"In order to articulate the nature of imperial sovereignty, we must first take a step back in time and consider the political forms that prepared its terrain and constitute its prehistory. The American Revolution is a moment of great innovation and rupture in the genealogy of modern sovereignty. The U.S. constitutional project, emerging from the struggles for independence and formed through a rich history of alternative possibilities, bloomed like a rare flower in the tradition of modern sovereignty. Tracing the original developments of the notion of sovereignty in the Unites States will allow us to recognize its significant differences from the modern sovereignty we have described thus far and discern the bases on which a new imperial sovereignty has been formed." (Empire, pg.160)
Actually, the modern "rupture in sovereignty" (to paraphrase) dates from the English Revolution, the postrevolutionary U.S. constitution was the continuation of that revolution (and here I partially follow W. A. Williams) when Britain had already brought us the first early modern version of Machievelli's "Turn", whose historical name is Whig Reform, i.e., passive revolution. So what was temporarily "unique" about the U.S. was how it took 150 years to successfully carry out this Turn. The first constitution itself did not outlast the 1820's Jacksonian political revolution, which also gave us the American Whig tradition. This traditon was first fated to endure a litany of failures, for what followed was an era of an almost uninterrupted series of wars along many lines, class not the least of them, until this era came to an end in the 1890's. Its centerpiece, the Civil War, was the last bourgeois revolution.
"Hopes" were higher in the period of classical American imperial racist Progressivism, but these too fell to naught until the 1930's-40's when the old premodern constitution was breached en tout before and after the World War II period. This event, which globally stands at the center of the first post-classical modern era (WWI to Thatcher), marks a divide in U.S. history. It was at this time that the "rupture" in sovereignty was realized in the process of Whig reform initiated by the conservative Democrat, Roosevelt, and concluded by his equally "Whig Conservative" successors. This was the new constitution that required our critical focus, not that of the late 18th century - especially in its new features, above all the erection of a Meiji-like superconstitutional military-bureaucratic absolutism commonly known as the "National Security State", atop the embalmed corpse of the now sacrized Constitution. Immanance had met its transcendence and is preserved in its provincialism.
> Now, what does "the internationalization of people" mean _within the
> Progress of the Empire_? In practice, doesn't it tend to translate
> into the globalization of the most _banal_ parts of _provincial_
> American culture? Hardt & Negri write, paradoxically seeing a
> revolutionary potential in the _Federalist_ (of all things!): "The
> American Revolution and the 'new political science' proclaimed by the
> authors of the _Federalist_ broke from the tradition of modern
> sovereignty, 'returning to origins' and at the same time developing
> new languages and new social forms that mediate between the one and
> the multiple. Against the tired transcendentalism of modern
> sovereignty, presented either in Hobbesian or in Rousseauian form,
> the American constituents thought that only the republic can give
> order to democracy, or really that the order of the multitude must be
> born not from a transfer of the title of power and right, but from an
> arrangement internal to the multitude, from a democratic interaction
> of powers linked together in networks....The contemporary idea of
> Empire is born through the global expansion of the internal U.S.
> constitutional project" (Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, _Empire_,
> Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000, pp. 161, 182).
Here must be crosslinked a passage from the immediately preceding post: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --- American leftists are often anti-statist, reflecting the decentralized structure of American polity; it seems to me that anti-statism of many American leftists should be read as an expression of political "sour grapes," so to speak. Most American leftists don't think that they will ever come into power, so they rationalize their projected "failure" ahead of time by theorizing the state power as what is to be avoided, for "power corrupts" in their minds.
Anti-statist European philosophers like Negri & Baudrillard tend to be big fans of things American, seeing paradoxical virtues in the weakness and disorganization of the working class here: "Against the common wisdom that the U.S. proletariat is weak because of its low party and union representation with respect to Europe and elsewhere, perhaps we should see it as strong for precisely those reasons" (Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, _Empire_, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000, p. 269). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
The critique in the second paragraph goes without saying. By the same token, is it not good to be "antistatist" in relation to the strongest state of Empire? What needs to be "pushed through" are the archiac and utopian Anglo-American traditions of individual autonomy, and of the dialectic of state and civil society first set into motion on a national level by Britain, in the springtime of capitalism, and projected on a world market scale by the U.S. This first is the much more limited actuality of the "immanent constituent power of the multitude", while the latter has ceased forward movement, crystallized into a highly centralized and globally deployed repressive apparatus closely cooridinated with global market networks, and a provincial collection of both bourgeois and proletarian "Suffolk Counties" in the continental U.S.
The resultant historical weakness of both the constituent American Individual and the underdeveloped provincial state power (including at the Federal level), can and must be theorized and acted upon to advantage, up to their limits. Revolutionaries only need intervene in these capitalist state institutions, as with the exposed institutions of the world market (since America is no Rome) to the extent that their functioning is disrupted.
> that "the internal U.S. constitutional project" is not at all based
> upon "an arrangement internal to the multitude, from a democratic
> interaction of powers linked together in networks"; in fact, _the
> former is dedicated to making the latter impossible_.
>
> Why do Hardt & Negri insist on calling the American Empire
> "progressive"?
It should also be asked why do we need to "first take a step back in time" and bend Pocock's excellent intellectual history (that is all it is) to some vaguely neo-Weberian end. Because "progressivism" - independent politics - disappers in the new constitution after the Second World War.
-Brad Mayer
>Such an optimism of the intellect can only help those
> who think like a Marine Colonel in _Full Metal Jacket_ who >proclaims:
> "We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook there
> is an American trying to get out" (at
> <http://www.sawnoff.demon.co.uk/script.txt>).
>
> Yoshie
>