Hardt and Negri and the Immobilization of States

Abstract

After the collapse of the Soviet empire, it was widely believed that humanity had coalesced around a single formula for optimal socioeconomic ordering (Žižek, 2009). The recipe for success called for less government and more markets. In the past, political authority was expected to check economic power on behalf of citizens seeking to protect themselves from the deleterious effects of markets (Polanyi, 1944/2001, pp. 79–80). Post-1989, political authority operating at the level of the national or sub-national was presumed to have dried up. States, it was said, were already doing too much; nor could they be expected to do much more.