Democracy is the project of the multitude, a creative force, a living god.
Antonio Negri delineated a counter-tradition of modern political metaphysics, one directly opposed to the state form and to its mystification of democratic materialism through the devices of sovereignty and representation. Together these works, with their complicated interweaving of theory and practice, comprise the fullest expression of Negri's democratic theory, a theory unfortunately neglected by most democratic theorists in the Anglo-American world. At the center of both works stands Negri's distinction between constituent power and constituted power, between potenza and potere . Through this distinction Negri elaborates an intransigent division at the heart of modern politics. The static field of constituted power is maintained only through countless acts of violence and domination, acts which work to transform political action into political behavior, living labor into dead labor, and to eliminate altogether the innovative unpredictability of democratic materialismcat least until constituent power roars forth again.