I've found another online text of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's popular and influential Empire (Harvard, 2000). The digital text that I'd initially found, and was using nearly two years, has disappeared into the void. In the meantime I've bought the book. This makes it much easier to read and work through the text. I was at a distinct disadvantage before.

If you recall, Empire is a particular expression of an interpretation of the process of globalization, which held that the increasing integration of economies and markets collapses national borders and lead to the extinction of national sovereignty. "Globalisation" and the "new world order" would usher in a planetary "rule of law" through multilateral institutions such as the U.N., WTO, and other means of harmonisation and international governance. Neo-liberal globalisation does tend to deconstruct the boundaries of the nation-state to further the processes of the world market.

I found Hardt and Negri's account of a new global apparatus of rule---Empire--- suggestive. Hardt and Negri capture the juridical and political contours of this new imperium without borders, and their text explores the decay or the hollowing out of the idea, and formation of, sovereignty in modernity. Part 2 of Empire is entitled 'Passages of Sovereignty' with the first section (2.1, p. 69) called 'Two Europes, Two Modernities. In this section Hardt and Negri argue that:

Modern sovereignty is a European concept in the sense that it developed primarily in Europe in coordination with the evolution of modernity itself. The concept functioned as the cornerstone of the construction of Eurocentrism. Although modern sovereignty emanated from Europe, however, it was born and developed in large part through Europe's relationship with its outside, and particularly through its colonial project and the resistance of the colonizedModern sovereignty emerged, then, as the concept of European reaction and European domination both within and outside its borders. They are two coextensive and complementary faces of one development: rule within Europe and European rule over the world.. (p.70)

its birth in the humanist Renaissance.This was revolutionary in that the old fedual order was toppled, the process destroys the relations with the past and a new mode of world and life is instituted;

the second moment of modernity is crisis: the Reformation was constructed to wage war against the new forces, establish an overarching power to dominate them and re-establsih ideologies of command and authority;

the third moment is the partial and temporary resolution of this crisis in the formation of the modern state as a locus of sovereignty. This unfolded in the centuries of the Enlightenment and crowns the transcendental principle as the apex of European modernity.

What this account highlights is that modernity is not a singular process but is profoundly split: between 'a radical revolutionary process' and an ordering 'counter-revolution' that 'sought to dominate and expropriate the force of the emerging movements and dynamics'.

What is this transcendent principle? Well it's not God. What they do is trace on path to the crisis of modernity that leads to the development of the modern sovereign state. Another pathway is the one to the nation, which presupposes the path to the state.

Hardt and Negri say that the transcendent principle can be found in the political machinery created in modernity:

The center of the problem of modernity was thus demonstrated in political philosophy, and here was where the new form of mediation found its most adequate response to the revolutionary forms of immanence: a transcendent political apparatus. (p.83)

Hobbes and Rousseau really only repeat the paradox that Jean Bodin had already defined conceptually in the second half of the sixteenth century. Sovereignty can properly be said to exist only in monarchy, because only one can be sovereign. If two or three or many were to rule, there would be no sovereignty, because the sovereign cannot be subject to the rule of others.. Democratic, plural, or popular political forms might be declared, but modern sovereignty really has only one political figure: a single transcendent power. (p.85)

But we knew that already. So what is new? Their view that sovereignty becomes a poltical machine that rules across the entire society whose workings bring the multitude into an ordered totality though the general economy of administrative discipline (Weber) that runs through, and delves deeply into society; with these disciplinary processes or political machinery (Foucault) reconfiguring themselves as apparatuses that shape the reproduction of the population.

Modern sovereignty is not simply an abstract locus of juridical authority that forms the basis for Westphalian international law and order amongst nation states. It is a complex disciplinary and ontological machinery of enormous depth and force which functions to harness and control the possibility of freedom within capitalist modernity.The realization of modern sovereignty is the birth of biopower is their argument of this sketch.

This account holds that sovereignty, as it was imagined within modernity and tied to the bounded territorial authority of the nation-state, is in decline; and there emerges a new - supranational and deterritorialising - or imperial form of sovereignty. Though this new form of sovereignty is still repressive and disabling it also forms the terrain of a new mode of critical and revolutionary action - the terrain of 'Empire' and the revolution of the 'multitude'. Hence Hardt and Negri talk in terms of the revolution after modernity, the formation of new subjectivities, desires and antagonisms to domination. A new season opens:

As modernity declines, a new season is opened, and here we find again that dramatic antithesis that was at the origins and basis of modernity…The synthesis between the development of productive forces and relations of domination seems once again precarious and improbable. The desires of the multitude and its antagonism to every form of domination drive it to divest itself once again of the processes of legitimation that support the sovereign power…Is this the coming of a new human power? (p. 90)