We ended the last post with a question: What then, is the juridical concept of Empire? In the text under consideration Hardt and Negri say that:
"The theoretical responses to this constitutionalization of a supranational world power, however, have been entirely inadequate. Instead of recognizing what was really new about these supranational processes, the vast majority of juridical theorists merely tried to resurrect anachronistic models to apply to the new problems. To a large extent, in fact, the models that had presided over the birth of the nation-state were simply dusted off and reproposed as interpretive schema for reading the construction of a supranational power. The "domestic analogy" thus became the fundamental methodological tool in the analysis of international and supranational forms of order."
"Two lines of thought have been particularly active during this transition, and as a kind of shorthand we can conceive of them as resurrections of the Hobbesian and the Lockean ideologies that in another era dominated the European conceptions of the sovereign state. "
"The Hobbesian variant focuses primarily on the transfer of the title of sovereignty and conceives the constitution of the supranational sovereign entity as a contractual agreement grounded on the convergence of preexisting state subjects. A new transcendent power, "tertium super partes," primarily concentrated in the hands of the military (the one that rules over life and death, the Hobbesian "God on earth"), is, according to this school, the only means capable of constituting a secure international system and thus of overcoming the anarchy that sovereign states necessarily produce"
And the Lockean? Presumably it would be more constitutionally orientated. Hardt and Negri say:
"By contrast, according to the Lockean variant, the same process is projected in more decentralized, pluralistic terms. In this framework, just when the transfer toward a supranational center is accomplished, networks of local and constitutionally effective counterpowers rise up to contest and/or support the new figure of power. Rather than global security, then, what is proposed here is a global constitutionalism, or really this amounts to a project of overcoming state imperatives by constituting a global civil society."