He was considered a pioneer of the Italian left. The state accused him of attempting a coup. He was sentenced to long imprisonment. The philosopher Antonio Negri has died at the age of 90.
The influential radical left Italian philosopher and political scientist Antonio Negri has died at the age of 90. This was reported by the Italian news agencies Ansa and Adnkronos. Negri was considered one of the pioneers of the Italian left.
Negri was politically active until the end – for example in the party of the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. Negri was born in the northern Italian city of Padua in 1933 and raised as a Catholic. While he was still a student, Negri founded workers’ councils, organized demonstrations and wrote manifestos. At the age of 33 he became a professor of political theory.
More influential Intellectual
He was early considered a leading theorist of the Italian radical left in the 1960s and 1970s and was at the same time a symbolic figure of the left-wing extremist revolt. Negri is the author of numerous books – together with the US literary scholar Michael Hardt, he wrote, among other things, the work “Empire – the new world order” and its subsequent volumes, with which he reached a wide audience. The text has been described, among other things, as the “communist manifesto of the 21st century”.
Terrorism allegations
After the murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro of the Christian Democratic Party by left-wing terrorists in 1978, Negri, along with many other left-wing intellectuals, was arrested under new Italian anti-terror laws and charged with attempts to overthrow the Italian state. Negri initially escaped imprisonment because he managed to get elected to parliament for a radical liberal party in 1983. He then enjoyed immunity and fled to France.
Negri turned himself in at the end of the 1990s and served part of his sentence in Italy. Negri was released in 2003 and moved to France, where he lived until his death.