Antonio Negri, philosopher who wrote a surprising bestseller, dies at the age of 90

Antonio Negri, an Italian philosopher whose essays and activism calling for a new workers’ revolution landed him in prison in 1979, and who twenty years later became a worldwide intellectual celebrity for writing “Empire,” a book praised as the new ‘Communist Manifesto’. died on Saturday in Paris. He was 90.

The philosopher Judith Revel, his wife, confirmed his death in a hospital.

Throughout his career, Mr. Negri was one of the few academic thinkers who had the talent and charisma to make their ideas accessible to a wide audience.

As the leading figure of the Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power) movement of the 1960s and 1970s, he inspired followers not only with his powerful essays, but also with his willingness to take to the streets and factories of northern Italian cities and organize workers . and calling for revolution.

“Empire” (2000), co-written with Duke University literature professor Michael Hardt, did something similar for a new generation of the left, offering what many found to be a compelling Marxist interpretation of post-Cold War globalization.

Although written in dense academic prose and running to nearly 500 pages, it was an instant hit. It was translated into a dozen languages, made the bestseller lists of The Washington Post and other newspapers, and secured Negri a permanent place among the global progressive intelligentsia, alongside figures such as Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Zizek.

Mr. Negri first emerged as a leading intellectual figure in Italy in the late 1960s, when he was a professor of philosophy at the University of Padua. The postwar generation was coming of age and many on the left were looking for new answers that went beyond the traditional socialism and communism of their parents.

Not content to remain in the classroom, he helped organize Potere Operaio, a movement whose ideology went beyond the labor politics of traditional communism and called for an end to wage labor itself.

“We were standing in front of the factories at five in the morning,” he said in an interview for “Antonio Negri: a rebellion that never ends”, a 2004 documentary about his career, directed by Andreas Pichler and Alexandra Weltz. “Then I would drive back to Padua, tie my tie and live my academic life.”

The movement increased in speed, and in 1969 it exploded to a series of sometimes violent strikes in factories in industrial cities such as Turin, but also to street fighting in Rome and Milan. Mr. Negri welcomed it all, speaking of an approaching “revolutionary horizon” in which groups like his would synchronize with social movements like feminism to bring about dramatic change.

The Italian government, sometimes in alliance with neo-fascist organizations, fought back, unleashing a decade-long quasi-civil war known in Italy as the Years of Lead. Police cracked down on protesters, beating and arresting them, while paramilitary groups carried out attacks to create the impression that the far left was responsible, including a 1969 bombing in Milan that killed 16 people.

Left-wing violence, which Mr Negri neither condemned nor condoned, continued in response. In 1978, a splinter faction, the Red Brigades, kidnapped Aldo Moro, a former prime minister who chaired the centrist Christian Democratic Party. Almost two months later he was found murdered.

Police have arrested dozens of left-wing activists, including Mr. Negri in 1979, who was taken to a high-security prison in Rome. Originally charged with leading the Red Brigades and helping organize the kidnapping, he was held without trial for almost four years.

During that time he returned to writing and published several long essays on the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. He also began to reconsider some of his fundamental assumptions about Marxism.

In 1983, he was elected to parliament on the proposal of the Radical Party, a result that granted him immunity from prosecution. But after Parliament voted to lift that immunity, prosecutors charged him with two murders unrelated to the Moro case and with writing inflammatory material. The charges specifically related to the Moro case were dropped due to lack of evidence.

Mr Negri fled to France, which refused to extradite him. He taught at various universities in Paris and became a friend and collaborator of theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

He also met Mr. Hardt, who was living in Paris at the time. They both believed that the end of the Cold War called for a new Marxist framework of analysis, one that took into account what they saw as the weakening of the nation-state in the face of global capital.

Their proposal was what they called an empire – not a single entity or place, but a fluid, controlled form of power structures that moved easily between governments, corporations and international institutions such as the World Bank.

The empire, they wrote in their book of the same name, was not simply the result of capitalist oppression; rather, it was the structure in which capitalist oppression takes place – and in which new forms of resistance can also emerge.

“Empire creates a greater potential for revolution than modern power regimes,” they wrote, “because, in addition to the machine of command, it offers us an alternative: the collection of all the exploited and subjugated, a crowd directly opposed to Empire, without mediation between them.

Mr Negri returned to Italy in 1997, believing he would be granted amnesty. Instead, he was sent to prison after being found guilty in absentia. He and Mr. Hardt completed the book while he was behind bars and published it in 2000.

“Empire” came along at the perfect time, as people were trying to make sense of the global upsurge in protests against central banks, the World Trade Organization and the Group of 8. For a while, every self-respecting humanities student had a dog-eared copy on their hands. the shelf next to books such as ‘Das Kapital’ and ‘The Judith Butler Reader’.

“What Hardt and Negri offer is nothing less than a rewriting of ‘The Communist Manifesto’ for our time,” Mr. Zizek wrote in a blurb accompanying the book.

Antonio Negri, known as Toni, was born on August 1, 1933 in Padua. His mother, Aldina Malvezzi, was a teacher. His father, Nerio Negri, was a trade union leader and founder of the Italian Communist Party. Nerio Negri died when Toni was just three years old, most likely from sepsis after being imprisoned by fascists and forced to drink castor oil.

He studied philosophy at the University of Padua and began teaching there shortly after receiving his doctorate in 1956. He remained on the faculty until his arrest in 1979.

His first marriage, to Paola Meo, ended in divorce. He met Ms. Revel in 1996, and they married in 2016. With her, he is survived by two children from his first marriage, Anna and Francesco Negri; a daughter from a separate relationship, Nina Negri; and three grandchildren. He lived in Paris.

Mr. Negri was released from prison in 2003. He and Mr. Hardt went on to write two sequels to “Empire”: “Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire” (2004) and “Commonwealth” (2009), both of which attempted to outline means of resistance to globalized capital .

He did not return to the University of Padua, but instead became an independent intellectual, speaking at conferences and writing extensively for both academic and general audiences. He was hailed in the left-wing press as the leading theorist of the new millennium, the first person to describe the emergence of a new form of society.

Mr. Negri has rarely been without critics, even from the far left. Many argued that he and Mr. Hardt underestimated the continued relevance of the nation state — for example, in the war between Russia and Ukraine or the trade tensions between the United States and China.

But, his supporters say, his work can also be seen as part of an evolving understanding of the complexities of 21st century society, in which both corporations and governments have the power to change geopolitics, while global grassroots movements appear to be out of control. can arise from one day to the next. and change the world.

“’Empire’ was written at a time that was completely different from what you find today,” Sandro Mezzadra, professor of political theory at the University of Bologna, said by phone. “But there are many ideas in ‘Empire’ that remain inspiring and challenge us to adapt them to the new conditions of globalization.”