Antonio Negri (Key Contemporary Thinkers)

Timothy S. Murphy is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma.

The Italian philosopher and militant Antonio Negri has been a provocative and controversial figure for over forty years. He has been a professor of law at the University of Padua, a labor organizer in the Veneto, a political prisoner in Rome, a member of Italian parliament, a political refugee in Paris and most recently, as a consequence of the success of his book Empire (written in collaboration with American Michael Hardt), an internationally influential theorist of globalization. He has written over forty other books, which have been translated into dozens of languages, and his work has challenged orthodoxy in intellectual history, political science, labor relations, theology, and literary and cultural studies.
This book is the first comprehensive study of Negri's work in any language. It follows the development of Negri's critical framework and theoretical innovations from his early work as a historian of legal philosophy in the Fifties, through his period of intense and unconventional leftist activism during the Sixties and Seventies and his imprisonment and exile during the Eighties and Nineties, culminating in a clear, thorough and evenhanded account of his important contributions to the emerging study of - and struggle over - globalization. The book also includes discussions of Negri's critics and the reception of his work at each stage.

Acknowledgements
Chapter One: Who Is Toni Negri, and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things About Him?
Militant and Professor
Two Modernities
Humanism After the Death of Man
Chapter Two: A Critical Genealogy of the Modern StateÑIn Reverse
Descartes' Reasonable Ideology
Kant and the Formalists
Hegel and Beyond
Chapter Three: Workerism Between State and Party
The Workerist Matrix
Workers' Power and Autonomy
Negri Beyond Marx?
Chapter Four: From Solitude to Multitude
The Anomaly of Immanence
Poetics as Ontology
Constituent Power
Chapter Five: Empire and Counter-Empire
From Imperialism to Empire
Empire Under Fire
Multitude and Commonwealth
Envoi: Time to Come
Notes
Works Cited
Index