Michael Hardt (born 1960) is an American political
philosopher and literary theorist.
Hardt is best known for his book Empire, which
was co-written with Antonio Negri.
It has been praised by Slavoj Žižek as the
"Communist Manifesto of the 21st Century".Hardt
and Negri suggest that several forces which
they see as dominating contemporary life,
such as class oppression, globalization and
the commodification of services (or production
of affects), have the potential to spark social
change of unprecedented dimensions.
A sequel, Multitude: War and Democracy in
the Age of Empire was published in August
2004.
It outlines an idea first propounded in Empire,
which is that of the multitude as possible
locus of a democratic movement of global proportions.
The third and final part of the trilogy, Commonwealth,
was published in 2009.
== Early life and education ==
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.
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.
It seemed that way, but I was quickly disabused."During
college, he worked for various solar energy
companies.
Hardt also participated, after college, in
the Sanctuary Movement and later helped establish
a project to bring donated computers from
the United States and put them together for
the University of El Salvador.
Yet, he says that this political activity
did more for him than it did for the Salvadorans.In
1983, he moved to Seattle to study comparative
literature at the University of Washington.
While working on his PhD, Hardt began to translate
Antonio Negri’s book on Baruch Spinoza,
The Savage Anomaly, in order to come into
contact with him.
He first met Negri in Paris in the summer
of 1986 to discuss translation difficulties.
After their meeting, Hardt decided to complete
his graduate exams and move to Paris the following
summer.
He received an M.A. in 1986 and completed
his dissertation on Gilles Deleuze in 1990,
with which he earned his PhD.After briefly
teaching at the University of Southern California,
Hardt began teaching in the Literature Program
at Duke University in 1994.
He is currently professor of Literature and
Italian at Duke.
== Thought ==
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."
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."Hardt says visions
of a public education and equal and open access
to the university are gradually disappearing:
the "war on terror" has promoted only limited
military and technological knowledges, while
the required skills of the biopolitical economy,
"the creation of ideas, images, code, affects,
and other immaterial goods" are not yet recognized
as the primary key to economic innovation.
Many of Hardt's works have been co-written
with Antonio Negri.
== Occupation movements of 2011–2012 ==
In May 2012 Hardt and Negri self-published
an electronic pamphlet on the occupation and
encampment movements of 2011-2012 called Declaration
that argues the movement explores new forms
of democracy.
== Publications ==
BooksGilles Deleuze: an Apprenticeship in
Philosophy, ISBN 0-8166-2161-6, 1993
Labor of Dionysus: a Critique of the State-form,
with Antonio Negri, ISBN 0-8166-2086-5, 1994
Empire, with Antonio Negri, ISBN 0-674-00671-2,
2000
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of
Empire, with Antonio Negri, ISBN 1-59420-024-6,
2004
Commonwealth, with Antonio Negri, ISBN 0-674-03511-9,
2009
Declaration, with Antonio Negri, ISBN 0-786-75290-4,
2012
Assembly, with Antonio Negri, ISBN 978-0190677961,
2017Selected ArticlesHardt, Michael (1995).
"The Withering of Civil Society".
Social Text (45): 27–44.
doi:10.2307/466673.
JSTOR 466673.
Hardt, Michael (1997).
"Prison Time".
Yale French Studies (91): 64–79.
doi:10.2307/2930374.
JSTOR 2930374.
"The Global Society of Control".
Discourse.
20 (3): 139–152.
1998.
"Affective Labor".
boundary 2.
26 (2): 89–100.
1999.
Hardt, Michael (2001).
"Sovereignty".
Theory and Event.
5 (4).
doi:10.1353/tae.2001.0040.
"Porto Alegre: Today's Bandung?".
New Left Review.
II (14).
March–April 2002.
Hardt, Michael.
(2007).
"Jefferson and Democracy".
American Quarterly.
59 (1): 41–78.
doi:10.1353/aq.2007.0026.
"Two Faces of Apocalypse: A Letter from Copenhagen".
Polygraph.
22: 265–274.
2010.
Hardt, Michael (July 2010).
"The Common in Communism".
Rethinking Marxism.
22 (3): 346–356.
doi:10.1080/08935696.2010.490365.
Hardt, M. (Winter 2011).
"The Militancy of Theory".
South Atlantic Quarterly.
110 (1): 19–35.
doi:10.1215/00382876-2010-020.
Hardt, M. (April 2012).
"Falsify the Currency!".
South Atlantic Quarterly.
111 (2): 359–379.
doi:10.1215/00382876-1548257.
Hardt, M. (2013).
"How to Write with Four Hands".
Genre.
46 (2): 175–182.
doi:10.1215/00166928-2088007.
Hardt, M. (September 2015).
"The Power to Be Affected".
International Journal of Politics, Culture,
and Society.
28 (3): 215–222.
doi:10.1215/00166928-2088007.
== Film appearances ==
Marx Reloaded, Arte, April 2011.
Examined Life, Sphinx Productions, 87 min.,
2008.
Antonio Negri: A Revolt that Never Ends, ZDF/Arte,
52 min., 2004
