Empire, Marxism, and Nationalism

aged 90.He was a leading figure in Italian history in the 1970s, but it was from the beginning of the twenty-first century that his political thought became a global reference.The reason for this lies in the impact of the book Empire (Hardt and Negri 2000), written with Michael Hardt and published in several languages and different countries, from Argentina to China.While a sociology of the varied receptions of this work remains to be done-an exercise that will contribute to the history of Marxism after the end of the Soviet era, as well as to the genealogy of the idea of an "Italian Theory" and of a then-emerging academic field, Global Studies-in this essay I will begin by briefly evoking parts of Negri's life, and then give an account of the positive impact that Empire had on me, at a time when I was beginning doctoral research into the relationship between communism and nationalism.With this research, I was trying to contribute to the critique of the patriotic and state-centric orientation that communism had taken in a small western European country during the course of the twentieth century.The opening up of a post-national communist horizon, as boldly proposed by Empire, inspired my intention.