Hardt

Michael Hardt. Property Law & The Common. 2015

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• published: 03 Mar 2016
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http://www.egs.edu/ Michael Hardt, Professor of Political Literature at The European Graduate School / EGS. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS. Saas-Fee Switzerland. 2015. Michael Hardt (b. 1960) is a political philosopher and literary theorist, best known for three books he co-authored with Antonio Negri: Empire (2000), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004), and Commonwealth (2009). The trilogy, in particular its first volume—Empire—has often been hailed as the “Communist Manifesto of the 21st Century.” Michael Hardt is a professor of literature at Duke University and a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS. Hardt, however, did not begin either as a philosophy or literature student. Indeed, he began as an engineer, receiving a Bachelors of Science from Swarthmore College, in 1983. During this time, Hardt worked for solar energy companies, both in Italy and the USA. This was not an apolitical time in Hardt’s life; rather, he saw work in the field of alternative energy as political: "I thought that doing alternative energy engineering for third world countries would be a way of doing politics that would get out of all this campus political posing that I hated." After his Bachelors, he turned his attention to comparative literature, and received an MA from the University of Washington, in 1986. Four years later, he would complete a PhD in comparative literature, also at the University of Washington. Parallel to his studies throughout the 1980s, Hardt participated in the Sanctuary Movement—a political and religious campaign to provide a safe haven in the United States to Central American refugees fleeing civil conflict. The campaign was a response to the American government’s restrictive federal policies for asylum seekers. Later, Hardt would help to organize a project to furnish the University of El Salvador with donated computer hardware and software. During this time, Hardt was also involved in contesting US funded wars across Central America. By his own account, he became progressively more radical over the course of the decade. In the 1980s, he would meet the Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri and begin a collaboration that has lasted to this day. In addition to Empire (2000), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004), and Commonwealth (2009), Hardt and Negri have also written Labor of Dionysus: a Critique of the State-form (1994) and Declaration (2012). Aside from these works, Hardt has also written Gilles Deleuze: an Apprenticeship in Philosophy (1993), as well as numerous articles, including: The Withering of Civil Society (1995), Prison Time (1997), Affective Labour (1999), Jefferson and Democracy (2007), and How to Write with Four Hands (2013). From when its publication until today, Empire stands as an exceptional work of the political Left for the simple reason that—unlike the majority of other works of similar ideological orientation—it proposes a total vision of the contemporary world as well as a positive outlook on the political potential of the Left today. Certainly, in the last three decades there have been numerous works that have offered comprehensive visions of the state of the world in the wake of the end of the Cold War, but they have been overwhelmingly on the side of the proponents of capitalist liberal democracy, in all of its variations. The works of Fukuyama, Nye, Huntington, Luttwak, Friedman, Brzezinski, and others, have all echoed the common sentiment that this socio-political matrix is the right one, and that political will ought to be directed towards its extension and perfection. Empire, on the other hand, critically analyses this same matrix but with a view to uncovering its hidden potential for radical political change. In consequence, it stands as one of the few theoretical works that does not see the last few decades as a long sequence of only punitive defeats of the Left.