A fresh take on this critical philosopher.

In this essential rereading of Spinoza’s (1632-1677) philosophical and political writings, Negri positions this thinker within the historical context of the development of the modern state and its attendant political economy. Through a close examination of Spinoza, Negri reveals him as unique among his contemporaries for his nondialectical approach to social organization in a bourgeois age.

After living in exile in France for nearly fourteen years, Antonio Negri is currently serving a jail sentence in Italy, his home country, for his political activism in the 1970s. His conviction, which was based on the substance of his writings, led Michel Foucault to ask, "Isn’t he in prison simply for being an intellectual?" Negri’s works in English include Insurgencies (1999) and, with Michael Hardt, Labor of Dionysus (1994), both published by Minnesota.