Michael Hardt

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Michael Hardt (born 1960)^[1] is an American literary theorist and political philosopher based at Duke University. Perhaps his most famous work is Empire written with Antonio Negri. The sequel to Empire, called Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, was released in August, 2004, and details the idea of the multitude (which Hardt and Negri initially elaborated in Empire) as the potential site of a global democratic movement.

Sometimes referred to as the "Communist Manifesto of the 21st Century", Empire proposes that the forces of current class oppression, namely - corporate globalization and commodification of services (or "production of affects") have the potential to fuel social change of unprecedented dimensions.

1 Biography
2 Ideas
3 Bibliography
4 References
5 External links
6 See also

[edit] Biography

Born in Washington DC, Hardt attended Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, Maryland. He studied engineering at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania from 1978 to 1983. In college during the 1970s energy crisis, he began to take an interest in alternative energy sources.^[1] Talking about his college politics, he said, "I thought that doing alternative energy engineering for third world countries would be a way of doing politics that would get out of all this campus political posing that I hated."

After college, he worked for various solar energy companies. Hardt also worked with NGOs in Central America, doing tasks like bringing donated computers from the U.S. and putting them together for the University of El Salvador. Yet, he says that this political activity did more for him than it did for the El Salvadoreans.

In 1983, he moved to Seattle to study comparative literature at the University of Washington.^[1] While there, he received an M.A. in 1986 and his PhD in 1990.^[2] From there he went to Paris where he would meet Negri and write his dissertation under Negri's guidance.

Hardt speaks fluent French and Italian, and is Professor of Literature and Italian at Duke University.

[edit] Ideas

Hardt's writings all address political activity.

Hardt is concerned with the joy of political life, and has stated, "One has to expand the concept of love beyond the limits of the couple."^[3] The politics of the multitude is not solely about controlling the means of productivity or liberating one's own subjectivity. These two are also linked to love and joy of political life and realizing political goals.

Hardt does not consider teaching a revolutionary occupation, nor does he think the college is a particularly political institution. "But thinking of politics now as a project of social transformation on a large scale, I'm not at all convinced that political activity can come from the university." [1]