28 Facts About Antonio Negri

Antonio "Toni" Negri was born on 1 August 1933 and is an Italian Spinozistic-Marxist sociologist and political philosopher, best known for his co-authorship of Empire and secondarily for his work on Spinoza.

Antonio Negri was accused in the late 1970s of various charges including being the mastermind of the left-wing extremist organization Red Brigades, involved in the May 1978 kidnapping of Aldo Moro, two-time prime minister of Italy, and leader of the Christian-Democrat Party, among others.

Antonio Negri was wrongly suspected to have made a threatening phone call on behalf of the BR, but the court was unable to conclusively prove his ties.

Antonio Negri was given an additional four years on the charge of being 'morally responsible' for the violence of political activists in the 1960s and 1970s.

The question of Antonio Negri's complicity with left-wing extremism is a controversial subject.

Antonio Negri was indicted on a number of charges, including "association and insurrection against the state", and sentenced for involvement in two murders.

Antonio Negri fled to France where, protected by the Mitterrand doctrine, he taught at the Paris VIII and the College international de philosophie, along with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.

Antonio Negri is the father of film director Anna Negri.

Antonio Negri was born in Padua, in the Northeastern Italian region of Veneto, in 1933.

Antonio Negri's father was an active communist militant from the city of Bologna, and although he died when Negri was two years old, his political engagement made Negri familiar with Marxism from an early age, while his mother was a teacher from the town of Poggio Rusco.

Antonio Negri began his career as a militant in the 1950s with the activist Roman Catholic youth organization Gioventu Italiana di Azione Cattolica.

Antonio Negri joined the Italian Socialist Party in 1956 and remained a member until 1963, while at the same time becoming more and more engaged throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s in Marxist movements.

Antonio Negri had a quick academic career at the University of Padua and was promoted to full professor at a young age in the field of "dottrina dello Stato", a peculiarly Italian field that deals with juridical and constitutional theory.

In 1969, together with Oreste Scalzone and Franco Piperno, Antonio Negri was one of the founders of the group Potere Operaio and the Operaismo Communist movement.

On 7 April 1979, Antonio Negri was arrested for his part in the Autonomy Movement, along with others.

Antonio Negri was charged with a number of offences, including leadership of the Red Brigades, masterminding the 1978 kidnapping and murder of the President of the Christian Democratic Party Aldo Moro, and plotting to overthrow the government.

At the time, Antonio Negri was a political science professor at the University of Padua and visiting lecturer at Paris' Ecole Normale Superieure.

In 1983, four years after his arrest and while he was still in prison awaiting trial, Antonio Negri was elected to the Italian legislature as a member for the Radical Party.

In France, Antonio Negri began teaching at the Paris VIII and the College international de philosophie, founded by Jacques Derrida.

In 1997, after a plea-bargain that reduced his prison time from 30 to 13 years, Antonio Negri returned to Italy to serve the end of his sentence.

Antonio Negri was released from prison in the spring of 2003, having written some of his most influential works while behind bars.

Today, Antonio Negri is best known as the co-author, with Michael Hardt, of the controversial Marxist-inspired treatise Empire.

In 2009 Antonio Negri completed the book Commonwealth, the final in a trilogy that began in 2000 with Empire and continued with Multitude in 2004, co-authored with Michael Hardt.

Hardt and Antonio Negri mean by this not merely the natural resources that capital seeks to appropriate, but "the languages we create, the social practices we establish, the modes of sociality that define our relationships", which are both the means and the result of biopolitical production.

In 2013, Antonio Negri published Spinoza: Politics and Postmodernity, a collections of essays on Spinoza and his contemporary relevance to philosophy and political theory, translated into English by William McCuaig.

Hardt and Antonio Negri insist on a self-critical and internally democratic left that never ceases to call its own assumptions into question.

Between 2016 and 2019, Antonio Negri published a three-volume collection of essays written in various years, but translated, collected and published together in English in these volumes.

On October 29,2021, Antonio Negri will publish the first volume of a new trilogy of books.