ABSTRACT
E as in Empire. What can you say about the concept of Empire you developed with Michael Hardt?
Our work has been chiefly one of linguistic clarification. In fact, there is a certain lingering ambiguity about the term ‘Empire’ itself, which entered almost at once into the political and journalistic lexicon and rapidly became static. By ‘Empire’ we mean something very precise: the transfer of sovereignty of nation-states to a higher entity. But this transfer has almost invariably been interpreted in terms of an “internal analogy”—as if Empire were implicitly a nation-state on a world scale. One consequence of this trivialization has been the rather sloppy inference that Empire corresponds to the United States. We insist, to the contrary, that the great transfers of sovereignty that are now taking place-in the military sphere, in the monetary sphere, and in the cultural, political, and linguistic spheres-cannot be reduced to any such internal analogy. This amounts to saying that the structure of Empire is radically different from that of nation-states.
