Hardt Michael, Negri Antonio. Empire

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TWO EUROPES, TWO MODERNITIES 83

representation in the conclusion of the process. Modernity was

complete, and there was no possibility of going beyond it. It was

not by chance, then, that a further and deﬁnitive act of violence

deﬁned the scene: the dialectic of crisis was paciﬁed under the

domination of the state. Peace and justice reign once again: ‘‘The

state in and for itself is the ethical whole . . . It is essential to God’s

march through the world that the state exist.’’

Modern Sovereignty

The political solution offered by Hegel to the metaphysical drama

of modernity demonstrates the profound and intimate relationship

between modern European politics and metaphysics. Politics resides

at the center of metaphysics because modern European metaphysics

arose in response to the challenge of the liberated singularities and

the revolutionary constitution of the multitude. It functioned as an

essential weapon of the second mode of modernity insofar as it

provided a transcendent apparatus that could impose order on the

multitude and prevent it from organizing itself spontaneously and

expressing its creativity autonomously. The second mode of moder-

nity needed above all to guarantee its control over the new ﬁgures

of social production both in Europe and in the colonial spaces in

order to rule and proﬁt from the new forces that were transforming

nature. In politics, as in metaphysics, the dominant theme was thus

to eliminate the medieval form of transcendence, which only inhibits

production and consumption, while maintaining transcendence’s

effects of domination in a form adequate to the modes of association

and production of the new humanity. 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.

Thomas Hobbes’s proposition of an ultimate and absolute

sovereign ruler, a ‘‘God on earth,’’ plays a foundational role in the

modern construction of a transcendent political apparatus. The ﬁrst

moment of Hobbes’s logic is the assumption of civil war as the

84 PASSAGES OF SOVEREIGNTY

originary state of human society, a generalized conﬂict among indi-

vidual actors. In a second moment, then, in order to guarantee

survival against the mortal dangers of war, humans must agree to

a pact that assigns to a leader the absolute right to act, or really the

absolute power to do all except take away the means of human

survival and reproduction. ‘‘Seeing right reason is not existent, the

reason of some man, or men, must supply the place thereof; and

that man, or men, is he or they, that have the sovereign power.’’

The fundamental passage is accomplished by a contract—a com-

pletely implicit contract, prior to all social action or choice—that

transfers every autonomous power of the multitude to a sovereign

power that stands above and rules it.

This transcendent political apparatus corresponds to the neces-

sary and ineluctable transcendent conditions that modern philoso-

phy posed at the pinnacle of its development, in Kantian schematism

and Hegelian dialectics. According to Hobbes, the single wills of

the various individuals converge and are represented in the will of

the transcendent sovereign. Sovereignty is thus deﬁned both by

transcendence and by representation, two concepts that the humanist

tradition has posed as contradictory. On the one hand, the transcen-

dence of the sovereign is founded not on an external theological

support but only on the immanent logic of human relations. On

the other hand, the representation that functions to legitimate this

sovereign power also alienates it completely from the multitude of

subjects. Like Jean Bodin before him, Hobbes recognized that ‘‘the

main point of sovereign majesty and absolute power consists of

giving the law to subjects in general without their consent,’’

but

Hobbes manages to combine this notion with a contractual schema

of representation that legitimates the sovereign power a priori.

Here the concept of modern sovereignty is born in its state of

transcendental purity. The contract of association is intrinsic to

and inseparable from the contract of subjugation. This theory of

sovereignty presents the ﬁrst political solution to the crisis of mo-

dernity.

In his own historical period, Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty

was functional to the development of monarchic absolutism, but

TWO EUROPES, TWO MODERNITIES 85

in fact its transcendental schema could be applied equally to various

forms of government: monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy. As the

bourgeoisie rose to prominence, it seemed there was really no

alternative to this schema of power. It was not by chance, then,

that Rousseau’s democratic republicanism turned out to resemble

the Hobbesian model. Rousseau’s social contract guarantees that

the agreement among individual wills is developed and sublimated

in the construction of a general will, and that the general will

proceeds from the alienation of the single wills toward the sover-

eignty of the state. As a model of sovereignty, Rousseau’s ‘‘republi-

can absolute’’ is really no different from Hobbes’s ‘‘God on earth,’’

the monarchic absolute. ‘‘Properly understood, all of these clauses

[of the contract] come down to a single one, namely the total

alienation of each associate, with all his rights, to the whole commu-

nity.’’

