Antonio Negri

Born in Padua, Italy, in 1933, Antonio Negri studied philosophy and built his career as a scholar of political thought. He taught at the University of Padua and became closely associated with the workerist current in Italian Marxism, writing about the state, class struggle, and the changing nature of labor.

Negri’s life was shaped as much by political conflict as by scholarship. In the turbulent years of late-20th-century Italy, he was arrested and later lived in exile in France before returning to Italy. Those experiences fed a body of writing that was deeply engaged with questions of democracy, resistance, and the possibilities of collective action.

He is especially well known to many readers for Empire, written with Michael Hardt, and for later books that explored global power and movements from below. Even when readers disagreed with him, his work remained influential for its energy, ambition, and willingness to rethink how politics operates in the modern world.