"Empire"

Paper Summary:

Michael Hardt and Antonia Negri's discourse picks apart the mechanisms and implications of economic, political and cultural imperialism. The paper explains how the authors trace the progress of the United States from imperialist power to Empire. The second half of the book deals mainly with the heyday of American hegemony in the 20th century and then examines factors that contribute to the fragility of its Empire. Finally, the paper describes how the authors criticize presuppositions about the global market in the third section of book, "Passages of Production."

From the Paper:

"In Chapter 3.5, the authors discuss the dynamic interplay between government and corporation, especially the multinational. With the recent push to loosen restrictions on multinational corporations, the concept of corporate political power is salient. Hardt and Negri emphasize the statement, "the state has been defeated and corporations now rule the earth!" (p. 306). Capitalism is more than an economic philosophy but a political ideology as well. Basically, the authors show that capitalism has not replaced systems of government, but that those systems have been transferred to the economic world. Finishing Part 3 with a critique of the imperialist "pyramid of power," Hardt and Negri offer what they call an "ethico-political discourse," (347; 353). The bomb, money, and ether are presented as the fundamental means by which Empire wields and maintains its global dominance."

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