The far left’s disgraceful response to September 11”it has temporized about terror, embraced moral equivalence between the Islamist fanatics who killed thousands of innocent Americans and the military actions of the democratically elected U.S. government, and even blamed the U.S. for the atrocity”shows that its hatred of democratic capitalism and, more broadly, Western civilization itself remains fierce more than a decade after the collapse of socialism. The intensity of this hatred will come as no surprise, however, to anyone who has paid attention to the praise that the academic left and its sympathizers in the liberal media have been showering on one of the most pernicious books published in recent memory: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s encomium to anticapitalist revolutionary violence, Empire .
This forbidding five-hundred-page book of political and social theory, which ends with a surreal celebration of “the irrepressible lightness and joy of being Communist,” is that rare commodity: a genuine academic bestseller. Its publisher, Harvard University Press, has gone through ten printings and has sold foreign translation rights to at least ten nations across the globe. Upscale bookstores have a hard time keeping it in stock. Everybody is talking about it.
