Antonio Negri is an Italian Marxist sociologist, scholar, revolutionary philosopher and author, who’s work has been heavily influenced by Karl Marx and Benedict Baruch Spinoza and who his best known for his autonomist Marxist writings and the Empire trilogy – co-written with Michael Hardt – which traces the changes in power structures accompanying globalisation and offers philosophical frameworks for resistance. Early on in his carrier, he worked as a professor of state theory at the University of Padua and as part of the editorial group of the intellectual Marxist journal Quaderni Rossi. However, his political engagement soon extended outwith the realms of the classroom and the pages of his journal entries and, in 1969, he became one of the founders of the radical left wing group Potere Operaio [Worker Power]. Later, as Potere Operaio disbanded he moved on to become an active member of Autonomia Operaia [Workers’ Autonomy] and it was his connections to this movement which led to his arrest in 1979. While in prison in 1983, Negri was elected to the Italian legislature with the Partito Radicale [Radical Party]. Acquiring immunity on his election, he was then temporarily released, at which point he escaped to France where he lived for the next 14 years. While in France, Antonio Negri taught philosophy courses at the Université de Paris VIII (Saint Denis) and at the Collège International de Philosophie and, in 1997, he returned to Italy to serve out a reduced sentence, spending another six years behind bars. During his incarceration, he had time to work on various publications and his best known work, Empire, was published in 2000.
Information valid as of autumn 2015.