In _Empire_, Hardt & Negri use, as an epigram to Part 2.5, the following remark by Thomas Jefferson: "I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self government" (160). They go on to invoke the _Federalist_ & U.S. constitution as heralding "a new principle of sovereignty" (169): "Already in this first phase, then, a new principle of sovereignty is affirmed, different from the European one: liberty is made sovereign and sovereignty is defined as radically democratic within an open and continuous process of expansion. The frontier is a frontier of liberty. How hollow the rhetoric of the Federalists would have been and how inadequate their own 'new political science' had they not presupposed this vast and mobile threshold of the frontier" (169)!
Deliberate anachronism on the part of H & N, but suggestive nonetheless. American Nationalism = an ideology for the Empire.
Yoshie