The Italian philosopher and militant Antonio Negri has been a provocative and controversial figure for over forty years. He has been a professor of law at the University of Padua, a labor organizer in the Veneto, a political prisoner in Rome, a member of Italian parliament, a political refugee in Paris and most recently, as a consequence of the success of his book Empire (written in collaboration with American Michael Hardt), an internationally influential theorist of globalization. He has written over forty other books, which have been translated into dozens of languages, and his work has challenged orthodoxy in intellectual history, political science, labor relations, theology, and literary and cultural studies.

This book is the first comprehensive study of Negri's work in any language. It follows the development of Negri's critical framework and theoretical innovations from his early work as a historian of legal philosophy in the Fifties, through his period of intense and unconventional leftist activism during the Sixties and Seventies and his imprisonment and exile during the Eighties and Nineties, culminating in a clear, thorough and evenhanded account of his important contributions to the emerging study of - and struggle over - globalization. The book also includes discussions of Negri's critics and the reception of his work at each stage.