The other conditions that Rousseau prescribes for the deﬁ-

nition of sovereign power in the popular and democratic sense are

completely irrelevant in the face of the absolutism of the transcen-

dent foundation. Speciﬁcally, Rousseau’s notion of direct represen-

tation is distorted and ultimately overwhelmed by the representation

of the totality that is necessarily linked to it—and this is perfectly

compatible with the Hobbesian notion of representation. 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.

There is at the base of the modern theory of sovereignty,

however, a further very important element—a content that ﬁlls

and sustains the form of sovereign authority. This content is repre-

sented by capitalist development and the afﬁrmation of the market

as the foundation of the values of social reproduction.

Without

this content, which is always implicit, always working inside the

transcendental apparatus, the form of sovereignty would not have

86 PASSAGES OF SOVEREIGNTY

been able to survive in modernity, and European modernity would

not have been able to achieve a hegemonic position on a world

scale. As Arif Dirlik has noted, Eurocentrism distinguished itself

from other ethnocentrisms (such as Sinocentrism) and rose to global

prominence principally because it was supported by the powers

of capital.

European modernity is inseparable from capitalism. This cen-

tral relationship between the form and the content of modern

sovereignty is fully articulated in the work of Adam Smith. Smith

begins with a theory of industry that poses the contradiction between

private enrichment and public interest. A ﬁrst synthesis of these

two levels is conﬁded to the ‘‘invisible hand’’ of the market: the

capitalist ‘‘intends only his own gain,’’ but he is ‘‘led by an invisible

hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.’’

This ﬁrst synthesis, however, is precarious and ﬂeeting. Political

economy, considered a branch of the science of the administrator

and legislator, must go much further in conceiving the synthesis.

It must understand the ‘‘invisible hand’’ of the market as a product

of political economy itself, which is thus directed toward construct-

ing the conditions of the autonomy of the market: ‘‘All systems

either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely

taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty estab-

lishes itself of its own accord.’’

In this case, too, however, the

synthesis is not at all guaranteed. In effect, a third passage is necessary.

What is needed is for the state, which is minimal but effective, to

make the well-being of private individuals coincide with the public

interest, reducing all social functions and laboring activities to one

measure of value. That this state intervenes or not is secondary;

what matters is that it give content to the mediation of interests

and represent the axis of rationality of that mediation. The political

transcendental of the modern state is deﬁned as an economic tran-

scendental. Smith’s theory of value was the soul and substance of

the concept of the modern sovereign state.

In Hegel, the synthesis of the theory of modern sovereignty

and the theory of value produced by capitalist political economy

TWO EUROPES, TWO MODERNITIES 87

is ﬁnally realized, just as in his work there is a perfect realization

of the consciousness of the union of the absolutist and republican

aspects—that is, the Hobbesian and Rousseauian aspects—of the

theory of modern sovereignty.

In relation to the spheres of civil law [Privatrecht] and private

welfare, the spheres of the family and civil society, the state

is on the one hand an external necessity and the higher power

to whose nature their laws and interests are subordinate and

on which they depend. But on the other hand, it is their

immanent end, and its strength consists in the unity of its

universal and ultimate end with the particular interest of indi-

viduals, in the fact that they have duties towards the state to

the same extent as they also have rights.

The Hegelian relationship between particular and universal brings

together in adequate and functional terms the Hobbes-Rousseau

theory of sovereignty and Smith’s theory of value. Modern Euro-

pean sovereignty is capitalist sovereignty, a form of command that

overdetermines the relationship between individuality and univer-

sality as a function of the development of capital.

The Sovereignty Machine

When the synthesis of sovereignty and capital is fully accomplished,

and the transcendence of power is completely transformed into a

transcendental exercise of authority, then sovereignty becomes a

political machine that rules across the entire society. Through the

workings of the sovereignty machine the multitude is in every

moment transformed into an ordered totality. We should play close

attention to this passage because here we can see clearly how the

transcendental schema is an ideology that functions concretely and

how different modern sovereignty is from that of the ancien re

gime.

