Although Empire sometimes strays from its central theme, it is a bold move away from established doctrine. Hardt and Negri's insistence that there really is a new world is promulgated with energy and conviction. Especially striking is their renunciation of the tendency of many writers on globalization to focus exclusively on the top, leaving the impression that what happens down below, to ordinary people, follows automatically from what the great powers do. In the final chapters they try to craft a new theory of historical actors, but here they stumble, sometimes badly. The main problem is that they tend to overstate their case. From observations that the traditional forces of resistance have lost their punch, the authors conclude that there are no more institutional "mediations." Not so fast.

One of the serious omissions in Empire's analysis is a discussion of the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, three of the concrete institutions of the repressive world government of Empire. Lacking an institutional perspective--except with respect to law--Hardt and Negri are unable to anticipate how the movement they would bring into being might actually mount effective resistance. Although not obliged to provide a program for a movement, the authors do offer indicators of which social forces may politically take on the colossus. Having argued that institutions such as trade unions and political parties are no longer reliable forces of combat, they are left with the postmodern equivalent of the nineteenth-century proletariat, the "insurgent multitude." In the final chapters of the book, incisive prose gives way to hyperbole, and the sharp delineation of historical actors melts into a vague politics of hope. Insisting that "resistance" precedes power, they advocate direct confrontation, "with an adequate consciousness of the central repressive operations of Empire" as it seeks to achieve "global citizenship." At the end, the authors celebrate the "nomadic revolutionary" as the most likely protagonist of the struggle.

The demonstrations against the WTO in Seattle last December and the subsequent anti-IMF and World Bank protests in Washington suggest a somewhat different story. The 40,000-plus demonstrators who disrupted the WTO meetings and virtually shut down the city consisted of definite social groups: a considerable fraction of the labor movement, including some of its top leaders, concerned that lower wages and human rights violations would both undermine their standards and intensify exploitation; students who have been protesting sweatshop labor for years and are forcing their universities to cease buying goods produced by it; and a still numerous, if battered, detachment of environmentalists--a burgeoning alliance that appears to have continued.

These developments shed light on the existence of resistance to Empire but also on the problem of theories that wax in high abstractions. Events argue that some of the traditional forces of opposition retain at least a measure of life. While direct confrontation is, in my view, one appropriate strategy of social struggle today, it does not relieve us of the obligation to continue to take the long march through institutions, to test their mettle. After all, "adequate consciousness" does not appear spontaneously; it emerges when people discover the limits of the old. And the only way they can understand the nature of the new Empire is to experience the frustrations associated with attempts to achieve reforms within the nation-state, even as the impulse to forge an international labor/environmentalist alliance proceeds.

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