Reading Negri

Antonio Negri, the most important Marxist theorist working today, is known in the English-speaking world primarily for Empire, a striking new analysis of globalization he coauthored with Michael Hardt in 2000, that became a surprise academic best-seller. While most accounts of Negri focus only on Empire, this collection of essays presents readers with a fuller picture of Negri thought, drawing upon all his works and doing justice to his remarkable ability to employ the great texts of the philosophical tradition to illuminate the present.

Reading Negri comprises essays from scholars representing a broad spectrum of disciplines and interests. Together these essays give us exposition of Negri's ideas, historical analysis of his influences, and both critical and positive evaluations of his impressive body of work.

"Against the tendency to reduce Negri's thought to Empire and its subsequent volumes, Reading Negri examines the breadth of his thought, from its origins in the factory struggles of Italy through the engagements with Marx and Spinoza to the critical theory of post-fordist capitalism. Through these different examinations, however, a common thread emerges: the problem of the radical imagination, of constructing a future radically different than the present. Reading Negri is a valuable volume for anyone interested in that question, the question at the center of Negri's thought."---Jason Read, author of The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present

"Reading Negri is an essential volume for anyone who wants to know more about Negri's ideas. It helps to show the connection of Negri's early work on Spinoza, Mant, and Machiavelli to his later work on Empire and Multitude, and it introduces English-speaking readers to the important role the autonomist Marxist school of Panzien and Tronti played in the development of Negri's thought."---Peg Birmingham, author of Hannah Arendt and Human Rights

"The work of Antonio Negri has become very important, as well as highly controversial, in post-Marxist discussions of the contemporary global situation. But secondary literature in English concerning it has been sparse. This new collection of essays is of great help in elucidating Negri's major ideas, filling in the Italian cultural background out of which he emerged, and articulating some of his critics' major discontents."---William L. McBride, author of Philosophical Reflections on the Changes in Eastern Europe