Multitude
Multitude is a political term first used by Machiavelli and reiterated by Spinoza. Recently the term has returned to prominence because of its conceptualization as a new model of resistance against the global capitalist system as described by political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their international best-seller Empire (2000) and expanded upon in their Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004). Other theorists which have recently used the term include political thinkers associated with Autonomist Marxism and its sequelae, including Sylvère Lotringer, Paolo Virno, and thinkers connected with the eponymous review Multitudes.
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Famous quotes containing the word multitude:
“All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to children by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the philosophers celebrate in vain. And nothing stands between the people and the fictions except the silly falsehood that the fictions are literal truths, and that there is nothing in religion but fiction.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“When I behold a rich landscape, it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The attention of those who frequent the camp-meetings at Eastham is said to be divided between the preaching of the Methodists and the preaching of the billows on the back side of the Cape, for they all stream over here in the course of their stay. I trust that in this case the loudest voice carries it. With what effect may we suppose the ocean to say, “My hearers!” to the multitude on the bank. On that side some John N. Maffit; on this, the Reverend Poluphloisboios Thalassa.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)