We are very pleased that Empire has generated such serious discussion and debate among so many readers in the United States and around the world. Timothy Brennan states in the final paragraph of his review essay that he wishes to approach the book as an opportunity for constructive dialogue and collective projects. This is certainly our desire, too. We have often said that the book invites and even demands critiques. It proposes such a large framework that it is bound to solicit different views at the highest and lowest levels of analysis. Moreover the book offers a strong argument with which the reader is invited to agree or disagree, in its entirety or in parts. It seems to us that the proposal, engagement, and critique of such arguments is the best way to advance our understanding of the issues at hand. Aside from the final paragraph, however, Brennan's essay is written in a very aggressive and dismissive style that does not in fact create the conditions for a constructive engagement of ideas. Quite the opposite. What seems to us the most important issue to address here is how (and how not) to conduct theoretical debates so that they may be most productive.

The epigraph for Brennan's essay sets the tone at the outset. In it Gramsci mocks the Futurists as Jesuit schoolboys who created a ruckus in the woods near their school. Brennan intends to identify us with the Futurists and their "pretensions to revolutionary and avant-garde originality"; our book has received a great deal of attention and created a ruckus, but it merely amounts to the petty games of schoolboys. He does not intend, we assume, to attribute to us other, more substantial qualities of the Futurists, such as their proto-fascist tendencies or their aestheticization of politics. This seems to us already a rather gratuitous insult because it carries no content--is every book that creates a stir or uses revolutionary language merely the play of schoolboys?--but the more problematic figure comes last. Gramsci tells us that the forest warden sets the delinquent boys straight, punishing them with his rod. This is the figure in which Brennan seems to cast himself, the critic who disciplines the petty rebellion of the puerile. This is not a parable of constructive dialogue and engagement. The model is exactly the opposite: distort and dismiss the adversary so as not to engage in a real exchange.

Brennan's essay raises a number of red herrings that only confuse the issues. He accuses our book repeatedly, for example, of not being based in real facts but rather engaging in myth making. (Curiously enough Brennan does not accompany this charge with any real facts of his own, unless one considers facts his vague gestures to suffering masses in different parts of the world.) Our book, of course, does not primarily use the tools of empirical analysis, statistics, or thick description. It is a theoretical project that proposes a broad framework for understanding the present global order. A theoretical project must, of course, be engaged with reality, and ours is through its analyses of struggle and resistance, through its construction of genealogies and periodizations. Even when such an analysis is abstract it still can and must grasp reality. Such political theorizing indeed often involves myth making. Some such myths help clarify our understanding of historical reality--Machiavelli's work is a classic example--and other myths merely mystify the world. But really there is no need for us to justify the vocation of theory here. Brennan is not really against theory. These elements of his critique are mere distractions

            Michael Hardt is an associate professor of literature at Duke University.

            Antonio Hardt was professor of political science at the University of Padua. They are coauthors of Empire (2000) and Labor of Dionysus (1994). Negri has published over twenty books, the most recent of which to appear in English was Insurgencies (1999).

 

 

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