Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State

by Antonio Negri, Maurizia Boscagli (Translator)

Overview

New Edition

In the ten years since the initial publication of Insurgencies, Antonio Negri's reputation as one of the world's foremost political philosophers has grown dramatically. An invigorating appraisal of revolutionary thought, Insurgencies is both the precursor to and the historical basis for Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's masterwork, Empire.

At the center of this book is the conflict between "constituent power," the democratic force of revolutionary innovation, and "constituted power," the fixed power of formal constitutions and central authority. This conflict, Negri argues, defines the drama of modern rebellions. Now with a foreword by Michael Hardt, Insurgencies leads to a new notion of how power and action must be understood if we are to achieve a democratic future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816667741
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	11/13/2009
Series:	Theory Out Of Bounds , #15
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Antonio Negri, who has taught at the University of Padua and the University of Paris, is the author of more than thirty books, including Empire and Multitude, with Michael Hardt; The Savage Anomaly (Minnesota, 2000); and In Praise of the Common, with Cesare Casarino (Minnesota, 2008).

Michael Hardt is professor of literature at Duke University. He is the author of Empire and Multitude, with Antonio Negri, as well as Labor of Dionysus and Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, both published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1. Constituent Power: The Concept of a CrisisOn the Juridical Concept of Constituent Power
Absolute Procedure, Constitution, Revolution
From Structure to the SubjectChapter 2. Virtue and Fortune: The Machiavellian Paradigm
The Logic of Time and the Prince's Indecision
Democracy as Absolute Government and the Reform of the Renaissance
Critical Ontology of the Constituent PrincipleChapter 3. The Atlantic Model and the Theory of CounterpowerMutatio and Anakyclosis
Harrington: Constituent Power as Counterpower
The Constituent Motor and the Constitutionalist ObstacleChapter 4. Political Emancipation in the American ConstitutionConstituent Power and the "Frontier" of Freedom
Homo Politicus and the Republican Machine
Crisis of the Event and Inversion of the TendencyChapter 5. The Revolution and the Constitution of LaborRousseau's Enigma and the Time of the Sansculottes
The Constitution of Labor
To Terminate the RevolutionChapter 6. Communist Desire and the Dialectic RestoredConstituent Power in Revolutionary Materialism
Lenin and the Soviets: The Institutional Compromise
Socialism and EnterpriseChapter 7. The Constitution of Strength"Multitudo et Potentia": The Problem
Constitutive Disutopia
Beyond ModernityNotes
Index

What People are Saying About This

Wendy Brown

Can democracy—the power of the people—be realized? Antonio Negri offers a deeply erudite, relentlessly political, and at times poetic meditation on democracy. Insurgencies is elegant, original, provocative and powerful thinking...This is political theory as it is hardly ever done anymore, political theory that idelibly transforms both its object of study and its reader. (Wendy Brown, University of California, Santa Cruz)