003), relies heavily on themes drawn from Augustine of Hippo and Baruch Spinoza, and might rather be described as an attempt to found the City of God without the aid of the "transcendental illusions" and the "theology of Power" that he finds in thinkers as disparate as Martin Heidegger and John Maynard Keynes, extending and attempting to correct the critique of ideology as false consciousness set forth by Karl Marx.

Central Themes in Negri

Among the central themes in Negri are Marxism, Antiglobalization, Anti-capitalism, Postmodernism, Neoliberalism, Democracy, the Common, and the Multitudes.

Although he acknowledges the influence of Michel Foucault, David Harvey's The Condition of Post Modernity (1989), Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari's , Negri is on the whole extremely dismissive of postmodernism, whose only value, in his estimation, is that it has served as a symptom of the historical transition whose dynamics he and Hardt set out to explain in Empire.