Is Everything Empire? Is Empire Everything?
2006; City University of New York; Volume: 38; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/20433991
ISSN2151-6227
AutoresAlexander J. Motyl, Niall Ferguson, Niall Ferguson, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri,
Tópico(s)Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East
ResumoEmpire is a growth business these days. Amazon lists 10,513 books with empire in the title on its website; Barnes and Noble lists 10,210.1 Whatever the exact number of books that deal with empires as specifically political entities, empire clearly qual ifies as a hot ticket item for scholars, journalists, pundits, policymakers, advertis ers, and many others. When a word comes to dominate discourse, it has become a cultural phenomenon. But is empire also real? It is hard to imagine that things were not always this way. Although historians have a long track record of studying past empires, social scientists began devoting substantial attention to empire only in the 1950s and 1960s, when European imperial rule in Africa and Asia crumbled.2 In the 1970s and 1980s interest in empire waned. Ideological critics of the two superpowers excoriated Soviet and American imperial ism.3 Some political scientists explored the rise and fall of great powers.4 Few social scientists studied imperial systems.5 This situation changed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union sparked a lively interest in empire.6 And a sea change took place after 2001, when seemingly everyone, from the far right to the far left, began applying the imperial logo to the United States of President George W Bush. That empire in general and American empire in particular should be so closely asso ciated with the actions of just one American administration in the three years after September 11, 2001, is good reason to be suspicious about the ubiquity of empire-and
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