Abstract

The Empire strikes again. This article puts forward a sharp critique of Hardt and Negri’s Empire. Despite the book’s « post-modern » apparel, what it actually proposes is a pairing of two teleological « grand narratives». The first of these is a history of western political thought which is basically an apologia for the American constitution, whose ultimate manifestation is this hypothetical empire, the contemporary guise of an elusive political power. As for the second narrative, it sketches a history of capitalism which, by way of its incarnations in the figures of the « professional worker » and the « mass worker », at last arrives at the figures of the « social worker » and the multitude, the latter being the-equally elusive- figure in a rather curious version of French communism. Faced with an epoch marked by a series of transformations requiring the most rigorous examination, telling such « stories » is a futile exercise