Empire and Imperialism: A Critical Reading of Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri, Atilio A. Boron, London: Zed Books, 2005, pp. 141.Michael Walzer, reflecting in a 2002 Dissent article (vol.
49, Spring) upon the compelling issues in world politics, asked “Can
there be a decent Left?” After reading Atilio A. Boron's
impassioned and derisive critique of Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri's Empire (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press,
2000), one wonders whether today there can be an empirically
sophisticated, coherent Left. (Negri, by the way, spent seventeen years in
Italian prisons for his involvement with the Red Brigade and the murder of
Italian politician Aldo Moro.) Boron, a professor of political theory at
the University of Buenos Aires claims, no doubt rightly, that the last
three decades, embracing the end of the Cold War, the impact of
neo-liberal policies on the “periphery” and sweeping
technological changes, have necessitated a reformulation of leftist
thinking. The influential Empire, which advances a
root-and-branch restructuring of socialist thought, though hugely popular
among anti-globalization groups and already translated into over a dozen
languages, is to Boron emphatically not it. While paying obeisance to
Hardt and Negri's “noble intentions and intellectual and
political honesty” (4–5), the author proceeds to shred
virtually all their main contentions.
Un presente lleno de historia(s): la poliomielitis, entre las secuelas y el legado