I don't know if you could say that Hardt came out of nowhere. He was pretty good at marketing himself. I thought his Deleuze book was decent, and its hard to ignore that he was able to popularize Negri's ideas in Empire fairly successfully (despite current ambivalences it certainly was a revelation for me at the time), however I saw him give a talk a couple years back and I have to say I wasn't all that impressed. I thought he was a bit to glib, kinda lazy on his Marx, and a little too dependent on saying the right phrases to win over the crowd, rather than offering concepts.
robert wood
> at the presentation of one of Negri's last books (actually, a book-long
> interview)Â in 2006, he said that Alexander Theodore Callinicos had
> finally, maybe grudgingly,recognized at a conference that the Parisian duo
> had been proved right.
> Â
> I personaly liked the book very much as much as I liked Multitude. they
> are FRESH. kudos to Fredric Jameson for picking Hardt from nowhere.