Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Multitude.(Book Review)

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Multitude. Penguin, 4-27 pages, $27.95

They're back. In 2001, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri published Empire, a long, hermetic neo-Marxist tract hailing the advent of "a new paradigm of Power"-"biopower"--that would finally, at last, after all these years, bring about the revolution that Karl and Frederick had promised us lo these many years ago.

The authors were perfect front men for their book. Hardt was a professor of literature at Duke, which meant that he was in the most politicized discipline at one of America's most politicized universities. And Negri, an architect of the Red Brigades, the Italian Marxist-Leninist terrorist group in the late 1970s, was serving a thirteen-year prison sentence in Rome. The New York Times, in a long puff piece about the book, speculated that perhaps with Hardt and Negri we had come at last to the "Next Big Idea." My, how the Left loved it. The Times opened its op-ed pages to the duo, who assured its readers that "A new species of political activist has been born with a spirit that is reminiscent of the paradoxical idealism of the 1960s." Thank God! This is what we've been waiting for! The book concluded with a paean to "militancy" "revolution" and "the ...