Born in Washington, D.C., Hardt attended Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, Maryland. He studied engineering at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania from 1978 to 1983. In college during the 1970s energy crisis, he began to take an interest in alternative energy sources. Talking about his college politics, he said, "I thought that doing alternative energy engineering for third world countries would be a way of doing politics that would get out of all this campus political posing that I hated."

After college, he worked for various solar energy companies. Hardt also worked with non-governmental organizations in Central America on tasks like bringing donated computers from the United States and putting them together for the University of El Salvador. Yet, he says that this political activity did more for him than it did for the Salvadorans.

In 1983, he moved to Seattle to study comparative literature at the University of Washington. While there, he received an M.A. in 1986 and his PhD in 1990. From there he went to Paris where he would meet Negri.

Hardt speaks fluent French and Italian and is Professor of Literature and Italian at Duke University and a Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee.

Hardt is concerned with the joy of political life, and has stated, "One has to expand the concept of love beyond the limits of the couple." The politics of the multitude is not solely about controlling the means of productivity or liberating one's own subjectivity. These two are also linked to love and joy of political life and realizing political goals.

Hardt does not consider teaching a revolutionary occupation, nor does he think the college is a particularly political institution. "But thinking of politics now as a project of social transformation on a large scale, I'm not at all convinced that political activity can come from the university."

Books

• Gilles Deleuze: an Apprenticeship in Philosophy, ISBN 0-8166-2161-6, 1993
• Labor of Dionysus: a Critique of the State-form, with Antonio Negri, ISBN 0-8166-2086-5, 1994
• Empire, with Antonio Negri, ISBN 0-674-00671-2, 2000
• War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, with Antonio Negri, ISBN 1-59420-024-6, 2004
• Commonwealth, with Antonio Negri, ISBN 0674035119, 2009

Articles