Italian Marxist political theorist, leading figure of the Italian operaismo (workerism) and later autonomia movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and — through his long collaboration with Michael Hardt — a figure whose late-career academic reach extended well beyond his earlier militant audience. Negri's intellectual life moved through three phases: the workerist theorist of the 1960s reading Marx from the standpoint of factory struggle; the political prisoner of the 1970s, arrested in 1979 on charges related to the Red Brigades (he was eventually convicted of lesser charges and served time; he always denied direct involvement in armed violence); and the philosopher-in-exile in France and later the transatlantic theorist whose Empire (2000) with Hardt reintroduced his thought to an English-reading audience.
His most enduring individual works are Marx Beyond Marx (lectures delivered in Paris in 1978 on the Grundrisse) and The Savage Anomaly (1981), a reading of Spinoza as the thinker of constituent democratic power from below against sovereign authority from above. The Spinoza book supplied the philosophical spine of the later Hardt–Negri collaborations: constituent power, the multitude, democracy as self-organization rather than representation. Negri died in Paris in December 2023.