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Empire: Ch1.#11- Universal Values

In finishing the third and last section of Chapter one Hardt and Negri say that they find themselves confronted with a classic problematic of political philosophy: the decline and fall of Empire. They spell this out along the following lines:

"Empire is emerging today as the center that supports the globalization of productive networks and casts its widely inclusive net to try to envelop all power relations within its world order----and yet at the same time it deploys a powerful police function against the new barbarians and the rebellious slaves who threaten its order. The power of Empire appears to be subordinated to the fluctuations of local power dynamics and to the shifting, partial juridical orderings that attempt, but never fully succeed, to lead back to a state of normalcy in the name of the "exceptionality" of the administrative procedures."

I guess you can see this in Iraq. The local crisis in Iraq affects many areas of life – security, economy, domestic politics and inter-ethnic and inter-religious relations in Europe and the Middle East. It is a global crisis in the form of a clash of civilizations; but a clash of civilizations in which there is an enormous clash within the Muslim world between those who want to reform, and secularise, and those whose power is threatened, or who want to take power in the name of fundamentalism. It is global in the sense that likely to have serious consequences for everyone on earth.

Hardt and Negri's way of thinking is classical in that it reaches back to the Roman Empire:

"These characteristics, however, were precisely those that defined ancient Rome in its decadence and that tormented so many of its Enlightenment admirers.... Should we conceive this as an Empire of decadence, then, in the terms Montesquieu and Gibbon described? Or is it more properly understood in classical terms as an Empire of corruption? Here we should understand corruption first of all not only in moral terms but also in juridical and political terms, because according to Montesquieu and Gibbon, when the different forms of government are not firmly established in the republic, the cycle of corruption is ineluctably set in motion and the community is torn apart... Second, we should understand corruption also in metaphysical terms: where the entity and essence, effectiveness and value, do not find common satisfaction, there develops not generation but corruption...These are some of the fundamental axes of Empire that we will return to later at length."

My my. This frames the issue from the perspective of classical republican philosophy. Aristotelian political philosophy adopted the "standpoint of the citizen-ruler and it sought to provide the moral perspectives and the linguistic resources that could generate prudential insight and sharpen skills required for political deliberation .... Aristotelian political philosophy defined its own function in practical political terms. Its task was not to provide a body of truths that would perhaps render the prudential insight and deliberative skills of the citizen-ruler superfluous, but rather to offer resources for sharpening that insight and making those skills more effective. "

Presumably the gesture to republicianism as a rejection of classical liberalism that defined itself with the imperatives of the rhetoric of pure theory, adopted the rhetorical posture of an absolutely detached spectator regarding a field of audience-independent "political" facts, and deduced deduced from indubitable first principles universal truths about the essence of human political association.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at May 15, 2004 11:39 PM | TrackBack