Antonio Negri (b. 1933) is an Italian political philosopher best known today for the Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth trilogy, authored with the American literary theorist and philosopher Michael Hardt (b. 1960). Negri was born in Padua, northern Italy. At the age of 25, he completed his doctoral dissertation on German historicism in the field of “state doctrine” or “state theory” broadly speaking, the philosophy of law at the University of Padua where he became a professor shortly after.