Paolo Virno's on the rich concept of the 'multitude' as crucial to understanding contemporary life. Paolo Virno's A Grammar of the Multitude became the Italian theorist's best-known work in English, influencing a generation of activists and performance artists, when it was first published by Semiotext(e) in 2004. Two decades later, this new edition proves Virno's conception of contemporary life--as a cartography of virtualities made possible by post-Fordism--to have been strikingly prescient. At the start of the twenty-first century, globalization forced a rethinking of some of the categories--such as 'the people'--that had been traditionally associated with the now-eroding state. Virno argues that the category of 'multitude,' elaborated by Spinoza and for the most part left fallow since the seventeenth century, is a far better tool to analyze contemporary issues than the Hobbesian concept of 'people' favored by classical political philosophy. Hobbes, who detested the notion of