In addition to being a political power against all external political

powers, a state against all other states, sovereignty is also a police

power. It must continually and extensively accomplish the miracle

of the subsumption of singularities in the totality, of the will of all

88 PASSAGES OF SOVEREIGNTY

into the general will. Modern bureaucracy is the essential organ of

the transcendental—Hegel dixit. And even if Hegel exaggerates a

bit in his quasi-theological consecration of the body of state employ-

ees, at least he makes clear their central role in the effective function-

ing of the modern state. Bureaucracy operates the apparatus that

combines legality and organizational efﬁciency, title and the exercise

of power, politics and police. The transcendental theory of modern

sovereignty, thus reaching maturity, realizes a new ‘‘individual’’ by

absorbing society into power. Little by little, as the administration

develops, the relationship between society and power, between the

multitude and the sovereign state, is inverted so that now power

and the state produce society.

This passage in the history of ideas does indeed parallel the

development of social history. It corresponds to the dislocation of

the organizational dynamic of the state from the terrain of medieval

hierarchy to that of modern discipline, from command to function.

Max Weber and Michel Foucault, to mention only the most illustri-

ous, have insisted at length on these metamorphoses in the sociologi-

cal ﬁgures of power. In the long transition from medieval to modern

society, the ﬁrst form of the political regime was, as we have seen,

rooted in transcendence. Medieval society was organized according

to a hierarchical schema of degrees of power. This is what modernity

blew apart in the course of its development. Foucault refers to this

transition as the passage from the paradigm of sovereignty to that

of governmentality, where by sovereignty he means the transcen-

dence of the single point of command above the social ﬁeld, and

by governmentality he means the general economy of discipline

that runs throughout society.

We prefer to conceive of this as a

passage within the notion of sovereignty, as a transition to a new

form of transcendence. Modernity replaced the traditional transcen-

dence of command with the transcendence of the ordering function.

Arrangements of discipline had begun to be formed already in the

classical age, but only in modernity did the disciplinary diagram

become the diagram of administration itself. Throughout this pas-

sage administration exerts a continuous, extensive, and tireless effort

TWO EUROPES, TWO MODERNITIES 89

to make the state always more intimate to social reality, and thus

produce and order social labor. The old theses, a

la Tocqueville,

of the continuity of administrative bodies across different social

eras are thus profoundly revised when not completely discarded.

Foucault, however, goes still further to claim that the disciplinary

processes, which are put into practice by the administration, delve

so deeply into society that they manage to conﬁgure themselves as

apparatuses that take into account the collective biological dimen-

sion of the reproduction of the population. The realization of

modern sovereignty is the birth of biopower.

Before Foucault, Max Weber also described the administrative

mechanisms involved in the formation of modern sovereignty.

Whereas Foucault’s analysis is vast in its diachronic breadth, Weber’s

is powerful in its synchronic depth. With respect to our discussion

of modern sovereignty, Weber’s contribution is ﬁrst of all his claim

that the opening of modernity is deﬁned as a scission—a creative

condition of individuals and the multitude against the process of

state reappropriation. State sovereignty is then deﬁned as a regulation

of this relationship of force. Modernity is above all marked by the

tension of the opposing forces. Every process of legitimation is

regulated by this tension, and operates to block its capacity for

rupture and recuperate its creative initiative. The closure of the

crisis of modernity in a new sovereign power can be given in old

and quasi-naturalist forms, as is the case with traditional legitimation;

or rather, it can be given in sacred and innovative, irrationally

innovative, forms, as in charismatic legitimation; or ﬁnally, and this

is to a large extent the most effective form of late modernity, it

can be given in the form of administrative rationalization. The

analysis of these forms of legitimation is Weber’s second relevant

contribution, which builds on the ﬁrst, the recognition of the

dualism of the paradigm. The third relevant point is Weber’s treat-

ment of the procedural character of the transformation, the always

present and possible interweaving of the various forms of legitima-

tion, and their continuous capacity to be extended and deepened

in the control of social reality. From this follows a ﬁnal paradox:

90 PASSAGES OF SOVEREIGNTY

if on the one hand this process closes the crisis of modernity, on

the other hand it reopens it. The form of the process of closure is

as critical and conﬂictual as the genesis of modernity. In this respect

Weber’s work has the great merit to have completely destroyed

the self-satisﬁed and triumphant conception of the sovereignty of

the modern state that Hegel had produced.

