Michael Hardt

Michael Hardt
Michael Hardt speaking at the Seminário Internacional Mundo. 2008
Born	1960 Bethesda, Maryland or Washington, D.C.
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Continental philosophy Autonomist thought Queer theory
Main interests	Political philosophy Literary theory
Notable ideas	Theory of Empire
Influences Antonio Negri, Antonio Gramsci Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari

Michael Hardt (born 1960) is an American literary theorist and political philosopher. Hardt is best known for his book Empire, which was co-written with Antonio Negri. It has been praised by some as the "Communist Manifesto of the 21st Century".

Hardt and Negri suggest that several forces which they see as dominating contemporary life, such as class oppression, globalization and the commodification of services (or production of affects), have the potential to spark social change of unprecedented dimensions. A sequel, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire was published in August 2004. It outlines an idea first propounded in Empire, which is that of the multitude as possible locus of a democratic movement of global proportions. The third and final part of the trilogy, Commonwealth, was published in 2009.

Hardt attended Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, Maryland. He studied engineering at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania from 1978 to 1983. In college during the 1970s energy crisis, he began to take an interest in alternative energy sources. Talking about his college politics, he said, "I thought that doing alternative energy engineering for third world countries would be a way of doing politics that would get out of all this campus political posing that I hated. It seemed that way, but I was quickly disabused."