TThis widely discussed book is the result of the collaboration between Michael Hardt, a left-wing American scholar, and Antonio Negri, an Italian radical thinker, who is still serving a sentence for his political activism in the 1970s. Written between the Gulf and Kosovo Wars, Empire has become, two years after its publication, the new theoretical manifesto of the anti-corporate-globalization movement and continues to have a great relevance to recent events. Hardt and Negri fuse historical analysis and philosophical theory to trace the formation and explain the nature of the new global system they call “Empire.” That is, a global, juridical, and economic entity that has succeeded the nation-state. Developed as a response to the uprisings of the past century, and consolidated only after the 1960s social upheavals and subsequent recession, Empire can no longer be understood in terms of British, French, Russian, or even American imperialism. Instead, it has a decentered structure, with its foundations in transnational corporations. It is a series of national and supranational organs — the WEF, WTO and other major players, as well as NGOs and media conclomerates — united under a single logic of rule: To facilitate the protection of the global corporate economy and increase its profit. In Empire, economic production and political constitution tend increasingly to coincide. Similar to ancient and medieval sovereignties, the new Empire is based on the concept of “just war,” with some fundamental innovations. In this postmodern era, war is no longer a tool that guarantees survival, but an activity justified by its portrayal as ethically grounded and the bearer of peace and order. The enemy is demonized as a threat to the ethical order, and military intervention and law enforcement are legitimized by essential values of peace and order. Empire’s methods of intervention range from lethal weapons to moral instruments, such as those deployed by the major NGOs. Moral intervention often prepares the fields for military intervention, which today is dictated almost unilaterally by the United States. Military and moral interventions take the form of police actions because they are aimed are maintaining an internal order and stability. The central task is repressing internal enemies, who, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, have often been identified with religious fundamentalists. As the authors specify with incredible contemporary relevance, these new enemies are “most often called terrorist, a crude conceptual and terminological reduction that is rooted in police mentality.” Empire is ubiquitous but it is also vulnerable and ultimately provides greater possibilities for the creation of an alternative world. The new revolutionary force is what Hardt and Negri call “multitude,” an irreducible multiplicity of political-cultural subjectivity, acting from within Empire and against its repressive constituency. But how can the multitude become political and overcome “the central repressive operations of Empire?” The authors are firmly convinced that in globalization, alternatives to capitalism are not defeated so much as given new opportunities to work on a global scale. “The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchange.” Empire, then, contains the seeds for its own tools of expansion as well as its own tools of destruction. For example, unification of the anti-corporate-globalization movement and the increase of communication and cooperation can be used as tools of liberation. Hardt and Negri offer three potential demands for the new movement to take up: the global right to immigration (global citizenship); the global right to a social wage; and finally, global collective ownership of the means of production, including not only the factories of old, but the means of producing and circulating information. All of this can be obtained by gathering together the experiences of resistance, and wielding them in concert against the nerve centers of imperial command. By directly addressing the central political issue of the moment — the lack of access to the economic and political decision-making process — Empire has triggered stimulating discussions that have helped refine the new global movement’s identity and aims. But the book has been criticized for being too abstract and literary, and for not offering clear alternatives to the global-corporate Empire. Empire is not by any means an activist’s manual. It can however help people understand the genesis and internal dynamic of corporate globalization, while aiding in the search for a new way of life. Its fundamental aim is to help us think differently by creating new categories for constructing a conceptual framework better suited to the times. Meanwhile, the authors’ evocation of a diversified multitude unified against corporate Empire has been crystallizing in the streets, from Seattle to Genoa, with thousands of people with different backgrounds and different goals united under the anti-corporate-globalization banner.