A Load of Bull? LRB On Hardt, Negri, Sovereignty and Totalitarianism
The London Review of Books has this thought-provoking review, by Malcolm Bull, of Hardt & Negri’s influential Empire.
Bull posits that Negri has substituted Spinoza for Marx in his political reasoning on sovereignty (which is based in the autonomist movement) and that this distorts their whole thesis:
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It’s easy to see why Empire has proved the most successful work of political theory to come from the Left for a generation. Not only is it written with unusual energy, clarity and wit, but it addresses directly the central political issue of the moment: the perceived distance between ordinary people trying to live in the way they want and the systems of power that defeat them. By simultaneously redefining globalisation as a form of sovereignty and recasting the autonomist project in the republican tradition, Hardt and Negri offer an exceptionally optimistic analysis of the problem: remote as it may seem, sovereignty is nothing that a few like-minded people cannot create for themselves [My emphasis]. Today’s anti-capitalist protests may look like mob violence, but that is half the point: the street mobs made America, too; this is counter-Empire in the making.
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But Bull also says that replacing Marx with Spinoza results in a kind of shadow neoliberalism and says that Negri has misunderstood Spinoza entirely in espousing the view that power is only power if you take it. Negri has aligned himself with those who say there is no such thing as civil society, which Bull says was not Spinoza’s point at all.
It is not at all obvious that Negri’s interpretation of Spinoza is correct. In the Theologico-Political Treatise Spinoza had maintained that some sort of social contract was necessary and that natural right was transferred. In the Political Treatise, the contract disappears, but whether its elimination means the continuation of natural right in the civil state or the elision of the difference between the civil and the natural is less certain. Spinoza sometimes says the former, but he also emphasises that in the state of nature where ‘the natural right of man is determined by the power of every individual, and belongs to everyone . . . it is a nonentity, existing in opinion rather than fact.’ Only on entering the commonwealth does natural right become more than a fiction: ‘men in the state of nature can hardly be possessed of their own right.’ On this interpretation, civil right is the only form of right there is; in the state of nature there is so much risk that men are virtually powerless against each other; far from taking their unalienated power into the commonwealth, they experience it there for the first time. For man, the social animal, if not for God or nature, potestas creates potentia.
I have to admit that I gave Empire only the most cursory read, as I do so many things these days due my declining eyesight. (It’s much easier to read online and until they put brightness and contrast controls on books it’ll stay that way.) But I will make the effort to go back and read it in the light of Bull’s review.
I’m firmly of the view that sovereignty resides in the people, but why does it? Is it because of their innate potential for force or because we agree that it does? It’s arguable, which I suppose is Bull’s point.
Whether you agree with him or not Bull does flag up interesting issues about globalised social control and totalitarianism in this article. Well worth reading.
Read more: London Review of Books, Globalisation, Hart& Negri Italian Autonomism,Socialism, Marx, Spinoza
