Michael Hardt was born in 1960, and raised in a suburb of Washington DC. The son of a Sovietologist specialising in economics at the Library of Congress, he studied engineering and earned a BA at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania. He became interested in alternative energy sources, and worked during his holidays at a factory in Italy making solar panels. Hardt moved to Seattle in 1983, where he earned both an MA and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington. During this period Hardt spent time in Paris writing his dissertation, where he met the exiled Toni Negri, with whom he would collaborate on his most famous works. Hardt also worked in Guatemala and El Salvador for the Christian 'Sanctuary Movement' that gave church shelter in the US to refugees branded as illegal immigrants, often people in flight from CIA-trained death squads. He was eventually offered a position in the Italian department at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, where he taught until 1994 when he was offered a professorship teaching literature at Duke University in North Carolina. That year he and Negri started work on Empire, their seminal text that was eventually published in 2000.
Antonio
Negri
Paolo Virno
Franco Berardi (Bifo)
Maurizio Lazzarato
Nick Dyer-Witheford
Mariarosa Dalla Costa
Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari
Autonomist Marxism
Poststructuralism
Hardt’s work has straddled several theoretical traditions, extracting workable concepts from French poststructuralism, Italian autonomist Marxism, and Anglophone Marxism. His early work (from his dissertation, The Art of Organization, to Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (1993) involves an exploration of these traditions and can be seen as a working through of the terrain they present. Rather than championing one over the other, Hardt’s work from the beginning becomes an allegedly unlikely process of synthesis where poststructuralism’s affinities with radical forms of Italian Marxism are first explored in their political potentiality.
In 1994 Hardt’s collaboration with Antonio Negri on Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form cements the pair’s collaborative relationship. The book uses many of Negri’s earlier political writing of the seventies, wrapping them in chapters co-written by the two of them. It results as a departure in Marxist analysis of the state, furthering the Italian autonomist’s objection to versions of mainstream Marxism in which the state was theorized as needing to be seized in order for social transformation to be successful. Yet Hardt’s notoriety outside of somewhat restricted intellectual circles exploded in 2000 with the publication of Empire, again co-written with Negri.
The tract has since resulted one of the pre-eminent radical critiques of capitalist globalization, synthesizing the aforementioned theoretical traditions into a vision of globalization in which, having reached its supreme state, capital covers the face of the planet leaving no space untouched and is steadily reaching a new stage, Empire. As opposed to imperialism, in Empire the crisis of the nation-state and the Fordist organization of life, brought on by the cycle of social struggles witnessed globally through the sixties and seventies, have determined a new supra-national system of rule and form of sovereignty. However, far from determining the end of history, Hardt and Negri suggest that this has given rise to a new antagonist, namely the multitude, a subject that moves beyond the traditional marxist understanding of the working class. It is this figure to which most of Hardt and Negri’s forthcoming book (Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire) will be dedicated, as well as to the hegemonic form of labour she takes part in, immaterial labour. Hardt is currently also writing a book on the Italian director, Pier Paolo Pasolini.
(1993) Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
(1994) Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form. (with Antonio Negri)
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
(2000) Empire. (with Antonio Negri). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
(2004) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. (forthcoming, with
Antonio Negri). New York: Penguin Press.
Edited Volumes:
(1996). Radical Thought
in Italy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press. (with Paolo Virno)
(2000). The Jameson Reader. Oxford: Blackwell.
(with Kathi Weeks)
Hardt’s Dissertation:
“The Art of Organization”:
http://www.duke.edu/~hardt/Dissertation.html
Michael Hardt’s Duke University Homepage:
http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/Literature/faculty/hardt
Hardt’s Reading Notes on Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism &
Schizophrenia:
http://www.duke.edu/~hardt/Deleuze&Guattari.html
Hardt’s Reading Notes on Marx's Capital:
http://www.duke.edu/~hardt/Capital.html