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Antonio Negri

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Antonio Negri (1933–2023) was an Italian political philosopher and activist whose work spans autonomist Marxism, political ontology, and the theory of globalization. He is best known for his collaborations with Michael Hardt, particularly Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004), which analyze how global capitalism produces new forms of sovereignty and new possibilities for collective resistance.

Core ideas

  • Constituent power: Negri distinguishes constituent power (the creative, collective force that establishes political orders) from constituted power (the institutional structures that result). Modern political theory tends to subordinate constituent power to constituted power — treating revolution as a founding moment that gives way to stable governance. Negri insists that constituent power is ongoing, irreducible, and cannot be fully captured by any institutional form.
  • Multitude: against the liberal concept of “the people” (a unified political subject) and the Marxist concept of “the working class” (defined by a single relation to production), Negri and Hardt propose the multitude — a multiplicity of singular subjects who act in common without being reduced to unity. The multitude is not a mass but a network of differences that cooperate without homogenization.
  • Empire: Negri and Hardt argue that sovereignty has shifted from nation-states to a decentered, global form they call Empire. Empire has no territorial center and no fixed boundaries — it operates through networks of economic, military, and cultural power. But Empire also produces the conditions for its own opposition: the global networks that sustain imperial power also enable the multitude to organize across borders.
  • Immaterial labor: the shift toward labor that produces knowledge, affect, communication, and social relations rather than material goods. Negri argues that immaterial labor blurs the distinction between work and life, making all of social existence potentially productive — and potentially exploitable.

Significance for this research

Negri belongs to the Italian tradition of biopolitical thought alongside Roberto Esposito and Giorgio Agamben, though his orientation is distinct. Where Agamben analyzes how sovereign power reduces life to bare survival and Esposito traces the immunitary logic that dissolves community, Negri emphasizes the productive, affirmative dimension of collective life — the capacity of the multitude to generate new forms of political organization from below.

Notable works

  • Empire (2000, with Michael Hardt)
  • Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004, with Michael Hardt)
  • Commonwealth (2009, with Michael Hardt)
  • The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics (1981)
  • Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (1992)

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