Hardt: a track less traveled photo:Bruce Feeley

ichael Hardt is riding a wave of relevance. It's been a heady voyage for someone now dubbed a fast-rising academic star. But it's not been without its rough spots.

Hardt, a Duke associate professor of literature, was labeled by no less a cultural arbiter than The New York Times as "the latest contender for academia's next master theorist." The buzz surrounding Hardt, as the newspaper put it in a July profile, concerns Empire, "a heady treatise on globalization." The book is co-authored by Hardt and Anthony Negri, listed on the dust jacket as a former political science professor and more recently "an independent researcher and writer and an inmate at Rebibbia Prison, Rome." It was published by Harvard University Press in March of last year. Since then, translation rights have been sold in fourteen countries, including Japan and Croatia; the leading Brazilian newspaper has placed it on the cover of its Sunday magazine; Dutch television has broadcast a documentary about it; and Hardt has given more than two dozen academic talks along with an equal number of press interviews.

The book portrays a new global reality functioning along the lines of the World Wide Web: It's fluid, infinitely expanding, all-embracing. To accent the all-embracing quality of Empire, the two authors coin the word "biopower"--a determinism that, as they interpret it, carries a certainty beyond economic determinism. Biopower means "a control that extends through the depths of the consciousness and the bodies of the population--and at the same time across the entirety of social relations."

But Hardt and Negri don't regard this web of relationships as just some new brand of imperialism. Rather, they envision the end of imperialism, which involved nation-states vying for economic advantage. Empire suggests optimism about Empire: Because it disperses power and resists any kind of central control, it has great democratic potential. "Empire creates a greater potential for revolution than did the modern regimes of power," according to the book, "because it presents us, alongside the machine of command, with an alternative: the set of all the exploited and the subjugated, a multitude that is directly opposed to Empire, with no mediation between them." As they declare near the end of the book, "the fact that against the old powers of Europe a new Empire has formed is only good news."

If the Web is a metaphor for the emerging Empire, there's a historical parallel with the Roman Empire. Hardt says the Roman Empire was thought to be a great innovation because it combined monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy in a single structure. Empire today has aspects of monarchy--for example, in the presumed absolute rule of the World Trade Organization; of aristocracy, in transnational corporations and dominant nation-states that often call the shots on the world stage; and, perhaps most interestingly to him, of democracy, including non-governmental organizations and the border-leaping media.

Hardt also sees a kind of model for the new form of global power in American history. He notes that the Founding Fathers, after all, looked to ancient Rome as they envisioned the American Republic, and so they put in place a system that accommodated "multiplicity and unity" alike. As the book puts it, the U.S. constitutional project "is constructed on the model of re-articulating an open space and reinventing incessantly diverse and singular relations in networks across an unbounded terrain." (The authors don't treat that project as unfailingly positive; in their view, racial subordination and the expansionist Monroe Doctrine are aspects of the American Empire.)

Hardt and Negri discerned their theory at work last summer, when protests greeted the meeting in Genoa of the Group of Eight. Writing in the opinion pages of The New York Times, they said the protests were based on the recognition that no national power is in control of the current global order. That's not an unhappy development, as they see it: The world is a better place if it can no longer be understood in terms of British, French, Russian, or even American imperialism. But the new order has no democratic institutional mechanisms for representation, as nation-states do--no elections, no public forum for debate. "The protests themselves have become global movements, and one of their clearest objectives is the democratization of globalizing processes," said the two writers. This should not be called an "anti-globalization movement." It is rather "an alternative globalization movement," a democratic wave that's aimed at eliminating inequalities and deepening self-determination.

With the rise of such global players as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, how can the nation-state have a certain fate? Princeton political scientist Robert Gilpin, for one, insists that "the nation-state continues to be the major actor in both domestic and international affairs." It has been around for more than three centuries, he points out; effective international institutions have existed for half a century, while non-governmental organizations have been active for just a couple of decades. Many of those institutions and organizations can't function without the sanction of the nation-state. Likewise, in his view, many of the problems pegged to economic globalization are the consequences of national policies--notably the destruction of the Amazon forest, caused principally by the Brazilian government's national development policies.

In his book Global Political Economy, Gilpin also disputes the supposedly unprecedented level of global economic integration. "As the twenty-first century opens, the world is not as well integrated as it was in a number of respects prior to World War I," he writes. "Under the gold standard and the influential doctrine of laissez-faire, for example, the decades prior to World War I were an era when markets were truly supreme and governments had little power over economic affairs. Trade, investment, and financial flows were actually greater in the late 1800s, at least relative to the size of national economies and the international economy, than they are today." Historians of economics note that before World War I, half of British savings were invested overseas--far more than is now the case for the U.S. or any other country.

Other analysts point out that borders were, if anything, more fluid in the past. Exactly one month before the events of September 11, The New York Times offered a skeptical look at the novelty of today's globalization. Before World War I, "There were no passports and virtually no restrictions on immigration, making for perhaps the biggest migration in human history." By one estimate reported in the article, one-seventh of the world's working-age population migrated across national boundaries between 1870 and 1925. In more recent times, the U.S. may be the only country to have boasted a relatively open immigration policy.

It's not so much that, by his theory, the nation-state is fading, Hardt says; rather, the nation-state is contending with competing power centers. "What has changed about nation-states is that they are no longer the ultimate sovereign authority within and certainly outside of their own territories. That doesn't mean that nation-states are no longer important. It means that they function within a larger structure." So in allowing the clear-cutting of forests, the Brazilian government has to be attentive to larger economic forces--like the debt-relief demands of international lending agencies.

And trade figures, he says, are not the only indicators of an integrated world. The notion of "control" is more interesting to him. "In sub-Saharan Africa, there's very little production, very little consumption. What there is, though, is a lot of debt. And one could say that debt is a primary weapon of Empire," that debt is "a disciplining mechanism" in regulating the flow of capital.

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