Weber’s analysis was quickly taken up by the writers engaged

in the critique of modernity, from Heidegger and Luka

cs to Hork-

heimer and Adorno. They all recognized that Weber had revealed

the illusion of modernity, the illusion that the antagonistic dualism

that resides at the base of modernity could be subsumed in a unitary

synthesis investing all of society and politics, including the produc-

tive forces and the relations of production. They recognized, ﬁnally,

that modern sovereignty had passed its peak and begun to wane.

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. Has anything really changed? The civil war has

erupted again in full force. 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. Certainly, no one would imagine this as a return of that

old world of desires that animated the ﬁrst humanist revolution.

New subjectivities inhabit the new terrain; modernity and its capital-

ist relations have completely changed the scene in the course of its

development. And yet something remains: there is a sense of de

vu when we see the reappearance of the struggles that have continu-

ally been passed down from those origins. The experience of the

revolution will be reborn after modernity, but within the new

conditions that modernity constructed in such a contradictory way.

Machiavelli’s return to origins seems to be combined with Nietz-

sche’s heroic eternal return. Everything is different and nothing

seems to have changed. Is this the coming of a new human power?

‘‘For this is the secret of the soul: when the hero hath abandoned

it, then only approacheth it in dreams—the super-hero.’’

TWO EUROPES, TWO MODERNITIES 91

UMANISM AFTER THE

EATH OF

Michel Foucault’s ﬁnal works on the history of sexuality bring to life once

again that same revolutionary impulse that animated Renaissance human-

ism. The ethical care of the self reemerges as a constituent power of self-

creation. How is it possible that the author who worked so hard to convince

us of the death of Man, the thinker who carried the banner of antihumanism

throughout his career, would in the end champion these central tenets of

the humanist tradition? We do not mean to suggest that Foucault contradicts

himself or that he reversed his earlier position; he was always so insistent

about the continuity of his discourse. Rather, Foucault asks in his ﬁnal

work a paradoxical and urgent question: What is humanism after the death

of Man? Or rather, what is an antihumanist (or posthuman) humanism?

This question, however, is only a seeming paradox that derives at

least in part from a terminological confusion between two distinct notions

of humanism. The antihumanism that was such an important project for

Foucault and Althusser in the 1960s can be linked effectively to a battle

that Spinoza fought three hundred years earlier. Spinoza denounced any

understanding of humanity as an imperium in imperio. In other words,

he refused to accord any laws to human nature that were different from the

laws of nature as a whole. Donna Haraway carries on Spinoza’s project

in our day as she insists on breaking down the barriers we pose among the

human, the animal, and the machine. If we are to conceive Man as separate

from nature, then Man does not exist. This recognition is precisely the

death of Man.

This antihumanism, however, need not conﬂict with the revolutionary

spirit of Renaissance humanism we outlined earlier from Cusano to Marsi-

lius. In fact, this antihumanism follows directly on Renaissance humanism’s

secularizing project, or more precisely, its discovery of the plane of immanence.

Both projects are founded on an attack on transcendence. There is a strict

continuity between the religious thought that accords a power above nature

to God and the modern ‘‘secular’’ thought that accords that same power

above nature to Man. The transcendence of God is simply transferred to

Man. Like God before it, this Man that stands separate from and above

nature has no place in a philosophy of immanence. Like God, too, this

transcendent ﬁgure of Man leads quickly to the imposition of social hierarchy

and domination. Antihumanism, then, conceived as a refusal of any transcen-

92 PASSAGES OF SOVEREIGNTY

dence, should in no way be confused with a negation of the vis viva, the

creative life force that animates the revolutionary stream of the modern

tradition. On the contrary, the refusal of transcendence is the condition of

possibility of thinking this immanent power, an anarchic basis of philosophy:

‘‘Ni Dieu, ni maı

tre, ni l’homme.’’

The humanism of Foucault’s ﬁnal works, then, should not be seen

as contradictory to or even as a departure from the death of Man he proclaimed

twenty years earlier. Once we recognize our posthuman bodies and minds,

once we see ourselves for the simians and cyborgs we are, we then need to

explore the vis viva, the creative powers that animate us as they do all of

nature and actualize our potentialities. This is humanism after the death

of Man: what Foucault calls ‘‘le travail de soi sur soi,’’ the continuous

constituent project to create and re-create ourselves and our world.