Empire

Second printing. Large 8vo. Pp. xvii, 478. Black buckram stamped in silver to spine, in black illustrated dust jacket. Notes, Index.

An influential post-Marxist critique of globalisation, which since its publication in 2000 has sold well beyond its publisher's expectations for an academic treatise. Written behind bars, in the case of Negri, who had returned to Italy to serve the remainder of his sentence as an accomplice to the kidnap and murder of former Italian prime minister, Aldo Moro, by the Red Brigades, after a plea-bargain reduced his stint from 30 to 13 years. In the late 1980s, the then Italian President Francesco Cossiga described Negri as "a psychopath" who "poisoned the minds of an entire generation of Italy's youth."

A follow-up volume, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, further developing the concept of 'multitude', taken from Spinoza, was published in 2004. "The first great new theoretical synthesis of the new millennium projects a theory of globalization which is politically energizing and which draws the whole host of doom-laden post-structural analyses together into a positive and enabling vision of the future." –Fredric Jameson, author of The Geopolitical Aesthetic