Specialist of Spinoza, translator of Hegel and founder of the political movement Potere Operaio, Toni Negri is a world known political philosopher and sociologist. Born in Italy, where he became professor of “State theory” at a very young age, he has been spending a good part of his life in France, teaching in several universities (École Normale Supérieure, Paris VII, Paris VIII, Collège International de Philosophie). Here philosophers such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari took position against his controversial detention for political reasons, and opened a philosophical dialogue with his thought and with the political movements he was leading in Italy (with Guattari he wrote in 1985 Communists like us). He is well known as well as the co-autor with Michael Hardt of Empire, one of the most popular theoretical works of the last decade, where the transition from a “modern” imperialism, grounded on nation-states, to a “post-modern” one, is described as a shift toward a transnational asset of powers leading to a radical change in war policies and class dynamics. First of a trilogy, Empire has been followed by Multitude (2004) and Commonwealth (2009), where the topics of democracy and property at the age of the « Empire » are discussed.

A specialist of French theory, Ivan Buraj investigates political philosophy around questions such as freedom and power, as in his book on Michel Foucault (Foucault a moc, 2000). He has lately written about fanaticism, democracy and civil society. While teaching at the Comenius University, he is a member of a large scientific project on Science, Society, Values: A Philosophical Analysis of Their Mutual Relations and Interactions.