All of that makes it tough for today's dissidents to find a convenient demon. "If there's no center of power, we no longer have a Winter Palace to storm," said Hardt last summer, speaking on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation. "We can't just attack the White House because, in fact, the system is much more difficult to grasp than any of its specific actors."

Two months later came the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. Early in the morning of September 11, Hardt was meeting with a reporter for The Washington Post in New York, where he's on leave for the year. From his midtown apartment, he watched the strange spectacle of financial-district workers walking north from the shattered downtown. Applying the theory of Empire to the brutal nature of events, he sees the terrorists' targeting of the U.S. as senseless; he also says a U.S. response may not be adequate. "The general interpretation of September 11 is that it was a strike at the center of the global power structure. By our conception in Empire, that's wrong. In fact, it's wrong in the same way that those who think the U.S. can act unilaterally and dictate world affairs by itself are wrong. These are parallel misconceptions."

Hardt says the evolution of an anti-terror coalition--embracing as it does Russia, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, and potentially even Syria and Sudan, long accused of harboring terrorists--is an indicator of Empire. "It may be that this war coalition is in fact a formation of a new kind of power, a super-national kind of power. One of our fundamental claims is that the U.S. is not the world's sole and central actor, that the U.S. can't just dictate world affairs and force others to line up behind its lead."

That assessment echoes the book's discussion of the 1991 Gulf War--an event that the two authors peg as announcing "the birth of a new world order." Hardt and Negri write that the importance of the Gulf War derives "from the fact that it presented the United States as the only power able to manage international justice, not as a function of its own national motives but in the name of global right." While the U.S. showed itself to be the essential power--the "peace police"--it also rationalized its response in terms of international legal norms.

To Hardt, it's simplistic to insist that "everything changed on September 11." Terrorist networks, after all, are just one of the fluid forces of Empire. "Here we have an enemy that has no center; it's more serpentine, it's a distributed network rather than a centralized system. That requires not only a rethinking but a different kind of strategy in attacking it. It's not clear to me that a state structure can combat adequately a non-state enemy." Spreading the idea of democratic inclusion and participation may be the best weapon, he says. "Long-term security only comes from an increase in democracy. Constructing democracy on a global scale is a huge challenge, but that seems to me the most important objective to pursue. That doesn't necessarily conflict with the normal police activity of bringing the perpetrators of the crime to justice. These are separate issues in a way, but just one of them is a long-term and lasting solution."

Long-term or short-term, the campaign in Afghanistan is widely seen as targeting a religion-infused extremism. In Empire, Hardt and Negri write that the current forms of Islamic fundamentalism (and fundamentalism in general) should not be understood as a return to past social forms and values. As they describe it in the book, such fundamentalism "is not a premodern but a postmodern project" that "has to be recognized primarily in its refusal of modernity as a weapon of Euro-American hegemony." Fundamentalism and postmodern thinking are, then, both linked to Empire. "One has the ultimate security of the text and the truth of the Word," says Hardt. "And the other, postmodernism, is all about playfulness and relativism. Yet, we're claiming that they're similar to the extent that they are responding to the emergence of Empire."

But critics haven't been quick to embrace such linkages. Writing in The New Republic just after the September attacks, Alan Wolfe questions the authors' assumptions about "the progressive potential of Islamic fundamentalism," in his own phrase. For his part, Hardt says, "I guess one couldn't say that it's progressive at all; I'd say it's contemporary, which doesn't mean that it's progressive. And it's postmodern, in the sense that it's a reaction against tendencies of Westernization within the Islamic world."

Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, also savages the book as an apology for anarchism on a worldwide scale. "If it is true, as Hardt and Negri blithely claim, that efforts to find legitimate reasons for intervening in world affairs are only a smokescreen for the exercise of hegemonic power, then the way is cleared for each and every illegitimate act of global intervention."

"I was doing this radio show, and the announcer was just attacking me the whole time," Hardt says. "He was saying I'm responsible for September 11 because I supported anti-globalization. Well, for one thing, equating breaking Starbucks windows with killing 5,000 people seems to me very unusual. But he was upset because I wasn't willing to condemn all forms of violence. I do think there are times when political violence is useful and justified--the American Revolution being one, the struggles against fascism in occupied France and Italy being another. That doesn't mean that I support breaking Starbucks windows at demonstrations. In fact, I don't. Breaking windows and intentionally provoking police is very destructive to the movement and inappropriate in the contemporary context. But I don't oppose political violence on categorical grounds. These things have to be decided in context."

The National Review, in an essay headlined "Evil Empire," dismissed the book as "a political manifesto with the aim of laying out a new guise for Communism." As the essay summarizes the book's argument, "It is essential for Communists to gain control of the history of the Cold War, in order to be able to claim that they were right all along, and we must start the whole experiment over again in some form adapted to today's circumstances. That is what this hot, smart book is all about. Karl Marx it was who said that great events appear 'the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' Duke University is a lost cause, it may well be, but even at The New York Times, Time magazine, and Harvard University Press, you'd think they might be able to dispense with frissons and spot farce for themselves."

Harvard University Press, in promoting the book, dispenses with the language of dreary political science; the press calls it "an unabashedly utopian work of political philosophy, a new Communist Manifesto." But Hardt doesn't consider himself an apologist for Lenin, Stalin, or even Marx. The Soviet and Nazi experiments "were both horrible," he says. He sees totalitarian tendencies as inherent in the nation-state. "What we argue, perhaps in an exaggerated way, is against the nation-state as such, claiming that the nation-state, in all its forms, is a hierarchical and repressive organ, and eventually an obstacle to democracy."

"Many friends, and maybe some who are not friends, ask me why we maintain the word 'communism' when in a certain common understanding, it means something different from our meaning," he says. "Some seem to understand it as centralized state control, planned economy, tyranny. Others have criticized me for insisting on maintaining the word 'democracy'--for saying, that is, that the central project is to reinvent democracy for the world. Throughout the modern era, democracy was fundamentally tied to the nation-state and functioned within nation-states. The mechanisms of representation and expression that we have--labor unions, civic groups of various kinds that institutionalize democracy--were all national institutions. Today, in order to construct a global democracy, one can't simply magnify these institutions for the new terrain. They have to be fundamentally transformed. In other words, we can't just have global voting for, say, the head of the IMF.

"What I think we need, and I know this is an ambitious task, is the same kind of reinvention of democracy that was accomplished in early modern Europe. They didn't simply take the Athenian notion of democracy and plant it in Paris and London; they reinvented it for the nation-state. In the same way that I think democracy has to be reinvented and mean something different, I think, too, that the concept of communism needs to be reinvented and mean something different than it has previously. I see them as fundamentally linked."

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