Michael Hardt: Empire, Multitude, and a Theory of Power Without a Center

In the autumn of 2011, a few hundred people pitched tents in a small park near Wall Street with no leader, no manifesto, and no single demand. Political theorists who had spent a decade arguing that centralized power was already obsolete watched the movement spread from Zuccotti Park to Tahrir Square to Puerta del Sol and treated it less as a surprise than as confirmation. Michael Hardt was one of them. Hardt, born in 1960, teaches literature and Italian at Duke University, which is itself worth pausing on. He is not trained as a political scientist. His path into political theory ran through literary criticism and a collaboration with the Italian philosopher Antonio Negri, a former Autonomia movement figure who had been imprisoned in Italy in the 1970s on charges connected to the Red Brigades, charges an Italian court could never conclusively prove. Negri wrote from prison and later from exile in France. Hardt brought the American academic infrastructure and, by most accounts, a clearer prose style. Together they produced one of the most argued-over political theory trilogies of the twenty first century: Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), and Commonwealth (2009), later extended by the shorter Declaration (2012).

The core claim of Empire is a break with how the left had understood imperialism since Lenin. Classical imperialism had a center: a nation state, a flag, a metropole extracting from a periphery. Hardt and Negri argued that by the late twentieth century this model no longer described the world accurately. Power had become what they called Empire, a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus that incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers, with no outside and no single capital to storm. The United States is powerful within this order but is not synonymous with it. There is no emperor's palace to occupy, no colonial office to burn down. Against Empire, Hardt and Negri set the multitude. This is not the working class in the classical Marxist sense, a single collective actor united by a shared position in production. The multitude is plural by definition, a set of singularities that act in common without collapsing into sameness. It is closer to a network than an army. This is where the UPSC-relevant conceptual precision matters: don't mistake multitude for a rebranding of proletariat. Hardt and Negri are explicit that the multitude includes forms of immaterial and affective labor, communication, care work, and knowledge production, that the older category of the industrial working class could not hold. The tension in this framework, and critics have pressed on it from more than one direction, is whether "no center" is actually true or whether it is a theoretical convenience that makes resistance sound easier than it is. Marxist critics associated with the Aufheben collective and the world systems tradition have argued that Hardt and Negri understate real, persistent asymmetries between states, that Washington still matters in a way Empire's framework has trouble accounting for, and that talk of a smooth, centerless world capital risks flattening genuine differences in sovereignty, military force, and treaty power between, say, the United States and a country negotiating IMF terms. A theory built to explain Occupy's leaderlessness struggles somewhat when asked to explain a US carrier group. Declaration, written after 2011, is where the abstraction meets the calendar. Hardt and Negri traced a line from Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia in December 2010 through Tahrir Square, Puerta del Sol, and Zuccotti Park, arguing that these movements shared a structure of horizontal organizing and a refusal of designated leadership, whatever the media's appetite for a single face to interview. They wrote that Occupy Wall Street was only one moment in a wider cycle of struggles that shifted political debate over the course of 2011, and that the search for a Tahrir Square leader missed the point entirely, since the movements built horizontal mechanisms of decision making instead of headquarters or central committees. None of this settles whether the multitude can govern, only that it can gather. Hardt and Negri themselves conceded as much when they wrote that the movements would eventually have to find the passage from declaration to constitution, from making a claim in public space to actually building institutions that outlast the encampment. Most of them didn't. Whether that failure indicts the theory or simply describes the unfinished business of the decade it was written for is still an open argument, and probably the more interesting one to have.