The End of Sovereignty

This book brings together Antonio Negri’s critical writings on the nature and form of the modern state. The central theme that runs through these writings is our need to be done with the sovereign state – that is, with the particular form of political power that the capitalist organization of bourgeois society has imposed upon us. Negri seeks to show how the sovereign bourgeois state built in the course of modernity has now become a weapon in the hands of a declining ruling class, a class sometimes exhausted in its institutional expressions and sometimes frenetic, zombie-like and parafascist.

In arguing that the despotic power of the state should be abolished, Negri distances himself from some other left-wing thinkers who, erroneously in his view, have come to see the state as an unavoidable institution rather than as a place of power that, once conquered, should be transformed and ultimately dissolved, since it represents the central moment in the organization of force against living labour and free citizenship. In Negri’s view, the call for the abolition of the state remains vital and active today, as a concrete utopia that is expressed in every thought and act of liberation.

The articles brought together in this volume range from Negri’s analysis of the first great transformation of the capitalist state in the twentieth century, a phenomenon precipitated by the triumph of Keynesianism, to his more recent work on how the form of sovereignty changed from being a figure of transcendent and local command to being a dispositif of immanent and global control. Like its companion volumes, this new collection of essays by Negri will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in radical politics and in the key social and political struggles of our time.

Antonio Negri was formerly Professor of State Theory at the University of Padua.